The Moon at the End of My Street

According to Lawrence, who insists on an essential and dynamic correspondence between man and the heavenly bodies, the moon is a strange, white, soft-seeming world; a great cosmic nerve centre from which we quiver forever. 

Now, as readers of this blog may know, I'm philosophically hostile to such naive vitalism and what Quentin Meillassoux terms correlationism. However, la luna continues to attract my interest and affection and I agree with Lawrence that it's a far lovelier thing than merely a dead lump of rock in the night sky. 

And so it is that - just the other evening - I took the above photo of the moon at the end of my street, which, coincidentally, happens to be the title of a new collection of poems by Isabel del Rio, who, kindly, has given me permission to reproduce the following lines from a verse entitled 'If you and I did not have the moon':

    

If we did not have the Moon,
we would not know what to call
the night, perhaps only
darkness, we would describe it
only by its colour, black,
by its lack of purpose, pointless.


Other lunar-inspired verses in Ms del Rio's new book include 'wondering moon', 'this Moon is but a quaver on the sky', and 'Moon Haiku Number 1':


Like you, the Moon is
not in the universe, but
is the universe


Obviously, as a poet, there are moments when Ms del Rio falls into the same anthropocentric idealism and affectation as Lawrence. It's not so much that either author wilfully privileges the human over other objects, but each seems unable to help thinking the latter unless they conform to the mind of a knowing subject and in this way become products of human cognition and aesthetic fancy.

Still, it's been said that I often do the same, despite my best efforts to adhere to a strict form of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (i.e. to know that the moon and stars exist independently of Man and are not ontologically exhausted by their relation to us), so who am I to criticise ... 

Note: Isabel del Rio is a writer and linguist, born in Madrid and living in London. She writes in English and Spanish and has published fiction and poetry. Her new book is published by Friends of Alice Publishing (2016).  

It is your age - A Poem by Isabel del Rio

It is your age that pulls away the veil

From eyes expecting so much more than seen.

And what you did or who you were prevailed

just briefly, what you are is just has-been.

Dreams are no more and even love is dreamt,

No longer hope of saving skin or soul

From surest damnation, all feelings spent

On make-believe things until they run cold.

Don't say it's sad, unfair or undeserved,

this is the only journey you will take,

at least you're here for now, a sentence served

with no purpose but solely for its sake,

to prove or disprove nothing, even less

an answer to the question: what's this mess?

Isabel del Rio is a writer and linguist, born in Madrid and living in London. She writes in both English and Spanish, and has published fiction and poetry. Her bilingual book, Zero Negative / Cero Negativo appeared in 2013 (Araña Editorial). She works for an international organization as head of terminology, and is currently writing a memoir. 

Ms. del Rio appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for her kind submission of a sonnet written last year and, indeed, for the photograph.  

On the Stuttering of Language

I recently had an interesting and enjoyable evening at Europe House, where bilingual Spanish/English writers Isabel del Rio and Susana Medina were discussing their work and promoting new books.

Both women seemed keen to advance the idea that by writing in two languages simultaneously they were evolving a new literary genre that was beyond simple translation. Although their argument was coherent and their experimental practice of writing in the space between different cultures perfectly commendable, I'm afraid I wasn't convinced that anything radically new was on offer.  

In fact, I agree with Deleuze that great writers always and already inhabit their native languages like foreign agents and bring writing to a crisis in some manner by carving out a nonpreexistent language within their own tongue:

"This is not a situation of bilingualism or multilingualism. We can easily conceive of two languages mixing with each other, with incessant transitions from one to the other; yet each of them nonetheless remains a homogeneous system in equilibrium, and their mixing takes place in speech. But this is not how great authors proceed ... they do not mix two languages together, not even a minor language and a major language .... What they do, rather, is invent a minor use of the major language within which they express themselves ... They are great writers by virtue of this minorization: they make the language take flight ... ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium .... They make the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur."

- Gilles Deleuze, 'He Stuttered', Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael E. Greco, (Verso, 1998), pp. 109-10.