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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374525071 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 04/08/1997 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.55(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.65(d) |
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The Lost Lunar Baedeker
By Mina Loy, Roger L. Conover
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1996 Estate of Mina LoyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-52507-1
CHAPTER 1
FUTURISM × FEMINISM: THE CIRCLE SQUARED (POEMS 1914–1920)
There is no Life or Death,
Only activity
And in the absolute
Is no declivity.
There is no Love or Lust
Only propensity
Who would possess
Is a nonentity.
There is no First or Last
Only equality
And who would rule
Joins the majority.
There is no Space or Time
Only intensity,
And tame things
Have no immensity.
Parturition
I am the centre
Of a circle of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction
The business of the bland sun
Has no affair with me
In my congested cosmos of agony
From which there is no escape
On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations
Or in contraction
To the pin-point nucleus of being
Locate an irritation without
It is within
Within
It is without
The sensitized area
Is identical with the extensity
Of intension
I am the false quantity
In the harmony of physiological potentiality
To which
Gaining self-control
I should be consonant
In time
Pain is no stronger than the resisting force
Pain calls up in me
The struggle is equal
The open window is full of a voice
A fashionable portrait-painter
Running up-stairs to a woman's apartment
Sings
"All the girls are tid'ly did'ly
All the girls are nice
Whether they wear their hair in curls
Or—"
At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization
The conception Brute
Why?
The irresponsibility of the male
Leaves woman her superior Inferiority
He is running up-stairs
I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony
Incidentally with the exhaustion of control
I reach the summit
And gradually subside into anticipation of
Repose
Which never comes
For another mountain is growing up
Which goaded by the unavoidable
I must traverse
Traversing myself
Something in the delirium of night-hours
Confuses while intensifying sensibility
Blurring spatial contours
So aiding elusion of the circumscribed
That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast
Comes from so far away
And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth
Is no part of myself
There is a climax in sensibility
When pain surpassing itself
Becomes Exotic
And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of
sensation
Uniting the opposing and resisting forces
In lascivious revelation
Relaxation
Negation of myself as a unit
Vacuum interlude
I should have been emptied of life
Giving life
For consciousness in crises races
Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes
Have I not
Somewhere
Scrutinized
A dead white feathered moth
Laying eggs?
A moment
Being realization
Can
Vitalized by cosmic initiation
Furnish an adequate apology
For the objective
Agglomeration of activities
Of a life.
LIFE
A leap with nature
Into the essence
Of unpredicted Maternity
Against my thigh
Touch of infinitesimal motion
Scarcely perceptible
Undulation
Warmth moisture
Stir of incipient life
Precipitating into me
The contents of the universe
Mother I am
Identical
With infinite Maternity
Indivisible
Acutely
I am absorbed
Into
The was—is—ever—shall—be
Of cosmic reproductivity
Rises from the subconscious
Impression of a cat
With blind kittens
Among her legs
Same undulating life-stir
I am that cat
Rises from the sub-conscious
Impression of small animal carcass
Covered with blue-bottles
—Epicurean—
And through the insects
Waves that same undulation of living
Death
Life
I am knowing
All about
Unfolding
The next morning
Each woman-of-the-people
Tip-toeing the red pile of the carpet
Doing hushed service
Each woman-of-the-people
Wearing a halo
A ludicrous little halo
Of which she is sublimely unaware
I once heard in a church
—Man and woman God made them—
Thank God.
