How can writing register a relation between profane and sacred? A bigger question than its sentence but maybe something can be tried, by seeing how these appears in certain texts, work within them, by finding traces and repetitions, certain passages, by observing various desiring machines, their turning wheels, and by seeing just how they might be pieced together. To do this requires a knack at reading signs, not only to avoid misunderstanding them but also to arrive at reasonable symptoms. This is to be done without the patient at hand, only a text and a keyboard and (a bottle of Cointreau.) It is a study of the actual working of the destruction machines, love machines, god machines within certain works to see what happens when a writer takes on the “shattered, burned, broken-down objects, converting them to the regime of desiring machines….”1 It is a study in how these writing machines work as they approach the profane and sacred. And so, it is too many things already.

It is difficult therefore, being not simply a matter of snooping around in the private realm of the texts but of stepping on them so to speak while reaching for them at the same time, of isolating moments where the sacred appears, as if isolating a moment wasn’t a form of murder. Murders and resuscitations must be performed at one stroke. How much simpler if the sacred would simply come forward and wave its cape: here, here! But alas! So, in an attempt to avoid murder and do the least possible harm, performances of the sacred will be viewed in its various costumes in situ. It may not always be pretty. Perhaps this paper is just a desire in that direction, the placing of certain texts next to each other to see what happens, at least an attempt at some semblance of a Deleuzian reading of these texts, to detect the timbre, extent, and implication of these symptoms, (and all this, without even stethoscope.)

And to make it easier, none of the texts chosen lend themselves to dissection. The most that might be accomplished is to torment them by pulling their tails to see if any feathers fall out. As within that subset of Nietzsche’s thinking on misunderstood signs: I want to read the signs correctly, get the symptoms right, and see how these 'work'.

Can any of the texts be said to be tame? It could at first be thought in the case of Rilke. The beautiful language cannot be denied. There is beautiful language and it sings across the strings of the sensorium. Rather than a violent rupture of thought, Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is an outworking of delicate nurture towards a becoming and this makes tempting a misreading, what is more, a seduction. The disjunction—between aesthetic reading (the reader is slain) and a reading of caesura in the text then depends on how signs are read. Visitors, death, those charming dogs, all exist within a ravishing textual surface, everything finding or losing its way. It is a constant flow of inside and outside, the slow revelation of minutiae that is a becoming, a stitch added to a stitch on its way to death but the delineation is so luxurious as if to refute the uselessness of images, as if a production of desire in itself.2 The generation of meaning is subverted when resolution can be found here and there in polyvalent moments, not only at proscribed locations of narrative resolution.

To apprehend the text in its multiplicity rather than in a totalizing, thematizing sense, and yet not enter spectacle. (As if, inside Dorothy’s house once it has lifted off the ground and been taken up by the tornado in Wizard of Oz to fly around in the storm, a quick glimpse of the passing mélange were possible—chickens, fence posts, other houses, an over-abundance of images flying by in saturation.)

In a scene so intense images fade even as they become spectacular, images that at their highest point of intensity ejaculate, let go of whatever they were, and break down to find another line of flight.

In Cabrera Infante’s text, Infante Difunto, a sly pun on the words Dante’s Inferno?, the spectacular images are also partial images, the ‘talking feet of Fred Astaire’, the ‘singing legs of Ginger Rogers’3, that signal desiring machines while avoiding the tired morpheme that strung along by ascenders and descenders for the purpose of fable or castle building imagines some x was meant by its appearance (fur coat, long teeth) to represent y (wolf waiting around for his scene) and so on. It is a new wolf not some precursor wolf that wanders about in these texts. It is the “artist that stores up his treasures so as to create an immediate explosion….”4, the writing machines busy making and destroying with such ambient material native to each that in its difference, the line of descent must provoke singularity—Cabrera Infante wh/def/iling the hours in the carnivalesque, what would be pathos if only there wasn’t so much bathos, Artaud, gnawing his stick of dynamite, only too happy to show the inner life of shit, Rilke in a slow penetration of ‘radiant love’5 as if to show what happens when a text tries to get beyond the kiss, to reach the ‘real’. But what does it mean to reach the real, as suggested in Saiz, to be or not be, to be as the “poets of the surface” ?

