The Baudelaire Fractal Read online

  THE

  BAUDELAIRE

  FRACTAL

  LISA

  ROBERTSON

  COACH HOUSE BOOKS, TORONTO

  copyright © Lisa Robertson, 2020

  first edition

  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 Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Title: The Baudelaire fractal / Lisa Robertson.

  Names: Robertson, Lisa, 1961- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190142235 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190142251 | ISBN 9781552453902 (softcover) |

  ISBN 9781770566033 (PDF) | ISBN 9781770566026 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8585.O3217 B38 2020 | DDC C813/.54— dc23

  The Baudelaire Fractal is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 603 3 (PDF); ISBN 978 1 77056 602 6 (EPUB)

  Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email [email protected] with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)

  ‘I have insupportable nervous troubles, exactly like women.’

  – Baudelaire, in a letter to his mother

  ‘In this domain, as in Sartor Resartus, it is the masked, the disguised, or the costumed which turns out to be the truth of the uncovered.’

  – Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

  These things happened, but not as described.

  Raised from babydom into doubt, I’m as feminine as Rousseau. I, Hazel Brown, eldest daughter of a disappearing class, penniless neophyte stunned by the glamour of literature, tradeless, clueless, yet with considerable moral stamina and luck, left my family at seventeen to seek a way to live. It was the month of June in 1979. I was looking for Beauty. I didn’t exactly care about art, I simply wanted not to be bored and to experience grace. So I thought I would write. No other future seemed preferable. Let me be clear: I did not want to admire life, I did not want to skim it; I wanted to swim in it. I judged that to do this, I had to leave, and to write. I wanted to speak the beautiful language of my time, but without paying.

  I myself was not beautiful. Moody, angular, both dark and pale, of bad posture, for I was perpetually thrust forward as if rushing into time, awkward whilst being observed, a half-broken tooth in my reluctant smile, uncertain in manners, premature frown lines between my grey-green eyes, all of this magnified by an urgency with no recognizable context: comedic in short, in the mode of a physical comedy.

  Prodigal, undisciplined, with an aptitude for melancholy, I left houses, cities, lovers, schools, hotels, and countries. I left with haste, or I left languidly. Also I was asked to leave. I left languages and jobs. Leaving made a velocity. I left garments, books, notebooks, and several good companions. Sometimes I left ideas.

  After the leaving, then what? I suppose I would drift. I had no money and no particular plan. Cities exist; hotels exist; painting exists. Tailoring also, it exists, as anger exists, mascara exists, and melancholy, and coffee. I liked sentences and I liked thread. Reading surely and excessively exists; also, convivially, perfume and punctuation. I had a fantasy and my diary. I had my desire, with its audacity, its elasticity, and its amplitude. I carried a powder-blue manual Smith Corona typewriter in a homemade tapestry bag. I was eager, sloppy, vague. I wore odd garments. I carried no letter of introduction, and I knew no one. I was only a girl bookworm. I wasn’t to stay. None of this troubled me much.

  The nervous fluid of a city is similar to a grammar or an electric current. Loving and loathing, we circulate. I myself did not exist before bathing in this medium. Here I become a style of enunciation, a strategic misunderstanding, a linguistic funnel, a wedge in language. Here I thought I’d destroy my origin, or I did destroy it, by becoming the she-dandy I found in the margins of used paperbacks. What do I love? I love the elsewhere of moving clouds.

  Reading unfolds like a game called ‘I,’ in public gardens in good weather, in a series of worn-down hotel rooms, in museums in winter, where ‘I’ is the composite figure who is going to write but hasn’t yet. If I am not alone in these rooms, if I could be known, it would be by the skinny red-haired street singer, the secretary of Cologne in her ironical cast-off dress, the hard-shod horsegirls neighing in the dark apartment, by similarly hybrid she-strangers and foreigners, any girl with the combined rage of lassitude and complicity. They are blazons. Cool threads of anger bind me to them. We cease to be human. We’re neutral, desituated clouds. There is nothing left to fear. This realization is a vocation.

