“4:16 in the afternoon in the summer of my 52nd year / I’m lying on the bed in the heat wondering about geometry.” Thus begins 3 Summers, Lisa Robertson’s new collection of speculative lyrics. From an almost neo-romantic placement of the poetic speaker in a concrete present, Robertson immediately passes to meditation on the most abstract of sciences. This conjunction of lived embodiment and geometry, corporeality and form, is the project of 3 Summers. Attending to the immanence of form within the body, this book is both a statement of materialism and a statement of corporeal aestheticism. Materialist polemic in whatever guise too often takes the form of a glum and predictable reductionism. Robertson charts a different path: she avows a militant materialism, but a materialism of the superficial, the dandiacal, and the profligately lovely. Robertson’s growing body of work amounts, arguably, to a quietly audacious defense of aestheticism, and 3 Summers continues this enterprise by turning to the human body. It regards human biology as suffused with errant form and luminous ornament.
The complexity of Robertson’s materialism may stem in part from her eclectic learning: Lucretius haunts the pages of 3 Summers, but so do Edmund Husserl, Karl Marx, and Émile Benveniste. The last of these is likely invoked in the book’s frequent meditations on pronouns, which for Benveniste are a semantic mechanism that draws bodies into the semiotic web of language. For Robertson, the relation of pronoun to body is, at times, one of deflection:
I have no problem with the feminine pronoun.I’m stupid against its animate insult, mewith my scaly feet, my rubbed thoraxmy vibrating wings, my periodicradiation, my repetitive chant and cunt
This strange becoming-insect imagines femininity as an embodied ensemble of periodicities and frictional surfaces. The feminine pronoun lands with a thud against such a body, describing it without being able to penetrate it. Elsewhere, however, the body eludes semiotic capture precisely through its permeability: “What if the body does not signify? / Its wee lost cluster / starts to fade / the skin opening to the moisture of the season / its immunity is landscape.” The “wee lost cluster” of the body is minor and vulnerable, but its very openness to the world provides a path of escape from reductive meaning. We might call this radical exfoliation.
Robertson is particularly interested in the mouth, the organ which conjoins the biological and the symbolic: “Because of the fact of the structure of the human mouth / the festival of idleness is speaking in signs through my body. / I do this because it’s valueless. ” Language happens in the body but also remains in excess of biological function. It is a labor that produces the valueless and fills the oral cavity with a bacchanal of profligate sense. As it produces pleasure, so it produces politics: “And the enjoyable gland also / dribbles a politics / for its friend. ” Politics is an endocrinal excretion, something that dribbles from body to body. The enjoyability of the oral gland thus allows it to open onto a commonly held world:
I made a mistake in languagethen the water maiden came
fizzy things were happening at the surface of my hipsa lectern-cum-scaffold propped my arms
something buzzed behind the iliac crestand my breasts ached at the tops of them where the ribs curved out
so that the language had no content, only connectiveswe speakers were the content
The exact nature of the experience reported here, perhaps one of embarrassment, recedes behind the ripples of sensation that it causes to flow through the body. A linguistic community comprised of relations rather than communications is mediated by these embodied vibrations and pressures.
Robertson’s insistence on the embodied quality of language, however, gives way to a more inscrutable assertion: “this is how the question of form opened to me / leaving behind the aristocracy of concepts. ” Form is thus a principle of embodied relating to the world in excess of intellectual apprehension. Robertson develops the point exhaustively in “On Form, ” a poem of remarkably sustained lyric power:
the liver is a crown and it is a vesselit constitutes our life form is foldingthe full part is a vase the nostril iscartilage connecting mineral saltsthe root of the belly the palate acelestial dome a vault a sky…
This formalist account of the innards places the body in an analogical network with objects in the world. The correspondences established are organic but not therefore natural, and render the body as a repository of geometry, a life-form in the most literal sense possible. The claim, for example, that there is a sky in the interior of the mouth is not exactly a metaphor or a surreal image. Its correlation of the dome of the oral cavity with that of the firmament is purely figural (and not figurative). Embodied form is not function. It is anatomical but not physiological.
