Sarah Burgoyne is the author of Because the Sun (Coach House, 2021), Saint Twin (Mansfield, 2016), and Mechanophilia (Anvil, 2023), an infinite collaboration with American poet Vi Khi Nao.
“What would it mean if we responded to art by gleefully enacting the artist’s methods, as much as engaging with their ideas? What dimensionality—either furling outward into the universe or inward into the subject—occurs when the artist known through their work after years of wee candle-lit get-togethers, a pandemic in the snow, a trespass into her workshop (‘she doesn’t even go here’), becomes a friend? Derrida writes that the intimacy of friendship lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. Somewhere along my life, I collected the idea that the best way to respond to a poem is with another poem. I wish I could remember who said that.
“All of these ideas and questions go into ‘Four Thoughts on Gail Scott’—what Mallarmé might call a ‘divagation’ responding to Canadian experimental writer Gail Scott’s impressive oeuvre, specifically to My Paris (1999), ambiently to Furniture Music (2023), and, more often, by activating Scott’s creative paradigms. Those familiar with these works will recognize the character of the flâneuse, the woman city walker; the troubling of genre (is this art criticism, autofiction, memoir, theory?); and the need to respond to each other experimentally in order to avoid being cast under a spell by our catastrophic times.”
Let us at last seek help in interpreting the dream of the 21st century. We must pay attention to juxtapositions. I pick up one of my favourite books, Gail Scott’s My Paris. In it, the narrator, named Gail, explores Paris as the millennium approaches against the backdrop of the Bosnian War. In her small “faux-deco” studio apartment she peruses a copy of The Arcades Project by cultural theorist and philosophical intimate Walter Benjamin. She names him “B.” To experience space through B’s lens, then, is to seek the dialectical image, a sort of placement of unlike objects (outdated commodities, usually, kitsch often) next to each other through which we suddenly see history for what it is: ongoing catastrophe. Gail visits the Musée Carnavalet:
It was about to rain. I saw the sky suddenly darkening through the open window. Further reflected in glass doors of Second Empire cabinets. Shelves flagging objects projecting images of bloody exuberance. Sèvres saucers with man waving Marie-Antoinette’s head. Man on plate gleefully collecting blood in basin. Gushing from guillotined neck. Citizen Le Sueur’s watercoloured cut-outs of citoyens and citoyennes: patriotic women’s club snug in bon-culottes: Marat on shoulders of supporters. Revolutionary army: sans culottes: apprentice butchers. Hunters. Citizens with placards: Vivre Libre Ou Mourir, Freedom or Death. Pasted in little groupings on deep blue sky. Hard flat edges. Precursing social realism. In succeeding rooms: succeeding revolutionary waves. Checked by defeat or Thermidor. When populace taking comfort in cosy interiors. Before hopeful ordinary people again building better barricades than ever. In defence of phantasmagoria of bourgeois-worker brotherhood. Why shouldn’t they—prefect sniffing. They’ve no fortunes to compromise. Leading up to Commune. Exposed off-handedly. In long narrow alcove. A few objects including plate for printing “L’Internationale.” Plus painting of a pair of nice fat Paris rats. Communards eating during siege. In front of which straggling group of socialist ladies from Provence. Clucking embarrassed.
A jilted lover calls to say, the revolution has been domesticated. Exhibition value appreciates. I shut the book. Tisn’t so easy to capture the dialectical image, apparently, something between the surreal and the smell of a long-forgotten cookie that shoots you into your childhood. Re. backdrops, Scott has written, Like the daily news, much contemporary fiction fails to say what must be said. B agrees, Spleen is the feeling that corresponds to catastrophe in permanence. The phone is ringing. It’s Gail.