  My name is Hazel Brown.

  I awake in a hotel room. I hear gulls, the clinking and rocking of boats. I turn in the wide bed. The tightness and stiffness of the sheets feels pleasantly confining. In the first stirrings of thinking I discover within myself a strangeness – not a dislocation or a dissociation, but a freshening shimmer of sensual clarity shot through with strands of unmoored refusal and scorn. Beneath that, a slowly vibrating warp of erotic sadness. I abandon myself to this novel sensation. I open my eyes. Reader, I become him. Was that what I felt? No, I did not become him; I became what he wrote.

  Do you sometimes at earliest waking observe yourself struggling towards a pronoun? Do you fleetingly, as if from a great distance, strain to recall who it is that breathes and turns? Do you ever wish to quit the daily comedy of transforming into the I-speaker without abandoning the wilderness of sensing? The sensation isn’t morbid; it is ultimately disinterested. For me it’s a familiar moment, boring and persistent and disappointing. Again one arrives at the threshold of this particular, straitening I. With a tiny wincing flourish one enters the wearisome contract, sets foot to planks. Daily the humiliation is almost forgotten, until it blooms again with the next waking. It is an embarrassing perception best stoically flicked aside, left unreported. With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume.

  Between the puzzlement and its summary abandonment, between the folds of waking consciousness and their subsequent limitation, is a possible city. Solitude, hotels, aging, love, hormones, alcohol, illness – these drifting experiences open it a little. Sometimes prolonged reading holds it ajar. Another’s style of consciousness inflects one’s own; an odd syntactic manner, a texture of embellishment, pause. A new mode of rest. I can feel physiologically haunted by a style. It’s why I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal, yet the impersonal inflection can persist outside the text, beyond the passion of readerly empathy, a most satisfying transgression that arrives only inadvertently, never by force of intention. As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all the odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself. This description tends towards a psychological interpretation of linguistics, but the experience is also spatial. I used to drive home from my lover’s apartment at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. This was Vancouver in 1995. A zone of light-industrial neglect separated our two neighbourhoods. Between them the stretched-out city felt abandoned. My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise studios, the pools of sulphur light, towards a low-key dereliction. I would feel pretty much free. I was a driver, not a pronoun, not a being with breasts and anguish. I was neither with the lover nor alone. I was suspended in a nonchalance. My cells were at ease. I doted on nothing.

  Now, after a long absence, I had returned to Vanco
uver as a visitor. I had delivered the lecture on wandering, tailoring, idleness, and doubt. I had conversed, feasted, slept. The following morning, alone in the hotel, I awoke to the bodily recognition that I had become the author of the complete works of Baudelaire. Even the unwritten texts, the notes and sketches contemplated and set aside, and also all of the correspondence, the fizzles and false starts and abandoned verses, the diaristic notes: I wrote them. Perhaps it is more precise to say that all at once, unbidden, I received the Baudelairean authorship, or that I found it within myself. This is obviously very different from being Baudelaire, which was not the case, nor my experience. I had only written his works.

  It was a very quiet, neutral sensation. I associate it now with the observation of the immaterial precision of light.

  Such an admission will seem frivolous, overdetermined, baroque. But I will venture this: it is no more singular for me to discover that I have written the complete works of Baudelaire than it was for me to have become a poet, me, a girl, in 1984. I was as if concussed. Believe me if you wish. I understand servitude. My task now is to fully serve this delusion.