death and i on one long line sniffing its tracks

bumping our meaningless noses on the rump of the bird

whose gullet has been cut from this ear to that ear6

How does the writer efface the “surface” where poets congregate? What is this stick of dynamite Artaud waves about in the Mômo, for the poem is about to go off, such is the shock, and it refuses to provide the temporal or aesthetic component, the bow on top, that would allow it to find a ground. So, it doesn’t go anywhere, what can be done with so many balls in a cunt hole? If it were a painting, it would be a problem— where to put it, what if the in-laws show up? Of course human beings shock and Artaud does it well but the problem has more to do with the inability to commodify the poem’s strangeness than the strangeness itself. A line like “…the onor hairess from or-or the sail…”7 immediately shows this. What is a hairess? An image does not take hold, as if the word signals what can’t be written, a ding an sich, a presence whose presence can only be marked unintelligibly. It is a perilous ground, a breach of flight lines and flows that infinitely take and lose shape but not in the sensuous mode of Rilke. It is not that the poem is unusable but that it violates the rules of exclusion, what is prohibited by society, what can be said. For Artaud such a ground would be a bias hook on which judgment could be caught and locations of pain established. Artaud is not one of those “poets of the surface”. God can take “nothing from it”, to quote his poem. The poem effaces the profane that has masqueraded as literature. When Artaud says “In the filth of a paradise…who in this lair remade you but I…because I am there…and it is life that rolls its obscene palm there” 8, it is clear the ‘I’ will do the taking, the consuming of god, the profanation of the rite of communion. Later on what would be water transformed to wine becomes the “wine of the Mass” in “latrines of sublimity” 9.

God’s desecration in what seems a collection of insane fragments that defy arrangement is not simple effacement. Where a pseudo-emotional discharge can be achieved by a spectacular image, a horror show or a crystal palace, something with the strength to gesture toward lack, the flesh to be chewed in Artaud’s poem is not too fresh, the text itself a symptom of previous passage, the cunt hole, the anus, to paraphrase from Theater and its Double, the leftover masks from a tribal ceremony13, as if the chanting “o dedi a dada orzoura…”10 not only signals what cannot be expressed but also is somehow capable of provoking a curative affect, the casting of a spell, the sacrifice of god. So what seems at first glance a simple obscenity, now takes on a patina of mysticism, becomes a peyote dance, a textual ‘rite’ that allows Artaud to “…see the point where the universal unconscious is sick.”11

With the peyote dance the clinical passes into the mystical. It is a ceremony that discharges pain, is done with it. But if the peyote dancer could reach iconic status, become so popular as say, a Marlene Dietrich or a Ginger Rogers, then Artaud’s glossolalia could resonate on another register, no longer an eccentricity to be read in the clinical or mystical modality of healing but instead it would be an object of desire, a commodity with great taste or good legs. Cabrera Infante’s Habana text plays on just such commodification of delirium but the register is not the clinical. It is through the perverse veneration of icons rather than their ritual sacrifice or worship. If it has to be a sickness, it is a celebrated sickness, and thus becomes not only a re-action, but an affirmation, a series of prayers to venereal goddesses, and the machines that characterize the worship/sex are always separate from the women/goddess, “…a strict distinction between the means of production and the product.”12 In Infante’s tableaux Artaud’s shaman becomes voyeur. The sexual object, the leg, the arm, is fetishized. The destruction machine is a love machine, almost a carnival machine in an atmosphere of masks and shows. Infante uses the lush deity treatment where Artaud would go for the incendiary device. So it is a matter of style—pleasure palaces or toilets. The sacrifice is now seduction. Literature cannot escape its own effacement in the sexual free-for-all even if it’s allowed to do whatever it wants—where it fails to reach literature it’s impotent anyway. When it succeeds, it’s by deceit. Rather than prevent literature from penetrating, literature is penetrated, literature penetrates, appropriated in the name of the profane, sacrificed in the name of the sacred.

