Infinitely Dividing Sunflowers

Or, How To Avoid The Void, Part 1

1.

Jackie Wang’s new book The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void contains something like a secret or a lesson. As ever with poetic secrets and lessons, we can know in advance that they cannot and will not be captured or spoken easily, even if we believe them to be contained in the Book in question, even if we are convinced, when we finish reading the Book a first time, as I have just done, that we were let into the secret itself. I read this book in such a concrete sense of ecstasy, pain, and concentrated painful ecstasy, that it is hard for me to tell the status of this ‘secret’ or ‘lesson’ either way, even though I am saying it exists; it may even be that the secret caused the ecstatic pain, or that my resistance to the secret caused the ecstatic pain—I will try to explain and unpack how some of this may work.

Am I simply talking about the exact spell the book’s title names, the one that allows you to avoid the void, and which is given inside the book, or seems to be given, when she or one of many speakers says,

‘If you have read the Book, you may already know the Secret.’

? But then which book, since ‘the Book’ both is and is not The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void? And also, which ‘secret’, since this secret, even if you have not read the Book, is still said to have been shown to you here, tonight, anyway,

‘If not’, I continue, ‘I have shown it to you tonight.’

? When I try to write of this lesson and secret I think of something she, J.W., says elsewhere, and something I seem to remember from her Twitter account, back in the days of it being a dream machine, a dictation of dreams and politics (‘the dream was . . .’). This something had to do with questioning or being in tension with ‘the fidelity to the wound’. If anything, perhaps what the new book contains is an explanation or narrative about being saved from just that fidelity or about just why that dream machine had to be dissembled, so as to be set up elsewhere, and whether it really did survive. If my house had a golden dream machine in it, but I had to move, which seems to me to be what this book and its Book is saying, then I would have to of course be careful; I would know I was taking a risk in moving, and that such a golden dream machine might not manage the journey, such is its delicacy, and yet hopefully there will be more room for it, the machine, where I am going, even more space in which it may be used, even if it no longer appears to be the one I used to know.

The thing she says elsewhere, which I just mentioned and then lost in my writing, is found in ‘Twists and Turns in the Bowels of the Neon Dragon: A Dream Maze’, a text from April 2016 whose title riffs on Cixous’ Twists and Turns in the Heart’s Antarctic, and it is Cixous who provides at least one of the book’s internal epigraphs. What does Wang say in the 2016 text that seems so relevant, perhaps, according to me, to this text appearing in 2021 but surely written over a long period of time? We read:

I’m not living on the border. I mean I’m no longer looking in the direction of the border, which I once felt as a temptation or beckoning. When the other side beckons I turn away. When I think I’m not on the border I’m still on the border. We’re only ever one misstep away from becoming corpse. This, I hide. What is the nature of this truth, which I have consigned to secrecy? Once everything was weighed down by death, and it was almost impossible to move. I did a little trick. I said, ‘I’m not on the border’, so movement would again become possible. That is why today I have to start with the structure of the maneuver that conceals the corpse and not the corpse itself.

I can admit that, whenever I think about their writing, I think about this moment where she speaks of a ‘little trick’ and that when I think about this ‘little trick’, which seems somehow to also be an immense ‘trick’, then I feel both belief and disbelief, willingness and acceptance, horror and love, aggression and thankfulness, an angel’s hostility and what becomes of it. This would hardly be surprising to anyone who reads and lives and breaths. Such a ‘little trick’, if I can immediately connect it to the lesson and the secret, which remain of course here only in outline, might be the greatest thing you’ve ever known in life and it might be the most fraudulent thing you’ve ever known in life, such is what a ‘little trick’ is and such is what life is, it needs ‘little tricks’ to get by after all, and to be all of the above at the same time. When I think of this ‘little trick’ then, it drives me a little crazy, because I think I am Ismene and I think I am Antigone when I see it or hear about it, in myself or in these texts called ‘Jackie Wang’, and when I feel like this, I feel like Ismene-Antigone and Antigone-Ismene, I feel as if, in effect, I am my own twin, that I am looking at my own refection but the reflection is on the other side of a pond or a tumultuous river, so far away as to be not really me, even though we are identical; and then, finally, I wonder if I can do the same ‘little trick’, even when I know, it varies so much, that I have already done it, again and again . . . even so, I am still wondering if anyone has done it for real.