At Lana Café in Montreal, a man opens a door for another man, who looks annoyed. I sit by a window, not flaneusing today. Rêveries de la Plaza St-Hubert by Nicolas Lévesque in my bag, beside My Paris. “Immeuble à vendre” across the street. $3,500,000. Bijouterie le Roy. Inside the café is a fridge and a hum from it humming. A tuna sandwich on my plate. Salt from olives in the bread. African masks on the wall—c’est juste la decoration, says the barista. Screen on the wall: the politician expresses a “desire for change.” The passers-by squeeze past my window. Silhouettes in drag. The other side of the street is closed. Mannequins half dissembled in the window. One with no legs and one arm. One gets used to the nightmare of l’homme tronc, writes Lévesque. Like Lévesque, I have time to kill: je me trouve devant un vide de deux heures. On the screen, the politician says, “Yes we can.” This is a structure of feeling. We are told by the sign they put at the entrance to the Plaza as a harbinger of renovations that the Plaza belongs to a singular person, that this person can own it and it is self-actualizing: Ma Plaza se transforme. This is also a structure of feeling, a mode of governance, even. Scholem, B’s friend, scholar and Zionist advocate described the rumblings of Marxism in B’s book One-Way Street as “distant thunder.” How many of us have felt this far-off storm brewing in ourselves. B said he hated Marxist dogma, “but the attitude is obligatory.” You’ve changed, says the jilted lover. Ownership without responsibility: it’s a structure of feeling. A worker talks with the cook outside. They lean on metal by the cones, at the edge of the obstacle course that the Plaza has become, gang planks over deep crevasses, small steep bridges, thick gravel and labyrinthine fence-work next to saws. Droves of men in the pit with orange vests, mostly nothing-doing. The surface worker, the listless guard-type, the Mother Cone, waves and the cook laughs, her curly hair wobbling in its net. Her face looks familiar… Je viens de Paris, she says. The man who normally sits beside the metro entrance ambles towards them and asks them for change. They dig in their pockets. A stroller hesitates at the edge of the Plaza, where people squeeze out its funnel. Looks of dread all around. Look of dread on the baby’s face. I remember when the marquise came down, before they installed the new one, the pigeons, for days, would fly at the bricks, looking for their obliterated homes.
Over drinks and fries, in a busy little wine bar on Parc, Gail tells me my collection of names for the dialectical image might make a good poem. When I get home, wobbly, I pull out the list and my head starts to spin: The dialectical image has been called “surrealist philosophizing,” something that can be thought of in the coordinates of fossil, fetish, wish image and ruin, as existing at the “null point” with its “contradictory moments as axial fields,” as a “family tree,” as something which harbours “theoretical inconsistencies” and “ambiguities,” as “iridescence,” as “where the dynamis of what is happening coagulates into statis, as the moment in which “truth is charged to the bursting point with time,” as “a configuration of the Now and Then,” as “fugitive,” as something whose “prototype is allegory,” as something that can be “caught in a net,” as “sui generis” (a note beside this reads, the only example of its kind), as “too surreal,” as a “blend of the Marxist imperative to change the world and Surrealism’s heightened graphicness,” as “profane illumination,” as “revolutionary energy contained in the outmoded and obsolete,” as the “involuntary memory of redeemed humanity,” as the “constellation of awakening,” as appearing only in the “now of knowability,” wherein “what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation,” the constellation “saturated with tension,” as “the caesura in the movement of thought,” as a “dark star” or “theoretical and methodological black hole absorbing any number of attempts at critical illumination,” as “impermissibly poetic,” as “soliciting the use of the historian’s imagination the way a constellation solicits an astrologer’s imagination to read what was never written,” hence, perhaps, as something ultimately imaginary, perhaps there being “no such thing.” I add a question mark. Later that summer, J and I drive two hours to visit Gail at a cabin in Magog where she’d gone to work on a memoir of her time in Manhattan during the Obama elections and the financial crash throughout which she mingles with the city’s leftist poets and writers (though mostly poets) interrogating what poetry can do. We pull up in our rental “upgrade” and Gail does not emerge because she could not believe it could be us in practically a Hummer though it’s just a Jeep. She takes an ironic photo of us leaning on it. We drive, all three in the Hummer, to visit Lyne Lapointe and Nancy Marcotte in paradise. J and I climb the backyard mountain to look across the border at the land he will be moving to and I feel expansive and sad all at once. We climb back down and sit by the pond. Nancy and Lyne are wrapped in towels. A basket full of vegetables sits beside the garden. Nancy is making a documentary about happiness and asks us many questions.
