Inkyoo Lee
“Some Thing Black” by Jacques Roubaud and translated by Rosmarie Waldrop
The French poet and mathematician Jacques Roubaud lost his wife, Alix Cléo Roubaud, when she died of pulmonary embolism at the age of 31. He composed a single poem titled “Nothing,” then did not write anything for thirty months. Some Thing Black (1986) (1) is a collection of poems he managed to write in the subsequent years, named after If Some Thing Black (1980), a series of black-and-white photographs by his late wife. The book divides into nine sections (with the addition of “Nothing,” which concludes the book as a standalone poem) where each poem consists of nine stanzas—alluding to Dante’s Vita Nuova, in which 9 is Beatrice’s number. (2)
The stylistic features of Some Thing Black—prose poems interspersed with visual caesuras, almost all of which are monologues—are unconventional enough. But what strikes me as a defining characteristic of the book is its evocation of logic and theoretical philosophy (with an enormous shadow of Ludwig Wittgenstein), which may seem sudden for a work so dominated by grief and longing. Perhaps rationality offers some sense and shape to the author’s grief, thereby making it less debilitating for him. Or, perhaps, his philosophical thinking is more than just a way of coping: it is his way of grieving. It is not a blindfold but rather a pair of eyes in the face of loss. In the book, the tools of philosophy only serve to make his conveyance of grief clearer and more precise—and thus even more searing.
This meeting between grief and abstract thinking happens, for example, through motifs that have both emotional and philosophical significance. Among them is photography, Alix Cléo’s occupation and a theme that runs throughout Jacques’ book. Here I will focus on pictures, synonymous to photographs, and their relationship to the senses, possible worlds, and attitudes toward life.
*
Let us begin with vision, the primary sense for the perception of pictures. Several poems in the book point to the undoubtable nature of visual experience. This is done painfully in “Meditation on Certainty”:
your hand hung down from the bed.
Almost warm. almost. still almost warm.
Blood coagulated at the fingertips. like dregs of Guinness in a glass.
I couldn’t see it as human. “there’s blood in any human hand.” I understood this proposition
clearly. because I was seeing it confirmed by its negative.
I didn’t have to tell myself: “blood flows through any living hand.” though it’s a thing no
one has ever seen. the blood here obviously not flowing. I could not doubt it. I had no
reason to.
In Roubaud’s poems, not just vision but also hearing is to be distinguished from the more “physical” senses such as smell, taste, and touch. In the context of his grief, vision often corresponds to pictures of his lover; hearing, cassette tapes of her voice. Importantly, both are recorded—whereas smell, taste, and touch cannot be recorded but only remembered. Although recordings and memories can both be inaccurate, memories are arguably fickler than recordings, which at least have a physical form outside of one’s mind.
The certainty of vision and hearing over the other senses gains additional nuance when we consider how these senses affect the grieving person in different ways. See, for example, this passage in “History Knows No Souvenirs”:
Every picture of you—I’m speaking of those I have in my hands, before my eyes, on
paper—every picture touches a trace of recognition, lights it up,
But for all that it’s dead, they’re dead, each and every one of them, their patterns constitute
no life, no sense, no lesson, no purpose.
Your voice shifts with a crackle on the tape, I hear the effort of your breathing, at night,
before the tape recorder by your bed.
I hear it again after a hundred nights, unchanged, and yet there’s nothing in it of your
presence, nothing that mechanical magic could have transcribed, mimicked on rust, of any of
your moments, full, separate moments of difficult breathing, dead for being there in your
name, like a recourse.
This is perhaps why in these shots and tapings you are the most irrevocably dead.
This is also why what life you’ve left, if any, is imprinted on me, your shroud, fused with me
and refuses to be sorted out.
The fact that photographs and audio recordings are so certain and indubitable leads to their being “dead”; Alix Cléo is “the most irrevocably dead” in these. They are unchangeable and, as it were, unmalleable, just like the fact of her death. Instead, it is in memories, specifically those “imprinted” on Jacques through other senses (smell, taste, touch) and stored only in his mind, that she remains alive—for memories are more flexible. This does not mean, however, that memories are less painful than recordings. Consider “I Can Face Your Picture”:
I really can face your picture, your “likeness” as it used to be called. it’s difficult, but I can.
…
But I can’t bring myself listen to your voice again: the cassettes you recorded, all those hours,
at night, the final months.
Other traces of you, come through my other senses, are only inside me. These I stumble on
and choke.
Those physical traces, come through smell, taste, and touch, make him “choke” precisely because they are felt to be real—which in turn makes his grief more intense. Pictures of Alix Cléo, then, are among the most certain and undoubtable “traces” of her life for Jacques—although simultaneously the least visceral. In this respect, pictures resemble facts, conventionally described as “cold” and “hard.” The parallel between pictures and facts will be relevant in the subsequent sections.