  Delusion needs an architecture; this hotel room became for a crucial instant the portal for a transmission seeking a conduit. Garments, rooms, paintings, desire: in each of these perceptual frames, there is the feeling of the movement of time as an inner experience made available to sensing and the wilderness of interpretation by way of material borders or limits. Time is my body, and it is also others’ bodies; it could next become sentences, and the reflexive pause within the phrase. This is grace, I think: the achievement, in the company of strangers, of the necessary precision of the pause. A sentence flourishes only as a pause in thought, which extends the invitation of an identification. The great amateurs of fashion understand this supple grace. Garments can translate a city, map a previously unimagined mode of freedom or consent. A garment is a pause in textile. The pause admits untimeliness. One part of time acts counter to the will; one part of our bodily life is always and only untimely. We enter the room at precisely the wrong moment; we trip against the furniture, bruising our hips; we wake in the morning unable to recognize a suitable pronoun among the conventional phonemes. The garment must dress our untimeliness. I’m looking for the nonchalance expressed in an oddly shaped collar, a collar that appears to want to lift in the breeze of an open window to caress the line of my jaw. I’m intimate with the clumsy humour of buttons, the way a new kind of fit in a tailored jacket lifts my kidneys a little, coaxing open a readerly concave chest. At night the girls in galleries suddenly wear bright fringed shawls that move when they laugh, with hair slashed straight and high across their brows. There’s a new textile, it seems, something from sports or a futuristic movie. It’s lightweight and silvery, and the kids have plucked it off the internet to wear on the bus. It’s being held to their skinny bodies by their heavy backpacks and the home-tattooed arms they slide across one another’s waists. There’s the erotic shimmer of a silk-thin band T-shirt on breast skin. The emotional synchrony of garments transmits discontinuously and by energetic means, thus the metaphysical appeal of fashion. I had studied this question of fashion’s intellectual spirit in some of its great theorists – Lilly Reich, for example, and Rei Kawakubo – but also in my relationships to garments of every provenance. They need not have value in the commercial sense. There are the cast-offs and rejects, on eBay, in charity shops, draped over fences in modest residential alleys, swagging the rims of dumpsters by the apartment blocks, and certainly I have been a passionate amateur of their study and occasional acquisition. But here I’m not talking about the material research, as all-absorbing as it can become in its gradual, irregular advancement, but the mood of a garment, the way an emotional tone is brought forward in the wearing, in the suggestive affinities of the toilette. The unfamiliar set of a shoulder or the tugging sensation of a row of tight wrist buttons can hint at the gestural vocabulary of a previous epoch and so substitute for eroded or disappeared sentimental mores. Time in the garment is what I repeatedly sought, because sartorial time isn’t singular but carries the living desires of bodies otherwise disappeared. This has been part of my perverse history of garment-love; I’ve wanted to inhabit the stances, gestures, and caresses of vanished passions and disciplines. And the various garments each person gathers to wear together, the way she groups fibres, colours, eras, social codes, and cuts, this mysterious grammar speaks beyond the tangible and often-cited economies and their various political constraints. I keep a home-sewn pale yellow silk shantung jacket that I haven’t worn for decades because it once matched the hair of the girl who became my grandmother. I discovered this the season I myself was pale blonde, in 1983, the year of my grandmother’s death. Garments are not signs in a signifying system, not in my cosmology. Fashion is the net of the history of love.

  The hotel room was decorated with two prints of paintings, both seascapes. Around these portal-like rectangles the walls and fabrics were all placid tints of pale green and grey. It was curious that the decorator had taken such pains to establish an aquatic theme, given that Vancouver’s own harbour was visible from the window. Yet these were not port images. They showed only unpeopled, unfigured planes of sky and sea, rendered in watercolour with some expertise, bisected or linked by their horizons. This now-tasteful minimalism of the previous decade left a polite space for reverie, as did the furnishings. I can’t recall the carpet. It was Poe who said that the soul of an apartment is its carpet, and by this measure, I have rarely occupied a hotel room that could be said to have a soul. But I am not sure that I want a hotel room to have a soul, since the task of that innocuous limbo is to shelter mine, and unimagined others’, with as few contradictions as possible. I go to the hotel to evade determination. What I thought of, what I imagined in this blandly contrived place as I woke, were those marvellously glowing baroque harbours by Claude Lorrain, the ones hanging in the Louvre. Listening to the boat sounds from my bed, watching the pale light slide in from beneath the sage-tinted curtain, I pictured the tall porticos rising on both sides of the sheltered water, pale columns rhyming with masts, the cheerful flapping of faded flags, the wooden hull of a great ship discharging cattle and wrapped bundles by means of little boats, bare-chested stevedores straining at their work while others, in red-and-blue belted tunics and matching turbans, stand by and discuss serious matters: impending weather conditions or import duties or the precarity of love. A cow in a sky-blue harness is being led by a man in a loincloth across a narrow gangplank to shore. I still keep an old postcard of this image, now bleached of its warm tones after being propped for several years on a sunny window ledge, so that my imagination of Claude has transmuted to cool-grey-green-blue, like the veiled marine sun of the Pacific port I now woke to. The more the Claude postcard fades, the more it resembles what I know.

