on nothing.
Now, after a long absence, I had returned to Vancouver as a visitor. I had delivered the lecture on wandering, tailoring, idleness, and doubt. I had conversed, feasted, slept. The following morning, alone in the hotel, I awoke to the bodily recognition that I had become the author of the complete works of Baudelaire. Even the unwritten texts, the notes and sketches contemplated and set aside, and also all of the correspondence, the fizzles and false starts and abandoned verses, the diaristic notes: I wrote them. Perhaps it is more precise to say that all at once, unbidden, I received the Baudelairean authorship, or that I found it within myself. This is obviously very different from being Baudelaire, which was not the case, nor my experience. I had only written his works.
It was a very quiet, neutral sensation. I associate it now with the observation of the immaterial precision of light.
Such an admission will seem frivolous, overdetermined, baroque. But I will venture this: it is no more singular for me to discover that I have written the complete works of Baudelaire than it was for me to have become a poet, me, a girl, in 1984. I was as if concussed. Believe me if you wish. I understand servitude. My task now is to fully serve this delusion.
Delusion needs an architecture; this hotel room became for a crucial instant the portal for a transmission seeking a conduit. Garments, rooms, paintings, desire: in each of these perceptual frames, there is the feeling of the movement of time as an inner experience made available to sensing and the wilderness of interpretation by way of material borders or limits. Time is my body, and it is also others’ bodies; it could next become sentences, and the reflexive pause within the phrase. This is grace, I think: the achievement, in the company of strangers, of the necessary precision of the pause. A sentence flourishes only as a pause in thought, which extends the invitation of an identification. The great amateurs of fashion understand this supple grace. Garments can translate a city, map a previously unimagined mode of freedom or consent. A garment is a pause in textile. The pause admits untimeliness. One part of time acts counter to the will; one part of our bodily life is always and only untimely. We enter the room at precisely the wrong moment; we trip against the furniture, bruising our hips; we wake in the morning unable to recognize a suitable pronoun among the conventional phonemes. The garment must dress our untimeliness. I’m looking for the nonchalance expressed in an oddly shaped collar, a collar that appears to want to lift in the breeze of an open window to caress the line of my jaw. I’m intimate with the clumsy humour of buttons, the way a new kind of fit in a tailored jacket lifts my kidneys a little, coaxing open a readerly concave chest. At night the girls in galleries suddenly wear bright fringed shawls that move when they laugh, with hair slashed straight and high across their brows. There’s a new textile, it seems, something from sports or a futuristic movie. It’s lightweight and silvery, and the kids have plucked it off the internet to wear on the bus. It’s being held to their skinny bodies by their heavy backpacks and the home-tattooed arms they slide across one another’s waists. There’s the erotic shimmer of a silk-thin band T-shirt on breast skin. The emotional synchrony of garments transmits discontinuously and by energetic means, thus the metaphysical appeal of fashion. I had studied this question of fashion’s intellectual spirit in some of its great theorists – Lilly Reich, for example, and Rei Kawakubo – but also in my relationships to garments of every provenance. They need not have value in the commercial sense. There are the cast-offs and rejects, on eBay, in charity shops, draped over fences in modest residential alleys, swagging the rims of dumpsters by the apartment blocks, and certainly I have been a passionate amateur of their study and occasional acquisition. But here I’m not talking about the material research, as all-absorbing as it can become in its gradual, irregular advancement, but the mood of a garment, the way an emotional tone is brought forward in the wearing, in the suggestive affinities of the toilette. The unfamiliar set of a shoulder or the tugging sensation of a row of tight wrist buttons can hint at the gestural vocabulary of a previous epoch and so substitute for eroded or disappeared sentimental mores. Time in the garment is what I repeatedly sought, because sartorial time isn’t singular but carries the living desires of bodies otherwise disappeared. This has been part of my perverse history of garment-love; I’ve wanted to inhabit the stances, gestures, and caresses of vanished passions and disciplines. And the various garments each person gathers to wear together, the way she groups fibres, colours, eras, social codes, and cuts, this mysterious grammar speaks beyond the tangible and often-cited economies and their various political constraints. I keep a home-sewn pale yellow silk shantung jacket that I haven’t worn for decades because it once matched the hair of the girl who became my grandmother. I discovered this the season I myself was pale blonde, in 1983, the year of my grandmother’s death. Garments are not signs in a signifying system, not in my cosmology. Fashion is the net of the history of love.