When Infante writes Marlene Dietrich’s body it is as a multiplicity of women, women that demand their “Pound” of flesh. It’s a traveling through the singularity that is Marlene…no ego is involved…it’s a sexual delirium, flush with the real, the exterior of sex on through to the interior of literature, and Infante is in charge of La Singueta, the fuck, of fucking the interiority.13 If literature would extract from Infante, Infante will overflow literature. If Literature in the Habana text would like its spectacle served up in a commodified, digestible bite—an excerpt from a porno novel, a word on Ezra Pound, El Mar by Debussy—the passions of the body that would be reduced by it instead exceed its limit. The body’s superiority to language is always shown. When Infante says of his lover, “…I was more interested in the kiss than in her literature…I attended her lengua more than her lengua-je”14 language’s lack of passion is drawn. Language is the insipid double at the surface of a real that cannot be written. Kissing in La Habana is a passion that will slip into sex and get out of hand. Lucinda would return him to the pressed page of literature, never lets him touch her only read to her. The reading is what excites her. But finally, Infante does not want to continue reading. He has started to write. 15

The body mirrors the textual body. The writing body violates the written body. (Such is the history of literature, little forages and excursions into the symbolic in search of alcohol and sex, a woman’s profile, a face that never happens, a kind of childhood act remembered and held up as an example of bravado, a literary substation for sexual energy: “…more brains than sex she was the incarnation of a literary ma boule de Swift...”16

Attempts by countless women in the story to capture him, to corral sex within the confines of literature is always thwarted by continual, blatant sex mirrored by the Habana text, itself a double for the debauched happenings. But if Literature intrudes early on as El Mar, a sex novel or Ezra Pound in an attempt to interrupt the flows of desire, over time literature becomes co-conspirator—posing as a passive movie screen, a theater, a movie star. In this avalanche words are of no use if sex is the machine to counter the literary machine, a kind of deterritorializing tongue and mouth where the lengua as sex/writing overpowers lenguaje as body/text. As if to prove the point, a movie screen goes blank, the sex transpiring in front of it has simply erased it. It is a sex that insists it is not dependent on literary embellishment but rather that the literary embellishment depends upon sex. The transgressed body as sexual prey is always replaced by another conquest in a writing/sexual conquest that reaches a frequency pitch approaching a sort of sexual echolalia in a kind of self-perpetuating delirium. Prey is useless once it stops moving, to paraphrase Infante 17, but not to fear, the supply is inexhaustible. Infante is the lone hunter searching for prey, something like the Dracula in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature: something always moves. There are always new refractions of feminine perfection appearing, miraculated or so it seems from an infinite store.

A new level of sexual conquest develops, as if “Napolean’s campaign to an erotic Russia…”18, the ongoing parade of women acts as a repeated ‘remarking’ of the body and of the text.21 A high altar is built19, a religion of cinema/text/body whose star rises in the sky, an x machina of sex where each sexual transgression bespeaks its own dissolution, an arcade of comic tirades, the sexual ‘reading’ always the pretext to force literature beyond the kiss, beyond its sense of limit, to the creation of the imperfect kiss that for C.I. is then perfect. The goddess is fabricated20, temporarily sacrificed/worshipped through all this marking upon the bodies of women. But this ‘worship’ makes transcendence inoperative, because it is not one superlative goddess but a carnival filled with her reflections and the quandary is what to do after the ‘act’ of writing has been consummated. Each transgression becomes the platform for a new line of escape, a new ‘reflection’ to hunt within the darkened theater—it is never the complete woman hunted in Habana. It is the profile, the flicker of an eyelash, the rise of a shoulder or the outline of a nose—all partial objects—that in double image imprint upon the screen as the movie images wash across it.

In this way, the Venereal Goddess’s ‘exclusive’ contract is voided. Such intense sexual competition can only result in dethronement. Death for the goddess happens here by inundation—the sheer volume of sexual escapades—the deintensification of constant use and over-familiarity. But she is not left dead within some linear narrative construction. Constantly her image expands, amended from the sum of her parts. Her deaths are constant but they are small and never compare to the huge specter of her image, so close as to arrive at the very surface of the eye. It is a different kind of inscription happening, a kind of graphism21 where the goddess remains on her throne and continues to enjoy a filiation with all her reflections and retains a “designating” power. Every scene of lovemaking becomes the act of worship where one joins with her and even as she is transgressed she becomes part of the “writing”. She is the despotic signifier, and perhaps in another reflection she is even the text of Habana itself being written.

