Theory of Mesh
By Yongyu Chen
For Yun Qin
There has to be a part of nonpossession
that’s still relation. There has to be a purity without closedness.
Purity, almost
without consciousness, loneliness, a pure
energy, pure
person, I hope to sustain always an energy that’s very pure.
thought,
I will write a Lucie Brock-Broido line but even longer. I will write a poem
obsessed
with sleep. Duration. Then
I read a book by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. I realized
what I was writing was a Mei-mei Berssenbrugge line.
When
things like this happen I
know why I’m writing. Theory
of mesh. I came back
to New York. There was a collection of Rachel
Kushner’s essays in every bookstore. In each one,
with S, I read her essay on Duras. Things happened to Duras,
Kushner writes, “that she never
experienced.” The story of Duras and the older Chinese lover was
a legend
which, having ripened during her whole life, finally
came true in The Lover. Her best book. Which means she had
to write
it until it felt like experience. As,
I think, does Kushner. In her novels, with
her life, in her own way. It’s why I love her
essay. It’s why her essay
is familiar like the road home with
someone suddenly new. I was visiting H’s place in Queens and their
roommate C told us
about Leonora Carrington. In C’s print of
And Then We Saw the Daughter of the
Minotaur, who
is the Minotaur’s daughter, C asks us. I think
it’s the dancer
the dogs see, I love the dogs. C says the Minotaur’s daughter is
everything we see after the painting. Maybe. That much. Looking
away is everything. Maybe. At the center
of looking away, being gone
is everything. Leonora H. Kushner. Mei-mei
C. Duras. It was true: I didn’t come here to not fall in love. Writes Kushner
of New York. In
the mesh who is she talking to. In a dream
my family photos were taped onto photos
of the distant star and then, as the dream
reached its point of inflection, I realized the star could see us
through our backsides, and,
somehow, you were part of it, you were part of the dream, then part of
the star, part
of the seeing,
by being the one outside it, the one element
of waking. In her note at the end
of Empathy, Berssenbrugge wrote—I was living alone
in northern New Mexico. Wrote—I met Georgia
O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin. Wrote—I wanted to feminize
scientific language
and philosophic language. Wrote—The slow arc
of the sun across “empty” land
became long, poetic lines.
Friendship
as a way of life.
And then we saw the daughter of the Minotaur.
The key to all the work up to this point.
