Luminous Explosions

It was late August, last August; the baby had been dead five years. Her absence hung in my chest and thickened like a bell that grew more silent with time.Some cultures have names for such hauntings, by sickly, sticky children who didn’t get to live—the myling in Sweden, the bird rider in Korea. These little ghosts are spiky, fickle, as liable to help the living as to strangle their mothers by the neck. I was not so lucky. I received no aid nor was I relieved of my life, but continued to drive life’s circuit. So it was I found myself a block from the middle school, stopped at a light. Midmorning, mid-August, and also, I feared, the middle of my life.Then I looked to my right.Across the empty passenger seat, across an empty lot, above flowering weeds that knotted and bowed above the chunked asphalt like the braids of schoolgirls hunched over their math, I saw pale letters floating on a sandy wall. And they read:Electrical Pain.This pale vision then directed my eye upward to the big-bellied clouds in the sky like goddesses on a painted ceiling, close but leaning away, as if ambivalent about we humans down below them, mired in light and time:Electrical Pain.The next morning, instead of stopping at the light, I drove into the lot. The wall with its spectral message shored up an abandoned grocery–cum–hardware store along its west side; the chain had left the neighborhood along with its sign, leaving this ghost phrase to emerge in pale letters. Studying this wall, I now noticed bricked-up loading docks, sagging chain links, staff entrances painted shut.As I looked closer, words began to emerge from the ruins: exit, keep out, this premises protected by . . . carries a fine . . . Each sight line ended not in a vanishing point but in a sign blocking sight, addressing me, warning me off, advising me that I was being watched. At the height of the building tangles of wires reared up where some instrument had been ripped away. No current ran here to light the no-cameras. Only direct communication through a ghost sign:Electrical Pain.The rats and I laughed. Midmorning, mid-August, the middle of our lives. To my right ran the redbrick facade of an abandoned brewery; I had often driven along its lot side where a tilting chimney waited for the EPA wearing a cracked face and a long, widening train of asbestos-laden bricks. From where I stood, I could see right to a clutch of what had been offices, corridors, and doorframes, wire soundproofing still stood in the transoms. Where people had lately sheltered there, sheets and tarps were tacked up, though these too were washed pale with light and rain. The effect was mesmerizing: exposed, yet emblematizing enclosure, a space available to the eye that could still, somehow, not be penetrated. It protected its privacy, an interiority clad in an infinitely regressing exteriority, an impossible site.I felt a sense of vertigo, suspended in this lot by the full tide of this paradox: half familiar, half strange, and generous. The abandoned store held up its banner of pain under an incongruously palatial sky; the ruined brewery, a gauntlet of thresholds, both accepted and defied exposure. I felt inside and outside myself, revealed and concealed, in a glitchy, gelid triple-time of rest, crisis, loss. Pollen and asbestos fibers twitched in my lungs.My bell twitched.Surrounded by passersby on foot, on bike, on car, I felt invisible because I was looking the other way.I was looking at something else.…In 2008, as the facade of wealth and prosperity shredded away to reveal the rotten beams and sclerotic drains and pumps of global capital, a ruination unvaryingly described with the dead architectural metaphor a global financial collapse, the Marxist UK poet Sean Bonney published Baudelaire in English, a work of uncannily alert concrete translation palimpsesting Baudelaire’s notorious Les fleurs du mal onto the psychogeography of then-contemporary London. Electric with the glares and shadows formed by the foundering ditches and flaring wells of capital, Bonney’s concrete Baudelaire in English propagates the occult energy of ruins—collapsed and expansive, extinguished yet persisting, contradictory and singular, intimate and exposed.It’s commonly held that Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal initiates modern European poetry with the most elegant of howls against a Haussmannified, bourgeois Paris, spasmed with unexpected torrents of idealism and praise. Baudelaire elaborates these tonal opposites until they become co-ironized, absurd, and collapsed, producing, perhaps, the paradoxical instars of beauty and ill will evoked in its title. Bonney’s Baudelaire in English runs a live wire from Baudelaire’s Paris of 1867 to his London of 2008, revealing his city to be a site of hyperbolic, macrocosmic collapse—“the incinerated city lurks in the center of the vicious heart’s splinter.”1Emblematic of this impossible yet occultly charged spatiality, Baudelaire in English does not begin with a poem at all, but with a black-and-white photo snapped within an abandoned building, rendered at once visible and not quite parsible by harsh flash and lo-fi reproduction. Rotting ceilings and mysterious supports, empty compartments inside other empty compartments, double rooms that reveal both everything and nothing about themselves, seed the text with dubious energy, or bleed energy from the normally prioritized text—as if photographs of squats could themselves squat within the ruined edifice of the book. Later Bonney further ornaments and distresses some of these “rooms” by incorporating them into collage, gathering them into the general energy of obscurity and inflorescence that overruns—even overwrites—the book itself. As he notes: These photos were interesting to me because they were of the “invisible,” both in terms of being of rooms I couldn’t see, and of being of an