Difficult Epigrams

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1.

I love difficulty the way I love an obsidian mirror. Call me John Dee. Call me the Aztecs, Códice de Tepetlaoztoc. They knew to use obsidian for sacred things. I’m not trying to scry or deflect. I’m trying to see what is in front of me shrouded in materiality, weight, encircled in a hammered gold frame. You can’t drown in obsidian. It’s volcanic, rock not glass. Had the pool been burning lava, Narcissus would have thrown himself into the liquid flames instead, have been named for the furling-dark cracks in the earth instead of a pleasant, but ultimately tame, butter-yellow flower. What do you call scrying backwards? Not just a history, that’s insufficient. What do you call scrying the present? Dear Diary, today before the Bronze Age, I knocked an arrowhead into a sharpened point. Dear Diary, killing makes everything obsolete. Dear Diary, except for the obsidian plinth that holds the record on a Technics SP-10 MK II turntable. Needle drop.

2.

Everything I love is dying. There were worlds for me once, in the dusty open-stack shelves on infinite quadrangles. Difficulty used to be a virtue the university cultivated in some ways, and watching the death of the university spool out in real time feels like a curse. The world will barrel on with its charlatans, their easy answers for easy marks. Tycho Brahe, will you take me to Uraniborg? Will you explain the allegorical ordering of the bushes, the fortress walls like nested stars? I will trade you my nose. You can give me one of brass that looks like gold, as long as I am allowed to question it. The rest of the brass in the Age of Iron lies, pretends to be gold, turns black on your neck when you sweat. The Gods have left the building. 

3.

I will make my Brooklyn one-bedroom into a Uraniborg. I will worship difficulty, I will pattern it into the window-glass, into the obsidian things, the phone, the laptop, snarling from my desk. Maybe I was born to be an anchorite anyway, bricked in beside a church. If I had a faith it would be a faith in the near-inscrutable. Epistemic tightrope wobble; I don’t know what it means to know anymore. Can reason, then, be a type of faith? Call Montaigne, he would know. He still has a landline. Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations playing on the Technics SP-10 MK II turntable, the one with the humming.

4.

“Nam Sibylllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidiin ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβνλλα τί ϴέλεις; respondebat illa: άπο ϴανεΐν ϴέλω.”

I saw with my own eyes the Sibyll at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: “Sibyll, what do you want?” she answered: “I want to die.”

—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, epigraph, originally from the Satyricon of Petronius

Referentiality is a type of reverence, a faith that you’ll get it, or go back and track it down. It’s also reason. Anyway, I’m the Sibyll that’s not Cumae, that’s neither New World nor Old, that stands up and rends the bars of the rusted cage until they break, despite seeing the world for exactly what it is and always will be and says fuck you I want to live.

Throw the rocks back at the schoolboys on the internet. Look at the tracery of the future in the sky, pull a Fernand Braudel and write it all out from counting individual grains in a field in medieval Sicily. Do you know what the soil tastes like? He knows that’s how you write history: by putting it in your mouth. By knowing the footnotes so well you can write them on toilet paper in a prisoner of war camp. Braudel, they don’t make us like you anymore. All the Sibylls have iPhones in alabaster cases; faces of false obsidian. No one can quite reckon the intersections in sticks of cast yarrow.

5.

Make the catafalque for my coffin out of obsidian when I die, look at your faces in it, see if you see me amongst you, haunting the question in semi-reflective inverse. Difficulty means by nature not being agreeable, which probably means fewer people at your funeral, with more that might actually remember you. That is if the entire earth doesn’t scorch and flood and descend into postliterate chaos first. Difficulty isn’t currency when it’s the apocalypse, when it’s live or die. If I lose my brass nose from Tycho Brahe fighting a man for squirrel liver in Prospect Park, it won’t have been because I was difficult. I should have been at Uraniborg but ended up in Brooklyn. 

6.

Are You There God? It’s Me, John Dee. It’s me prostrate before the statue of Athena in the city of Troy asking her to break the spear of Diomedes. She turns her other black cheek, and it doesn’t work, the war grinds on. Fifth Book, Iliad. There’s lots of dying left to go. My father tells me he prays to the Buddhist goddess of compassion and action, Tara, for my migraines, for the men who want to kill me for existing on the internet. I tell him I prefer Kali. She is the Hindu goddess of destruction standing in a field of bodies, holding a severed head in one of her many hands. If I’m going to pick a god, I who have no gods, it should be one who will satisfy my Homeric tendency to slit aortas, drag a corpse behind a cart until someone begs for it back. This is what I want for the men who want to kill me for existing on the internet. For being difficult, I am sentenced to die. I am defiant about it; I like living. My mother didn’t fail to dip me in any rivers yet I still manage to be a little querulous about it, sulk in my tent with my pride. They don’t like women difficult, these men; they accept that Achilles is difficult by nature. They come running with their mirrored shields like Perseus, hoping we turn into stone. Good thing I’m good with mirrors, black mirrors especially. If I am monstrous to them they should be afraid that I, unlike Medusa, can look at my reflection and grin, lopsided.

