There Will Be Light: The Immersive Sky Writing of Aaron Shurin's The Blue Absolute
In culinary arts, a mise en place means that everything has its necessary setting, a process governing the professional kitchen’s organization of food and equipment before service begins. The stack of gleaming plates, garlic minced, parsley chiffonade, spices measured, fish stock ready for poaching. One could argue that, similarly, Aaron Shurin‘s new book of prose poems, The Blue Absolute, enacts a meticulous mise en place of its vital components: light, memory, grief. Or door, night, alphabet. Or else, summer, tongue, blue cloud. Akin to a poetic syntax that shuffles its letters with such precise measure, its reading will require a cognizance, say, a literacy in the becoming-lyrical. It is understood that it will take nothing but a hop and a skip to tilt this course instead toward mise-en-scène, wherein a boy in “toreador pants” or “bougainvillea shorts,” “green eyes” and” lips of pearl” trembles as he fixes “the naked shelves” of his self- portrait. The cumulative effect is a series of seductions, ultra-secular altar pieces that inscribe a Baudelairean invitation au voyage the poem’s pining heart makes as real as the frothing spume at the crest of a wave. Each page is a spell, a barge, boundless sky, “a pulled stitch in the loose fabric opening like a scroll…”
In her Nobel Prize lecture, the 2018 Polish laureate Olga Tokarczuk evokes the notion of a tender narrator:
We can regard this figure of a mysterious, tender narrator as miraculous and significant. This is a point of view, a perspective from where everything can be seen. Seeing everything means recognizing the ultimate fact that all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us
Although the incessant use of ellipses telegraphs Shurin’s reluctance to weave sequential and complete stories, as he prefers to “break the frame” and unlink time from its rigid unities, the narrative thread, attenuated as it may be, or lingering on a set of impossible questions, or simply whooshing from here to there, does indeed belong to a tender narrator. In “telescoping phrases” he populates the text —”this habitat of forms”— from every possible point of access. “If I am in a chair then I am the chair. If I am on the street I am the street…” As Tokarczuk claims, connecting the here to there unravels the distinction between gender and genre, frays the hem of familiar pronouns and, through the scrim of remembered and imagined things, stitches The Plain of Jars (in Laos) to the Sea of Cortez (in California), to indigo crosscurrents and rivers and pools, the undertow of time and writing.
Organized into four long sections, The Blue Absolute builds its lyrical momentum through repeatability, variation and “affective modes of construction,” as Tyrone Williams dubs them. Undergirding the thematic hoops, what takes shape is the evidence of place, lived and parsed in an arc that sustains the poet’s line. Whether “the blazing strips of light” of a city beach or the sidewalk cafés of San Francisco, “the city’s hill-rise and fall,” “the pink walls” and “dark armada of hills” are steeped in what the French Situationists liked to call psychogeography. Under the aegis of this concept, one surrenders to the urban landscape in order to get away from predictable paths through playfulness and dérive — the deliberate letting go of motives so as “to be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters [one] finds there.” This type of exploration shifts the ground from objective description and instead inscribes the psychogeographical effects of space, emotions, and behaviors upon a subject. The upshot is that the poems mobilize “an axis of love” that turns the text and its fundamental coordinates into “the torque of desire that would unmake him.”
To account for the event of the poem in The Blue Absolute is to take note of the distinctive mark of Eros and its attendant libidinal figures, which like a midnight cortège, storied and ablaze in “the harlequin light,” rolls on, firing on all cylinders. We can see here not only a catalogue à la Roland Barthes in Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse, but the signifier’s libidinal thrust that we remember from the writing of Georges Bataille. One need not recognize these French authors to heed the sway and jolt of a language bent on revealing the joy and longing of sex. Time and again, Shurin is given to set in motion “body rhymes” that frame his journey to the physical: from the “cardinal positions” to “a muscle-queen before a mirror”; from “our lingering kiss” to “the angle of erection”; from “he’s my jelly on the wing” to “crackling crystals on his face.” Whether evoking “a danzón in the square with you,” or sketching the iconic fabric of drag, he abuts the hard edge of jouissance with “shirt [open] to the skin so he can breathe me and calculate the distance home…” In these fluid erotics, the signifiers slide along and blissfully exchange places. It will be the window that “throbs” and the city that “shivers” while we, dear readers, let go of the guardrails.
If it’s a well-known fact that Inuit cultures have dozens of words to denote snow, we might be surprised to observe how deftly Shurin declines the word “sky” with a lexicographer’s rapt attention to minute variants. The Blue Absolute models the vault over the earth as a supreme, prodigious and dynamic structure that emerges in the production of meaning on par with other textual elements. The shapely prose poems in this collection are unabashed odes to “sky, my guide…” Many a page scans the immeasurable firmament as if consulting an oracle, reading its omens, annotating its flashes and hues, writing its glyphs, “sky-within or the sky-without.” The miraculous openness and cyan-blue on a clear day becomes the inner logic and gravitational field binding together the sensual and the atmospheric, where air, sky, and light bend toward dream; in other words, “sky writing” — “the opening sky, spreading like a fable or a smile…”
Our tender narrator lets in just enough light through memory’s aperture to illuminate reels of things past. In an elegiac poem titled “The View from Here: Sky Room,” a muted citation from Baudelaire’s “Le Balcon” (“mère des souvenirs…”) amplifies, as parental symmetry, Shurin’s “père des souvenirs!” Donning peculiar emblems, time struts down a catwalk, “with its shovel, its iron clang…”; ” its hockey stick, its crack of polished wood”; “its spigot.” Over and beyond the book of dead, displaced, and wounded, the song stays death’s hand: “She adds your name to the list. She won’t forget you, visitor, denizen, prisoner, supplicant, émigré, traveler, stopping by this house of air…” The condition of mourning reaches a sublime instantiation in the concluding section, “Shiver,” which gathers San Francisco and its “heart lit” denizens into a gesture of apotropaic magic that seals time in “a shiver of thanks.”
Behind intrinsic complexity of themes and figures in The Blue Absolute lies a poetic calculus which returns us to the alphabet, the white sandy page, “a door of text.” This book is a crucible where raptures are sung and undone, sheets of time flutter against their chains, city drapes laurels or shrouds, and pink skies slip on lacy déshabillés. Shurin’s performance never lets us forget that at the fore of this material is a continued engagement with language, a written blazon. The explicit meta register comes down to marking the circulation of signs which usher in a mimetic universe of sunbeams and lemon trees, tables and notebooks, bodies and whistles. But no matter how much visual and affective power they muster, in the final analysis, both “sailor and “boat” hang on by their paper tails. The universe’s ongoing textualization, hardened against oblivion and erasure, lives in “the book of sky.”
Finally, this volume incontestably nails down Aaron Shurin’s upper hand in matters of the lyric. Having authored fourteen books spanning various genres, including memoirs, talks and essays, he continues to recast the prose poem into a singular musical object. The Blue Absolute‘s sonic felicity binds each page to a common score which draws from song its deep notes, an encompassing melopoeia that subtends the whole. Whether held in a knot of anguish or bliss, whether echoing hollow nights or breathing along pelicans, wind, trees, and storms, the poem will always tilt toward an upper limit, melody, which is its own kind of transcending “shiver.”
Once I was a sailor when the sky was one thing, a blue breath
from pole to pole I caught in my wild hair and out-flung hands
as if I were the boat I sailed, and streamed on the gleam off the
waves to any place I named…