The things that we could not afford to remember in the vernacular
The Breathing Body of This Thought
by Genya Turovskaya
(Black Square Editions, Sept. 2019)
Review by Ian Dreiblatt
“The story began,” the singular Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko once wrote, “without resistance, as a rumor, a conch shell in the fingers.” This scene, where we dream through a kind of lyrical murk, something uncertain pulsing in the semantic mist, is classic Dragomoshchenko; consciousness, in all its bizarreness and intricacy, finds its bearings by inviting, and also resisting, meaning. A little further into the poem, Dragomoshchenko writes, “Names come later, resembling diaries, / lagoons, lanterns, chalk. Later still, in common speech, / ‘now’ encounters the word ‘now.’” Awakeness narrates its discovery of itself.
Dragomoshchenko, best known to American readers from his decades-long engagement with postmodern American writers, especially Language poets like Lyn Hejinian and Michael Palmer, was a visionary whose stature has grown since his death eight years ago in Saint Petersburg. His phenomenologically defamiliarizing, syntactically complex, and metaphorically disjunctive writing, enacting a calmly feral break with the intense legacies of rhyme and meter in Russian poetry, exerts a tremendous influence on younger generations in Russia, thanks not least to Dragomoshchenko’s intellectual generosity and personal accessibility.
His influence is decisive not just among young Russians, but also among American writers indebted to Russian traditions. The lines quoted above were translated into English by one of the most gifted of those writers, Genya Turovskaya, another poet whose work conjures the slippery figure of awareness coming to terms with itself. Born in Soviet Ukraine, Turovskaya moved to the U.S. as a child, and has over the past twenty years published her own work in a steady stream of chapbooks, as well as book-length translations of major post-Soviet Russian poets — Dragomoshchenko to be sure, as well as Elena Fanailova and Aleksandr Skidan.
The first full-length collection of Turovskaya’s own poetry, The Breathing Body of This Thought, is out now from Black Square Editions. It’s beautiful and attentive, sounding out the possibilities of consciousness and language as they slowly reshuffle each other across the space of human life. Like Dragomoshchenko, who seems to preside over The Breathing Body as mentor, influence, and lodestar, Turovskaya has an almost preternatural ability to turn the activity of language onto language itself, revealing it as a restless totality of mutually contingent phenomena. Each word resonates over a vast undertone series, haunted by every possibility it suggests and forecloses.
One exemplary poem, dedicated to Dragomoshchenko, is called “Life on Mars (Another New Year’s Day).” It begins:
Words for the wind were filled with trees
I was filled with a feeling I couldn’t name
I knew I would never be seeing her again: the girl with the shy tuck to her head, in the folkloric embroidered dress
In the aftermath I found myself in the mirror of ambivalent desire
Stripped of all continuous nature
The first line here begins with a kind of inversion — we tend to think of wind filling the trees, not the other way around. But Turovskaya’s voice comes in from another direction: the wind, neither a thing nor a place, is the size of the air, and so really is filled with trees. And things are subtler still, because it’s not the actual wind we’re concerned with here, but words for the wind. Words, when we speak them, are made of breath, of wind. And our lungs are full of trees, or at least arboreal little tubes — but neither these nor the fleeting congealment of sound into comprehension makes Turovskaya’s language straightforward.
The poem continues in this way, upending the relationship between object and ground, one cognitive shape lithely rorschaching into another, and by the time we get to “nature,” meaning has been fully bifurcated: the word suggests the natural landscape of trees and wind, and also the psychological reality of the speaking subject. Characteristically, this duality registers an absence — it’s what the speaker has been stripped of.
This dislocation and effacement may point to another kind of experience: that of an immigrant eternally suspended between languages and between places. There is, doppling around in here, a narrative of coming to America: wearing the wrong clothes, forfeiting the names for your feelings, losing continuity with nature — with both the natural landscape of your youth and the sense of your own nature as an unruptured psychic continuity. The first line also makes an added kind of sense if you know that the Russian word for “wind,” veter, contains a scrambled iteration of the English “tree.” (This, too, is redolent of Dragomoshchenko, whose language bathes itself in similar currents; he was especially fond, for example, of rearranging the Russian mat’, “mother,” into t’ma, “of the darkness.”)
