Today, we at The Metropolitan Review are featuring a lyric essay, which combines poetic language with creative nonfiction, by poet and writer Eric Janken.
This essay looks at longing, loss, and the physicality that is inescapable in love and heartbreak. When is it time to finally let go? How do we change before, during, and after loss? After love ends, are our bodies canvases or cadavers?
Kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer dusted in gold or other mediums, is often romanticized in poetry. Look at the imperfections. Look at how something stays together and is beautiful because, not in spite of, the fractures. But here Janken reminds us of the real-world implications of trying to apply the procedures, structures, or formulas of art to intimate relationships.
Two artists together can be disastrous, especially when their different mediums lead to constant misunderstandings. This gorgeous lyric essay examines the pain behind breakups in their final form, when the explosion of loss has subsided and you are left alone with the memories of someone.
—The Editors
I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire.... —The Sound and the Fury
For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice. —The Futurist Manifesto
[A]
My family lore is a photograph I took as a young boy — the first artistic artifact — which still bobs in my mind like a mackerel with a ripped bladder. I took it on a Kodak, one of those late-90s digital cameras where the screen had a broken line running down the middle. I posed my uncle, grandfather, and father outside on the driveway.
It is summer. My uncle and grandfather almost never come to North Carolina. I am a tiny boy with a bad bowl cut and a lisp. I do not know these men. I assume I ordered arms around waists,1 not concerned about the hundred degree heat and barked at them to smile.
An amateur’s work — all belly. An accident. A decapitation.
[B]
Seven years with M. Two apartments, only three visits home with her. The last time we met for coffee, I laughed and said I used to keep a map of all the public places we fought in. At the end, just before I moved out, when we had stopped talking to each other, I would leave my grief-poems in the living room and a canvas would appear soon after. Strange to be in love with a painter. Even then, the pangs of slight desire, followed quickly by deep envy.2
It is only with the passing of time that I find how my mother and father feel about M, the way we left each other. Or how my hair became shoulder-length and beard-full. (“Serpico” “Kris Kristofferson”). It is a simulacra of closeness. We talk most days — sometimes for an hour or more. I lecture them on numerous things: negative capability, the novels of António Lobo Antunes, Nâzım Hikmet. Yet I find my tongue castrated,3 lacking the fortitude to go beyond the realm of knowledge and into my own inner life outside of experiencing art.
I wonder if they think they know me. I wonder when my parents will tell me what I know — my belly is fat. I have gained significant weight.
[C]
Home again, no rented car, dropped off at the bar by my mother. An old high school classmate buys me a Sazerac and asks what I’ve done for the past decade. We chat, shoot pool. He then tells me how one of the girls we knew is now “a fat pastor, with a fat kid and a fat husband, which makes a certain type of person happy.” There seemed to be a hint of jealousy. I wish I had asked, but couldn’t articulate. Instead, I returned to my childhood bedroom, and slept until noon.
[D]
More and more I wish to abandon writing.
If language cannot transmit more than the echo of true meaning, then we must return to the kingdom of the image. Pasolini claims film is more poetry than poetry due to free indirect subjectivity — the notion that through “original oniric, barbaric, irregular, aggressive, visionary qualities” we can feel/infer quiet personal experience. In Michelangelo Antonioni’s first color film Red Desert, the northern Italian industrial landscape is ocherous, matte, alien, and dead — where even fruit is rendered gray.4 The only bright colors are sulfurous, unnatural plumes of yellow and red factory smoke. What is seen on screen are sensory perceptions of Monica Vitti’s character, Giuliana.
What is more open and pleasing than a camera? Benjy, the mentally disabled narrator in The Sound and the Fury, can only be described as a camera. He senses everything, feels nothing, is the lens with which we judge the Compsons. Faulkner didn’t regard him as human, thought Benjy to be an animal.
I am scared my turn to the image is an un-sensed resignation that I am not a subject in my own life. That the need to observe, watch, reference, classify is a substitute for my own felt joy and pain. What else do I feel besides the dog-eared pages of a book or the slight pain after the cinema lights turn on?
[E]
My belly photograph’s decapitation could be seen as transgression — a Freudian field day — something my father has noted in polite company. Things like this amuse him. Once, while at a bar in almost-gay Los Angeles, the bartender mistook my father to be my sugar daddy. Yet I think that most transgressions involve unwanted shared knowledge, the flipside of intimacy.
