Hotel Oblivion, page 1
Also by Cynthia Cruz
POETRY:
Guidebooks for the Dead
Dregs
How the End Begins
Wunderkammer
The Glimmering Room
Ruin
CULTURAL CRITICISM:
The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class
Disquieting: Essays on Silence
HOTEL OBLIVION
Cynthia Cruz
Four Way Books
Tribeca
This book is for my mother and my father.
Copyright © 2022 Cynthia Cruz
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cruz, Cynthia, author.
Title: Hotel Oblivion / Cynthia Cruz.
Description: New York : Four Way Books, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2021047744 | ISBN 9781954245112 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781954245198 (epub)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3603.R893 H68 2022 | DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047744
Four Way Books is a not-for-profit literary press. We are grateful for the assistance we receive from individual donors, public arts agencies, and private foundations including the NEA, NEA Cares, Literary Arts Emergency Fund, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
We are a proud member of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.
Contents
Neukölln
Blood Work—Steady Decline
Stammer
Number
Saturday
The Ring
Fragment: Pollen
Fragment: Small Talk on Melancholia
Fragment: On the Magical World of the Animal
Hotel Letter
Hotel Letter
Hotel Letter
Hotel Letter
Hotel Letter
Hotel Letter (Refrain)
Hotel Letter
Hotel Letter
Hotel Letter
Fragment: Verzweiflung
Fragment: Verwüstung
Fragment
Fragment: The Earth Like a Golden Goblet Over Whose Rim the Golden Ripples of the Moon Foamed
Refrain
Ursprung
Fragment
Hotel Warsaw
Fragment
Hotel Letter
Hotel Letter
Fragment
Fragment
Hotel Letter
Hotel Letter
Refrain
Refrain
Fragment
Phosphorescence
Fragment
The Moment of Exposure Is the Moment When It All Begins
Fragment
Fragment
The Gift
Fragment: I Twice Drew, Both Times from a Different Angle, the Gap Between Two Poplar Trees
Fragment: Warsaw
Hotel Belgrade
Fragment
Correspondence
Fragment
The Undersong
Fragment
Hotel Warsaw: Fragment
Philosophy
The Way
Small Atlas
Tagebücher
Hotel Letter
Felt
Fragment: Nachleben
Correspondence
Schöna
The Reason
The Language
Fragment: With Scrap of Fur on My Left Shoulder
Hotel Nocturnal
Bambule
The Moment
Definition
Its Origins
Notes
oblivion (n.)
late 14c., oblivioun, “state or fact of forgetting, forgetfulness, loss of memory,” from Old French oblivion (13c.) and directly from Latin oblivionem (nominative oblivio) “forgetfulness; a being forgotten,” from oblivisci (past participle oblitus) “forget,” which is of uncertain origin.
The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhē. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it.
—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever
Neukölln
Around the corner
on the river:
three girls in heels.
Crimson, the color
they are saturated in.
Soft gold, its window.
Blood Work—Steady Decline
After Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Have you recently, he asks,
had surgery.
Or an accident, perhaps.
Acute, he says.
His hands miming
catastrophe.
Something
has happened.
In Chinese medicine
they say
the spirit has left the body.
Your spirit, he says,
is floating.
Stammer
There is the story my mother used to tell.
How she woke at 3 a.m.
from a dream that her grandmother died
at 3 a.m.
And when she woke
she learned that her grandmother
died at 3 a.m.
It’s like that:
visceral and animal.
The silver grammar of vanish.
A soft violence
pushing up against me—
soundless,
its static,
satelliting music.
Even now, it is there
at the edge, on the periphery.
When I stand in the light before the mirror
it is overpowering.
And always, without end.
Number
Take it in, Genet says.
Drop your body, willing
into the dilation.
Ruined in the apparition
of complex lines and shadows,
wild-weed and rattle of this
black fragment of city park,
Genet.
Loving anyone
who will tender.
Criminal, hopeless,
strange and inside
the brutal fever of this
small strange night: 2 a.m.,
nadir-blue, Eastern city.