Artaud would dispense with God in a different way. Not attracted to god, and rather, repulsed at the thought of him, not interested in resuscitations and encores, his method is drastic, more a surgery or explosion than Infante’s euphoric raids (always carried on at night, these crossings into enemy territory.) To be Done with the Judgment of God is not merely polemic offered for shock value. Perhaps the shame in Infante is the realization that the Venereal Goddess Literature with her golden whip should now be shunted, relegated to wait in line for her turn at being worshipped along with all the other faces in the darkened theatre. There are so many of her! The dismantling of God in Artaud (God, the soon to be effaced by the TUTUGURI) takes on a revolutionary tone because Artaud discards the entire disproportion, the vile ‘value’ system God represents, his false towers of Truth, Beauty, etc, the univocal nauseams that like streams of shit capture everything and prevent circulation in the body. It is not that emotions are not real or even that truth and beauty do not exist in some higher harmonic. The problem lies in lifeless, second-hand reproductions. So when Artaud says “…those who live, live off the dead….”22 this is literally true. It is not poetic allusion.

but because the men of this world here

spread the word in their “perisprit”:

rubbing of their full balls,

on the canal of their anus

nicely caressed and nicely grasped,

in order to pump out my life23

It is a perfectly lucid text, for Artaud is quite aware that they will pump out his life, reproduce and use him. To prevent it Artaud would destroy even the mode of conveyance, the narrative, the image itself, and prevent appropriation, the “splashing around there in a circle”.

if you don’t get the image

—and that is what I hear you say

in a circle,

that you don’t get the image

which is in the depths

of my cunt hole,—

it is that you are ignorant of the depths,

not of things,

but of my cunt

mine,

although since the depths of time

you’ve all be splashing around there in a circle

as if yapping a madmenage,

plotting an incarceration unto death. 24

It is not Artaud floundering in a sea but these others yapping a madmenage. How far is this Artaud from the impossibility of Agamben’s “I am a poet”?, the poets that “make the ‘I’ into the ground of their experiments, or who have made themselves into the experimental ground of the ‘I’”. 25 The ‘‘I’ it seems that would be at home in Artaud’s ‘theater of cruelty’ and its version of stagings, of subjectifications and desubjectifications. Is not “…orch torpch ta…” of the Four Texts precisely “…the aporia of an absolute desubjectification…”? Artaud weaves himself “unfruitfully” and “into thin air”. He is “this unframed hole that life wanted to frame…”He is the captured man in the TUTUGURI: (who is now NOTHING) and “…the animals ate him.”…“It was not a rape, he lent himself to the obscene meal”32. If Artaud is eaten, he also experiences an intensity along a line of flight and even partakes: “He relished it, he learned himself to act like an animal and to eat rat daintily.” 26 The poems are lyrical gestures performed in a ‘theater of cruelty’. A poem as “gesture that carries its energy with it.” 34 In the poetry and theater of Artaud there is no room for Art:

To create art is to deprive a gesture of its reverberation in the organism, whereas this reverberation, if the gesture is made in the conditions and with the force required, incites the organism and through it, the entire individuality, to take attitudes in harmony with the gesture.27

Through this reverberation, Artaud creates affect in the organism, repulses the vile and through an alchemical theater acquires health: “A violent and concentrated action is a kind of lyricism: it summons up supernatural images, a bloodstream of images, a bleeding spurt of images in the poet’s head and in the spectator’s as well.”28Artaud’s Mômo text is such a violent, curative gesture, a poem whose vibration might purge the vile from both poet and spectator, the alchemical theater whose caustic lyric exists not for aesthetic effect but towards the creation of positive symptoms. 37

Profane echoes of art would have no use in this view. It would be a kind of masturbatory simulation. In Artaud it becomes the object of consumption, just as in Habana literature is consumed. This ‘gesture’, this “central action and necessity” 38 is the real poem, a poem composed of a nothing that underlies its sickly double on the surface, a poem that cannot be captured by surface literature and dragged back to the festering surface, a surface festering with sex.

In Infante, the surface is no less festering and the threat of capture, the extinguishing of a real poem, a real literature by its double is always present but the mood is entirely different. In Infante there is an abandon, a lovely debasement of images in carnivalesque obscenity even as the poverty of the solar is exposed but it is a suffering quickly effaced by moving onto the next scene. It is almost a poverty transformed into gaiety. C.I. shows the goddess in pure debauchery, and exhausts her image through sex, each discarded body like the beautiful “fallen bodyies of sin”29. Thus of sin he makes an affirmation. He sacrifices sin and raises it to the utmost power. Iin Artaud, if God’s not dead, he’s about to be sacrificed in the most ignominious way possible. The images are starkly obscene and inhospitable.

