My heart is abode of terror and a snake

An essay on the Baroness

The Baroness and Djuna Barnes, 1926. Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.

Seeing the
             Baroness
                  Djuna Barnes said
                                      “One thought of
death in reverse.” Seeing
the Baroness, one
thought, Djuna Barnes did not say
had no need to say,
of thought itself,
             philosophical
                              thought,
one thought, that is,
of death …

Seeing
the Baroness
one thought all
                of death that
can be
thought:
                  “Death in reverse”
                         
One can never think death itself
only the steps away from and towards …

One thought of death coming towards us, but in reverse.
One thought of such steps as the Baroness took or may have taken

in Munich, Cincinnati, New York, Berlin, Paris
memorable steps, unknowing steps
with a dog on a leash with several dogs
several dogs on several leashes
The Baroness, 70 black and purple anklets
Christmas tree balls as earrings
a tea strainer around her neck
a wig of purple and gold.

The Baroness,
who once said: I have
spiritual cancer of the womb …

She steals the crepe from the door
of a funeral home and makes a dress of it …

The Baroness,
who once said: High culture is
only possible with emotional people …

The Baroness,
a postage stamp on her cheek,
foreign, cancelled …



          *



The Baroness
does not violate the rules
but enters a realm, Bodenheim said,
into which they can’t pursue her …
A realm without rules
that could appear as Dada
but Dada could also be a desert,
a dead realm of dry distance.
It is not even that she alone
of all the Dadaists “lived Dada,”
lived Dada as Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia
did not, but that the Dada she lived
was never quite Dada, was
overtly apocalyptic, was in fact
pure Expressionism, that
final vision to which
she bore such true witness
in an earlier, European life,
when she was a baroness only in spirit,
a baroness purely of the spirit.
And so in all matters
regarding Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
there resides what can only be
called a spiritual quality
though one never so evident
as in the most violent of
her antagonisms,
where she shone forth
as the living instance of
“a principal of
non-acquiescence.” (Pound)



         *



The Baroness,
with every gesture,
ecstasy and transcendence …
The Baroness and Wagner,
The Baroness and Stephan George,
The Baroness and Wedekind, renown for
masturbating on a Munich stage.
The Baroness and the lyrics her mother loved.
The disdain of the Baroness is, ultimately,
less the diffidence of Duchamp
than a clear indication of
what Kandinsky
called for, an art of
“internal necessity,”
an art that called forth
“the purposive vibration
of the human soul …”
The Baroness,
as Djuna Barnes said,
“irreparably
German.”



          *



The Baroness
before her entitlement
was prayerful,
an Art Nouveau Orpheus:
in a forest, virginal, with lyre
and halo in a field of flowers
that could be nodding with
narcotic glamour in the garden
of Odelon Redon. As if for a moment
she were secretly H.D., wandering
in the woods of Rossetti
hushed, the trees all birches.
This is the sacred forest of Europe,
the green light of Celtic grail quests
and pre-Raphaelite agonies.
(Or, amid homosexuals in togas:
I am, the Baroness said,
the berhymed adoration of
a circle of acolytes, around the
Weimar Mallarmé.) Still, here,
in this painting, suppliant,
androgynous, as if Orpheus
were half Eurydice, as if
Eurydice is lost within him or her,
As if Eurydice is dead, as if
Eurydice is put to death,
is murdered within, too
feminine to live, in keeping
with the adjuration of, let’s say
for the moment, de Saint Point,
the Futurist dancer and later
convert to Islam, who said: “Let
woman rediscover her
own cruelty, the violence
that makes her turn on
the beaten, just because they
are vanquished, and mutilate them …”



          *



Or perhaps all mythic hope
is in the end illusions, is a dead dog
on a beach, a dog the Baroness poked
with a stick, as Barnes observed,
to see what it was made of,
and all possible futures find us
selling newspapers on the streets of Berlin
in the waning days of the Weimar.
Or will we all again be as a sylph
in an entourage of aesthetes:
A brilliant, joyful sun, one says.
An unparalleled purity, says another.



