Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip. Lisa Robertson

      LISA ROBERTSON’S MAGENTA SOUL WHIP

      Coach House Books

      Toronto

      copyright © Lisa Robertson, 2009

      This epub edition published in 2010. Electronic ISBN 978 1 77056 133 5.

      Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

      LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA

      CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

      Robertson, Lisa

      Lisa Robertson’s magenta soul whip / Lisa Robertson.

      ISBN 978-1-55245-215-8

      I. Title.

      PS8585.03217L58 2009 C811’.54 C2009-900013-X

      Lucite

       (an amuse-gueule)

       (because the present is not articulate)

      Sit us on Lucite gently and we will tell you how knowledge came to us.

      First the dull mud softened, resulting in putrefaction, lust and intelligence, pearl globs, jewelled stuff like ferrets, little theatres of mica, a purse containing all the evil smells of daily life. Then just the one vowel, iterate and buttressed and expiring; leaning, embracing, gazing. With our claw it devised identity for the sake of food. Selves, it says, feeding us, I adore you, you know. Like a boy blowing from a tree, we decided, we were paid, we were free. We incessantly prepared for the future. On the title page, two angels blowing on the trumpets of fame held up a globe decorated with three fleurs-de-lys and topped with a crown. We learned habits and tricks. We were a single grin with lips pasted back. We said we saw Europes of hallucination, fatty broths sprinkled with deer, stencilled eagles, serpents and lurid rags. That was a format of saying, a frayed ligature. We were fading into the presence or absence of food.

      Enough of the least. Sincerity takes too long in an aggressive emergency. Also we feel a sense of duality. We wear out the art. We start to modify our vocables – flick, pour, dribble estrangement’s sex. Since it is we who are one, and we who are scattered. We’re this pair or more which can’t absorb one another in a meaning effect. We feel palpitated by daylight and its deliberate plants. We feel this elsewhere sculpt our body.

      We would be walking down the street in the city. Gauze would be everywhere. The day would be big, halting, gracious, revocable, cheap. We’d be the she-dandies in incredibly voluptuous jackets ribboning back from our waists, totally lined in pure silk, also in pure humming, and we’d be heading into the buildings with ephemera like leafage or sleeves or pigment. The streets are salons that receive abundantly our description. The buildings are charming. And our manners are software. We feel sartorial joy. We’d be at the river watching the fat water on the blond built part, loving temporal improprieties, the bright trash floating in slow liberation. We’d be applying our makeup at noon, leaning on the balustrade, thinking about a little shun, a little fight, a little sofa. We’d be thinking about hinges. We’d feel for our pen. Something might seduce us. A likeness. A knowledge.

      Samesame pouring through it.

      Early Education

       I designed my own passivity. I present it to you by my face, by your guts, and in the name of human space. I was born into a rough little city, site of hasty invention actively dissolving into steel sky. The city was a glittering ruin sucked upwards.

      I

      great virtues are numerous and wisdom has a laughable magnitude. the circumference of a human creature is his own testimonium, her superb mortal resistance as a creature is a liquid gate. our hearts are intelligible. to excite and to tempt you I will relate the ways of my past unhappiness. should I invoke necessity or fate? quomodo item I invoke is unbelievable. all gods are gravegods. what is without predicate? let’s sing to the god who requires it. let’s sing to our enemies also. quœram te, invocans te et I’ll invent credens in te: a predicate is a noble enemy and my fidelity is my own disaster, inspirasti mihi per feeling humanitatem with this speech.

       (Another version of the same beginning is simpler and more direct: in the long science of submission it is the mind that, quietly spectacular, unhooks the bodies and opens the face.)

      II

      the dominator is cuddled inside me: what would you call that? when we quibble and feast, what would you call that? since tua quidquid fades, has faded, this quidquid that’s your name. all that’s feral in me, whatever being I am, eats into my docent. I invoke dominance to undo myself.

      I had no enemies, no parent, no clock. dominant you filled the nurse’s tits and so abundantly taught me to sip. I’m telling you about things I don’t remember, nothing more, fibbing and sipping, sipping and fibbing, very similar. et cum non intellecto me obsessit, non subditus indignation, no servitude. quam scientes is my nutrient. dominant qui est semper vivus and nothing in us tu creasti et really instabilium et immutable. quam illa intra visceral matrix? dominant my soft word, no memoria could have prepared me for your earth. I am the first suckling among multa, your artifice, your animal, gaudy with cries, gaudy with hunger and lovely with hunger and hunger.

      III

      listen to the humans fib. misery dictates. I remember the fibs of my infancy, a fib per heartbeat cooked by earth. will this commemorate me? dominant do you remember me?

      my ego’s made from milk, abundant fountains of milk, my dominant, my own, which dedicate themselves to the illuminant corpus, instructress of senses, so that I speak to you in the syllables of your name dominant and as bonus I make for you a nest of my ordinary thighs, tu, forma omnia et lege.

      ergo dominant for you I have the fidelity of a fox a piglet an enemy a name multum so many fidelities and oblivions for you are shadow and concept with no memory no vestige no need.

      IV

      remember the undulant speech of your childhood enemy saying give it give it give it? I give it as various vocables and membranes voluntarily like this I name the liquids and seconds that move the body turning towards memory and emitting sound among its quorum this turning and opening this masking and what gets called humanœ vitœ authors no greater horror.

      So who possesses the stamina to parent their own sensibility? no brat does and beneath the school of belts a language its audibility no refuge, no accident. to be coherent is to form enemies. dominant I wanted to wear memory like a moulded hunger willing ahead of myself some form of satisfaction or vindicate legendary torment with what certainty did I console my welts.

      V

      though dominant even my fibs are ordinary as belts flicking against authority a peccadillo diligently diligently unspeakable.

      a kid’s weaned on eternal promises and humiliation. dominant give me your superb sign so I can use it as a crutch or a rope cast into my pointless fidelity, yes dominant I’ll tell each dilated fib with my dripping tongue as delicious recreation, enstate my credo of necessity, the tongue like an ego to me, dominant – whom shall I serve? without you for whom welts fatten I’d be minus agency minus glory minus number my author who cuddles me insatiably my soul’s bulky with you as it is bulky with fibs.

      VI

      whatever the cause of the grace of dogs, the soft odour of books, the quibbling of kids, it’s unbearable. no docent knows such grammar. nor am I parsed, me, a vain wreath of milk, vanity itself, caro factum, quia certiones, non spiritus ambulans and islands of written