The Lost Lunar Baedeker Read online

  Mina Loy is not for everyone. It is not by accident that her work has been misplaced. “Difficult” is the word that has been most often used to describe her. Difficult as a poet and difficult as a person. And certainly difficult to place. Her work has never attracted casual readers. It is easiest simply to ignore her. Until now, the determination required to find her poems, let alone the perspicacity required to read them, has served as a qualifying experience. But her readers, if small in number, have also been large in commitment. Once discovered, if her poems do not immediately repel, they possess. Her work is far more likely to be a toxic or a tonic—quickly sworn off or gradually acquired as a lifelong habit—than a passing interest. In my own experience, and that of many people with whom I have shared her work over the past twenty years, her poems either embed themselves deeply within the imagination or they alienate. With Loy, there is no in between. She is not an academic poet, but her poems are of the intellect. In order to read her with profit, you need at least four things: patience, intelligence, experience, and a dictionary.

  One generally takes Loy—or does not—as one takes a vow. She tends to be accepted or avoided. No one considers her “decent.” She is contrary, she is antimetric, and certainly she is indecent. Her first readers found her so, and most contemporary readers still do. You become either a sworn believer or a fast enemy. Loy’s poetry has gradually fostered community among scholars, but it has also helped to define the sides of a poetry war which is quite real. In recent years her poetry has begun to register with a critical valence for the first time since the 1920s; this is new. But there will always remain those who don’t subscribe. She forces us to take sides, and the easiest side to take is the one that looks past her. That is all right, for I believe, finally, that she will establish the reputations of critics more than they will hers, and that a true and good argument about Mina Loy has begun. That argument is needed. There is no version of the twentieth-century canon that includes Mina Loy’s work, yet somehow it has survived. Perhaps her absence from such lists is itself a form of status. Perhaps it was her wish to remain unchosen.

  It is not given to each of us

  To be desired.

  Loy once said in The Blind Man: “Art is The Divine Joke, and any Public … can see a nice easy simple joke such as the sun.” She named her lunar baedeker not for the sun but for its ghost. It is now, just as the sun is setting on the century, that her guide to the moon seems indispensable. How strange her voice still seems. And how disturbing.

  I believe there are certain guidebooks we should take with us as we navigate our way toward the next century, and that Mina Loy’s is one of them. I think her poems have a relevance to the formation of a new modernity, and that she might yet prove to be the poet of her century, as Duchamp proved to be the artist of his. For some of us, she is already.

  R.L.C.

  I

  FUTURISM × FEMINISM: THE CIRCLE SQUARED

  (POEMS 1914–1920)

  Loy in Florence, ca. 1909, holding her daughter, Joella, and wearing a hat and dress of her own design

  There is no Life or Death,

  Only activity

  And in the absolute

  Is no declivity.

  There is no Love or Lust

  Only propensity

  Who would possess

  Is a nonentity.

  There is no First or Last

  Only equality

  And who would rule

  Joins the majority.

  There is no Space or Time

  Only intensity,

  And tame things

  Have no immensity.

  Parturition

  I am the centre

  Of a circle of pain

  Exceeding its boundaries in every direction

  The business of the bland sun

  Has no affair with me

  In my congested cosmos of agony

  From which there is no escape

  On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations

  Or in contraction

  To the pin-point nucleus of being

  Locate an irritation without

  It is within

  Within

  It is without

  The sensitized area

  Is identical with the extensity

  Of intension

  I am the false quantity

  In the harmony of physiological potentiality

  To which

  Gaining self-control

  I should be consonant

  In time

  Pain is no stronger than the resisting force

  Pain calls up in me

  The struggle is equal

  The open window is full of a voice

  A fashionable portrait-painter

  Running up-stairs to a woman’s apartment

  Sings

  “All the girls are tid’ly did’ly

  All the girls are nice

  Whether they wear their hair in curls

  Or—”

  At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization

  The conception Brute

  Why?

