Gossamurmur (11 page)

UV-colored to lure; great train-energy storage;

efficient protein manufacture

Gossamer with binds to the more rigid:

branches, walls, twigs, grass stems,

the edges of roofs

all architectural structure

Lycosid spiderlings in a velocity gradient

of breeze and currents

There is the lift of gossamer

and the glide

The scramble of spiderlings

to the highest point

for a better launch

The drag-to-lift ratio

enough drag to engage the breeze

enough thin delicate strands to glide

and not parachute too soon

Gossamer mostly as seen floating in air

PIVOTS

Archive, Archeion, Archon

See Jacques Derrida,
Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
(University of Chicago Press, 1996).

I know this from Derrida
, as written in the poem.

Archive Fever
is a salient text, useful in a meditation on the overreaching
arkhe
, naming commencement and commandment as nomological principles. The contradiction, as Derrida explicates it, is the irony of an archive that shelters itself from this memory of
arkhe
, and also forgets it. We grow fainter in our memory and for the purpose of memory (versus erasure) require residence and command for our archives, and for a particular kind of concealment. Archeion is the domicile, which moves from private to public. Archons are those who command, who guard the documents. Poetry is by nature self-secret, but it is also fragile as document, and when recorded falls even more victim to decay and the unknowable technology of future guardians, if there be such. And who will be present to establish “voice recognition”?

Argana Café, Marrakech

Parts of this poem were written while traveling in North Africa, living and working for several weeks in Marrakech on two occasions. I first arrived shortly after the bombing of the Argana café in the medina of Jamaa el Fna, a terrorist act that killed seventeen people and wounded twenty-five on April 28, 2011. I also was working with a foundation that had a library and a center for translation, Dar Al-Ma’mûm (House of Wisdom), near Marrakech, named for the son of a caliph in Abbasid-era Iraq, and the notion of preservation was keen on people’s minds, given the ransacking of museums and other sites of archive during frequent times of strife and war and inclement weather.

Caddis fly catch-nets

The name of the order of insects,
Trichoptera,
to which caddis flies belong, comes from the Greek words meaning “hair” and “wing.” They are also called rail-flies or sedge-flies and resemble moths. The combination of hair and wing and a gossamer-like membranous quality—brought to my attention by Peter Warshall—was an eidolon for the poem.

Dark Lady of my DNA

Rosalind Franklin was a chemist whose research was used without her permission by Francis Crick and James Watson in their scientific breakthrough around DNA and the double helix.

demolishing stacks in a library

A reference to the much-debated renovation plan that would demolish seven floors of “stacks” at the New York Public Library. Many of the books would be stored under Bryant Park; with a new compromise generated by great protest from artists and writers and scholars, a new facility for storage would be built under the library. Many opponents have feared that the Central Library Plan will turn the historic Forty-Second Street Library into a giant Internet café.

Djinn: Jinn

Jinn (Arabic:
, singular
variant spelling
djinn
), or genies, are described in the Qur’an and in Arab folklore and Islamic mythology as occupying an alternative world to that of mankind. Jinn, humans, and angels make up the three sentient creations of Allah. The Qur’an mentions that jinn are made of smokeless flame or “scorching fire.” Like human beings, the jinn may also be good, evil, or neutrally benevolent.

Djuna Barnes

I observed the celebrated and somewhat reclusive author of
Nightwood
in my Greenwich Village neighborhood as a child. Barnes stands in as a guardian here, and the site where she lived, at 5 Patchin Place, is an historic landmark. She reappears in New York City dreams. There is no visible plaque or marker at this site acknowledging her former residence there.

Holy Grail as a blank check

David Graeber’s provocative idea of the Holy Grail as a blank check is from his book
DEBT: The First 5,000 Years
(Melville House, 2011), an inspirational tome for the Occupy movement.

“…(I swear it) from the breath”

From Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” 1950.

Juan Goytisolo

Born January 6, 1936, in Barcelona, Juan Goytisolo is a Spanish poet, essayist, and novelist who has been living in voluntary self-exile in Marrakech. He has been largely responsible for the saving and preservation of the Jamaa el Fna square and market in Marrakech’s medina, one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

[L]ike a spider, like an octopus, like a centipede slithering away, wriggling and writhing, escaping one’s embrace, forbidding possession, there is no way of getting a firm grasp on it.…

The spectacle of Jamaa el Fna is repeated daily and each day it is different. Everything changes—voices, sounds, gestures, the public which sees, listens, smells, tastes, touches. The oral tradition is framed by one much vaster—that we can call intangible. The Square, as a physical space, shelters a rich oral and intangible tradition.