if he had taken care to put his head

on the curvature of that bone

located between anus and sex,

of that hoed bone that I speak

in the filth

of paradise30

The tide of sexuality and literary profanity are tied, says Foucault, 31 "…Sexuality, as method of reproduction, becomes crucial in a world without god, as a mode of continuance, as a method of escaping capture and even death, as a mode of becoming. Language and sexuality become interchangeable as the body itself becomes the text…”, “…the inscribing surface of events.” 32 In Habana the physical space of the apartment becomes a kind of inscribing surface, and provides a literary gathering place of styles, forces, and fetishes. The apartment itself is a ‘microcosm of city’ and becomes the novel, a ‘microcosm of literature’ that constantly fills with reunions, even complete operas. But in the solar there is never a way to release desire in private. The space has become a congested commons. Desire must find circuitous routes of release.

The Habana text itself becomes the body, the secret pathway to passion that must stay on the outskirts, a writing always hounded just as the inhabitants of the solar are always hounded by a lack of privacy, by prying eyes, by the need to behave. It is this very sense of anxiety for sex that will never take place even as sexuality permeates the text that mimics the atmosphere of the solar but when sexual union finally happens, later in the novel, and just as the lovers lie there in a sweat of post-delirium, when it seems they both must know what’s been done, Julieta attributes the whole thing to Art saying, “Isn’t Debussy marvelous?” She must reduce and contain their passion, even demand at a crucial moment that her lover speak to her of Ezra Pound.

If a venereal temple is to be erected, if literature lacks passion or blood and must rely on art or the image of passion or blood then it must rely on image and representation for its power and is a body that cries not from a real depth of pain but instead a disassociation of any real cause. It is a reflection away from the real, it is the light from a mirror—the body then becomes degenerate or hypochondriac and can no longer diagnose what ails it. Its cries evince no sympathy. The slightest brush with materiality causes it injury. Its surface is traumatized and no longer remembers the original body, the previous body, the previous site of re-marking. And so, it is plagued with undefined “symptoms”. 33 It is this profane text that always at war with its double, a writing that writes,that proliferates, that language would captures in the book.

Through the incantational power of poetry, a pure gesture of nothing, Artaud deinscribes and heals the body of its wounds, the text acting as powerful Double to generate physiological affect. C.I. celebrates/worships the body in a seriality of inscription, the sexual ‘marks’ made in Habana upon the inscribing surface of paper acting as a kind of mirror stage, a writing machine where the text “speaks” and “writes” the reader, a doubled marking upon the ‘body’ that reflecting in a continuous chain of writing finally causes deinscription—the pummeling of sexual images against the inscribing surface a glossalia for the sensorium that must overwhelm it.

The image is not only exhausted but generates a kind of altered state. Unlike the affect that might be accomplished by a theater of cruelty that “…addresses itself to the organism by precise instruments, by the same means as those of certain tribal music cures which we admire on records but are incapable of originating among ourselves”34, the effect in Habana is that of trance, a dizzying disconnection of focus, a chaos of multiplicity. It is because of this multiplicity that no ultimate goddess, no transcendent value can be fixed. It is a body that can’t be defined by a particular body and there is no memory of individual positions only the movement from one to the other as they are written. A process of forgetting is set in motion, the movement of the text unconcerned with meaning or effect per se but simply continuing on its nomadic quest, to fill the catalogue of love even as the character fills his catalogue of love. Forgetful love is the serial weapon, the method that can subvert the symbolic order and literature itself wherever it appears. In Habana the text acts as a transgressive, deterritorializing machine. It becomes a story of how easily bodies can be re-marked. C.I.’s text has nothing to do with sex in this sense. Sex is just a backdrop that approaches the sacred in a way C.I. seems to say literature does, when it is not literature that has lost its passion and has no “tongue”, or evoking Rilke, no “brow-horn”. Writing effaces writing, the text, and the unicorn, the animal that profanes the virgin, by the end of Rilke’s poem is in her:

Oh this is the animal that never was.

They didn’t know that, they just went ahead

and loved it; its walk, bearing, neck—they loved

even the light of its silent gaze.

Never existed. And yet because they loved,

a pure creature began to occur. They always

left room for it, and in that cleared space

it simply lifted its head, and hardly needed

to exist. They never fed it grain

but rather, always, possibility.