Genya Turovskaya. Credit: Arkadii Dragomoshchenko
Whatever its sources, the poem makes a vivid excavation of the experience of experience — a record of the effect awareness, which is made of language, has on language. Just as this feedback starts threading itself into a loop, though, we’re carried nonetheless forward by a carefully tuned music that holds us to time (listen, for instance, to how the shared vowel of “again,” “head,” and “dress” becomes a kind of tonic note in the melody of that line). A few more lines follow, in which these elements — wind and breath, nature and nature, tree and mind — swirl around a charged psychic landscape. By the last lines, those relationships have been stretched to the breaking point, and “I am once more the child filled with unformulated words / A loony-tune torn apart by the trees.” This can certainly read as a reflection on the regression that may follow estrangement from one’s native language, wordlessness being a defining quality of both childhood and displacement. The winds, vetry, have continued their transformation, so that it is now the assonant “trees” that tear the speaker apart into an inchoate identification, and in “loony-tune torn” we may hear echoes of the Russian “nyetu,” the negative colloquialism used to indicate that something, or someone, is not present. Absence roosts in the heart of meaning.
This poem appears in the second of the book’s four parts, titled “what opera is this?” It’s characteristic of some of the work’s most engaging tendencies — its unwillingness to ignore the negation that laps the shores of consciousness, its distinctive mode of crisp uncertainty, its vibrant ear, its ability to follow the lucid trace of a thought, in all its meandering intimacy. Many of the poems seem to elaborate on the experience of being an immigrant — for one thing, it’s hard to read the name of the addressee in Part III, a single longish piece called “Dear Jenny,” as anything other than Americanized doublet of the author’s name — but the book doesn’t feel like it’s about immigration; rather, it considers uncertainty, slippage, unstable identity, beguilingly material consciousness, and the utter mystery of being anyone, marshaling immigrant experience in the service of even more fundamental questions. The book’s opening lines cue this reading, in which the experiential specificities of spatial and cultural displacement gale into broader psychological urgency:
I have been inappropriately
quiet
in my mother tongue
Why
do we destroy
what made us?
It’s a dynamic that surges contrapuntally through a progression of intricately-made psychic quandaries. Early on in Part I, “harbor lights of temporary cities,” the speaker, “at sea” in a boat, mentions “the things that we could not afford / to remember in the vernacular,” invoking a provisional constellation of speech, memory, frenzied departure, and the sacred, built up counterintuitively with negative cantilevered on negative. Before long the thought has developed into “eros in idle hands.” In a different poem in Part III, in the voice of someone “no closer to being the boy that I was than I am / to the man I thought I would be,” Turovskaya writes, “I mean nothing / more than this: we move / from one into another into a third room, / and only there do we live casually in false etcetera,” assimilating doubt, collectivity, and untruth to a hazy cognitive architecture that leads to a cataract of weeping: “I weep / at the roundness of the moon. I weep at the mere mention of violins. I weep at the drabness / of the sparrows in the park, at the smallness of the sparrows, at the sparseness of the grass.” Here, too, we may hear the resonances of immigrant experience, but ultimately all of this — being at once present and absent, changing and being changed, living with thoughts that seem to arrive from an unknowable elsewhere leaving you nothing to do but sing about them, crying in the park — sounds a lot like being a person, in a highly distilled form.
This work’s fidelity to the ramifying, precise bewilderments of existence takes on a super-real dimension in the book’s fourth and final section, whose poems describe an encounter with “the Listening Machine.” Despite the name, the main thing the Listening Machine does is talk, saying everything from “ratatatat” to “admit the ghost.” In some of the book’s most minerally gorgeous language, these closing poems present an idea of a person as a squiggly overlap of hardware and spirit, desire and fear, horizon and fog. Matter trapped in the predicament of consciousness is at the same time individual perception trapped in the predicament of interconnected experience. Turovskaya’s day job as a psychotherapist may be relevant here, too, and one thinks of the many familiar machines that actually listen — from John Searle’s “Chinese Room” argument to the artificially pleasant voices we argue with when we call insurance companies. In the end, though, the mind is the listening machine par excellence, mysteriously hearing itself and others, never shutting up, and “arranging itself, rearranging itself.”
The book takes its title from a poem in this section, which begins:
The mind is physical, says the Listening Machine.
The machine is physical.
The wet physical wind bends
the reeds of the physical field.
We are two bodies thinking together, this thought,
the breathing body of this thought.
The Breathing Body of this Thought is a beautiful book. Amid the current fashion for declarations, it’s restorative to encounter work so porous to the possibilities opened up by its own resonances. As in Dragomoshchenko’s writing, thoughts here pivot and churn (“theories have broken down / radiance”), and the language becomes a kind of phenomenology of the sphere in which their after-effects linger and recombine. This is also to say reading it feels like constantly waking up mid-song to ask,
Where is the first snow of the first day of the first breath of the world?
What day is this? What hour of the day?
Where is the snow?
How does it all turn out?
Ian Dreiblatt is a poet, translator, and musician who lives in Brooklyn. He is TV Commercials Correspondent at the Believer, and an editor at Counter. His translation of Dmitrii Furman’s Spiral is forthcoming from Verso Books, and a full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2021.
Banner image © Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and reproduced with permission of the photographer.