Once, sober, at an after-hours spa, like an honest plumber snaking a toilet, I rotely prayed, Help me lord, im hurt, im forsaken hoping that in the absence of sensation God would appear. I expected silence. I was no stomach-stabbed Saint Theresa of Ávila, who wrote that after Saint Michael pulled out…the sweetness caused by this intense pain, so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease. I expected nothing because even if God existed, God could not possibly penetrate the nothingness of a sensory deprivation pool, this kingdom of salt — remote, inhospitable to outside consciousness. Prayer trapped, skin-stuck like crude oil.
Retreating to the dressing room, I saw a woman give a handjob. Too much ketamine. Flaccid. Arm like a Futurist study, all body no mind. Unhappy lamps in the windows taught [me] to despise [my] mathematical eyes.5 She moved grotesquely, slowly. In man or woman, I could see no pleasure in this mechanical dry task. I fled. I heard later it took them twenty minutes to put on their pants.
Their most noticeable feature — matching appendectomy scars.
[F]
Desire involves the threat of loss, which can only be communicated imperfectly through language.6 The beauty of film, of the image, is its nowness. It is a flattening of time, a container. I think this is why the cinema is the most uncomfortable place to see bodies. A breast or curled pubic hair atop a penis, trapped in nowness, cannot show loss.7 It may be counter-intuitive, but the image is best in service of alienation, as the image can be described in what is not being shown.8
Camera in hand, I found myself on Arthur Avenue. I sat alone, as the men strolled the street or stopped at a cafe, languidly taking in macchiato and mineral water. The sun passed overhead. The sun passed overhead. I adjusted the aperture and shutter speed. The men laughed, lit cigars. Smoke drifted. They left, replaced by a family with a stroller, then a young couple holding hands. I shot them all. I still sat alone. My photographs lie. I abandoned them.
[G]
Yellow-bellied: meaning coward. Soft-bellied: meaning weak. Potbelly: meaning fat or strong. My cat, Elvin, has a black-ticked belly typical of tabbies. He is a docile creature who shows me his belly without prompting, slow-blinking which signifies love or trust. Elvin is an orphan. He has retained kitten behaviors into adulthood — most notably sucking, a result of forced early weaning. Toes, fingers, blankets, my own nipples. Sweet Elvin searches with sandpaper tongue, feeling, but not knowing, the loss driving his desires.
[H]
What I cannot do well on the first go I refuse to do. Once M hosted a still-life painting party. Oils and tiny stretched canvases. I behaved poorly — bitching and moaning, sighing, cursing silently and audibly the stupid Cherokee heirloom tomato so fresh from the community garden you could see trichomes. What I wanted to say was: I know the light from the eastern bay window makes the verdant vine a lighter green than if it was in the kitchen and I know I want to mix white and make it seem like the tomato itself is sacred and juicy.
[I]
Sweet nakedness. Everything previously said about alienation, the naked body, the image should be thrown out when talking about Alain Delon.9 Especially Delon in La Piscine. Partially because the saturated colors of the French summer landscape like Hockney and the fecund bronze skin of Delon and Romy Schneider. Partially because cinema is sometimes nothing but a pervert in a dark room looking at people who never look back (and this film is sublimely pleasurable), where the heat of the riviera and the darkest blue pool water makes it so that even when Delon and company are deeply alone, the power of generative bodies subsumes.10
After M left, I watched La Piscine alone. It was July and the cinema was full. I sat next to an elderly couple holding hands.
[J]
There is no escape from this problem. Being serious about sex has been tried,11 as has SSRIs, as has a serious weightlifting regimen with a group of Italian friends that call themselves Mishima club. I wish to be free of language, to exist only as isolated emotion — but then there is only the turn to the thought of the tough-looking throat-tattooed man turning himself into the police.
We were on the train together, going uptown. He asked me if I knew where the police station was, saying the cops had beat up him the night before in Brooklyn. As proof he pointed a shaking finger at his two black eyes. I said yes and told him. He started to cry.
I held him. There was nothing else I could do. He didn’t tense or consider my body a threat — he just cried. The train car was silent. All you could hear was the asthmatic breaking of the poorly oiled wheels grinding a curve, his sobs, and my hand’s compressions on his conditioned leather jacket. His face stayed buried in my chest until we reached the Grand Concourse. Somebody in the car called me a faggot and took a picture. From that angle, we looked like a pietà.