Genet, my other, brave
double, tell me,
what do I say, what do I
do—
to the dream
when it comes to me.
Saturday
What is a fragment, a found
postcard, ephemera, ruin or a photograph.
For example: Doris Peter’s “Children
collecting scrap metal, George Washington Street,
1997,” Russian. Or a Che Guevara montage
on dream board in the sweetshop, Neukölln.
Why glean, why assemble, or
how does accumulation keep.
How does getting it all down
do the same work as making. And how
is the gluing of words together
not unlike taking something beautiful apart.
In the afternoon, on Saturday,
I bought a pale blue dress from Humana
and walked alone, home, in it,
through the parades of my emptiness.
The Ring
I am learning to speak, again.
Astral, spectral, half-in-dream.
I make my way through the jig-
saw of a cruel and perfect grammar.
Or, just barely. And I have stopped
making work that can’t disappear.
But the music is too much for me. I can take it
but only in minute and fixed increments.
Baby food in a spoon, measured in bite-fulls,
or a capsule I swallow only in daylight,
midday after classes. I take it, a sweet
obscene ointment, cosmetic, or
medicine. The most nourishing.
Delicate gold capsule of infinite
emollient and sorrow, I swallow
the powder and it enters me.
Like ink spilling, or voracious,
an appetite, and all-consuming.
A memory or a snapshot, its flash-light,
illuminating, it takes me, and then
it erases everything.
Fragment: Pollen
Relentless, the song that keeps me up
every night now for weeks.
The color of crimson, its feel
is rich on the skin, a food-
like substance. But more precise and hopeful.
Secret, it sounds like a murmur,
unrecognizable, just like this:
I bought myself a cream-
colored blouse, French, with tiny shell buttons
and a narrow, black, ribbon-like tie
for survival, a book of Unica Zürn’s last letters,
sketches, and ephemera, and a pair of white stockings in dot-
like pattern, like snow in summer,
in Grünwald, or near my neighborhood,
the forest at the precipice near the water
at daybreak. The days here are not
like days at all. But, instead, like a film,
the top layer of dream. The city I am in
is completely different from Brooklyn.
&nb
I’m reading Zürn’s final letters to her sister, after
she followed Bellmer to Paris.
Her tiny drawings are exquisite
and intricate like the broken traces
of memory that occur upon waking.
Everything I eat
here tastes the same, like cream-filled
pastries, or warm milk
served in a porcelain cup
to a child unable to sleep,
in the middle of the night.
You confuse yourself, she said,
so you can tell yourself you don’t
know. But you do, she said,
you do.
Fragment: Small Talk on Melancholia
In Lars von Trier’s film, Melancholia, Kirsten Dunst’s
character, Justine, tries to keep one step ahead of it.
You can see this in the first half of the film
where, at her own wedding, she keeps moving.
From room to room, guest to guest, through
the many rooms of her sister’s mansion
as if moving back in time to her own beginning
until, in the end, she finally collapses. Moving through
rooms and rooms of the mansion like endless
rooms of memory. And what is it
she collapses into? She loses herself inside a kind of small death,
not unlike what happens when one eats sweets, or dreams,
or the moment when an idea enters the mind. Her madness
is no madness, it is a reprieve, a tiny sleep, a space
she forms out of nothing, and then enters, an in-between.
Where do I go when I drop into sleep? Where
does my mind vanish into?
When I tasted the cake I went away for a small moment,
I was erased. I entered something else, a next-to
world. Or, when I leave the body and lose time
in thought. It is the body that leads me,
though I always want to anchor myself in the mind.
Justine wants to leave the world she lives in—
its small rules and hard corners. It isn’t death
she envisions, but a tiny collapse, a din to drop into.
Death, or eating, a dream, or what happens
when, animal-like, one feels one’s body,
the centering mechanism of the body,
pulling to someone else’s, magnetic, spectral,
not of this world. A small blur, a move, but
infinitesimal, like a yawn, but barely.