7.

The intertwining pattern of the Goldberg Variations is difficulty embodied. They make a scapegoat of difficulty, things that take more time and knowing to scry than a fast world prescribes become proscribed. There is a new ivory sceptre unearthed beneath an old dig site on the island of Knossos. We get 119 more signs. They will probably decipher Linear A in my lifetime now. Michael Ventris, when I die, I will look for you, and we can dance like banshees to every iteration of the pattern that Bach changes the mood of in the fifteenth variation, on a Technics SP-10 MK II turntable with an obsidian plinth like we are Deathless Gods. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in Bach, in Glenn Gould needing a very particular modified chair, low to ground, and post facto, placed on display in the National Library of Canada. Sweet talk me in Linear A, let’s take inventory of our depleted stores of everything, the dark is coming down.

8.

When the Sibyll wants to live she hides in a Fragonard. Oh you thought Fragonard was easy? That because Fragonard is soft he cannot be difficult? Shh, I have a secret for you, in the haze of the garden that becomes the forest, soft and sloping green, in all the bright ribbons of the courtly bows. A Fragonard is an Agnes Martin that hasn’t been fed through the grid. It hasn’t been disciplined into modernity yet. Pastels can be hard too; Agnes Martin’s are, like the hedge patterns at Uraniborg, orientational geometries. Your pastoral is my algorithmic feed. Let’s go to the desert and see the world patterned out. Let’s stand on the cratered rim of the dead volcano and map the edges of the tectonic plates in that blue-green, the blue-green the woods is in all the Fragonard gardens, somewhere between Tivoli and Claude Lorraine. Let’s eat igneous macarons.

9.

Infamously, volcanic ash from the late nineteenth-century eruption of Krakatoa darkens the sky in Edgar Degas’ Race Horses at the Met. That’s why the sky is so yellow. Turner was on St. Vincent for the eruption of the volcano there in 1812. If you had tasted the soil then, it would have tasted like ash. Turner alludes to the horror of the thing in paint, searing meteoric streaks of orange on apocalyptic black. The horror might really just be the slavery that existed at the time. The volcano was secondary. History is darker than scrying in obsidian. Difficulty has to admit the pollution of beauty with truth, or rather, the clarification of it. The obsidian mirror in the Met was taken back to Europe from the Aztecs. It is set in a round fifteenth-century French frame, with gilt leaf on the wood. Parergon and ergon stage a fight; Kant is offstage. You either stare at the gold or the black but it’s hard to give your attention to both at once. 

10.

Mirror Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? 

Would you still love me if I had a brass nose? What if I were intractable? What if I were as old as the Sibyll? Beauty isn’t everything. I cannot recall the face of Bach. Sometimes you can see where Agnes Martin makes a mistake in pen or graphite, the lines are not perfect lines, the horizon is not a perfect horizon, pastel coated like a steel beam. The Theocritan shepherds are sleeping it off under a rock. In Arcadia, death has already come and gone, and now they’re just dealing with the consequences. I was in Arcadia; I am in Arcadia, I too, have seen the ubiquitous prints of the Younger Holbein. Death makes paupers of us all. I don’t think that’s difficult. What Donne worries about is assembling the pieces of all the burnt bodies to be raised back after the apocalypse, he worries it dry in a sermon. I like Donne, I like his difficulty, all those metaphysicals. Like Derek Jarman, I forgive him the invention of heterosexuals.

11.

Difficult things can be delicate, but they don’t have to be. Diderot finds Boucher twee, petty, too many thematic putti. Fragonard is likewise often regarded as frivolous, easy beauty. That is because you cannot see the spines of steel beneath all these delicacies, cast into ingots from a furnace with the carbon output of multiple volcanoes per year, just across the river from the city in Cleveland. Indulge me: relevé on one leg in pointe shoes, a prosthesis that is an extra foot instead of a nose. I’ve spent a season at the barre, building a knot in my calf that feels like rope. You can’t do it can you? You probably couldn’t even stand on your little paste boxes, made from the pulped bones of the horses that used to pull chariots across the plains of Troy, forty miles per hour past the infamous oak. Ballet is the delicate difficult thing I have chosen for myself; I wear a pink skirt the color of fleshy ears in a Fragonard, in a Boucher, who said nature was trop verte et mal éclairée. Where the ribbons of my shoes hit the back of my ankle there is an elastic gap, room for the Achilles tendon to move. My mother didn’t dip me in any rivers, but two ribbons thick could probably stop an arrow, no matter how well nocked to the recurve bowstring of fate.

