Delft Blue & Objects of The World

Delft Blue & Objects of the World

Archives I and II

Louise Warren

Translated by Karen McPherson

Guernica - Essential Translation Series 15

TORONTO–BUFFALO–BERKELEY–LANCASTER (U.K.) 2013

Contents

Preface

Notes

Delft Blue: Archives of Solitude

Readings and Notes

Translator’s Notes

Objects of the World: Archives of the Living

Apart

September Song

Cells of Summer

The Experience of Le Torrent

Objects of the World

Yo Veo Aquí

The Blue Hour

Breath Catchers

Mandelbaum

Marks of Love

Bibliography

Author's Acknowledgements

Translator’s Notes

About The Author

About The Translator

About The Book

Copyright

Preface

Opening Up the Archives

So here I am gazing at this ancient lake emerging from the clouds and destined for the archives.

—Apricot (Delft Blue: Archives of Solitude)

Three volumes of poetic essays comprise Louise Warren’s Archives trilogy: Bleu de Delft: Archives de solitude (2001); Objets du monde: Archives du vivant (2005); and La forme et le deuil: Archives du Lac (2008).¹ Each book has a distinct character and focus, but they also work together, united by the idea of archives, by the free essay form, and by the matter common to and running through the three volumes, a dense interweaving and cross-referencing of lexicon, themes, observations and preoccupations. So how are we to understand these archives that name, contain and fill the three books? Archives are often depicted as musty repositories, museum cellars, warehouses shoring up retaining walls against forgetfulness and the inevitable erosions of time. Objects deposited in the archives are tucked away for safekeeping. But Warren’s archives are not file boxes or document lockers. They are not relegated to closed cabinets in locked rooms. They are where writing goes and what writing does.

In the epigraph above, taken from the first entry to the first volume of the trilogy, Warren gives us a key to her archives. The archives have to do with presence (So here I am), with contemplation (gazing), with past and memory, revelation and enigma (this ancient lake emerging from the clouds). Later, in the trilogy’s final volume, Form and Mourning: Archives of the Lake, Warren addresses her choice of archives more directly:

The word archives brings me to an idea of preservation. It carries an individual memory, but also a shared memory since the archives are legacies. Like memory, the imaginary must circulate. Preserve solitude, living, a lake, my most precious possessions. In archiving them, I let others consult them. (Form and Mourning, 159)

What stands out here is the idea of archives as legacies through which memory and the imaginary must circulate. Marking the poet’s present and presence, the archives thus open onto both past and future. When Warren adds that her books of poetry also gather archives, we begin to understand how the archive defines her relationship to the world and its objects through writing. Later in Apparitions: Inventaire de l’atelier, she clarifies: For me poetry is associated with the work of archives. The opposite of a symbolic writing where everything is camouflaged. To unbury (32).² Unburying, preserving and sharing, the three volumes of essays in Warren’s Archives trilogy are both poetry and archives.

Warren’s comments further suggest that, even before naming the archives in this trilogy, her writing was creating them. In her retrospective reading of the project in Form and Mourning, Warren notes that in an earlier volume of essays, Interroger l’intensité, she was, without knowing it […] already in the process of constructing the archives that would follow.³ It was her development of a free and generically hybrid essay form in that earlier volume that led her into the archives. And once there, she realized that she had been there all along. That earlier work might therefore even be read as a kind of archive of the archives, not only an antecedent but also, through this process of reading backwards, a postscript. Such a temporal fold in the reading and the writing is a central characteristic of Louise Warren’s archives. We find this in the trilogy where the three books continue to read one another, each volume both containing and contained in the others. All are archives of solitude, archives of the living, archives of the lake. All of them arise from and are infused with the Delft blue. All observe and preserve objects of the world, uncovering a relationship between form and mourning. At the same time, each book in the trilogy is constantly gesturing beyond its own textual boundaries. The ideas, images, encounters and reflections woven into these three volumes become threads picked up in the works that are to follow. With Attachements: Observation d’une bibliothèque (2010), Anthologie du présent (2012) and Apparitions: Inventaire de l’atelier (2012), the archives continue to open up and open out in all directions.⁴

To write is to keep entering the archives. In Interroger l’intensité, Warren compared writing to an underground experience […], a work of exhumation of buried material that needs to be dug out, uncovered, given voice: Unearth, dig up, go to meet a voice embedded beneath my own. Describing the reflexive descent that brought her back to familiar authors, cherished works, marked by darkness, liquid, opaque or immobile, she makes a telling remark: Carried along by the movement, my notebooks opened up.⁵ Open notebooks opening up the archives.