  The irresponsibility of the male

  Leaves woman her superior Inferiority

  He is running up-stairs

  I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony

  Incidentally with the exhaustion of control

  I reach the summit

  And gradually subside into anticipation of

  Repose

  Which never comes

  For another mountain is growing up

  Which goaded by the unavoidable

  I must traverse

  Traversing myself

  Something in the delirium of night-hours

  Confuses while intensifying sensibility

  Blurring spatial contours

  So aiding elusion of the circumscribed

  That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast

  Comes from so far away

  And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth

  Is no part of myself

  There is a climax in sensibility

  When pain surpassing itself

  Becomes Exotic

  And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation

  Uniting the opposing and resisting forces

  In lascivious revelation

  Relaxation

  Negation of myself as a unit

  Vacuum interlude

  I should have been emptied of life

  Giving life

  For consciousness in crises races

  Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes

  Have I not

  Somewhere

  Scrutinized

  A dead white feathered moth

  Laying eggs?

  A moment

  Being realization

  Can

  Vitalized by cosmic initiation

  Furnish an adequate apology

  For the objective

  Agglomeration of activities

  Of a life.

  LIFE

  A leap with nature

  Into the essence

  Of unpredicted Maternity

  Against my thigh

  Touch of infinitesimal motion

  Scarcely perceptible

  Undulation

  Warmth moisture

  Stir of incipient life

  Precipitating into me

  The contents of the universe

  Mother I am

  Identical

  With infinite Maternity

  Indivisible

  Acutely

  I am absorbed

  Into

  The was—is—ever—shall—be

  Of cosmic reproductivity

  Rises from the subconscious

  Impression of a cat

  With blind kittens

  Among her legs

  Same undulating life-stir

  I am that cat

  Rises from the sub-conscious
<
br />   Impression of small animal carcass

  Covered with blue-bottles

  —Epicurean—

  And through the insects

  Waves that same undulation of living

  Death

  Life

  I am knowing

  All about

  Unfolding

  The next morning

  Each woman-of-the-people

  Tip-toeing the red pile of the carpet

  Doing hushed service

  Each woman-of-the-people

  Wearing a halo

  A ludicrous little halo

  Of which she is sublimely unaware

  I once heard in a church

  —Man and woman God made them—

  Thank God.