Like music, when you first heard it, indiscernible,
when it happens, like that.
Fragment: On the Magical World of the Animal
On my knees on the earth
and the world up above me.
Or, the world in my mind
and the trees stand around me.
I cannot see, but can hear
the dream, as it repeats
and enters the slip of my body.
With the force of a thought
or the bright smear of a dream
as it enters the sleeve of my body.
The dream of the body—what
it was, and the world:
remnant, or fragment, a thought or a thing.
The Uexküllian animal and the magical
cell-like realms of its mind.
In the dream, when it comes,
I am gone but not dead.
You are there, also, with me.
And the trees, and the film
of the world as it unspools
like a world undoing itself before us.
Hotel Letter
White dot-patterned
Wolford stockings.
Piles of makeup and glass
bottles of nail polish.
Photographs silver-duct-taped on the wall
from the studio wall in Brooklyn:
Bettina Rheims’s postcard of her photograph,
“Karen Mulder with a very small Chanel bra,”
Doris Peter’s “Children collecting scrap metal,
George Washington Street.”
Black dress and cream blouse
with very thin black ribbon tie.
Thick denim shorts, too big, childlike.
Floradix and Magnesium.
Polaroids and magazines.
Hotel Letter
But the body,
as instrument.
A sign for something else,
but what.
In the room I am in
I listen to the static I am making
by thinking for days on end.
When I was small and electric
only the nighttime
knew me.
I made things
out of wire and some of the more delicate
trace elements.
And I made a room
inside the mind.
But the body was littler then
and I could fit
into small spaces.
When I shut my eyes,
it, too, went away.
Mornings, I walk along the abandoned airport
trying to remember what it felt like.
But the body is a mystery, a dumb
move made in childhood. Or,
made strange—the way food turns
in the hotel minibar
after too many days.
On the floor of the hotel room
are Polaroids, and ephemera:
notes I won’t let go of, and photo-
graphs of who I was and what happened.
Hotel Letter
Red leather suitcase filled with Polaroid
snapshots. Or Novalis, his fragments.
What the body desires but the mind will not
allow. Or else, what the mind wants.
Language—silence and its shattered
iterations. Guyotat’s desire to make
a new language was so overpowering,
by the end of 1981, he was living the creation
of his language with such obsession
he gave up eating, lost half
his body weight, and was rushed
to hospital to be resuscitated
from a coma that was nearly fatal.
On the U-Bahn at night I carry my own damage—
inside the body—inside the mind—my own self-
made language. I stop at stations based on calculations
constructed entirely on invisible patterns
of this summer’s intrinsic molecular
systems. Such language is not written down. It is
whispered into the ear at night
in a hoarse voice. In secret,
on pink and burgundy-flocked benches
in random underground stations,
I sit in my silence and wait.
Hotel Letter
Because there are photographs—
magazines and porcelain, glitter taped
to canisters and burgundy bottles of medicine.
Hölderlin nox animae in the mountains of Auvergne, or
Genet in the sanctuary of his prison cell
loving the other men, tending them.
Form as the means to contain.
One wonders, what is the light that blinds,
the music that enters, then fills the body.
Rendering the mind other, black with thought.
The body as animal, a living thing, but
separate from the mind. Singing limb, or
a child not held when small,
left alone: turns, changes. You’ll never recover
they said, annihilation’s dark noises
will overcome you, fill you with its voices.
The summer was a flower I tended to. No,
what happened that summer
was a wound I tended to—
touched and tendered, but never nourished, never fed.
Hotel Letter
Now the poems are coming like grey rings
of memory. Or an endless series of Polaroids.
It happens like that when something happens.
And then everything changes.
I haven’t slept and have taken
to walking for hours through the city
streets without destination.
It doesn’t help but it does
push away the imminent tide of terror.
In the classroom I sit and watch
as the worlds move past me. And everything
is strange now. Outside the open window
are lights in the darkness, and men
linger in the chains of wetness
that occur at this hour of morning.
