The Lost Lunar Baedeker (24 page)

Hunger & drawing breath

The laboured seasons of the year

The rise & fall of love & fear

All leaping into death.

See the angel carrying the swag

Of blossoms culled with sweat & fag

He is man's guardian.

But what use have the gods for such flowers

Of earth, up in their sheeny bowers

On Heaven's meridian?

Their smell is the joy of His nostril

Breathing the essence of the Gospel

Out in a narrow flame

For the gods supporting the million

Miles of darkness round His pavilion

Are lighted by that same.

The Prototype

In the Duomo, on Xmas Eve, midnight

a cold wax baby is born— born of the

light of 1,000 candles.

He is quite perfect, of that perfection

which means immunity from

the inconsistencies of Life.

Perfect in pink-&-whiteness, in blue-

eyedness, in yellow-silk-curledness

& nearly as bright as the tinsel star

that rises on his forehead.

Worship him, for his infinitesimal

mouth has no expansiveness for a puck-

ering to the heart-saving wail of the

new-born Hungry One.

In the Duomo at Xmas Eve, midnight,

there is another baby, a horrible little

baby—made of half warm flesh;

flesh that is covered with sores—carried

by a half-broken mother.

And I who am called heretic,

and the only follower in Christ's foot-steps

among this crowd adoring a wax doll

—for I alone am worshipping the poor

sore baby—the child of sex igno-

rance & poverty.

I am on my knees humbly before

him, praying, not to a god, but to

humanity's social consciousness, to

do for that mother & that child in the light, what

the priests have tried to do in the dark.

For that half-broken mother the child

on the high altar is the prototype,

the prototype of all babies as they

might have been.

She has this unique Xmas present from

the church, an inebriating glimpse of

something that a baby is supposed to look

like; she is shown the Perfection of which

the offspring & object of all her love is

           the battered symbol.

Blow out the candles—

Throw away the wax-baby

Use the churches as night-shelters

Come into the Daylight & preach

                        a New Gospel

           Let them eat—

O let them love—

And let their babies be

                        pink & white.

Involutions

When the last flower blows in the first seed

Carried away by the thought of a wind

When the first concept fills the last deed

Shews us the longest way we have sinned

The last step is the mountain's measure

Trod deep in the long flat face of Fraud

And the pain's gasp, the length of pleasure

In the Saint's wounds—the soul of a Bawd.

With the last chains, forge the first freedom

Renunciation's claim on the lover

The last King of a crucified kingdom

Destroying himself to find his brother.

“Love Songs” (1923)

In 1923, ML's first book was published by Robert McAlmon's Contact Publishing Co. (Paris), which that same year had published Ernest Hemingway's
Three Stories and Ten Poems. Lunar Baedecker
[
sic
] was announced for $1.50. (It was recently listed—and sold—for $1,500.) A modest paperback, it was printed on what even then was considered cheap paper, in an edition of several hundred copies, of which at least one copy was bound in green boards with silver endpapers. It contained fewer than twenty poems, if we count the suite of thirteen “Love Songs” as a single poem. In
LB,
the individually numbered sections of “Love Songs” were not only presented in a different order than the original thirty-four; many sections were eliminated altogether, while several entirely new lines appeared. “Love Songs” was an excavated skeleton of the former body, absent some bones.

Perhaps because it is shorter and more accessible, the 1923 “Love Songs” has been much more frequently anthologized than the 1917 “Songs to Joannes.” Jonathan Williams considered the
LB
version the “text of record” when he published
LBT,
but this was his decision, not ML's. Any serious consideration of “Love Songs” should begin with the
Others
publication of “Songs to Joannes,” which is printed in the main text of this edition. For comparative purposes the 1923 renovation should then be taken into account. Likewise, readers interested in a detailed textual and critical history of this poem should refer to n. 15 (Appendix B).

The 1923 “Love Songs” lacks the body heat of the 1917 “Songs to Joannes.” The later version tends to be suggestive and abstract, where the early version is more explicit and graphic. Comparing the foundation text and the instaurational text offers a rare opportunity for critical speculation about how and why ML revised her poems. Did the scandal over the erotic content of the 1915 (
Others
) publication of “Love Songs” or ML's awareness of the censorship problems facing James Joyce's
Ulysses
(n. 26) prompt her to censor her own work? Would the publication by an expatriate press raise the eyebrows of customs officials when the publication was checked for clearance in the United States? Might this explain the elimination of some of the earlier version's sexually explicit passages? In 1982, I speculated as much; apparently part of the U.S. shipment was impounded. In a (July 16, 1930) letter addressed to her older daughter, ML suggested that she favored obscure language not only for its own sake, but to “get by the censor!”

The
LB
text of “Love Songs” is printed verbatim below, with the exception of two emendations:

VII. 11: sarsenet] sarsanet

X.6: archetypal] architypal

Love Songs (1923)

I

Spawn of fantasies

Sifting the appraisable

Pig Cupid     his rosy snout

Rooting erotic garbage

“Once upon a time”

Pulls a weed         white star-topped

Among wild oats sown in mucous membrane

I would           an eye in a Bengal light

Eternity in a sky-rocket

Constellations in an ocean

Whose rivers run no fresher

Than a trickle of saliva

These are suspect places

I must live in my lantern

Trimming subliminal flicker

Virginal          to the bellows

Of experience

                                     Colored glass.