As an anatomical formalist, Robertson meditates with particular gusto on the endocrine system. She sings of toxins and hormones: “What I want to say is / I’ve been the transparent instrument of / certain chemicals and it’s excellent. ” As Robertson reports, the late poet Stacy Doris theorized that “hormone ” etymologically means “star-snot. ” This etymology invests the chemical substrate of subjectivity with a halo of cosmological radiance. The slimy substance of life, in 3 Summers, is shot through with an astral and unearthly light. The most austere materialism becomes difficult to distinguish from mysticism, and bodily sludge is transubstantiated into cosmic holy water: “nothing apart from the Gushing Abdicating Bilious Live Body // the pools of bile glistening on the floor of the operating theatre / beneath the heavenly blue lamps. ” According to such a materialism, there is no valid distinction between aesthetics and politics, “just the juiciness and joy of form / otherwise known as hormones… ”
Robertson becomes more explicit in her politics when she moves from bodies to what covers them: clothing. In “A Coat ” she responds to the first chapter of Marx’s Capital, where this garment exemplifies the general equivalence of objects in commodity exchange. The textile commodity, however, has form in addition to value, and as with the body its form resides in that which exceeds utility. Clothes ruffle, drape, and flow to constitute what Robertson, in an essay on the Value Village chain of thrift stores, has called the “dandiacal body. ” Drawing on a nineteenth-century tailor’s manual, Robertson enumerates the endless surface of such a body:
a waistcoat of white Marcella, single breasted with a stand-up collara blue dress coat with gilt buttons and velvet collara fancy under-vest with a blue under-vesta green dress coat with a fancy velvet vest and a blue under-vesta wide French braid down the front edges around the collar with five volutes of braid down each side of the breast
Clothiers were practicing materialists long before neo-Heideggerians made it cool. Robertson constructs a coat of many colors, an endlessly unfolding, profligately rich superficiality. Its fabric is a deep surface. If “A Coat ” wrests the commodified object out of capital flows and back into concrete materiality, then it does so via immersion in the textural and ornamental frivolity of this surface.
Robertson is all the more worth reading when both Darwinian and materialist reductionisms are on the march in aesthetic thought. The former asserts that a living body is a thoroughly and inescapably purposive object, the latter that such objects must be described as inert matter. Robertson accepts the materialist thesis, but quietly demurs from its most influential corollaries by describing bodies and the language they excrete as florid, intricate, and inefficacious. She attends to that in the body which is purposeless and therefore radiant, and calls it form. Hers is a dandiacal materialism that discerns a utopian dimension of freedom in the ornamental, the surficial, and the fabricated. She declares: “in the fashion-nature dialectic / I’ve positioned myself as the custodian of the inauthentic. ”
3 Summers closes with a manifesto for aesthetic inauthenticity in the form of a remarkable prose poem titled “Rose. ” The protagonist of this first-person narrative obtains the proverbial rose-colored glasses, and reports on her experience of wearing them. The fit is awkward at first, but the new, rosy world she inhabits grows on her (“the blackberries and prune plums did glow like purple diodes ”; “Each person who passed on the boulevards seemed gently inflamed with a precise gorgeousness ”). She happens to be reading Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, with its millenarian promise of a new human being living in a condition known as the Great Health. That is:
Our hidden organs seem to sparkle—the kidneys lift and flare a little; beneath the sternum the long vagus nerve decompresses and throbs like an intelligent tentacle; the body-wide, clear connective web called the fascia becomes a warm communicative medium. Bones feel less heavy.
This new body, suffused with vitality, thrives in the rose-tinted ether of unreality provided by the lenses. Robertson operates in outright defiance of the habitual slander on rose-colored glasses and other devices of aesthetic inauthenticity. The aesthetic, she claims, erects a new Health, a new embodied form of life, and does so precisely because of its artificiality. This is an uncompromisingly utopian idea, which is to say one bound for disappointment. But honest poets are generally utopians.
June 2017
This review was published in Issue 60:3.