Reading Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's I Scrape the Window of Nothingness scooped me out so thoroughly that only scaffolding remained. The scaffolding and the notes jotted down in a sketchbook while crouched on a rock in the arboretum. A sample:
untitled 3
the truth belongs
to those
who never say
good-bye
or lie about
being
here in love
with falling
gods
Where to begin? I'll begin in the black hole- the place where the literature of dissent abandoned its respect for language. Start with the sparse aesthetic of the political dictatorship, how it led to the absurdism of Eugene Ionesco, the veiled fruits of Herta Muller. What remains after totalitarianism (and utopian propaganda) rendered ordinary words meaningless.
Now progress to the shores of democracy where people know billboards better than the native plants in their backyards- look around, it's a brave new world and nothing is out of your reach if you're willing (and able) to buy it.
Alas, the hyper-mediated consciousness of consumer culture does not resuscitate language. Perhaps there is disappointment for the political exile upon discovery that democracy honors language by accident- and only on occasion.
The poet returns to the page with a mistrust of what man creates to make sense of things. No man-made signs can be trusted to offer truth. The words betray as swiftly as clock hands put us at another border, begging to be accepted into another country where only the moon is familiar.
But there are seasons, stars, and particular forms of light by which the world can be known. To read Radulescu is to re-learn geography. To jettison the GPS maps for enfleshed topography. To tell time by what we glimpsed in childhood faces or the heat of a mother's hand.
lend me your tongue
I buried mine a long time ago
there was no place for such a flame...
And then to hide what we know in our marrow but cannot afford to say- maybe because it fails to signify but really there are no words. No words unmolested.
The scene in Radulescu's poems winds through a distinctly liminal space- the thin skin stretched between light and dark. The space where superstitions are more legible than street signs. The space becomes the place where one expects the epiphany. For Radulescu, the poet's sacred absolutions- the pen, the paper, the attentive expectation- rarely give rise to revelation. She remains alone with a past she can't verbalize and a pen that draws blood without offering us a sentient body.
Other things I found: There are dogwood blossoms but they don't feel green. The flower's sensuality is held back. We are deprived of the resonance by which a bloom holds our attention. There is the ghost of Paul Celan. There is a moon (an eternity of moons). And other characters, or words, which return to re-orient us. There is ice, silence, wind, time, and light. There are eyes, scars, vowels, shadows, children, lovers...
The visual aspects are not effusive. In this regard, her poems resemble Eastern Orthodox icons more than photographs, oil paintings, or watercolors. Nothing of gouache's tender, wistful touch. The heaviness of holy things- gold foil on wood, the abstracted solemnity of faces who have seen holy things and yet cannot speak of them. The point at which silence morphs into reverence. The point at which she earns my trust.
She brings us to this point again and again and then refuses to go any further. I savor the non-adulatory awe- love the courage of language so bare you can see the swollen joints, the skinny knees knocking together.
Ultimately, what I find in Radulescu's poems is inseparable from what I know about being a Romanian defector: the past is easy to recount but impossible to translate. So I trust the bark of a tree for what it doesn't say. Maybe only a tree is equipped to handle the holy. Maybe the televangelists despise what they cannot touch.
a poet dying seeks refuge and
sets the page on fire
Radulescu offers her poems to a culture marked by impatience, a culture disinterested in the ineffable. Her courage comes from refusing to cater, pander, or prevaricate. Among my favorites from this book- "1955"; "bells & bones"; "rough winter, cold meals"; "starting point"- emblematic of her voice.
Sketch by George Terry McDonald [source]
I Scrape the Window of Nothingness will be available for purchase on March 12th, but you can pre-order a copy now from Orison Books.
"But why should I do this if you just finished saying Radulescu doesn't offer any revelations or certainties? Why bother if the poems won't fulfill me?"
Because any poet who fulfills you is a one-night stand on the bedside table; and what seems acrobatic at night looks foppish on two legs. Fulfillment is only temporary, a flash in the pan, but the silence of unspeakable things beguiles indefinitely. This is Radulescu's poetic gift- to convey the ineffablility of exile's place and the way language desecrates as much as it preserves. Read her for want of a moon.
"femme bleue" (in French)
"the earth begins" (translated by Luke Hankins)
"night in four voices" (in French)
"flood" (YouTube reading by the author)
"some words suicidal"
more poems at Orison