II

At your mercy

Our Universe

Is only

A colorless onion

You derobe

Sheath by sheath

                       Remaining

A disheartening odour

About your nervy hands

III

                    Night

Heavy with shut-flower's nightmares

— — — — — — — — — — —

                    Noon

Curled to the solitaire

Core of the

Sun

IV

Evolution fall foul of

Sexual equality

Prettily miscalculate

Similitude

Unnatural selection

Breed such sons and daughters

As shall jibber at each other

Uninterpretable cryptonyms

Under the moon

Give them some way of braying brassily

For caressive calling

Or to homophonous hiccoughs

Transpose the laugh

Let them suppose that tears

Are snowdrops or molasses

Or anything

Than human insufficiencies

Begging dorsal vertebrae

Let meeting be the turning

To the antipodean

And Form     a blurr

Anything

Than seduce them

To the one

As simple satisfaction

For the other

V

Shuttle-cock and battle-door

A little pink-love

And feathers are strewn

VI

Let Joy go solace-winged

To flutter whom she may concern

VII

Once in a mezzanino

The starry ceiling

Vaulted an unimaginable family

Bird-like abortions

With human throats

And Wisdom's eyes

Who wore lamp-shade red dresses

And woolen hair

One bore a baby

In a padded porte-enfant

Tied with a sarsenet ribbon

To her goose's wings

But for the abominable shadows

I would have lived

Among their fearful furniture

To teach them to tell me their secrets

Before I guessed

— Sweeping the brood clean out

VIII

Midnight empties the street

— — — To the left a boy

—One wing has been washed in rain

The other will never be clean any more —

Pulling door-bells to remind

Those that are snug

               To the right a haloed ascetic

               Threading houses

Probes wounds for souls

— The poor can't wash in hot water —

And I don't know which turning to take —

IX

We might have coupled

In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment

Or broken flesh with one another

At the profane communion table

Where wine is spill't on promiscuous lips

We might have given birth to a butterfly

With the daily-news

Printed in blood on its wings

X

In some

Prenatal plagiarism

Fœtal buffoons

Caught tricks

— — — — —

From archetypal pantomime

Stringing emotions

Looped aloft

— — — —

For the blind eyes

That Nature knows us with

And the most of Nature       is green

— — — — — — — — — — —

XI

Green things grow

Salads

For the cerebral

Forager's revival…

And flowered flummery

Upon bossed bellies

Of mountains

Rolling in the sun

XII

Shedding our petty pruderies

From slit eyes

We sidle up

To Nature

— — — that irate pornographist

XIII

The wind stuffs the scum of the white street

Into my lungs and my nostrils

Exhilarated birds

Prolonging flight into the night

Never reaching — — — — — — —

Other Writings

This list records alphabetically by title the first published appearance of all of Mina Loy's known published works which are not included in the present edition. I am not reporting second or later appearances in magazines or anthologies, nor am I distinguishing posthumous works from those published during her lifetime. This distinction can be easily made by the reader; ML died in 1966. The notes on individual texts in Appendix B contain information on the first published appearance of all works included in the main text of this volume.

Poetry

“America* A Miracle.” LLB82, pp. 227–31.

“Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.”
The Little Review
9:3 (Spring 1923), pp. 10–18; 9:4 (Autumn/Winter 1923), pp. 41–51;
Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers
(Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1925), pp. 137–94.

“Aviator's Eyes.” Larry Krantz, “Three Neglected Poets,”
Wagner Literary Magazine
[formerly
Nimbus
] (Spring 1959), p. 54.

“Birth of Melody.” LLB82, 241.

“Brain.” LLB82, p. 257.

“Breath Bank.” LLB82, p. 254.

“Brilliant Confusion of Brilliance.” LLB82, p. 234.

“Ceiling at Dawn.” LLB82, p. 242.

“Child Chanting.” LLB82, p. 239.

“Continuity.” LLB82, p. 255.

“Desert of the Ganges.” LLB82, p. 252.

“Echo.” LLB82, p. 240.

“Evolution”. LLB82, p. 256.

“Hilarious Israel.”
Accent
7:2 (Winter 1947), pp. 110–11.

“I Almost Saw God in the Metro.” LLB82, p. 248.

“Impossible Opus.”
Between Worlds
1:2 (Spring/Summer 1961), pp. 199–200.

“L'Inavouable Enfant.” LLB82, p. 236.

“Maiden Song.” LLB82, p. 237.

“The Mediterranean Sea.” LLB82, pp. 250–51.

“Mother Earth.” LLB82, p. 253.

“Negro Dancer.”
Between Worlds
1:2 (Spring/Summer 1961), p. 202.

“Overnight.” LLB82, p. 258.

“Portrait of a Nun.” LLB82, p. 260.

“Repassed Platform.” LLB82, p. 249.

“Revelation.” LBT, pp. 73–74.

“The Song of the Nightingale Is Like the Scent of Syringa.” LBT, p. 80.

“Songge Byrd.” LLB82, p. 238.

“Stravinski's Flute.” LBT, p. 77.

“Surfeit of Controversy.” LLB82, p. 232.

“There Is No Love Alone.” LLB82, p. 233.

“To You.”
Others
3:1 (July 1916), pp. 27–28.

“Transformation Scene.” LBT, pp. 78–79.

“Untitled.”
Between Worlds
2:1 (Fall/Winter 1962), p. 27. YCAL MS title is “In Extremis.” Published as “Show Me a Saint Who Suffered” [first line of poem] in LLB82.

“Vision on Broadway.” LLB82, p. 247.

“White Petunia.” LLB82, p. 243.