—Juan Goytisolo, on the active culture of Jamaa el Fna, Opening Meetings, May 15, 2001

one of two

Ida used to sit and as she sat she said am I one or am I two. Little by little she was one of two, that is to say sometimes she went out as one and sometimes she went out as the other.

—Gertrude Stein,
Ida
(Yale University Press, 2012)

moisopholon domos

House where one cultivates the muses. The myth survives that Sappho (approx. 630–570 BCE) was the headmistress of an academy or school of girls, akin to the Spartan
agelai
or
thiasos
, a sacred band.

the movies I appear in

The Edge
, by Robert Kramer, 1968.

Brand X
, by Wynn Chamberlain, 1970.

Renaldo and Clara
, by Bob Dylan, 1978.

This section of the poem plays with the author’s presumed resemblance to the actor Charlotte Rampling.

Narada and myths of doubles

See Wendy Doniger,
Dreams, Illusion
,
and Other Realities
(University of Chicago Press, 1984). Her study includes variants on the story of the Hindu sage Narada, who was transformed into a woman:

The outer dream is a myth, which nourishes our hope that it is possible to break out of this prison of our secret loneliness to dream one another’s dream.

seed vault

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault resides on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, a remote archipelago only eight hundred miles from the North Pole, a sanctuary providing refuge for seeds in case of a large-scale global crisis. They are held in trust for future survival.

Spider Woman

Creator deity for several indigenous U.S. tribes, including the Navajo, Keresan, and Hopi. Extraordinary weaver of life and the subject of many myths.

Spiderlings

Young spiders whose silk is sometimes referred to as gossamer.

storage units of rogue plutonium

A reference to Rocky Flats (1952–1992), a former nuclear weapons plant near Denver and Boulder, Colorado, that created plutonium-laced “triggers” for warheads. Although the structure has completely vanished, the soil continues to be toxic and hazardous, containing leaked amounts of plutonium, the half-life of which is close to a quarter of a million years. Many local citizens, including poets from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics community at Naropa University, as well as high-profile antinuclear activist Daniel Ellsberg, protested the site for two decades, facing harassment and arrest.

Temporary Autonomous Zone

See Hakim Bey,
T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic
Terrorism
, published by Autonomedia in New York City in l991 with an anticopyright notice. The thinking in this book, essentially a manifesto, has influenced many cultural interventions and projects I’ve been personally involved with over the last decades.
T.A.Z.
investigates space that eludes formal structures of control.

Tirta Gangga

A water palace built by the Raga of Karangasem in eastern Bali, Indonesia. It has a spiritual connection to the river Ganges in India, and I cast a few of Allen Ginsberg’s ashes into its pools, as a tribute to Allen’s spiritual connection to India and to that river where he once bathed.

Tundra

From the Finnish word
tunturi
, meaning “treeless.” Frost-molded landscapes, extremely low temperatures, low precipitation, poor nutrients, and a short growing season. A metaphor in this allegory for refuge.

Peter Warshall, ecobiologist

Where the conversation that became this book began, with “gossamer,” “doppelgänger,” and “archive” in the symbiosis of the “braided river.”

The fungal mat actually connects those trees, and what you have is not the image of all the Abrahamic religions, that things come out as the tree of life, with branches that go further and further apart with humans over here and elephants and frogs over there, but you actually have the image that symbiosis teaches, that life is a braided river. That things come
apart, like an algae and a fungus, and then come back together again. And then they spread out and come back together again. So the whole imagery of symbiosis is contrary to the prevailing religions all over the world in not thinking of life as a tree but more or less as a braided river.

—Peter Warshall, “Symbiosis,” from
Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action
(Anne Waldman and Lisa Birman, eds.; Coffee House Press, 2004)

women in robes of sleep and utopic dream

Joanna Macy, an ecophilosopher and activist, has advocated the concept of “nuclear guardianship,” where citizens would train for this role and guard contaminated sites well into the future. She at one point imagined a ritual period of service here, a way “archons” might help preserve and honor a more sacred site, dressed in ceremonial uniforms or monks’ robes. Some of these ideas become conflated in the poem, moving between thoughts of preservation, what’s hidden or concealed, and what needs guardianship, as with both poetry and deadly nuclear waste.