And that gave the animal such energy

That it grew a brow-horn. A single horn.

and it came white unto a virgin here—

and was, in the silver mirror, and in her. 35

The unicorn that cannot exist but exists in any case, is not a fable, not a story but a ‘becoming’ that kneels there before the virgin in the tapestry Rilke saw at the Músee du Cluny in Paris. Perhaps this makes the Hunt for the Unicorn housed at the Metropolitan all the more devastating—though it is an image of a unicorn, is it not also an image that shows the attempt of the symbolic order to capture the real? The animal is fed possibility and from it gains “such energy”, evocative of the reverberation possible in Artaud’s poetic gesture. The ‘theater of cruelty’ is not far from mind, either, when Malte describes what is wrong with the theatre.

Now plays fall in lumps through the holes torn in the coarse sieves of our stages, and collect in heaps, and are swept away when we have had enough. It is the same underdone reality that litters our streets and our houses, save that more of it collects there than can be put into one evening. (Let us be honest about it then; we have no theatre, any more than we have a God: for this community is needed. 36

The unicorn is a difficult, time-consuming becoming, an approach to the real in a time when the real is “underdone.” Is this what happens to Malte? Is he in a way like the unicorn, “terribly difficult to love” 37? He views the “becoming” self in the mirror while trying on gowns. The dizzying parade of costumes are a myriad of abstractions of women he can become. He is a virgin to the unknown that presents itself to him in the mirror, the sacred that will penetrate him, the unicorn waiting there. The image becomes stronger than the reality it reflects and has a mesmerizing power over him, inflicting a kind of trance. Malte fuses with the image, “a reality, a strange, unbelievable, and monstrous reality, with which against my will I became permeated: for now the mirror was the stronger and I was the mirror. I stared at this great, terrifying unknown and it seemed to me appalling to be alone with him. But at the very moment I thought this, the worst befell: I lost all sense, I simply ceased to exist.” 38

Upon seeing the masks Malte had said: “I had never seen masks before but I understood that masks ought to be.” Then, as if in a ritual performance that makes ignoring the peyote dance as it might exist in this scene difficult, Malte fastens on a mask and disguises himself with a swatch of yellow fabric wrapped around his head like a turban but when he “trailsed” towards the mirror, the “conjuring gestures” are so strong as to make him ill. In the middle of the “solemn” moment where he is so outside himself that he is unaware of overturning a table, he is “…frightened, I losest sight of the presence in the mirror…”39 The mask is suddenly a malevolent entity, independent of Malte. The flowing, energized transporting effect of the faces suddenly becomes terrifying. Malte can barely remove the mask, striving “in boundlessly increasing anguish to squeeze somehow out of my disguise.” That moment of revelation, of seeing the real, has left everything in chaos, the room and Malte. Malte ceases to exist. Malte is he. What was inside is now outside. The unicorn in the silver mirror is now in her. The virgin has been pierced but is at the same time it is ‘he’, the unicorn, that becomes through love and the feeding of possibility. What kind of creature is it this exists but cannot exist, that exists in the impossibility of both inside and outside? Like the unicorn, Saiz’s lyrebird cannot exist but exists in any case—

(how were you seen?)

(are you seen now?)

only she saw the outer tail feather

the fabrication of the lyre…40

It is “she”, the “sacred receiving nothing”, the ‘she’ that sees “the outer tail feather”, and who in a mating frenzy is sacrificed. “…she comes into the twirling/the frenzied song unheard/the climax of the dance/a coming frenzy…” but in the next lines, his singing voice is now “a figure/translated by the flowing stream”—is this the song territorialized? What follows is a terrific scene of violence. Translation/writing has killed the figure. The river flows but the image is of blood, “…the river running red over the gold”41. When the image of the bird returns it is a “writing bird” we see—somehow lacking the 12 feathers but still vaguely recognizable, seemingly costuming itself for war—camouflaged in grey, a warlike bird in fatigues that has been “hunted before but i’m the killer now.” The bird has become the hunter, “…snakes I tear with my powerful hooked bill/(fastidious I swallow in dainty bits.) 42 and the mouth that sang now tears at snakes before returning to silence, (eating and speaking, according to Deleuze is not easily accomplished at the same time) and because the swallowing has been ‘fastidious’, it is assumed here that no dainty bits are left—‘nothing’ remains, only silence, for everything has been consumed. The bird has learned a trick or two. It recalls Artaud’s “obscene meal” and “…implies a deterritorialization of the mouth, the tongue and the teeth,” 43 a writing that consumes itself, leaving nothing to be used.

