The other night I decided to google myself. It had been a while since I had last done so. I scrolled through the google entries, checking the degree to which the algorithmic ties between the appearance of my name and the selected thumbnail photographs were accurate. I concluded that my name had gotten less murky and more outlined. Clicking through the pages, which chronologically tend to list the vaguer connections, I suddenly discovered my name in the headline of an article in a literary journal, written by David Berridge. To my surprise, the name turned out to actually refer to my person. It was an article about my contribution to the book Glancing to the right of Antares in Medium Blue, I intuit cosmic allurement. This having never happened to me before, I wondered if it is common to write about others and their work without letting them know, speculating about their motives, strategies, and attempts. Strange, that I should wonder about that only when the tables had turned—it had never crossed my mind before to contact the people whose work I write about. I roam freely through the information available, speculate about what is unavailable, and draw invisible lines where they appear to me.

One particular sentence from the article rings through my head: “Does Winder decide she has gone too far?” He takes note of my calling it an unauthorized translation—a confession of sorts on my part that my text does not meet the typical standards we hold translation work against. I roam a little too freely, insert myself slightly too readily, I make myself known. The work I was translating and commenting on in the form of lose annotations is the book Læsningens Anatomi (The Anatomy of Reading) by Amalie Smith. Written in the form of a daybook, journaling the evolution of beginning to read again in the wake of a severe concussion, it is deeply autobiographical. I grew up in the city where the book takes place, so all its settings are crowded with my own memories. I too, have been heartbroken at the Assistens churchyard, I too have read, seated on a stony staircase, flooded in dim, darkly orange streetlight. Is this the practice of a bad or of a good reader? In traditional terms, I would likely be considered a bad reader—not to mention a bad translator. My verdigris green copy of Læsningens Anatomi lies on top of a pile of books to my right, eying me with slight condemnation: keep out of my narrative, write your own book. Here I am again, metabolizing The Anatomy of Reading. My appetite for this little book, which I first encountered at sixteen, does not seem to have diminished. However, the title of Berridge’s article in the literary journal, “The Anatomy of Reading: Amalie Smith and Anna R. Winder,” shows me that I have definitely gone too far.

It must be said that I did ask for Smith’s permission to make and publish this annotated translation, even though I have to admit that I was running so short on time approaching the deadline, I didn’t dare ask before submitting my contribution in case she would decline. I only asked for permission once the book had already gone to print. Along with Smith’s book, I have brought a small selection of titles with me to a three-month residency I have just begun. Among them is Mother Reader by Moyra Davey, a book that has also become somewhat of a manual to me, which I return to for consultation. More than motherhood as such, what spoke to me about the book was a quality often acutely experienced in motherhood; the strong sensation of being called to a world outside your own, and the sense that you are not separate from this world but part of it, just as parts of it are part of you. A mirror spilling its content in both directions. My former arts professor once told me that during her pregnancy she could hear the stars sing. Another aspect of this tied-to-the-world-ness—or state of attunedness—described here in the context of motherhood, is its urgent bodily dimension. It highlights the sensual quality of negotiating one’s ties with the animated world. Leaning in or withdrawing, feeling your outline dissolve into that of others, or other worlds, or crystallize around you, in moments of metaphorical instantaneousness. Here, I follow the Borgesian idea of the metaphor being an immediate but unanalytical and unconstructed nearness between two things. It is the product of the chance encounter between two kindred-spirited things, two things whose forms align, between which a line can be seen shimmering, producing a constellation. Recognition—does it always follow in both directions?

The apartment where I am staying for the next three months is fully furnished and belongs to two elderly women—I have been told that it is their childhood home. Strangely, I find it easy, even seductive, to slip into the life that this apartment speaks of, like a cosplayer that sleeps in their costume. All its rooms are lined with wooden built-in shelves, low boards, and wardrobes. The cabinets and drawers, most of which I have spied into, contain endless sets of china and rows of silver cutlery. Yesterday, I tried on a dotted silken scarf left in a cupboard, in front of one of the many mirrors installed throughout the rooms. There are also books and textiles, lamps and clocks, all carefully selected to fit the style, which I would describe as German-flavored mid-century modern. Perhaps the completeness of the architecture and furnishings is so convincing that I am sucked right into it? No. Something must be missing. Otherwise, its universe would be hermetically closed and there would be no room for me. There must be cracks here too, frayed edges, washed off veneer, a certain osmotic pressure. At least that is my theory; I easily slip into environments—be they real or fictional—that have something unfinished to them, that contain little voids. Smith’s book has a sketch-like quality, a study. Perhaps because it is journaling a process. It is a collection of material, a notebook. Apart from logging the various steps in beginning to read again after the concussion, it traces the history of reading, or as the title names it; the anatomy of reading. It recounts the development of letters and alphabets, the transition from oral to silent reading and the remnants of speech in written words, the book as technology, and its way into the library, among other aspects. As the days follow one another, information is accumulated, sourced from various books that I, the reader, feel an urge to pick up too.