  Italian Pictures

  July in Vallombrosa

  Old lady sitting still

  Pine trees standing quite still

  Sisters of mercy whispering

  Oust the Dryad

  O consecration of forest

  To the uneventful

  I cannot imagine anything

  Less disputably respectable

  Than prolonged invalidism in Italy

  At the beck

  Of a British practitioner

  Of all permissible pastimes

  Attendant upon chastity

  The one with which you can most efficiently insult

  Life

  Is your hobby of collecting death-beds

  Blue Nun

  So wrap the body in flannel and wool

  Of superior quality from the Anglo-American

  Until that ineffable moment

  When Rigor Mortis

  Divests it of its innate impurity

  While round the hotel

  Wanton Italian matrons

  Discuss the better business of bed-linen

  To regular puncture of needles

  The old lady has a daughter

  Who has been spent

  In chasing moments from one room to another

  When the essence of an hour

  Was in its passing

  With the passionate breath

  Of the bronchitis-kettle

  And her last little lust

  Lost itself in a saucer of gruel

  But all this moribund stuff

  Is not wasted

  For there is always Nature

  So its expensive upkeep

  Goes to support

  The loves

  Of head-waiters

  The Costa San Giorgio

  We English make a tepid blot

  On the messiness

  Of the passionate Italian life-traffic

  Throbbing the street up steep

  Up up to the porta

  Culminating

  In the stained frescoe of the dragon-slayer

  The hips of women sway

  Among the crawling children they produce

  And the church hits the barracks

  Where

  The greyness of marching men

  Falls through the greyness of stone

  Oranges half-rotten are sold at a reduction

  Hoarsely advertised as broken heads

  BROKEN HEADS and the barber

  Has an imitation mirror

  And Mary preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see ourselves

  Shaving

  ICE CREAM

  Licking is larger than mouths

  Boots than feet

  Slip Slap and the string dragging

  And the angle of the sun

  Cuts the whole lot in half

  And warms the folded hands

  Of a consumptive

  Left outside her chair is broken

  And she wonders how we feel

  For we walk very quickly

  The noonday cannon

  Having scattered the neighbour’s pigeons

  The smell of small cooking

  From luckier houses

  Is cruel to the maimed cat

  Hiding

  Among the carpenter’s shavings

  From three boys

  —One holding a bar—

  Who nevertheless

  Born of human parents

  Cry when locked in the dark

  Fluidic blots of sky

  Shift among roofs

  Between bandy legs

  Jerk patches of street

  Interrupted by clacking

  Of all the green shutters

  From which

  Bits of bodies

  Variously leaning

  Mingle eyes with the commotion

  For there is little to do

  The false pillow-spreads

  Hugely initialed

  Already adjusted

  On matrimonial beds

  And the glint on the china virgin

  Consummately dusted

  Having been thrown

  Anything or something

  That might have contaminated intimacy

  OUT

  Onto the middle of the street

  Costa Magic

  Her father

  Indisposed to her marriage

  And a rabid man at that

  My most sympathetic daughter

  Make yourself a conception

  As large as this one

  Here

  But with yellow hair

  From the house

  Issuing Sunday dressed

  Combed precisely

  SPLOSH

  Pours something

  Viscuous

  Malefic

  Unfamiliar

  While listening up I hear my husband

  Mumbling Mumbling

  Mumbling at the window

  Malediction

  Incantation

  Under an hour

  Her hand to her side pressing

  Suffering

  Being bewitched

  Cesira fading

  Daily daily feeble softer

  The doctor Phthisis

  The wise woman says to take her

  So we following her instruction

  I and the neighbour

  Take her—

  The glass rattling

  The rain slipping

  I and the neighbour and her aunt

  Bunched together

  And Cesira

  Droops across the cab

  Fields and houses

  Pass like the pulling out

  Of sweetmeat ribbon

  From a rascal’s mouth

  Till

  A wheel in a rut

  Jerks back my girl on the padding

  And the hedges into the sky

  Coming to the magic tree

  Cesira becomes as a wild beast

  A tree of age

  If Cesira should not become as a wild beast

  It is merely Phthisis

  This being the wise woman’s instruction

  Knowing she has to die

  We drive home

  To wait

  She certainly does in time

  It is unnatural in a Father

  Bewitching a daughter

  Whose hair down covers her thighs

  Three Moments in Paris

  I. One O’Clock at Night

  Though you had never possessed me

  I had belonged to you since the beginning of time

  And sleepily I sat on your chair beside you

  Leaning against your shoulder

  And your careless arm across my back gesticulated

  As your indisputable male voice roared

  Through my brain and my body

  Arguing dynamic decomposition

  Of which I was understanding nothing

  Sleepily

  And the only less male voice of your brother pugilist of the intellect

  Boomed as it seemed to me so sleepy

  Across an interval of a thousand miles

  An interim of a thousand years

  But you who make more noise than any man in the world when you c
lear your throat

  Deafening woke me

  And I caught the thread of the argument

  Immediately assuming my personal mental attitude

  And ceased to be a woman

  Beautiful half-hour of being a mere woman

  The animal woman

  Understanding nothing of man

  But mastery and the security of imparted physical heat

  Indifferent to cerebral gymnastics

  Or regarding them as the self-indulgent play of children

  Or the thunder of alien gods

  But you woke me up

  Anyhow who am I that I should criticize your theories of plastic velocity

  “Let us go home she is tired and wants to go to bed.”

  II. Café du Néant

  Little tapers leaning lighted diagonally

  Stuck in coffin tables of the Café du Néant

  Leaning to the breath of baited bodies

  Like young poplars fringing the Loire

  Eyes that are full of love

  And eyes that are full of kohl

  Projecting light across the fulsome ambiente

  Trailing the rest of the animal behind them

  Telling of tales without words

  And lies of no consequence

  One way or another

  The young lovers hermetically buttoned up in black

  To black cravat

  To the blue powder edge dusting the yellow throat

  What color could have been your bodies

  When last you put them away

  Nostalgic youth

  Holding your mistress’s pricked finger