The return of the bird seems to indicate that in spite of the enormous effort expended by the symbolic order, territorialization will not be so simple. (The bird will come back as a war bird or a writing bird and eat you. The bird will come back, again and again.) Capture will not be simple.

So it is in the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries at the Musée du Cluny. The tapestries revolve around the five senses and relate to a sixth, A Mon Seul Désir, which shows the collar meant to capture the unicorn (as it is described by Malte, “…a chain, a heavy, magnificent ornament that has always been locked away” 57) but the capture is never shown, only the hunt, only the collar. Capturing the unicorn is an impossible affair. Perhaps, as in Malte’s discovery that Malte is now “he” is the image of the unicorn after it has subdued what would capture it, is the text overcome by the tongue in Habana as if to ask, can the lengua ever be captured by lenguaje? The sixth tapestry, ‘the instrument of sense’, tries to marshal the other senses and capture the unicorn, even as in the earlier panels, the virgin had loved it, fed it, and so forth. Suddenly the love has turned to desire, the virgin that would give “the animal such energy” that it needs so it can grow the horn, so it can, to paraphrase Rilke, begin to “occur” now wants to ‘collar’ it. In C.I. and in Rilke, this scene must end violation. In Saiz’s poem, poetry is a violent act, a revolution. In the “clearing that is a ruin now”, warmed only by what is left of its mother, the plucked feathers”, nothing remains but the spent mask.

© Maria Cuervo

December 2005

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, G and Guattari, anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia.

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 32.

2 Ibid., 299.

3 Cabrera Infante, G., La Habana Para un Infante Difunto. (Barcelona: Editorial SeixBarral, S.A.,

2000), 77.

4 Ibid., anti-oedipus.

5 Rilke, Rainer Maria, trans. M.D. Herter Norton, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. (New York: Norton &Company, Inc., 1949), 214.

6 Saíz, Próspero. the bird of nothing and other poems, (Madison: Ghost Pony Press, 1993),124.

7Artaud, Antonin. Four Texts. (Los Angeles: Panjandrum, 1982), 21.

8 Ibid., 25.

9 Ibid., 38.

10 Ibid., 21.

11Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 21.

12 Ibid., anti-oedipus,

13 Ibid., Habana, 34.

14 Ibid., Habana, 80.

15 Ibid., Habana, 116.

16 Ibid., Habana, 107.

17 Ibid., Habana, 84.

18 Ibid., Habana, 50.

19 Ibid., Habana, 73.

20 Ibid., Habana, 86.

21 Ibid., anti-oedipus, 203.

22 Artaud, Antonin, Selected Writings. trans. Helen Weaver. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 555.

23 Ibid., Four Texts, 45.

24 Ibid., Four Texts, 23.

25 Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz. ( Cambridge, MA:Zone Books, 2002).

26 Ibid., Selected Writings, 23.

27 Ibid., Theater and its Double, 81.

28 Ibid., Theater and its Double.

29 Foucault, Michel, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), 29-52.

30 Ibid., Four Texts, 25.

31 Ibid., Language, Counter-Memory.

32 Ibid., Language, Counter-Memory, 148.

33 Ibid., Language, Counter-Memory, 148.

34 Ibid., Theater and its Double.

35 Rilke, Rainer Maria. Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. David Young, (New Hampshire: Wesleyan

University Press, 1987), 63.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, G and Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature.

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 19.

36 Ibid., Malte Laurids Brigge, 196.

37 Ibid., Malte Laurids Brigge, 216.

38 Ibid., Malte Laurids Brigge, 92-95.

39 Ibid., Malte Laurids Brigge, 92-95.

40 Ibid., The Bird of Nothing, 108.

41 Ibid., The Bird of Nothing, 109.

42 Ibid., The Bird of Nothing, 111.

42 Ibid., Minor Literature, 19.

Artaud, Antonin. Anthology, ed. Jack Hirshman, (San Francisco: City Light Books,

1965).

Artaud, Antonin. The Peyote Dance, trans. Helen Weaver, (New York: Farrar, Strauss

and Giroux, 1976).