What did you seek to accomplish by doing this?
To touch the wires between us along microtones of pitch.

What do you mean by “between”?
This is the hardest to explain.

There is a sense beyond empathy
where some pain and rage simply enter you.

Are you saying you don’t feel empathy?
I have empathy. I am talking about a visceral sense

beyond, where the universe and the political facts
and the particulars of shock and numbness cross and meet in you

making an entanglement or a net of entrapment
that the word “between” begins to answer for.

– Rachel Blau Duplessis, from Jacketmagazine.com

Rachel Blau Duplessis’s Draft 89, published in Jacket 35, takes the form of an interrogation, a circulation or rather a doubled spiraling, something like a double helix of two voices traveling along the path of an argument. The source and basis of the argument is the “ethical zone” opened by Duplessis’s treatment of a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann. This treatment takes the form of another Draft, number 88, also published in Jacket 35, and is a free variation on Bachmann’s poem Keine Delikatessen.

When I read Draft 89, I was deeply struck by the lines above, especially the phrase “to touch the wires between us along microtones of pitch”. This speaks to a concern which for me, and I think for any writer, is pressing. The “doing this” of the question could be translating; it could be composing one’s ‘own’ work (another form of translation); it could be performing work aloud, or addressing another in speech. All forms of composition or spontaneous unravelling are shadowed by someone who is not-me, whether behind me consciously (quotation, allusion), behind me unconsciously (influence, my own past), before me consciously (an interlocutor, an audience) or unconsciously (a future reader). Response and address are crucial in order for a work to mean (and that is surely a minimum that all writers “seek to accomplish”, at least).

And so there must always be an “us”; and between these two beings are “wires” – actions or words – that can extend through time and space, separate, indissoluble one to the other, even when pressed together in the constituent space of dialogue. There is a sense in which we ourselves are the wires, compressible like thumb and forefinger but not conjoined and always capable of springing apart. Meanwhile the “microtones of pitch” escape the well-tempered clavier, the rational mode of delight and speak deeper, glissando through the notes and shades between, pause and resolve perhaps on one or the other. This has to do with yearning.

But Duplessis brings us back to “between”, which is indeed hard to explain. In his epigraph to Being Singular Plural, Jean-Luc Nancy writes “com-passion is the contagion, the contact of being with one another in this turmoil. Compassion is not altruism, nor is it identification; it is the disturbance of violent relatedness”.

The cross-currents of particular events intersecting within and across; contagion, skin to skin, breath to breath, word to word; the violent transmission of shock-waves through fluid bodies; trapped in our common net (our common-ness), entangled and working in and held up by it. Writers are ventriloquists, speaking from the belly, site of viscera and shaking liquid, speaking with others’ voices: “the thinking comes from between us, an ethical zone”, writes Duplessis. It is easy to forget this.

February 2008