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Warren’s description of the essay genre in Delft Blue gives us some insight into her reasons for embracing this literary form:

An essay offers test, trial and effort, exploration and discovery, all at the same time, just enough strolling about to be reachable, listening and curious. So many possibilities since each stroke performs a slow transformation, a kind of initiatic voyage, as if in writing one might find a place to wander, hands in one’s pockets, or to dig deep, cross out, search, begin again, somehow entitled to more than one’s dictionary, one’s studio and one’s self as form, test, matter. (Vertical)

The strolling, the wandering, the state of receptivity where one is reachable, listening and curious, all of these evoke and elucidate the fluid and dynamic nature of Warren’s essays. In writing an essay one is willing to dig deep, cross out, search, begin again; one is prepared to make a voyage into uncharted territories. Thus Warren’s essays are shape-shifters, sometimes art criticism, sometimes travel writing, sometimes poems or short meditations or snippets of memoir, yet all characterized by what she herself has referred to as active contemplation.⁶The introduction to the dossier in Contre-jour dedicated to the work of Louise Warren describes the hybrid nature of these writings:

[U]nrolling and fragmenting thinking’s thread, [her essays] resist categories, embracing figures and genres that suit their project and practicing a hybridization that is both learned and discreet. (55)

The author of this introductory text then goes on to describe Warren’s most recent publication, Apparitions: Inventaire de l’atelier, as an open studio in which

there develops a free reflection on the poetic experience and a transparent exploration of the creative process, supported by the living traces of numerous collaborations with artists, especially visual artists. (55)⁷

This image of the open studio might easily describe all of Warren’s writing, especially as the studio shares common ground with the open notebook, the open archive, the natural world, all places of memory, imagination and creation. In Studio in Delft Blue, Warren writes: I always feel that I am in the studio. I am continually worked. The writer’s studio is, for her, quite simply this open space of being, the space from which she writes. In Form and Mourning Warren refers to the studio of the outdoors, and at the start of Apparitions she describes how the studio defines the writer’s mobile and expansive place in the world: "studio, an active word […] Mobile, the writer’s studio moves about into a park, a train, as well as into his house or a notebook. I name these spaces. A well of light appears."⁸ But essays may have, for Warren, a particular and privileged relationship to the studio and its opening:

The studio and the essay go together. If poetry seems to be a pure form of creation, the essay, in its opening and its welcome, can lead to that expression. So it is not surprising to find certain words on their way toward the poem or already marked by that vertical stroke slipping away along other paths. […] I feel as if I’m then flinging open the shutters of a deep dwelling and that suddenly the world is filling up with an extra second. (Vertical)

For Warren, the opening of the studio is an invitation, a welcoming in of other people, objects, art, ideas. As she observed in Interroger l’Intensité, one writes with others and the material of others becomes substance (12). Entering into the open archives and the open studio means making connections, realizing attachments. Thus does Warren’s writing create what Étienne Beaulieu has described as a community of readers, a circle of reciprocal attachments⁹ and what the author of the introductory text in Contre-jour, borrowing Warren’s own emphasis and anticipating the 2010 volume Attachements: Observations d’une bibliothèque, has called a writing of attachment.¹⁰

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Perhaps most striking as we enter Warren’s open studio, however, is the call for accompaniment. In Delft Blue we find numerous specific references to the act of accompaniment: Warren speaks on several occasions about accompanying a dying person’s passage into death; she writes of the poetry that accompanies her life and describes writing itself as an accompaniment.¹¹ In Stroke, the encounter with the work of art is described as an act of accompaniment:

The arts come together here in the inner and intuitive experience I have of artists’ works, of the singing voice or of music. Feelings should nourish either the text of the poem or how one approaches it, makes it move: in every case the way of opening oneself to the world, absorbing it and being reached by it is the same. The presence, the accompaniment linked to that feeling of being is the same.

It is in the introductory pages of Form and Mourning that Warren clearly and explicitly identifies this shared space of connection and collaboration as an organizing principle for her work. In an apt illustration of what I have called her poetics of accompaniment, she evokes her participation in her sculptor brother’s exhibit of pieces that he named "sculptures of accompaniment" and she then proceeds to include his own descriptive text, in its entirety, within her own. The essays that follow in Form and Mourning ask to be read under the sign of this accompaniment. The encounters with artists and their work, the visits to exhibitions and festivals, the travels to foreign places, the readings and the reflections on reading, the proliferation of citations of other people’s words all point to shared spaces. And as we move into and through these spaces, we realize that we have been there all along. Since we first entered Warren’s Archives, we have been in a place of accompaniment.

Paths of solitude

The letter comes alone before the word.