The hotel room was decorated with two prints of paintings, both seascapes. Around these portal-like rectangles the walls and fabrics were all placid tints of pale green and grey. It was curious that the decorator had taken such pains to establish an aquatic theme, given that Vancouver’s own harbour was visible from the window. Yet these were not port images. They showed only unpeopled, unfigured planes of sky and sea, rendered in watercolour with some expertise, bisected or linked by their horizons. This now-tasteful minimalism of the previous decade left a polite space for reverie, as did the furnishings. I can’t recall the carpet. It was Poe who said that the soul of an apartment is its carpet, and by this measure, I have rarely occupied a hotel room that could be said to have a soul. But I am not sure that I want a hotel room to have a soul, since the task of that innocuous limbo is to shelter mine, and unimagined others’, with as few contradictions as possible. I go to the hotel to evade determination. What I thought of, what I imagined in this blandly contrived place as I woke, were those marvellously glowing baroque harbours by Claude Lorrain, the ones hanging in the Louvre. Listening to the boat sounds from my bed, watching the pale light slide in from beneath the sage-tinted curtain, I pictured the tall porticos rising on both sides of the sheltered water, pale columns rhyming with masts, the cheerful flapping of faded flags, the wooden hull of a great ship discharging cattle and wrapped bundles by means of little boats, bare-chested stevedores straining at their work while others, in red-and-blue belted tunics and matching turbans, stand by and discuss serious matters: impending weather conditions or import duties or the precarity of love. A cow in a sky-blue harness is being led by a man in a loincloth across a narrow gangplank to shore. I still keep an old postcard of this image, now bleached of its warm tones after being propped for several years on a sunny window ledge, so that my imagination of Claude has transmuted to cool-grey-green-blue, like the veiled marine sun of the Pacific port I now woke to. The more the Claude postcard fades, the more it resembles what I know.
The two imaginary seaports by Claude, these complex frontiers of an urban ambiance, as Guy Debord described them, were rivalled in their beauty, he said, by the Paris metro maps conveniently posted at stations. The affinity of the maps and Claude’s seaports had to do, he claimed, with his characteristically utopian vagueness, with ‘a sum of possibilities’ rather than any compositional aesthetics. It’s a literary mode of comparison, using not signs as its components, but the transformative potency of transitions. Metaphors, in other words. His method also takes into account the anticipation of transitions, not only the events themselves, which is what I like about metaphor, and about Debord: time is perversely multiplied. Nothing replaces anything else; contradictory sensations acquire contingent truth. The baroque seaports of Claude Lorrain exist right now as future potentials. I would agree with Debord about the psychogeographic equivalence of the harbour’s beauty with the modern transports, but with the proviso that the similarity holds only for the time before one has ever visited Paris, when the metro and its map is still a pittoresque novella by Queneau borrowed from a smalltown library, or glimpsed in a scene in a film by Godard, the one for example where Anna Karina, her childish face and pulled-back hair being lightly stroked all the while by her lover, looks at the presumed sadness of the other metro passengers – the moody boy with the cake box, the bored businessman reading the newspaper – and recites, then sings aloud, a poem by Aragon: Things are what they are. From time to time the earth trembles. The train pulls up to a station called Liberté. But is there a station called Liberty? I have never noticed it on any line I’ve travelled. And were the men sad? Maybe they were just angry. The tautly inflected instant of transformation between vocal recital and song, the poignant artifice of the threshold