Italian Pictures
July in Vallombrosa
Old lady sitting still
Pine trees standing quite still
Sisters of mercy whispering
Oust the Dryad
O consecration of forest
To the uneventful
I cannot imagine anything
Less disputably respectable
Than prolonged invalidism in Italy
At the beck
Of a British practitioner
Of all permissible pastimes
Attendant upon chastity
The one with which you can most efficiently insult
Life
Is your hobby of collecting death-beds
Blue Nun
So wrap the body in flannel and wool
Of superior quality from the Anglo-American
Until that ineffable moment
When Rigor Mortis
Divests it of its innate impurity
While round the hotel
Wanton Italian matrons
Discuss the better business of bed-linen
To regular puncture of needles
The old lady has a daughter
Who has been spent
In chasing moments from one room to another
When the essence of an hour
Was in its passing
With the passionate breath
Of the bronchitis-kettle
And her last little lust
Lost itself in a saucer of gruel
But all this moribund stuff
Is not wasted
For there is always Nature
So its expensive upkeep
Goes to support
The loves
Of head-waiters
The Costa San Giorgio
We English make a tepid blot
On the messiness
Of the passionate Italian life-traffic
Throbbing the street up steep
Up up to the porta
Culminating
In the stained frescoe of the dragon-slayer
The hips of women sway
Among the crawling children they produce
And the church hits the barracks
Where
The greyness of marching men
Falls through the greyness of stone
Oranges half-rotten are sold at a reduction
Hoarsely advertised as broken heads
BROKEN HEADS and the barber
Has an imitation mirror
And Mary preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see
ourselves
Shaving
ICE CREAM
Licking is larger than mouths
Boots than feet
Slip Slap and the string dragging
And the angle of the sun
Cuts the whole lot in half
And warms the folded hands
Of a consumptive
Left outside her chair is broken
And she wonders how we feel
For we walk very quickly
The noonday cannon
Having scattered the neighbour's pigeons
The smell of small cooking
From luckier houses
Is cruel to the maimed cat
Hiding
Among the carpenter's shavings
From three boys
—One holding a bar—
Who nevertheless
Born of human parents
Cry when locked in the dark
Fluidic blots of sky
Shift among roofs
Between bandy legs
Jerk patches of street
Interrupted by clacking
Of all the green shutters
From which
Bits of bodies
Variously leaning
Mingle eyes with the commotion
For there is little to do
The false pillow-spreads
Hugely initialed
Already adjusted
On matrimonial beds
And the glint on the china virgin
Consummately dusted
Having been thrown
Anything or something
That might have contaminated intimacy
OUT
Onto the middle of the street
Costa Magic
Her father
Indisposed to her marriage
And a rabid man at that
My most sympathetic daughter
Make yourself a conception
As large as this one
Here
But with yellow hair
From the house
Issuing Sunday dressed
Combed precisely
SPLOSH
Pours something
Viscuous
Malefic
Unfamiliar
While listening up I hear my husband
Mumbling Mumbling
Mumbling at the window
Malediction
Incantation
Under an hour
Her hand to her side pressing
Suffering
Being bewitched
Cesira fading
Daily daily feeble softer
The doctor Phthisis
The wise woman says to take her
So we following her instruction
I and the neighbour
Take her—
The glass rattling
The rain slipping
I and the neighbour and her aunt
Bunched together
And Cesira
Droops across the cab
Fields and houses
Pass like the pulling out
Of sweetmeat ribbon
From a rascal's mouth
Till
A wheel in a rut
Jerks back my girl on the padding
And the hedges into the sky
Coming to the magic tree
Cesira becomes as a wild beast
A tree of age
If Cesira should not become as a wild beast
It is merely Phthisis
This being the wise woman's instruction
Knowing she has to die
We drive home
To wait
She certainly does in time
It is unnatural in a Father
Bewitching a daughter
Whose hair down covers her thighs
Three Moments in Paris
I. One O'Clock at Night
Though you had never possessed me
I had belonged to you since the beginning of time
And sleepily I sat on your chair beside you
Leaning against your shoulder
And your careless arm across my back gesticulated
As your indisputable male voice roared
Through my brain and my body
Arguing dynamic decomposition
Of which I was understanding nothing
Sleepily
And the only less male voice of your brother pugilist of the intellect
Boomed as it seemed to me so sleepy
Across an interval of a thousand miles
An interim of a thousand years
But you who make more noise than any man in the world when you
clear your throat
Deafening woke me
And I caught the thread of the argument
Immediately assuming my personal mental attitude
And ceased to be a woman
Beautiful half-hour of being a mere woman
The animal woman
Understanding nothing of man
But mastery and the security of imparted physical heat
Indifferent to cerebral gymnastics
Or regarding them as the self-indulgent play of children
Or the thunder of alien gods
But you woke me up
Anyhow who am I that I should criticize your theories of
plastic velocity
"Let us go home she is tired and wants to go to bed."
II. Café du Néant
Little tapers leaning lighted diagonally
Stuck in coffin tables of the Café du Néant
Leaning to the breath of baited bodies
Like young poplars fringing the Loire
Eyes that are full of love
And eyes that are full of kohl
Projecting light across the fulsome ambiente
Trailing the rest of the animal behind them
Telling of tales without words
And lies of no consequence
One way or another
The young lovers hermetically buttoned up in black
To black cravat
To the blue powder edge dusting the yellow throat
What color could have been your bodies
When last you put them away
Nostalgic youth
Holding your mistress's pricked finger
In the indifferent flame of the taper
Synthetic symbol of LIFE
In this factitious chamber of DEATH
The woman
As usual
Is smiling as bravely
As it is given to her to be brave
While the brandy cherries
In winking glasses
Are decomposing
Harmoniously
With the flesh of spectators
And at a given spot
There is one
Who
Having the concentric lighting focussed precisely upon her
Prophetically blossoms in perfect putrefaction
Yet there are cabs outside the door.
