The Lost Lunar Baedeker Read Free Page A

is the one that looks past her. That is all right, for I believe, finally, that she will establish the reputations of critics more than they will hers, and that a true and good argument about Mina Loy has begun. That argument is needed. There is no version of the twentieth-century canon that includes Mina Loy’s work, yet somehow it has survived. Perhaps her absence from such lists is itself a form of status. Perhaps it was her wish to remain unchosen.
    It is not given to each of us
    To be desired.
    Loy once said in The Blind Man: “Art is The Divine Joke, and any Public … can see a nice easy simple joke such as the sun.” She named her lunar baedeker not for the sun but for its ghost. It is now, just as the sun is setting on the century, that her guide to the moon seems indispensable. How strange her voice still seems. And how disturbing.
    I believe there are certain guidebooks we should take with us as we navigate our way toward the next century, and that Mina Loy’s is one of them. I think her poems have a relevance to the formation of a new modernity, and that she might yet prove to be the poet of her century, as Duchamp proved to be the artist of his. For some of us, she is already.
    R.L.C.

 
    There is no Life or Death,
    Only activity
    And in the absolute
    Is no declivity.
    There is no Love or Lust
    Only propensity
    Who would possess
    Is a nonentity.
    There is no First or Last
    Only equality
    And who would rule
    Joins the majority.
    There is no Space or Time
    Only intensity,
    And tame things
    Have no immensity.

Parturition
    I am the centre
    Of a circle of pain
    Exceeding its boundaries in every direction
    The business of the bland sun
    Has no affair with me
    In my congested cosmos of agony
    From which there is no escape
    On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations
    Or in contraction
    To the pin-point nucleus of being
    Locate an irritation             without
    It is                                          within
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Within
    It is without
    The sensitized area
    Is identical              with the extensity
    Of intension
    I am the false quantity
    In the harmony of physiological potentiality
    To which
    Gaining self-control
    I should be consonant
    In time
    Pain is no stronger than the resisting force
    Pain calls up in me
    The struggle is equal
    The open window is full of a voice
    A fashionable portrait-painter
    Running up-stairs to a woman’s apartment
    Sings
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â â€œAll the girls are tid’ly did’ly
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â All the girls are nice
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Whether they wear their hair in curls
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Or—”
    At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization
    The conception                            Brute
    Why?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â The irresponsibility of the male
    Leaves woman her superior Inferiority
    He is running up-stairs
    I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony
    Incidentally with the exhaustion of control
    I reach the summit
    And gradually subside into anticipation of
    Repose
    Which never comes
    For another mountain is growing up
    Which            goaded by the unavoidable
    I must traverse
    Traversing myself
    Something in the delirium of night-hours
    Confuses while intensifying sensibility
    Blurring spatial contours
    So aiding elusion of the circumscribed
    That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast
    Comes from so far away
    And the foam on the