*
In Some Thing Black, Roubaud’s grief manifests itself in the language of possible worlds. Sometimes he imagines and ruminates on possible worlds in which his wife is not dead; at other times, he is tormented by the fact that this is his world and not another, and that there is no reason or explanation as to why this has to be his world. As he writes in “Singular Death”:
And why a picture?
Why, impervious to both affirmation and negation, why in the world this insistent,
subsistent, irrepressible, pure repetition be it of nothing, why a picture?
Why this picture?
…
It’s not that your pictures slip away. not that they are many and lie, for no reason. but that I
shall never know more.
You said: “the singular is stupid.”
The first and third stanzas above remind me of the way Derek Parfit put what is perhaps the fundamental question of philosophy:
Why does the Universe exist? There are two questions here. First, why is there a Universe at all? It might have been true that nothing ever existed: no living beings, no stars, no atoms, not even space or time. When we think about this possibility, it can seem astonishing that anything exists. Second, why does this Universe exist? Things might have been, in countless ways, different. So why is the Universe as it is? (3)
It is only that this awe-inspiring question takes on a note of regret in Roubaud—not as in regretting anything he has done, but regretting that the world is as it is. Recall the parallel between pictures and facts. Why this fact, the fact that she is dead? Why this set of facts, i.e., this world? He “shall never know more” than this singular world as it has turned out, no matter how much he ruminates on a plurality of other, possible worlds in which things might have turned out differently. Hence, “the singular is stupid.” The idea of possible worlds figures more explicitly in “Universe”:
“She is alive.” I can imagine that this proposition, false in my universe, be true in some
other, the (fictional) universe of its truth.
He even imagines a contact between different worlds, as described strikingly in “Novel, II”:
A man, alone because of a death, gets a phone call. The call is from the woman he loves,
who is dead.
He recognizes her voice. She calls from a different, possible world, in every respect like the
world he is used to except for one difference: in that world, she is not dead.
…
The telephone does not ring. As long as it does not ring, that new world, that possible world,
is still possible. It is still possible that the phone will ring and the voice be the voice of the
woman he loves, who is dead. Who is no longer dead, has never died.
The phone will ring. The voice which the man who is alone because of a death will hear is
not that of the woman he loves. It’s some other voice, any voice. He will hear it. This does
not prove he is alive.
What Roubaud suffers from—and we all do—is the thought that things could have been different, that he has irrevocably lost all that might have been.
*
For all his experiences of senselessness and dreams of an otherwise-world, a certain resignation or acceptance seems to be within reach for Roubaud. In “Envoi,” he says:
the writing of the light does not require our consent
with the word “photography” coming from the Ancient Greek phōs (“light”) and graphein (“to write”). The pictures (or facts) we end up with do not always match what we had desired; sometimes the light reveals what we wish to be blind to, or fails to deliver what we wish to see. Sometimes the light writes down and makes permanent what we most wish to erase and forget, or does the opposite to things we wish to remember. The light simply happens.
In all these pictures that defy our will, which were written by rays of light against their will, Wittgenstein’s echoes can be heard: “The world is independent of my will”. (4) The world is such that the way things are is independent of the way I wish them to be. The facts of the world cannot obey my desire, since “there is no logical connexion between the will and the world”. (5)
And, for Wittgenstein, “there is only one way to be free, independent and happy: to accept fully, without any reservations, the brute factuality of the world”. (6) In visual terms, this might take the form of looking at this world, and only this world, with fullest intention and no avoidance. I will conclude with Roubaud’s poem, “The Art of Seeing,” in which this looking is beautifully expressed:
The cleanness, the extreme decisiveness of visual intent
Without a doubt this lack of hesitancy comes from photography’s ubiquity which fragments
all movement into a sequence of emulsions
But in the cold immobility reaped from the salts, the body’s heat, solarized, evaporates like
the foggy sweat above the horses in Stieglitz’s New York winter
On one side the literal, Mannerist absolutism, rays of light induced, forced, as it were, to
write
On the other, on a minimal geometric ground (given), the gesture of holding the camera
against her chest (her heart, her breasts), endless nocturnal pose, for the stars only, “fifteen
minutes at night in respiratory rhythm”
Image engulfed by breath
No trace of fear in this attention
*
(1) Jacques Roubaud, Some Thing Black [Quelque chose noir], trans. Rosmarie Waldrop, photographs by Alix Cléo Roubaud (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990).
(2) Marjorie Perloff, ““But isn’t the same at least the same?”: Translatability in Wittgenstein, Duchamp, and Jacques Roubaud,” Jacket, Issue 14 (2001).
(3) Derek Parfit, “Why anything? Why this?”, The London Review of Books 20, no. 2 (1998).
(4) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (New York: Humanities Press, 1961), 6.373.
(5) Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.374.
(6) Eddy Zemach, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of the Mystical,” The Review of Metaphysics 18, no. 1 (1964): 40, 52.