[K]
But what pain actually belongs to me? What right does the witness have to, as Tennyson says, “the dirty nurse, Experience”? In a plain composition notebook, separate from my diary and writer’s journal, I sequester the things I have seen, but refuse to write.
At the First Battle of Bull Run, the Washington political elite followed General Irvin McDowell’s men some thirty miles to picnic and watch a very quick war. Here from a distance, I assume it looked beautiful — the Shenandoah Gap in July 1861.12
Picnickers drinking tempered champagne and eating Chincoteague oysters saw, from a distance, what Marinetti called “the multi-colored and polyphonic surf” of two armies colliding. It was, I assume, beautiful. Red-white cannon fire — pure motion, no mind. Ripping of earth, men falling silently, bloodless. And then the charge across the same hills we sweated across. Peach-fuzzed privates bleeding and suddenly the war was no longer something to be observed.
M often thought writing anything other than myself was theft. That to feel is one thing — impermanent, imperfect, humble. To write is to assert a breath.13
[L]
Yet sometimes the body is to be laughed at or feared. Rameses the Ram,14 live Dorset Horn sheep, perpetual mascot of the University of North Carolina, omnipresent at every football and basketball game. There are photographs of me with Rameses from infancy to twelve. Two things are of note.
In official publicity photos and press materials, the UNC athletic department photoshops out Rameses’ prodigious testicles.
Sex can be mimetic. At a football game, somebody next to me — in memory it doesn’t matter who — pointed out their prodigious nature. I hadn’t noticed before. I felt an odd sensation. A mixture of humor and the sickening feeling that my own body was on display, and I wondered what would happen the first time somebody other than me would see my body — if they would laugh, if it was proportional, proper.
[M]
Dark mid-winter. After Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Blue, stumbling out of the cinema on to Houston Street, I watched myself walk through the East Village, thinking that nothing I saw — the pocket park filled with trash and children, natural wine bars, bookstores, cold NYU students not wearing enough layers, a young couple sharing a hot chocolate while waiting for a downtown bus — was as beautiful as Juliette Binoche’s slender fingers tracing sheet music or the unreal blueness of the pool before she breaks the surface tension. I was horrified — scared of my complete retreat, my rejection of the material world.
[N]
This is a dewdrop world / And yet… / and yet… wrote Issa after burying his daughter. What word gets the emphasis? “This” — a tether to the loneliness of existence. “And” implies the threat of repetition, of having to bury again, the ease of a spade on clay after heavy rain and high water table. How clay opens like a stomach. But true terror is the ellipses, a ceaseless limping adagio, especially if read aloud — no finality, continuing past breath.
[O]
A sailor may say “add more belly to the sail” meaning give more curvature. There is nothing more beautiful than a sail unfurling and inhaling current. I wished to photograph myself against the sea, a backdrop of escaping boats, but the beach was covered by a thick fog and the gray sea, opaque. It is thrilling to know there are jagged cliffs and boulders with razor barnacles that exist but cannot be seen, only felt through differing massive shadow.
Unthinking, I rushed into the water. Nothing can prepare you for the cold, rough salt of the North Atlantic, in the same way a description of a hug cannot match the power of your mother’s embrace after six months away or a photograph of saguaro cannot prepare you for the complete isolation of a day-long hike in the Sonoran Desert, where all life is asleep and all that exists is your footsteps and the sweat on your neck. I dropped, lungs attempting to open, mouthful of foaming sea, leg sliced by unseen rock, pain overpowered by cold and brine. I thought only of silent fish. And then as I tread water, I thought nothing.
Fog lifted. Not delicately plucked or swept with a broom. Instead, similar to how Venetian Murrina masters pull molten glass from the kiln, and then roll it through cane, hot-red, then exploding in color.
I looked to where landslides settle near the top of the dunes, the path from the top of the road covered in oyster shells and slate, the blue of the water, the fishermen with octopus spears, ancient rocks virile with grass, cacti, aloe plunging back into the white-flecked blue.
I lost myself.
