All experience, of course, is filtered through one’s personality, disposition, upbringing, culture (which is why I know we do not all sound like John Cheever). Truth be told I was never much for ordinary narrative, it seems. Even as a child, the eldest of five, I would wander year after year in and out of our bedtime reading room, dissatisfied by the stories, the silly plot contrivances, the reduction of an awesome complicated world into a rather silly, sterile one. When my mother was reading stories I would often wander out to the night garden, taking one sentence or one scene out there with me to dream over, stopping, I guess, the incessant march of the plot forward to the inevitable climax. Only when it came time for poetry did I sit transfixed. These seemed to me much closer an approximation of my world, which was all strangeness and wonder and light.
Back then my remote father grew roses. The tenderness of this fact, and the odd feeling I had that he cared more for these silent, beautiful creatures than he did for us, always intrigued and oddly touched me. It was what my childhood was: random, incomprehensible, astounding events, one after the next. I cherish this image of my father. And because I have never wholly understood it I gave Ava’s father the task of growing roses. Unlike my father, Ava’s father survived Treblinka. He gives Ava a penny apiece for each Japanese beetle she can collect from the garden. The Germans sold the dead Jews’ hair for fifteen pennies a kilo. There were piles of women’s hair there. Fifty feet high. Ava in her innocence and purity, holding her clear jar of beetles, says, “Yes, we’ll have to make holes for the air.” The book is built on waves of association like this. There is a rose called “Peace.” A rose called “Cuisse de Nymphe Emue”—that’s “Thigh of an Aroused Nymph.” It blooms once unreservedly and then not again.
I have attempted in some small way to create a text, as Barthes says, “in which is braided, woven in the most personal way, the relations of every kind of bliss: those of ‘life’ and those of the text, in which reading and the risks of life are subjects to the same anamnesis.”
Back to my mother reading me stories those long ago nights. Another thing I did was to detach the meanings from the words and turn them into a kind of music, a song my mother was singing in a secret language just to me. It was a rhythmic, sensual experience as she sang what I imagine were the syllables of pure love. This is what literature became for me: music, love, and the body. I cannot keep the body out of my writing; it enters the language, transforms the page, imposes its own intelligence. If I have succeeded at all you will hear me breathing. You will hear the sound my longing makes. You will sense in the text the body near water, as it was then, and in silence. Not the body as it is now, in Washington, D.C., next to obelisks and pillars and domes, walking it seems in endless circles and reciting the alphabet of those streets over and over. That will show up later; the body has an incredible memory.
My hope is that you might feel one moment of true freedom in AVA. That the form, odd as it may at first seem, will not constrict or alienate, but will set something in motion. Here I am always just on the verge of understanding, which is the true state of desire. Perhaps you will feel some of this enormous desire for everything in the world in the fragments of this living, changing, flawed work. And in the silence between fragments.
“Almost everything is yet to be written by women,” Ava Klein says, moments before her death.
Let us bloom then, unreservedly.
There’s still time.
A Novel of Thank You
for Getrude Stein
BEGIN in singing.
Chapter One
Rose.
A Longer Chapter
A word whispered. Called through green. In the years she was growing and lilting hills sung in the night and in the day and in every possible way over water rose the first word, the world. Was I loving you I was loving you even then.
One word. Rose
To Be Sung
Urgently, sweetly, with bliss, and sometimes with desperation
Chapter Bliss
Rose.
Chapter Wish
Rose. And Chapter hope…
And this is what bliss is this.
Rose to be sung against the sky and diamonds night.
Red Roses
A cool red rose and pink cut pink, a collapse and a solid hole, a little less hot
In direct sensuous relationship to the world.
Chapter Early and Late Please
I found myself plunged into a vortex of words, burning words, cleansing words, liberating words, and the words were ours and it was enough that we held them in our hands.
Chapter
Sincerely Beverly Nichols Avery Hopwood Allan Michaels and Renee Felicity also how many apricots are there to a pound.
And this is what bliss this is bliss this is bliss.
They found themselves happier than anyone who was alive then.
Chapter Saint
Saint Two and Saint Ten
Saint Tribute
Saint Struggle
Chapter Grace
Chapter Faith
Chapter Example
Saint Admiration
Our Lady of Derision
Saint Deadline — not finished and not finishable. I like thinking of this.
How many saints are there in it? Saints we have seen so far:
Tributes are there in it? A Very Valentine — for Gertrude Stein.
Colors are there in it?
A Novel of Thank You. A Basket.
Saint Example and Saint Admiration
Thank you, how many, audacity religiosity beauty and purity your ease your inability to compromise ever thank you
very much.
Your freedoms Saint Derision, Chapter One
Do prepare to say
Portraits and Prayers, do prepare
to say that you have
prepared portraits and prayers and
that you prepare and that I prepare
Yes you do.
A vortex of words very much.
For your irreverence and desire