asocial, abandoned space in the inner city / rapidly being cleared in the last push of the alleged creation of a smooth-surface postmodern city / safe for faux-bohemian yuppies. The “invisible” is not some otherworldly visionary realm, but just these abject spots, these gaps in the safely constructed social text, tenuously analogous to “poems,” where nothing “useful” can happen. (BE, 86)Rather than merely ornamenting or even illustrating the text proper, the photos, like flowers of evil, initiate and propagate the palpable yet undecidable space that blooms through the poems themselves. Photos also push up through Bonney’s notes, which follow the sequence, notes themselves starred and interrupted with possibly random numerical references rhizomatically rootling back to individual poems in the main sequence (a random-seeming numbers sequence that recalls that recited through the radio in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée—a subterranean summons from Art). The ingrown and overgrown relation between the photos and the poems is indicated by the way Bonney uses the vectors of spatiality, invisibility, access, and inaccessibility to describe both: “Each poem as a map/impenetrable chart of (a) no admittance except on business (b) username and password (c) human beings & their luminous explosions in space” (BE, 86). These “luminous explosions in space” mark the signature pulse of the human, and of Art, ungovernable by the laws of the market and the state—ungovernable, even, by the ban the poet might place in his own heart against the heartbreaking inefficacy of poetry itself. Like Baudelaire in his splenetic/uxorious paroxysms toward and away from the human, and from Beauty, Bonney has a rueful relationship to Art’s “luminous explosions.” He gives this account of taking the photos: I scrambled into the building into a hole on the wall, on impulse. & inside it was absolutely dark apart from a few cracks of light coming through gaps in the wooden boards where the windows had been. When I tried to take photos, the flash illuminated the whole interior, giving me a set of well-lit photos of a place that nobody could actually see—poetry continues because the chance for its realization was missed. (BE, 88)Art is impossible, dissatisfactory, and, for Bonney, I think, irresistible, creating a pulse of attraction/repulsion, that is, splenetic/idealistic energy that runs in a direct current from Baudelaire and produces luminous explosions, electrifying this sequence as it does all of Bonney’s work. In this way, even as the photos, poems, and notes of Baudelaire in English double for, ornament, and obscure each other, they cast on each other a radical, transfixing light. The translations themselves crackle with visual logic. Each bears a French title linking it obediently to the fleur du mal with the same name—“le soleil,” “le paysage”—but the obedience stops there. Each is emphatically typewritten, struck with force into the page. An unreadable yet irresistible visual static erupts as dashes, symbols, cross-outs, and other marks both develop and conceal the text, as if the poem is being eroded away with the same gesture as it is being brought into view. In place of Baudelaire’s deceptively orderly alexandrines, here the lines appear cut up and put down at tangled angles, layered on top of each other in a snarl with suggestive words and phrases breaking free. The effect is that house first exploded then collapsed—after the lightning strike of a first reading, one can reread the poem for the ambivalences, declarations, and bolts of tone it hosts. To return to each page is to read a poem in ruins, with slants of lights and cracks, sudden illuminations by force, “a place nobody could actually see,” yet allowing, through the interventions of Art, “luminous explosions in space.”If Baudelaire in English is an overt visual dismantling of Baudelaire, Bonney also clearly treasures the earlier work, and under the pyrotechnic special effects, he performs more intimate negotiations with the text itself. He overwrites and comments on the earlier poet’s lines with asides like “(no similes),” or impatient glosses like “&,” “etc,” or else by paraphrasing, skipping stanzas, and having the poem end precipitously as if the signal had abruptly cut out. These impatiencies and disloyalties ironically have the effect of amplifying the boredom and antipathy transferred directly from Baudelaire.Here Bonney’s version of “l’Albatros” or, as Bonney has it, “l’albatros:::::,” is so typed-over and crossed out it seems to nail Baudelaire’s bird to the page, just as the ship’s crew nails down an albatross out of, naturally, boredom. Baudelaire’s poem concludes: La Poète est semblable au prince des nuéesQui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer;Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.In Richard Howard’s standard translation: The Poet is like this monarch of the cloudsriding the storm above the marksman’s range;exiled on the ground, hooted and jeeredhe cannot walk because of his great wings.2But Bonney rejects Baudelaire’s elevating comparison; instead he sides with the crew: The Poet isNothing like this///the crowds are right totake the piss. (BE, 74)If this poem reads like an excoriation of Baudelaire, with the hammers of the typewriter striking the blows, many other moments in the sequence, and indeed the sequence itself, seem to physically shelter the poems, forming a kind of lover’s archive of tenderness, intimacy, anger, rejection, reconciliation, and pain. This seems especially so in Bonney’s paired translations of “l’Invitation au voyage,” in which he (twice) seems to share Baudelaire’s beleaguered dream of arriving at a place of ideal calm at once domestic and, somehow, general. Baudelaire’s invitation, in Howard’s translation, figures both a golden elsewhere and a specifically imagined domestic interior—“Furniture gleaming / with the patina / of time itself in the room we would share.”3 Bonney isolates this moment and makes it a refrain in his own versions—“in our rare room.” He also preserves Baudelaire’s own refrain, which itself reads like a dream-preservative, a suspension in amber, or in an ampule of opiates—“hyacinth & gold / shuddering, luminous;; / all is order, / beauty— / voluptuous calm & luxury,” reads Bonney’s first version. Bonney’s second version steers a more rocky visual course to the final precarious phrase, “all is order & b /voluptuous calm &.”