  The two imaginary seaports by Claude, these complex frontiers of an urban ambiance, as Guy Debord described them, were rivalled in their beauty, he said, by the Paris metro maps conveniently posted at stations. The affinity of the maps and Claude’s seaports had to do, he claimed, with his characteristically utopian vagueness, with ‘a sum of possibilities’ rather than any compositional aesthetics. It’s a literary mode of comparison, using not signs as its components, but the transformative potency of transitions. Metaphors, in other words. His method also takes into account the anticipation of transitions, not only the events themselves, which is what I like about metaphor, and about Debord: time is perversely multiplied. Nothing replaces anything else; contradictory sensations acquire contingent truth. The baroque seaports of Claude Lorrain exist right now as future potentials. I would agree with Debord about the psychogeographic equivalence of the harbour’s beauty with the modern transports, but with the proviso that the similarity holds only for the time before one has ever visited Paris, when the metro and its map is still a pittoresque novella by Queneau borrowed from a smalltown library, or glimpsed in a scene in a film by Godard, the one for example where Anna
Karina, her childish face and pulled-back hair being lightly stroked all the while by her lover, looks at the presumed sadness of the other metro passengers – the moody boy with the cake box, the bored businessman reading the newspaper – and recites, then sings aloud, a poem by Aragon: Things are what they are. From time to time the earth trembles. The train pulls up to a station called Liberté. But is there a station called Liberty? I have never noticed it on any line I’ve travelled. And were the men sad? Maybe they were just angry. The tautly inflected instant of transformation between vocal recital and song, the poignant artifice of the threshold marked by a slight catch in her voice, a kind of physiological caesura or inflation that also seems spiritual, is what I recall most intensely of this film, first seen on a small static-strewn television screen in one of the shared sprawling apartments of the eighties, those roughly furnished places now mythic for their three-day parties and cut-up poems strewn across patterned blue carpets, also faded. Those carpets had soul – the pile rubbed bare to the rough jute warp in places of passage, the arabesque, as Poe called it, not only traced out in gridded botanical curlicues by the yarn of the pile, but stamped directly onto the now-visible jute backing with a kind of indelible blue-black ink. True, Poe preferred crimson carpets.

  Transposed maps of different regions would be a variant explanation. The Vancouver hotel room I occupied that morning seemed in my state of half-wakefulness to contain all the hotel rooms and temporary rooms I had ever stayed in, not in a simultaneous continuum, nor in chronological sequence, but in flickering, overlapping, and partial surges, much in the way that a dream will dissolve into a new dream yet retain some colour or fragment of the previous dream, which across the pulsing transition both remains the same and plays a new role in an altered story, like a psychic rhyme, or a printed fabric whose complex pattern is built up across successive layers of impression, each autonomously perceptible but also leading the perceiver to cognitively connect the component parts in an inner act of fictive embellishment, so strong is the desire to recognize a narrative among scattered fragments of perception. My own youth seems to move in my present life in such a way – present and absent, at times incoherent, sometimes frightening, scarcely recognizable, rhyming and drifting.