III. Magasins du Louvre
All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass
Long lines of boxes
Of dolls
Propped against banisters
Walls and pillars
Huddled on shelves
And composite babies with arms extended
Hang from the ceiling
Beckoning
Smiling
In a profound silence
Which the shop walker left trailing behind him
When he ambled to the further end of the gallery
To annoy the shop-girl
All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass
They alone have the effrontery to
Stare through the human soul
Seeing nothing
Between parted fringes
One cocotte wears a bowler hat and a sham camellia
And one an iridescent boa
For there are two of them
Passing
And the solicitous mouth of one is straight
The other curved to a static smile
They see the dolls
And for a moment their eyes relax
To a flicker of elements unconditionally primeval
And now averted
Seek each other's surreptitiously
To know if the other has seen
While mine are inextricably entangled with the pattern of the carpet
As eyes are apt to be
In their shame
Having surprised a gesture that is ultimately intimate
All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass.
Sketch of a Man on a Platform
Man of absolute physical equilibrium
You stand so straight on your legs
Every plank or clod you plant your feet on
Becomes roots for those limbs
Among the men you accrete to yourself
You are more heavy
And more light
Force being most equitably disposed
Is easiest to lift from the ground
So at the same time
Your movements
Unassailable
Savor of the airy-fairy of the ballet
The essence of a Mademoiselle Genée
Winks in the to-and-fro of your cuff-links
Your projectile nose
Has meddled in the more serious business
Of the battle-field
With the same incautious aloofness
Of intense occupation
That it snuffles the trail of the female
And the comfortable
Passing odors of love
Your genius
So much less in your brain
Than in your body
Reinforcing the hitherto negligible
Qualities
Of life
Deals so exclusively with
The vital
That it is equally happy expressing itself
Through the activity of pushing
THINGS
In the opposite direction
To that which they are lethargically willing to go
As in the amative language
Of the eyes
Fundamentally unreliable
You leave others their initial strength
Concentrating
On stretching the theoretic elastic of your conceptions
Till the extent is adequate
To the hooking on
Of any— or all
Forms of creative idiosyncracy
While the occasional snap
Of actual production
Stings the face of the public.
Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots
Latin Borghese
Houses hold virgins
The door's on the chain
'Plumb streets with hearts'
'Bore curtains with eyes'
Virgins without dots
Stare beyond probability
See the men pass
Their hats are not ours
We take a walk
They are going somewhere
And they may look everywhere
Men's eyes look into things
Our eyes look out
A great deal of ourselves
We offer to the mirror
Something less to the confessional
The rest to Time
There is so much Time
Everything is full of it
Such a long time
Virgins may whisper
'Transparent nightdresses made all of lace'
Virgins may squeak
'My dear I should faint'
Flutter..... flutter.... flutter....
....'And then the man—'
Wasting our giggles
For we have no dots
We have been taught
Love is a god
White with soft wings
Nobody shouts
Virgins for sale
Yet where are our coins
For buying a purchaser
Love is a god
Marriage expensive
A secret well kept
Makes the noise of the world
Nature's arms spread wide
Making room for us
Room for all of us
Somebody who was never
a virgin
Has bolted the door
Put curtains at our windows
See the men pass
They are going somewhere
Fleshes like weeds
Sprout in the light
So much flesh in the world
Wanders at will
Some behind curtains
Throbs to the night
Bait to the stars
Spread it with gold
And you carry it home
Against your shirt front
To a shaded light
With the door locked
Against virgins who
Might scratch
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Lost Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy, Roger L. Conover. Copyright © 1996 Estate of Mina Loy. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Introduction,
I. FUTURISM × FEMINISM: THE CIRCLE SQUARED (POEMS 1914–1920),
II. SONGS TO JOANNES (1917),
III. CORPSES AND GENIUSES (POEMS 1919–1930),
IV. COMPENSATIONS OF POVERTY (POEMS 1942–1949),
V. EXCAVATIONS & PRECISIONS (PROSE 1914–1925),
APPENDICES,
Acknowledgments,
Copyright,