I was always drawn to the written word, characters and signs, to alphabetizing. As a child I collected alphabets in a small orange notebook. When I encountered people that spoke other languages than my native Danish, I asked them to write down their alphabet for me. I would make a diary entry spelled out with Polish characters—masking Danish words of course—another form a cosplay? Inhabiting strange alphabets, trying them on. I even drew the rune alphabet on twenty-four small cards that I handed out to my class mates, in the hope that they would join my play. For a time, I could read the stone inscriptions, but eventually my knowledge of runes faded as it lay inactivated. I only remember how to spell my name. The same goes for Egyptian hieroglyphs. My name in hieroglyphs consists of a bird, with a rounded chest, like the chest of a ‘q,’ facing left, followed by horizontal zigzags, repeated with a bit of air between them, ending with another bird, identical to the first. My name, an anagram, two identical parts, folded in the middle.

My name, as a decorative element that can be repeated to form a patterned chain. Names have never been holy to me but shifty and slippery. I love pseudonyms and have changed my own name several times. Aliases. I have often sensed that my shifting name has been a source of irritation to others, as if there is something suspicious about name changing. The idea of a fixed name is tied to that of personal property. To conceive differently of property, perhaps we need to relax our relationship to names. One of my favorite presses, known as Creation Books, among many other aliases, however, has a slightly too relaxed relationship to property, hence their many names. Among them are: Solar Books, Future Fiction, Tears Corporation, Sun Vision Press, Glitter Books, Wet Angel Books, Creation Oneiros, Velvet, Bondagebest Limited, Butcherbest Limited, The Kobra Kollection, Attack! Books, and Annihilation. These names are strangely alluring to me, like little shiny stones that one can collect, or small colorful boxes that one can peek into. I am not sure if they still operate, and if so, under what name. Here, names are means to occultation by diffusion, of going undercover, instead of a means to be found.

Another title from the stack of books I have brought with me is The H.D. Book, poet Robert Duncan’s book on the work of poet Hilda Doolittle, who went only by her initials. Duncan’s book is partly the result of a letter correspondence with H.D., initiated by Duncan when he began writing the book in 1959, lasting until her death in 1961, and his intensive and continuous reading of and engagement with her writing. At the time, H.D. had been largely forgotten, and through writing The H.D. Book, he also regarded it his task to uncover her writing from oblivion, though he worried about how to do it without creating hype around her name. The result was a monumental and difficult book whose publication Duncan didn’t live to see. Apart from discussing H.D.’s work, it is also a book on Duncan’s poetics; a search or quest for a poetics developed in dialogue with her work. In the introduction to The H.D. Book, its editors state that the initial conversation between H.D. and Duncan opened up to include a vastness of other voices and minds. About conversation as form, which they call a “particular kind of event,” they write: “The central responsiveness—back and forth—is also always, in a true conversation, a further, an opening beyond.” Many of these other voices and minds are referred to by name. While the contours of the conversation are not limited to those names, they serve as entry points: “The presence of the names is itself an opening and an invitation to each reader to join in.”

Rigorously written and rewritten, Duncan returned to the different chapters many times, revising, editing, and expanding them. He compares this method to the process of architectural construction—or rather reconstruction or restoration—he says that he does not want to “correct the original” but to “live again its form and content.” Instead of féting the “original,” he compares the series of revisions and recompositions to an old city. As opposed to strictly designed housing developments and landscapings, often constructed where disorderly areas of a city have been removed, the old city is multi-layered and multi-temporal, open-ended. Duncan compares this palimpsestic approach to Gaudi’s restorations of the gothic cathedral of Palma, or Freud’s picture of Rome upon Rome. His method implies a concept of content as emerging rather than as a finalized form, of form as open-ended. May only the author return to their work in this way? What if the reader is taken with an urge to add successive layers or digressions? Is she a welcome or unwelcome guest? Duncan seems to endorse such a reader: “The poet and the reader, who if he is intent in reading becomes a new poet of the poem, come to write or to read in order to participate through the work in a consciousness that moves freely in time and space and can entertain reality upon reality.”