—but it still holds on to the refrain like a life raft (BE, 70–77). For all the erosion, erasure, distortion, and revision of the poems, Bonney seems to be Baudelaire’s true reader, twin to his passion, fitfulness, idealism, and spleen, the one to whom Baudelaire directly beckons in his famous “To the Reader,” which opens Les fleurs du mal: “Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!” For “hypocrisy” I read ambivalence in Bonney toward Baudelaire, himself, and poetry, an ambivalence so wide that it becomes an engine of the translation, castigating, treasuring, excoriating, preserving, resisting, and finally collapsing into that explosive illumination, Art.Around the same time as Bonney was writing his Baudelaire, here, in America, the term ruins porn was ambient in the media. The term largely applied to visual images of the urban Midwest, especially Detroit; it critiqued work that seemed to aestheticize the “ruins” of urban homes and public spaces without attending to the lived experiences of the communities who had built and lived there. Nearly twenty years later, it seems telling that this critique surfaced just as the 2008 financial crash was gathering steam, with its phenomena of unreal, ballooning debt, devastated families, bankruptcies, and foreclosures (and corporate bailouts). This collapse was surreptitiously followed by the predacious financialization of real estate and the epiphenomenon of ghost landlords that, among other factors, has created the contemporary housing crisis. While the corrective framing of “ruins porn” may have been useful, as an epithet relying on individual shame it missed another kind of gaze—that of a predatory system of extraction and erasure working forward and backward in time, most of which happens out of sight. The predatory gaze of invisible, remote hedge funds and corporations only becomes apparent by its aftereffects, when it’s too late—when communities are hollowed out, buildings razed, and people evicted, unprotected and unhoused.In 2013 Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s “1000 Houses in 1000 Days” campaign set out to repair or, more frequently, raze houses in states of apparent disrepair across the city and address what Buttigieg has called, in his autobiography, “the contagion of blight.”4 According to the South Bend Tribune, over 60 percent of the houses on Mayor Pete’s list were demolished this No were to just who was under this to a more and So many now a ghost lot. the lot on our on people still on the that from the to the with with when once had formed a the middle school, I looking for another and across the of South of South Bend was a formed by at the in to the and other that them from or building their own the of the were to and houses in over When financial the this neighborhood was not the In one of of of South back for the of the the house he built was had been down the 1000 the face of such it is to at the “ruins” of our what and what has not with or but with and these of and beauty and pain are away. ruins, we are and by and we cannot quite not This is a to in when in the of a is a of arriving at it has Bend of of of of London of Paris of to seem that collapse is the signature of Art, as it is of the collapsing and and interior, “luminous it is a to that the poetry of with Les fleurs du one could as that it in is, that Baudelaire’s and his sense of tone are through his translations of is the that to be Baudelaire’s translations of began and continued his own in this is also the by own as they are by both and so with tone that they become for ghosts or, more for the In most of the of the is at the dead center of the the book opens the until that of the exteriority, the into of the the site is into the collapse collapse, To the the of the the of the house and back on its To or this is to be by its of collapse, to its luminous And these of translation also work backward and forward in time, forward to the which Baudelaire’s translations still and in and backward over the to and in the with seems to have transferred directly to Baudelaire, in his many of ideal rooms with et This is a rare as Bonney has it is also a available to all through of the the of is the of as in Baudelaire’s published Paris by room that is like a dream . . . a voluptuous dream in an . . . of is an and and seems to be one would with a like and The a silent like and . . . An of the most with the of through this where the is so that of is uncannily with the is also with and both the human and the itself. The room seems and even the one the of the an one could actually if one were to into debt, which Baudelaire leaving to to funds and his the other, the double room an interiority that only in its own its of It is the room is of, the room that of life to the double room of Art, to the book of the and to live there, are the impossible sight lines ruins alert to the eye to the double room of the an impossible a and and and and this whole this whole is the double room of Art, with and impossible opposites that instead of or of light. the ruins of South Bend their in they intimate that the many that have on our might collapse into a and of the to the end of this the book of the next and that book is here, in ruins, to the will we will read this book the next time I down on it will for it will close over my