          *



Return, O Elsa Plotz,
the classical soul of art to Italy.
In Florence, theaters free of charge,
the doors of private galleries swing open.
By Mt. Vesuvius, above the Bay of Naples,
she sleeps in a hotel beloved of Nietzsche,
bedrooms with ceilings like churches,
stairs, hewn rock down to the sea …
In Venice, she compels her way
into a pornographic cabinet,
approaching the phalluses,
“as if they were antique lamps …”
The Baroness not yet the Baroness
journeys far or not so far from
her childhood Saturnalias on the Baltic:
“We slaughtered pigs. That’s what pigs are for …”
Finally, the Baroness not yet a baroness
is ready for New York, ready
for rebirth in the new world,
ready for her apotheosis
as a splendidly offensive
Demeter, in a hat
“inconspicuously
trimmed with gilded carrots …”



          *



The grotesque, a critic argues, is deeply congruent with Expressionist aesthetics, in which art exists around the poles of empathy and abstraction. Empathy when our relation to the world is untroubled, abstraction, when we have given up, when we seek redemption in form . . .




          *



The Baroness
delighting as a child
in the cruel cartoons of Wilhelm Busch,
the grandfather of the Katzenjammer Kids
“psychoanalytic before his time,” said Peter Gay.
The Baroness, a girl who especially cherished
“Pious Helena,” a tale in which
“a fading alcoholic beauty
overturns her oil lamp in a drunken
stupor, incinerating herself,
then dropping into a boiling
cauldron in hell where
her cousin Franz,
a priest, father of her twins,
is waiting for her,” Peter Gay
summarizes in The Cultivation of Hatred



          *



The Baroness,
appearing in a dream to Bakhtin
so one imagines, to tell him God was a plumbing pipe …



          *



The Baroness,
finally entitled, notes: If I eat
I can eliminate — it is logic. It is why I eat.
My machinery is built that way. Yours also.
Though you do not like to think of it
Because you are not an aristocrat …



          *



The Baroness,
finally entitled, defends the
pornographer, James Joyce: Without him, without his help,
she tells America, you would become
less than a dog, a cow, a worm …



          *



Finally entitled
the Baroness was not,
as one critic claimed, in herself
the mystic marriage of New York and Paris,
but that of New York and Thebes.
Seeing as the Baroness
                           As Djuna Barnes said,
is a citizen of terror,
                   would that mean,
                               and, as Barnes said it,
could it not help but mean,
a citizen of Thebes,
                        a citizen of terror, as if of
the ancient city that denied the god,
that staged the entire drama of the arrival of Dionysus
that other death in reverse, without which western
thought cannot be imagined.
In seeing the Baroness
we see Barnes as
Tiresias,
         Tiresias seeing
the Baroness
who is
seeing the snake, seeing
the moment of
union
between man and woman,
woman and woman, man and man,
being and being, being and
nonbeing,
human and divine,
self and soul
who found a figure of the divine
in a piece of plumbing
which could be male genitalia
which could be the workings of the womb
which could be the valves of the heart
which could be a vortex into which
rushes all our bodies are.

I am, the Baroness said,
the abode of terror and a snake …



          *



Such is the pathos of the expressionist self: alienated, it would be made whole through expression, only to find there another sign of its alienation … its utterance is less an expression of its being than an address, or plea to another … for even as expressionism insists on the primary, originary, interior self, it reveals that this self is never anterior to its traces, its gestures, its “body.”



          *



Soul: his hair is molten gold and a red pelt
Self: he is vain, not gold. His soulless beauty makes me sad

Soul: his nostrils sweep like a scythe up to his cheek.
Self: cast iron, not even death, because death has at least been life.

Soul: hammered iron will quiver. Iron is alive to flame. Are you flame?
Self: I could be.

Soul: you know you are flame, and we are one.
Self: I am your fuel; you hinder my wish to touch …

Soul: We are artisans, we flare and are satisfied, and all you say is alas.
Self: I want him to step into you through me

And you will break him down, dissolve him, build him up, shake him, make him quiver, and two will be one, “as it was in olden times.”

(After all, the Baroness as much as asks
as she opens the inquiry into her own madness
in the pages of The Little Review, can one really be
Dionysian without dialogue, without the imagination
of a consciousness that does not know the god,
without the division of perspectives, the imagination
of ignorance of the god, of estrangement of,
from, the god, of denial of the god, without
the knock on the gate of the city, the promise of
gentle pleasure, or a horrific immanence …)

Soul: Are not your eyes my fingers, do they not touch
until they form his image in me

Self: I do not want his image, my fingers suffer,
they are my eyes, my touch is sight, my fingers caress with a look

My eyes, your fingers, grow unsteady, dim
Soul: my body, you are making me sad. Go, leave …

(Here our text seems uncertain: does the soul ask
the body to leave, or has the body asked the soul to leave?)

are they saying now together: we must wait and smile,
I am thine body, mine soul, thine revolting body

