Secret of Breath
Translated from the French by Eléna Rivera
SERIE d'ECRITURE, No. 21
Burning Deck/Anyart
Providence
2004 (original publication) / 2008 (translation)
64 pages
Softcover, $14
Spare, open, with dream drama, and longing, hard to figure, and yet figured. Touching, isolative, embracing, distancing. Transmissions from the air, conversations seemingly unlocateable. Sentences, helium-filled, floating away. On page 18:
No longer pushing away the obsession.
Seeking. Like an exploration, slow, diligent, desperate,
looks, faces, bodies.
Repeating in front of this face and this body:
“There is something, there is something.”
*
Page 43:
What is this, tears?
Tell me, is it you who cries?
A little before leaving, knowing that I would never see him again,
I wiped a tear from his cheek; though he wasn’t crying.
She was alone and he was asleep, and something was crying.
*
As Howald says, “there is something.” And one is constantly transfigured, in reading the work, by the search, the investigation, for this something or multiple somethings. There appears to be a dialog between the narrator and an other, a male, though the other is lost, missing, or present—somewhere else—and not returning. Then, he is dead. The plot is miniscule, is emotional, is piercingly subtle.
I haven’t gone back and back and back to a book, picking it up for a little time, reading another little sequence, quite like I have with this book. This behavior of mine has been going on for a couple of months now.
“There is something.”
Perhaps one is trying to fill in the spaces with story, with a reason for the errancy, the threads of spacious meaning. What happened to her? To him? What am I missing? Am I not missing anything? Und so weiter.
Perhaps a war widow.
Page 37:
Breathing every other time,
with the other mouth’s breath
-- not even a kiss, I don’t even kiss you anymore, as if
sealed by the distance
no longer moves, the one
no longer moves, the other
*
Howald’s writing is evaporative. The writing is writing toward or into. The writing exteriorizes an interiority of nervousness, of hope, of loneliness, of documentary necessity.
Page 50:
“It’s nothing,” he says several times,
doubled over, prostrate,
his hands caught in mine.
It’s nothing that approaches.
*
Page 36:
He kept on asking for paper.
___________
Isabelle Baladine Howald
Eléna Rivera