[P]
Excerpts from a journal:
“Tarkovsky sucks ass except for Mirror. I find myself horribly bored by endless slow shots and I pray that my dissatisfaction isn’t linked to my own inability to focus. Things that used to fascinate — Arnold Schoenberg’s string quartets, waiting for bluebirds in my mother’s wicker outdoor rocker with a sweating glass of lemonade, the long painful deadening silence of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony — seem like ash. Things that require patient breath I can no longer do. They say Gustav, hearing his inflamed heart pump without conviction, pulled down his spectacles and thought not of Alma........Nonetheless, I am plagued by Tarkovsky’s shot of his mother washing her hair, the sounds of the water and ceiling collapse.” “Haven’t dreamt in a while — perhaps it’s the pipes knocking. Noticed another gray hair. I’m bloated from too much beer.” “Today, an odd sense of grief. Realized I wasn’t thinking about M over morning coffee. This strange absence — not person, but thought....” “Shot a series of still-lifes, that due to a camera feeding error, came out blank. Empty espresso cups on saucers with spilled grounds and ripped sugar packets. Wine glasses with red residue. Curious....”
Eric Janken is a writer and educator living in the Bronx with his two cats. He holds an MFA from Hunter College. His work has previously been featured, among others, in Shenandoah, Honest Ulsterman, and Birmingham Poetry Review.
It should be noted that I have always displayed a dictatorial personality. As a child, I ordered my grandparents to write reports on books I assigned, calling to the EGG (Eric Grandma Grandpa) club. I was a harsh grader, often failing my grandmother for lack of ideation.
M’s painterly strengths are light and movement, the empathy of her subject’s faces. An early painting Lady with Chicken (based on her photograph of a live chicken-monger seen at market) is the perfect example. The woman clutches the pullet tenderly, contemplating if she should renege the sale. How often I drank my morning coffee underneath this painting — which hung over our couch — admiring the creases under the eyes, the blue shawl with textured folds, the woman’s lips in mid-breath. How could she have such care in her art, how could she be so perceptive of anatomy and cloth and not understand me?
This idea stands closely with John Donne’s metaphor of aural vasectomy, which underlies his belief in the spiritual connection of the ear with God.
To achieve this, Antonioni famously used a combination of lenses, natural light, and paint.
From Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism.
M wanting to move to Paris, to Quito. Me saying “how dare you” as a substitute for grief.
The best example of abstracted loss occurs at the end of Polanski’s Chinatown. Off-screen, Faye Dunaway shot dead. The long lowing of her head on the car horn. The grief of her sister-daughter.
My father’s face — I can no longer recall what he looked like as a young, angry man. Jeanne Moreau, naked in the bathtub, in Antonioni’s La Notte. Body as body, separated by emotion and camera angle, from her husband — signifying distance from human connection and her own sexuality.
The only exception is Delon in Monsieur Klein. While still in the prime of his looks and career, his slithering bourgeois paranoid Nazi collaborator appears positively repulsive, even while naked. I mostly remember his grotesque baroque gold-embroidered bathrobe.
I have seen it over seven times. I cannot tell you a single line of dialogue. It is, in effect, a silent film.
Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”
M and I went there together when we couldn’t be separated and cleaved to each other even in summer sleep. Summer in Virginia — tall pines, despite being young growth, felt primordial and supreme. I can never feel the difference between young growth and virgin uncut forest. Same breeze, same creek as 1861 — the night before we arrived, a thunderstorm gutted undergrowth. I felt a wild energy in my spine. When we went to bed — lingering dreams of eels.
Oh how I felt attacked. From the list of public places: Prince Coffee House, Washington Square Park, Sofreh. Yet she is right. There is something vampiric about moving beyond the self and into another person.
It is a patricidal business. In 2008, Rameses XVII — age eight with brittle horn structure — was playing in a field outside of Chapel Hill. His son Pablo, age three, engaged in a head-butting contest, which ethologists say is normal behavior. Pablo broke his father’s horn, which became infected, despite a treatment of penicillin. Rameses died and Pablo became Rameses XVIII.
My comment is mostly to the editor: I liked the piece, the essay , the mix of intellectual richness and the personal approach. I less understand the qualification as lyric. If the point is to show the writer's emotions, it fits the definition, but I'd hope to feel something as a reader. The experience challenged my brain, but did not affect my heart. But, yes, I liked the piece. Thank you.
Thanks for your lengthy exposition. I’ll try to use the time I’m saving by not reading it utilitariany.