Difficulty is often the effortful made to look effortless.

12.

They call me a Mandarin for being difficult, as if that’s an insult. Chinese, classical or modern, is one of the languages I don’t read. Up here in my ivory tower, ivory just like the sceptre from Knossos with the 119 new signs of Linear A, I study Japanese in the excellent air conditioning. Many of the American furnaces for steel were bought out by a Japanese conglomerate, Nippon Steel. The steel in American skyscrapers is usually imported now; no man is an island. Did you remember that was Donne? Full points. Turntable needles are tipped with diamonds, but not the ones from Krakatoa. Make me an orange if I am to be a Mandarin, espalier me out in the glasshouses of the Palatinate. I wrote a paper once about those oranges, their unusual grafts to hardier roots. The Palatinate fell and the glass probably blew out in all the latticed windows, but I’d like to think they stayed there, the orange trees, splayed out, prodding their new shoots up through the empty grid of the roof. Γλυκύπικρον, those oranges. I hear it is elitist now to prefer the difficulty of the Greek, but what word does that mean in English even? Sweetbitter doesn’t quite cut it. 喜びと悲しみが混ざり合った– Yorokobi to kanashimi ga mazari atta—joy and sadness mixed together, for this world that wishes itself to become oblivious of the Greek as if this were some virtue, to be unable to scry history from its own words, to be a simpleton by choice. Willed ignorance always abhors difficulty. 

13.

Dear Diary, I never actually had a Technics SP-10 MK II turntable. I just had a t-shirt of one from a chain store at the local mall when I was seventeen. Dear Diary, knowing the plinth was obsidian came later. Dear Diary, I wanted so badly to be a sophisticate, I bought little black notebooks and wrote poems I could plausibly pretend weren’t about women in the enclosed Starbucks of my local Barnes & Noble. They don’t give difficulty easy to suburban teenage girls, their dull sublunary lovers’ loves. I fought for it with pointed teeth. I never learned to drive, but put me in a cage with a Sibyll and we’ll make a heist of it, split the bars, and I’ll drive the getaway car like a four-horse charioteer standing, presumably some Lamborghini or Bugatti. Roman charioteers have only four colors for their racing teams: Red White Green Blue.

14.

Pliny the Younger documents how Pliny the Elder goes running into the maw of Pompeii live wire with curiosity and dies in the eruption. I am going to Tokyo in winter. Mt. Fuji, by the way, is still an active volcano. I’d go running too. Difficulty has to have an element of heedlessness to it, the thing you do because you can’t live otherwise. For the record: I prefer elder Plinies, elder Bruegels, but Younger Scarlattis. I am split on Holbeins. Also for the record: Twombly Red, Malevich White, Dutch Sixteenth-Century Altarpiece Green, and Derek Jarman blue. IKB comes in second, but just barely, wheeling around the corners of the arena, all the bets and bread and circuses, but if you trust Gibbon you trust too much, because history, which in this way resembles scrying, isn’t linear or narrative. Nothing falls one way with that much simplicity.

15.

I lost my virginity to a scalpel. Even my flesh is difficult. I have given practice sutures, in my childhood, to the skin of an orange. I agree with my father that everyone should own a hemostat. I never became a surgeon because Benjamin says the camera is the surgeon, but the painter is the magician, and I don’t need a laying on of hands. Look at me now, writing hunched in the dark, enchanting you from a distance with my tendrils, because hothouse flowers have their own way of keeping time. My pupils are belladonna wide, obsidian black. If you asked me to choose between dying difficult and living easy, I would have to choose the former. When screens light up they’re not black mirrors anymore. I’m seeing this, seeing you, instead of myself. Put these epigrams on the catafalque of my coffin, make then epigraphs in virtue of the materiality of the stone.

16.

Everything I love is crumbling down and I’m standing here in the ruins telling you about the excavation. Uraniborg is currently uninhabited. The Gods have left the building but if I could say it like a prayer: dear Pallas Athene don’t turn your cheek, Dear John Dee, Dear Every Dead Aztec, Dear Uncaged Sibyll—I would go to Cumae from Brooklyn and kneel in the crack of the cave that burbles with gas that makes you speak in hexameters, because volcanoes are not the only tectonic phenomenon—Dear Derek Jarman, Dear John Donne, Dear Diary——needle scratch, in the dying world, I still say: give me difficulty or give me death. And because yes, always, et in arcadia ego, I already know I have death waiting in the palm of my hand, that it makes a prince of me with an obsidian crown, I who was a pauper of simple things once, and makes a pauper of all the princelings in their ignorance, too. Death resolves the Fermi Paradox, and the incompleteness of Gödel, and in that moment perhaps I will know that it was worth it, humming over the notes of the Bach. The laurels of difficulty are invisible; you can only just glimpse them there in the steam that rises when the lava hits the water.