I sing my soul, the Baroness writes

Reddish complexion, pale ivory, talons finely chiseled, finely carved animal, cast iron animal, chiseled animal, with hands, that never was born, I touch them, they quiver, I kiss them, they grasp, tear, draw blood

Cave animal, animal of shadow, around the edges it runs over with crimson,

his hair is molten gold and a red pelt

golden eyes, eyes of a toad, hidden behind shining surfaces of glass,
jewels hidden in his head, a toad, a king on a read throne, dreaming he is a bee

is this the toad at the roots of the tree of the great work, Saturnine, associated with the First Matter, alchemical Baroness, her soul is a toad ugly and venomous, “Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.” As Shakespeare might observe …



          *



Now we see
the Baroness smoking
pot in a china pipe “that must
have held half an ounce or more …”



          *



Now we see
the Baroness opening
a scarlet raincoat: over her nipples,
two tomato cans, held up with green string around her back
between the tomato cans, a very small bird cage
with a live canary …



          *



Now we see
the Baroness stripping
the bachelors bare, the bride with red nail polish.
The Baroness is the future, Duchamp said.



          *



Now we see
the Baroness looking
at me through her blue-white
crazy eyes and saying: “are you afraid to
let me kiss you?” I was shaking all over when
I left the dark stairway, and came out on 14th street …



          *



Now we see
the Baroness, smearing
emerald paint on her cheeks
eyelashes of gilded porcupine quills …



          *



Now we see
the Baroness with ropes
of dried figs around her neck,
in deep poverty, facing deportation,
speaking to an embassy bureaucrat
“rustling coquettishly”



          *



Now we see
how the click of her eyelashes
make her, she says, irresistible …



          *



Now we see
the Baroness expelled
nonetheless from Germany,
scheming to get a visa for France,
wearing a birthday cake on her head,
not long before her suicide …



          *



About a hundred years ago
in New York City, a woman
from Germany became a Baroness
became, possibly the last truly regal figure
the earth could sustain, an entitlement
verified in city hall in 1913,
the year of the Armory show.
Scholars have yet to determine
If the Armory Show was
In fact, her bridal shower …
So: a woman from Germany
becomes a Baroness, and later,
roams around gathering up outcast items
and makes them art, brings together
grain and metal and wood
in a way that explains
how the universe works
an immigrant, a Baroness,
a woman, Djuna Barnes said,
“undismayed about the facts of life,”
on whose cheeks might be found
on certain ceremonial occasions
streaks of mustard color
a woman who, on the way
to her wedding, finds a metal ring
on the street, a sign of Venus
and her touch makes it so
forever, a woman
whom it would not be
unwarranted to characterize
as abrasive, charming, devastated,
frightfully hilarious, bringing her spectacular grief
at so much death and abandonment
to the forest of Manhattan
of which Mina Loy
once said:
“No one who has not lived in
New York has lived in the Modern world.”
the Baroness in the years of her honeymoon
and her grieving “amid the turmoil,
Ezra Pound said, of yids, letts, finns, Estonians,
cravats, niberians, Nubians, Algerians
sweeping along 8th Avenue
in the splendor of
their vigorous,
unwashed animality …”



          *



Williams and Stevens and Mina Loy
are sleeping. The Baroness is in her basement
befriending vermin, granting sanctuary to insects
amassing the glories of a secret regency
stepping onto the street, arrayed,
shaved, painted, dyed, bedecked
to bring art to America,
a country that, unfortunately,
was so given to mercantilism that
it might never be much better than a Jew …



          *



Now we see
the Baroness arriving
at a soiree for an opera singer
in a bright blue dress, a peacock fan,
on her head, the lid of a coal
scuttle strapped under
her chin like a helmet
two mustard spoons
hang like feathers
beside her face
She knows the voice
in all its throes,
intelligible and otherwise.
She has long known
the dream of a total artwork,
that modernity could be transfigured
by a glorious ritual art, a new myth
could bring gods into being.
the Baroness knew what
an aria could accomplish
had composed, after all,
her own threnody,
her own deathwail, her own
“metaphysical speculations on consolation”
in a language beyond language,
a pure lament, a music
that anyone could understand,
that any grief could enter, that could
recover, possibly, the soul blown apart by the world:

Ildrich mitzdonja — astatooch
Ninj — iffe kniek —
Ninj — iffe kniek —
Arrkarr — barr
Kararr — barr —

Arr —
Arrkarr —
Mardar
Mar — doorde — dar —



          *



At the soiree, the Baroness
had a chance to mingle with the stars —

I sing only for humanity, the opera singer said.
I wouldn’t lift a leg for humanity, the Baroness said …