—Form and Mourning¹²

Warren has called Delft Blue: Archives of solitude the book of words. Describing the genesis of her project, she tells of how words led her into the archives:

I began writing my Archives of solitude while I was preparing the anthology La poésie mémoire de l’art. Several words kept coming back, several artists, too. Studio, colour, model, museum, painting. Chagall. Matisse. Van Gogh. […] Then other words were added, and from the word to the fragment, and these gave me Delft Blue. […] I had just moved to the country and never before had December evenings seemed to me so dark, so cold, it was suddenly vital that I start creating. I had nowhere to go, I had only the blue to gather me into its archives. (Form and Mourning, 159-60)

Delft Blue is organized as an abécédaire, an alphabet book with one hundred and twenty-six entries arranged alphabetically from Apricot to Voice. This lexical approach draws the reader’s attention to the particularity and integrity of each word, its materiality and its resonance. The volume also serves as a kind of glossary to accompany Warren’s work since many of the entries in this little book are responding to images, words and ideas familiar to any reader of Louise Warren’s poetry and essays.¹³ Words like clarté, abstrait, trait, pli, création, vivant [brightness, abstract, stroke, fold, creation, living] circulate through these essays and we can follow them forward and back not only through the trilogy but through Warren’s entire body of work. Furthermore, the alphabetical ordering in Delft Blue creates chance associations and contrasts that remind the reader that the essay is, for Warren, a place to wander (Vertical). Indeed, the form provides the liberty of the constraint: following the letters, the collection moves forward through contiguity and association.

But it is important to keep in mind that this book of words is also the book of solitude. In the entry Room, Warren writes of her need for solitude:

I have always felt free in this solitude as I am nowhere else. Solitude is a room. I think that this retreat, this expression of self in solitude, manifests itself very early and that this need can be a sign of self-affirmation in the imaginary, a path toward art.

In another essay, she describes the artist’s withdrawal into solitude as essential to the creation of the work:

Solitude lets the work take shape in silence, the bluish darkness of a withdrawal into oneself. Letting the voice pass, letting the light pass, but also letting silence pass, this is what I am after when I pull my chair back under the trees. (Solitude)

Yet at the same time, she notes how solitude’s rite of relinquishment opens the way, marks the furrow and creates new links. The solitary work in and of the archives is at once withdrawal and reconnection. It is the work of following the paths that solitude opens up:

As archivist of my solitude, I feel I must gather together the shining moments of childhood, my mother’s smiles, the poems, silences and sleepless nights, the slowness and the letters that open onto other places, other faces, but always in the continuity of the sky, the practice of the blue. (Incompletion)

Earlier, in the entry Delft Blue, Warren had already described this practice¹⁴:

Writing poems, we enter the movement of rivers, their uninterrupted circulation […] Sometimes the hand seizes the current, slips down to the riverbed and brings up rings, young girls’ tears, and strange gleaming shards of pottery that, in menacing the heart, reveal it. As if we needed the rivers’ course so that our gaze may open up, so that memory may slip in and reconnect with the Delft blue.

The gathering (shining moments of childhood, gleaming shards of pottery) and the opening (onto other places, other faces) ensure the continuity of Louise Warren’s project.¹⁵ These descriptions also anticipate the solitude that Warren will later evoke in Form and Mourning: Creating bonds, stringing up bridges: the more my solitude abstracts itself and intensifies in contact with other materials, the stronger the bonds become(160). Solitude, for Warren, is always a solitude of abstraction. And just as the abstract and the concrete accompany one another through her work, so do solitude and connection.¹⁶ The abstraction of her solitude connects her to the living, the material. Gathered fragments reconnect her with the continuity of the sky, the Delft blue. Thus, in Form and Mourning she writes: Collecting, just like bringing together and cataloguing the traces of absence, is part of the creative process and the two activities maintain a connection with the infinite (89).

The opening to the infinite is at the same time an opening to the world and its objects for [a] collector is never done seeking a new object (Form and Mourning, 89). The paths of solitude in Delft Blue then lead naturally into the next volume of the trilogy where the gathered shards will reappear in and as Objects of the World. In the final pages of Delft Blue, we move first through Vide [Emptiness], Violoncelle [Cello] and Vision [Vision]. In Emptiness, Warren embraces time for letting myself be worked upon by my project. To be there, to feel, to put myself into a receptive state; in Cello, she writes of returning unburdened from a descent into the cellar, place of melancholy; and in Vision she describes [t]he poet, listening intently, who finds himself alone and writing. Delft Blue then closes with three sections that gesture toward the two volumes that will follow. These three brief entries move us from the archives of solitude into the archives of the living, although it would be more accurate to say that they reveal the coexistence of these spaces. In fact, Vivant [Living] et Vivante [Living Woman] act like a hyphen not only to the archives of the living of the second volume but also to the mourning and accompaniment of the third.¹⁷ The final entry, Voix [Voice], speaks into that opening, evoking a future and imagining a voice, right close, calling for accompaniment¹⁸:

There will be trees, and few capital letters. Rivers and names, my dress in a surge of snow, other foreign languages and my voice, right close, calling to them.

Raising Up the Word

It’s always a surprise to see pieces of the real appearing on a page.

—Objects of the World

Warren has referred to Objects of the World: Archives of the Living as the book of objects. This second volume of the trilogy contains ten essays each of which is structured around a series of discrete short passages. In these hybrid texts, the