Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

Lisa Robertson

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781552452158
• eBook ISBN: 9781770561335
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

A New York Times 100 Notable Book and longlisted for the Warwick Writing Prize, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip collects occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turning vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.

About 1836

(an essay on boredom)

I met a dog who collected doubt

until doubt offered a repose.

I met a dog who displayed as love

a surplus of inactivity.

A surplus of inactivity.

I asked the dog

what I should do about believing.

‘Nothing’ he replied.

He was the dog of Latinity

and non-knowledge.

Tacit dog I said

tell me about boredom.

The dog replied:

‘At the edges of the villages of Europe

‘there is boredom.

‘The villages of Europe

‘don’t want your thinking.

‘They want

‘not a world.

‘In these villages

‘one rereads the soiled timetables

‘ofminor trains ’and finds therein

‘Grace. This is called

‘an environment. Now

‘you weep its surplus.

‘Nowhere is like that.

And the dog said

‘I am going to call it hegemony when

‘waking life

‘feels like

‘purchasing water.

‘On animality I’ll claim

‘I wanted to go right out over wordlessness until it became
a fabric

‘and then to lick it

‘gravely.

‘At the same time I was chagrined

‘and the social gadgetry hissed.

‘The outside spread without is the village, the outside

‘spread within is boredom.

‘We are often mistaken about origins

‘(against which we animals sleep).

‘So I became a collector of things

‘– ideas perhaps –

‘smoothing them in the privacy of my ennui

‘(my studio I mean)

‘as they smooth their

‘waning orchids.

‘Genially I am an object.

‘In my canine memory

‘things gently combine –

‘the glitter, the champagne, the sky-blue boudoirs

‘distributed across a surface

‘they would change but nothing would change

‘ever ever ever.

‘Time had no measure

‘other than enjoyment and boredom.

‘Simple bodies in combinations made types –

‘one suffocating, one airy, one narcotic:

‘there was an illegible relation to materiality

‘and this was mistaken for orthodoxy

‘but the orthodoxy did not replace the transcendent.

‘In its radical œther

‘flew

‘some dandiacal cravat.

‘One must withdraw for a long time to arrive at the minimum

‘at the cosmological minimum.

‘It takes an inhuman patience

‘to make the erotic into itself.†

‘By cosmology I mean

‘out in the shadows, out at the edge of the parking lot, just beyond

‘the signage, and beyond the erotic even

‘one’s relationship to utopia is elegiacal.

‘Time there is other time.

‘Forget the nostalgia for singularity. The

‘dismantling of hegemony begins with boredom.

‘If just a single one of the new sciences

‘had been sacrificed to the livid boulevards

‘(one of which extends from the era of Greek philosophy

‘to the advent of Christianity)

‘and the boulevard itself a mobile village –

‘and so it is with our own past:

‘Late Autumn

‘Low Latin

‘the history of the use of boredom

‘remains latent.

‘One’s strategies – how should I put this –

‘used up knowing.

‘I wanted to feel discourse on my pelt

‘but all I could see was theology’s iced hips

‘contra the use of the present.

‘Not will they welcome

‘the concept, not

‘the concept ... (that being what one usefully does against
loneliness).

‘Whereas we in the villages, we must share our nightingales.

‘Somebody brackets their body and somebody

‘doesn’t bracket their body.

‘Each thing changes into a bare unit of wit

‘which offers a repose at best.

‘Excellent the applause excellent the money’s

‘boat-like gliding

‘coming into peregrination

‘to the point where all of the furnishing and utensils

‘love one out of despair

‘or lie

‘with a filthy laugh.

‘Soon there will be only society

‘and caricature. Monsieur, I am frightened.

‘My friends die.

‘As for the river

‘the light was the light. The surface

‘imperceptible.

‘Suicides and stories became trees.

‘Was one for the event? Or on the wrong bridge?

‘We do not pray. The brooder is thinking.

‘The famed impossibility of repetition

‘places itself in relation to

‘the mercantile, hygienic and military class

‘where those purchasers are honoured.

‘Two elements accost one:

‘both doors remain closed.

‘The historian captures above all a document

‘as if his eye loves.

‘Experiments along these lines

‘having a degree of luxury sufficient

‘to a certain stage of myth

‘– as in a letter to one’s mother –

‘elegantly dressed and rifle in hand

‘(rifle not-yet-conscious) ...

‘And what does fashion determine?

‘Fashion determines empathy.

‘When one speaks to flowers for example

‘it is an empathy one seeks and offers

‘as when you offer thinking to a lily

‘and it to you. But now we take a more humble view –

‘some elements of divinity are simulacra

...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Lucite
• Early Education
• The Story
• A Hotel
• After Trees
• First Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant
• Wooden Houses
• Draft of a Voice-Over for Split-Screen Video Loop
• The Stricture
• About 1836
• A Modest Treatise
• On Painting
• The Dogs of Dirk Bogarde
• Lucy Hogg by Baudelaire
• Coda: The Device
• Essay on Lust
• Essay on Heaven
• Essay on Resemblance
• Report 1624: The House
• Acknowledgements