And then this is an abridged version
of the longer poem, which is called
"(dis)orient" dis in parentheses and then orient
not only in parentheses but lowercase,
and then the word orient.
It's an odd blending of three different texts, basically,
spliced in with my own narrative.
One of the texts I was looking at
was by a man named Wilfred Bion who
was a very strange psychoanalyst who
tried to apply mathematical, and cartographic, and physics
properties to basically psychoanalysis.
And he was mainly writing about the idea of containment
and how we know what our container is,
how it comes from in the womb and our mother is
our container, our fear that's projected
gets processed through the mother
and given back to us in a way that makes it bearable.
So what I was tying this into is my own constant
trying to figure out where I am and who's reflecting back to me
what and how to map the circumference of my container.
I compared it to mapping by the Jesuits in China
and the Great Lakes where they were obsessed with mapping
these bodies of water.
And hopefully it comes together.
And I'll begin with the two epigrams,
one by Wilfred Bion and one from Père Albanel who is a Jesuit.
Wherever there are quotes from the Jesuit relations,
hopefully you can just tell that I'll speed up
and you can realize it's prose.
OK, the first one by Bion.
"Meaning is revealed by the pattern formed
in the light thus trapped not by the structure
of the carved work itself".
Then by Père Albanel: "At length,
all our journeys which were made only by paths all strewn with
crosses, came to an end very fittingly at a lake bearing
the name of the Cross from its having the perfect shape
of one".
"How quickly we prescribe the shape of all things.
In the instance of disorientation,
a dim shimmering projects uncontainable
fear, spreads out from our wooden boat.
Separations sound soft as wool pulled from a spindle.
Alone on our glassy seats and rocking, overcome with
need to chart the water light between the bow and the border
with reference to ourselves, its distance and what
tribes dwell on shores.
To place myself when I have lost you.
Marker.
Born on the shore of your consequence,
though absent when you came, your desire to know
periphery, the jagged coast of your container.
Mapped by echo and story, a cry returned
by crosses along the strand does not
imply acceptance of your plan or shape.
Echo, mirror, story each bent to serve.
Do not listen to me but yourself listening to me.
What is returned to us by recount or reflection rendered
lying.
We obtained all the information we could from the Indians who
had frequented those regions and we even traced out from
their reports a map with the whole of the new country,
Père Marquette.
You've informed me of plans for dark men dance with spades,
their black hair a whirl, and others
where yellow men pound winter rivers that their waters not
field a freeze.
A marble boat hovers in a vast, bright lake which, in my mind,
bears your name for its having the perfect shape of you.
But how much faith is required before making the projection,
relating your stories?
I feel the irritable reaching looking steadily
to your experience till the pattern emerges,
a wind across her surface and you shiver in every limb.
And I would not make a rhinoceros of you.
Dürer how you erred drawing the creature on scene,
mapping the scaled legs of the rhino, his armored plates,
the color of a speckled tortoise.
An account of you naked in the gymnasium
before others, foreigners.
Your long skin and broad farmer's
feet if I were to sketch you from your experience.
If the savages are to be believed in one place where
the birds shed their feathers at molting time,
any savages or deer coming to the spot are buried in feathers
over their heads and are often unable to extricate themselves,
Père Albanel.
But disregarding your own savage account of your skin,
I draw you sleeping or naked before a mirror, buried
beneath the down of your cruel forearm.
Supplemented by tales all error and conjecture reflected,
I recall your sounding points as security,
skin your body for meridian.
Surrounded now by minute links which impregnated with cruelty
link your parts together cruelly, orient or disorient.
Huronia and Cathay.
The land bridge cannot be forced to function.
What is not familiar on either side
more important than what is as naming the rapid Lachine
does not move China closer.
In fear of dislocation, I returned to my drawings of you.
Consider my meridian neither Paris nor Beijing.
No map is a neutral document, both in selectivity of content
and a sign there is bias.