A man is slumped on the stoop of Lana Café, head in his hands. Fellow itinerant crosses sea of honking traffic, become-Moses, to give unto his friend a couple of slaps on the knee. Friend sufficiently roused. Moseses back across Jean-Talon with friend. Simon and Garfunkel on the radio. This is where I perform most of my Plaza-leering, because it’s on a corner, because it’s mostly windows. Characters linger here (what are these?). I am just a poor boy though my story’s seldom told. Uncovered, today, delightful assiette végé: bean salad, quinoa, tabbouleh. Fizzy lime- ish water. A woman in a blond straight wig and denim bucket hat is texting in loitering position (but not in a position of flânage. NO LOITERING is often translated as PAS DE FLÂNAGE, such as outside the Parc Metro station where I enter each morning on my way to work (if weather-obstacled, if late) from Parc X, often to teach Baudelaire, chief flâneur, often passing several desperate “loiterers” (if “loitering” could possibly describe having nowhere to go) often translating the sign in my head to NO POETRY). A flâneuse cannot be texting, must be looking, wandering, must have taped, briefly, a counter-sign above her desk: embrace oblivion hence why I am up at dawn these days while A sleeps on the other side of the wall, as if in another room in my brain, one I creep into in a lull. The loiterer outside Lana Café wears enviable cranberry lip gloss. She is waiting for someone and I know this because when she looks up from her phone she doesn’t know where to look, as if the friend (date, maybe?) could be arriving from anywhere. But they are meeting on la Plaza. Another woman in a fur coat, flared jeans and grey-tipped afro turns the corner abruptly and enters the metro. Not the date. In the corner of the café, an older man squat on a wooden chair, resting both his hands on the baroque metal handle of his cane, mafia-donishly holds court. His first guest, a young man, leaves. Then a woman in crisp white boots enters the café and joins him. At the table beside me another man eats a tuna sandwich while watching a video on propped phone. It’s unseasonably warm today. Everything dripping and melting. Hipster in a long teal coat and long brown air-dried hair (so, like mine, curled in patches, flat in others) passes wearing dorky but contextually cool mountaineering backpack. Turns not unto the Plaza. But a couple, she wearing a pale pink coat and woollen scarf worn over the back of the head hepburning toward her chin, he in matching pale pink turban, turns. As do two sauntering girlfriends. A woman in leopard print with glamorous sunglasses and patent leather boots texts, pigeon-toed, on the corner. A beautiful trans woman in Montreal trans-femme fashion, winding (wielding?) the profoundly risqué with the deeply elegant, a long denim skirt slit all the way up the back, fabric attaching only at sacrum (and wearing a thong to boot) turns unto the Plaza. “L.A. Woman” on the radio now. Morrison sings into your blues but I hear give me your blues. Hispanic family shuffles by. Everyone upset. Stern mother, father, daughter, and someone else who looks like she’s been crying. A screen-map leads a couple coming from the metro a few steps down the Plaza before they pivot back. Are you a lucky little lady in The City of Lights? Or just another lost angel? Me, bean-loving inside the cafe. Creamy centres. Vinegary skins. Maybe herbivorous protein deficiency amplifying love (mother on the phone last week, eat a hamburger already!). Enter storm clouds, weather of my youth to the city of my adulthood. Pigeons above the tabagie start to lift off one by one, grown numerous due to pigeon-sour new awning. In a phone call with Plaza chief, I learned the pigeons were the main incentive to build a new awning. Too many nests. Too much guano. In fact, I remember, in Plaza olden-days shit-dappled mannequin legs outside the Plaza (inciting disgust, despite my fondness for pigeons). This image conjuring, suddenly, my dream from last night in which I was shopping, with urgency, on the Plaza for pajamas for myself and B, finding, on the rack, polyester, floral arabesque, lotus flower and chakra motifs, fingering, in my dream, the cheap fabrics, feeling uneasy about purchasing though out of options. A line from Lisa Robertson’s “Value Village Lyric,” dog-eared on my bedside table, is scrawled in graffiti on the wall of the shop above the rack I am rigging: We want an impure image that contradicts fixity. Something deliciously insecure: the sheath of a nerve. In a dream dictionary online finding clothes reflect the dreamer’s confidence or deep-rooted insecurity that dwells under the mask they wear in public. You will be offered many metaphoric clues in your dream to see if you are suited for the role or have trouble fitting in. Concluding I am ill-suited to the Plaza. Remembering, also, that some dream interpreters believe every character in the dream to be you, reminding me of a passage by Flaubert that B had drawn to my attention (Freudian slip just now: had drawn to my intention): Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes. B pacing, in the dream, then stopping and staring at me full in the face, saying, There are all sorts of people undone. Awakening, then, with surprise, to the question, what is fashion, exactly? Exactness not the right goal. Precision, maybe. A woman passes by wearing the jeggings I was ogling in a Plaza shop window with thick stitching drawn where seams would be as if with felt pen, with cherry red roses on the thighs and cartoon rhinestones. Glory be to God for dappled things. Phantasmagoria of denim. Someone invented those (often the sole reason behind my outlandish thrift store purchases). Briefly, I consider abandoning my writ and going back to get a pair, remembering that Baudelaire would wear a violet boa on which curled his long graying locks. But even poetry has its limits. So many women arm in arm today. A youngster in hijab donning Playboy sweats. I slip My Paris in my bag and head into the unfurling asphalt.