I am reminded of a section from The Anatomy of Reading where Smith quotes an anonymous chat forum entry on the ethics of archaeology, of unpacking and handling material of the past: “in a sense, the matter of archaeology travels much faster into the future than I, who seem to be standing still, trying to grasp it. Therefore, there is no reason to fear violating it by interpreting it: It always escapes. And there is no reason to believe that it suffers in the process of interpretation: In the interpretation process, it is much stronger than me. Instead of guarding it, it is I, who should guard myself from it.” When adding layer upon layer, the bottom layer continues to make itself felt. The ‘original’ need not be protected from interference. What does the anonymous author mean with “it is I, who should guard myself from it.”? Perhaps it refers to a fear of becoming infected, inhabited by this past, of losing autonomy. A simultaneous search for likeness and relation but accompanied by a desire to keep this relatedness at a safe, scientific distance, to not lose ones’ delineated contour. Or is it about the matter itself, being frightening in its persistence and mute mystery? Subjectivity being lodged in soft matter, almost motionless if we zoom out far enough, while hard matter holds a different temporal dimension. I think of Henri Bergson’s proposition that the difference between a stone and a person is only a matter of degree.

Smith talks about how she was asked why she did not name the book ‘The Archaeology of Reading.’ She doesn’t answer this directly, but it is clear that she wants to insist on the bodily. Her focus is on the physiognomy of reading and the alphabet as (bodily) technique; braille, writing that is absorbed and decoded through the fingertips, silent reading’s relationship to oral reading, where tiny muscles of the tongue are activated with each word. Particularly the latter spoke to me, perhaps because of an early experience with the relationship between letters and the tongue. As a young girl I had a slight lisp. It wasn’t very pronounced, yet my parents deemed it proper (or maybe it was my own embarrassment of this irregularity and the felt autonomy of my tongue) that I go see a speech therapist to treat it. I remember that her practice was located in a suburban house, probably her own home. She had a s-machine, a little metallic apparatus, reminiscent of a thermometer, with a clock hand that responded to the sound of ‘s’ and showed how correctly it was spoken. She made me say “sssssss” repeatedly, until the clock hand pointed at the desired spot, and then asked me to pay attention to the position of my tongue. Oh, I remember thinking, this is where it is supposed to be. She asked me to memorize the tongue position, to think of it every time I pronounced words containing an ‘s’ for the next two weeks. I followed her instructions and my lisp disappeared after just one session with the s-machine. It does occasionally return if I am exhausted or drunk. Underneath the subsequent layers, the earlier body memory is still intact.

I am speculating if body memory is also stored in printed words, if there is a way to unfold this. Rhythm is present, and rhyme and diction. Conversation as call and response, like calling into a dark cavity using the echo of your own voice to feel out the shape of its interior. Smith: “Am I ventriloquizing for the book?” In his essay, David Berridge writes that he feels encouraged to prepare his own annotations for the text, “if only I had access to the InDesign file and there was room left on the page”, and proceeds to add one:

Anatomy, my hypothetical annotation explains, evokes Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp of 1632. The body laid out, the surgeon beginning his work, holding up a scissor-full of tendons having made an incision in the man’s side. The smartly-dressed audience, who do not look at the body but over it at the large open book on a stand. (…) Juxtaposed with “The Anatomy of Reading” it suggests how for Smith the “cuttable,” “divisible,” even the “bodily” have become absorbed into behaviors and understandings around reading, where they are wholly metaphors but evoking emotions from their fleshy past.

The association to Rembrandt feels accurate to me—as it if was there all along, underneath a thin membrane that one could perforate. It brings a text by Jean Genet to mind: What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet. The text is composed of two separate texts placed in two columns running parallel to each other. How one is supposed to read this double text is not clear; begin with one or jump between them? Stay within the confines of the single page, or skip ahead following one of the columns, to return to the other later? Were the texts written at the same time, or is one a comment on or result of the other? Does one attempt to add what isn’t present in the other, or are they simply two variations that Genet couldn’t or wouldn’t choose between? I think of the two brain halves, each column representing one of them—observation versus embodiment, intellectual attraction versus drive—the space between them as a cut. The motor of the text is an encounter that took place in a train where Genet found himself seated across from a man whose bodily presence was overwhelming. The eyes of the two men meet and in the flash of that instant Genet is overcome with a sense that he is the stranger. An instant of total identification. Is this a case of narcissistic-paranoid tendencies or of monstrous empathy?

I wonder about this experience of seing oneself in the other, even being the other, which feels familiar to an overly emotional reader. It can be habit-forming, addictive. Why is it so compelling to exit one’s own biography, to lose oneself in the endless details of the lives and thoughts of others? I think of it as more than escapism, as something more radical than that. Mimicry and the ability to read others as a basis for the social. More than a means of escaping oneself it produces belonging. There is play in mimicry, even something erotic. In recognition, warmth spreads from the mind to the senses. While compiling The H.D. Book, Duncan worked from notes on scraps and pieces of paper as a method for “avoiding a totalizing relation to his materials.” About Duncan and H.D., the editors of the book write: “They shared a commitment not to this or not this, not to the self or the other, but to the fissure from which such forms arise into the conditioned contingency of the given.” The contours of a methodology emerge, which is dedicated to the incomplete narrative strand, to the fragment, and holds a commitment to the social as based on central responsiveness, call and response in a field of play.






Works Cited or Discussed

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