Ismene believes the trick and Antigone does not. Ismene grocks it and Antigone says, ‘what’. That’s right, just the word, ‘what’. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t understand, although maybe she doesn’t understand, really and truly; maybe the person called ‘Antigone’ in relation the trick really doesn’t know what it is; maybe her refusal to believe in the little trick is a form of superior apotropaic denial we don’t even know how to know about yet and so she knows it best, better than Ismene; at the same time she doesn’t know how to trick, and so somebody would have to show her, and that is what Ismene is there for, like Claire in Melancholia (2011), or even Anna who says in Possession (1981) as if describing this problem in all its mysterious, involuted complexity, this tricknowledge:

What I miscarried there was sister Faith, and what was left is sister Chance. So I had to take care of my faith to protect it.

The at least triple gesture of the little ‘trick’ whereby to protect what I must lose, I must lose it, and I must turn back round, or simply leave—I must turn towards, in effect, the sun—is here everything, the trick itself that voids and avoids the void, and yet also what puts everything into question. In ‘Twists and Turns in the Bowels of the Neon Dragon: A Dream Maze’ what’s astir is the border and the corpse, the issue or matter of ‘the corpse-void’. To put this with a simplicity that should perhaps not be too quickly discarded, the ‘trick’ in the 2016 text seems to be nothing but, and everything but, the secret from The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void that saves me or rather us from the void. We want to know how to turn away from the corpse-void to the sun, in order to see it, it, the sun, and it, the corpse-void. The more sun, and the less corpsing around, the better the vision—of the corpse, of the corpses behind us, and of the sun. In 2016 she says,

I wanted to write the brutal fact of absence, the corpse that does not signify, but also the impossibility of grasping this absence, which jams our thoughts when we attempt to cogitate death and sets into motion a marvelous play of presences that dance on (or around) the corpse-void.

Put simply once again, in 2016 she wanted to write ‘the corpse-void’ but in order to do that she already knows it takes a ‘trick’ of knowing how to protect it, and of being on the other side (and I don’t want to rush this new book straightaway back into what may be old or at least alter-territory, or too ancient and shadowy and unsunlike a set of geographies, but this question of the side taken takes one back to Cixous again, and to her Hyperrêve, which is apparently absent from The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void but assuredly is there anyway, and to the question itself of the side):

I’m not living on the border. I mean I’m no longer looking in the direction of the border, which I once felt as a temptation or beckoning. When the other side beckons I turn away.

This turn is precisely the trick, or at least its speed is, the little jump away and I am suddenly on the other side, namely, in 2021, with this beautiful book, The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void, that broke my heart with a feeling that I must do—and have not yet done—the same thing. The Book broke my heart, I mean, with the feeling I must change my life and avoid the void.

2.

Is the Book therefore saying to me, ‘I must change my life and live in the secret of how to avoid the void’? When I spoke above of a remembered tweet that spoke of a ‘fidelity to the wound’ and of a wanting to let go or turn away from the fidelity to the wound, or of at least questioning it, keeping the wound of the fidelity to the wound close to one at arm’s length, than I was asking this same question. If I say too quickly that just this is our secret, and our lesson, the little trick of turning away and avoiding the void, then it’s also as if I lose the lesson, and the book at least imposes its lesson and secret through just the right amount of pain to remind me, to know what to do, to know what it is. When we think of the Book we think of Mallarmé’s Le Livre, of course, for example when read by Blanchot, but then in that case, is The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void that book, the Book, or the Book, more precisely, that allows you to feel something even better, that that book is easily and readily available? What The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void actually says, give or take a word, is that if you have read the Book, you will know the secret, but if not, don’t worry, since I have just shown it to you.

‘If not’, I continue, ‘I have shown it to you tonight.’

It is a consolation. Double Book, double night, sunflowers infinitely dividing—as if to save us from the void, and from avoiding the void too fast, I replaced the ‘little trick’ with the sunflower’s turning itself.

Antoinette Metzger, Faux Sun, 2019

TBC.