The fine rendering of a pale blue delta on your thigh
fades to cool yellow whiteness.
And all that is not you, the wall, the pillow, the stair
give way to darkness.
Delicate color disappears.
An atlas of the rivers on the underside of your foot.
An atlas of the line where your chest curves to arm.
An atlas of your open eye.
The many drawings you'll never see.
And my trips to the liquid parts of you, more apostolic
than geometric.
The glistening rim of your mouth.
Where this great lake discharges its waters
is very advantageous to perform religious functions
since it is the great resort of most
of the savages of these regions.
Charting by echo sense, both thought and real, compelled
to seek asylum in fiction because, disguised as fiction,
the truth occasionally slips through.
But whose truth?
Whose meridian already would show you a proper placement.
Not wanting to move you away by either idolatry or insult.
When seeing yourself so large, myself in a distant corner,
or sometimes drawn so small you are lost in the warm court
beneath my arm.
The more ignorant began to make fun of such a description,
but the more intelligent, seeing such an orderly arrangement
of parallel lines of latitude and longitude,
could not resist believing the whole thing true,
while the reach.
Born between inland seas, I traveled
towards water's empirical truth, the roiling glass reflection.
Show me how I've acted, looked, done, give to me.
Water formed borders.
The Silk City of Suzhou carved from the lake bed contained
by canal echo.
The other returns to us unthinkable dread
projected through revelry in bearable form.
The sound of the oar returned by the tiled roofs of Han Shan Sì
or hear the loons cry, resounding from painted rocks
beside the Sault.
It is that beauty which is nothing
but the beginnings of terror that we are still
this able to bear.
A bat etched into a charred canyon wall
or carved on a beam above the canal's east gate
is an empathetic creature.
Charting solely by what is returned,
each image projected through my experience of you,
with you bounced off your biased and tender aesthetic.
The lakes laid to align for missionary zeal,
influenced by the most ardent desire
to make him known and adored by all peoples of all countries.
Lacus Huronem et Tai Hu.
Aware of the empirical and angered
by infidels who blur all distinction between actual
lived space and imaginary idealized space,
not above adding soft folding heels below an auspicious ridge
to create a more favorable geometric space.
Linking the lid to the imagined, I
recall only the silent pause between harsh words.
The reconciliation not the wronging.
Wanting to avoid the empty space,
he moves in and fills the room with familiar objects.
Lying beneath the pine in the damp scent of red needles,
a white bow bends over me.
The senses ring familiar and I hang pictures of you
and I across the hostile void, then
comfort comes in recognition.
The little people who inhabit these shifting tenements
strike camp in the morning all together
to go fishing or work in the rice.
They sew and gather here three times a year.
One might say they're ready to embrace their religion
but you would be mistaken.
They respond coldly, your religion is not in our books.
It is a strange religion.
--Père de Prémare.
The Indians gather and prepare rice for food as follows.
In the month of September, which is the proper time for harvest,
they go in canoes through these fields of wild rice
and shake its ears into the canoe.
I told these wild rice people of my design
to go and discover remote nations in order
to teach them the mysteries of our holy religion.
They told me that I would meet nations who would never show
mercy to strangers but break their heads for no reason. --Père
Marquette.
What I tell you is what I want to hear but the words are dull,
a mouthful of rice.
Now making opposite shores connect the land bridge
dead in the water.
As stroking the rough skin of the pine above me
does not make it yours, my fingers
through your hair, needles.
And the coast shifts regardless of our desire
for things to remain the same.
The pines now replaced by silos and stacks.
An image of you constructed but never abandoned.
From the boat, from a distance, so simple to assume quietude.
Calm points of placement along the
shore, despite the maddening clang of tin
from elevators along the canal.
And from water's edge the boat, assumed silent,
though the deafening clap of wind
through skins from the mast both fore and aft.
Confused by what is returned from what was imagined,
lost when the roar that exists on the other side
of the silence."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]