Baudelaire Fractal. Lisa Robertson

of a slowed, non-linguistic perceiving. The change had to do with the deepening sensation of interior space by means of immaterial correspondences. Pigment striates the subject. Mineral affinities act within and across bodies and across times. We are paintings.

      It is evident that the image of Baudelaire in Courbet’s studio allegory has been transposed from the earlier portrait: the oblique light, the studious posture, the curve of the stooped shoulder link the two representations. In The Artist’s Studio, the entire crowded and mysterious image, so inclusive in its social cosmology, seems to radiate out and across the canvas from the dark lower-corner figure of Baudelaire bent over his books. One book is open; on another closed volume rests the poet’s nervous hand. The energy inaugurated in the earlier portrait by the placement of that tentative and nervous hand leads us to believe that at any instant Baudelaire will pause in his reading in order to reach for the splendid quill.

      When I began to write I trembled with an almost immediately disappointed ambition, but I liked paper and I liked ink. This much has remained constant or at least recurrent. The ambition had to do with a hoped-for intimacy between sentences and sensation. I believed that my future was located in the flagrant interstices of this relation, that an architecture capable of welcoming my essential nudity would reveal itself on the threshold of the page. I had no worldly knowledge and no aspirations towards anything that might be termed a literary society. I did not then suspect that such a society existed in the present; if it did, I was ignorant of any access to it. I needed to write in order to make a site for my body. There would be no other way to uncover my unwieldy desire. I was learning that the social fiasco of sex was not a reliable method. So many bludgeoning projections, such petty incompetence and scorn, so many mythological charades worked to lessen the mere possibility of sensual amplitude. I would never understand sex. I could not be that thing and learn to appear to myself. Sadness always undermined the pleasure. So I decided to understand sentences. There would be detours. My own allegorical studio then contained only my typewriter, the diaries, some books, and the figures I found in them. But I was always beginning to write. On every page of the heavy marbled journal I began, heavy with stupidity. The grand tradition had dissolved and the new one hadn’t yet been made. How girlish his hand. How fresh the feather looked.