I prefer indirect speech
I am speaking, or rather writing, to you now in English, which might seem strange for a 15th century old french jargon poem. And I too admit that it is. For all the niche fame that I have accrued over the past centuries in the French speaking world, I have been far less successful in the English. Whilst this text is mediated by an English speaking tongue that is not of my body, I insisted it be in first person for the sake of authenticity. Since I intend to write a kind of self-portrait I thought it best to do so in a language that has little to no knowledge of me. Thus, I will be at liberty to fashion an image of myself on my own terms, yet outside of my own words.
I will start describing myself in the neatest of possible ways. I am divided into four uneven parts. I count to 10 and then 8 and then 12 and then I end by counting to 5. I rhyme and then do not almost inconsequentially. My rhythm is that of a long question; a series of peaked open ends. I keep you, dear reader, a step behind or a step ahead. I am not interested in synchronization, but rather the way you hold me awkwardly in your mouth.
my body is under language
They say: ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ and the same is true, if not more so, for a poem. —And yet, I have been attributed a single human body, that is to say, given an author, in my case a father. I am one in a family of 11, that is at least how many of us are out in the open; in public, on paper. Six of us are pretty sure they’ve got the same father, the other five, of which I’m part, are less so. Daddy issues you could say. Although, I’ve never been too bothered by this factlessness. As I am not sure what a poem needs from its author after it’s been written. In my time, which particular body did the writing may have been less important than what my body contained. Many of my readers seem to think I’m incomplete without a body undoubtedly attributed to the author function. It seems they cannot fully understand me without it. And in the case that I would be attributed an author who is not in fact my author, it would mean that all prior readings be thrown out and started anew. Despite this, I find it difficult to cleanly cut one body out of its place, in the name of authorial responsibility, when what they made was anyways already there, ready to be made.
The 11 of us go about things differently, but we do occasionally borrow each other’s tricks. We have covered the traces of our own thinking in strange consonants that appear in the middle and the end of our words. These consonants seem to reveal the reader in any attempt at oration. When their tongue flickers and then folds, we can be sure that they don’t yet know how to use us. Our obscure spellings offer bridges for those who are willing to cross, whilst souring our legibility and our membership to the language called Le Français. A simple answer cannot be given to the question: What language am I? Because our words are neither foreign nor familiar, in fact we ourselves are neither. And we have begun to believe that all of everything is foreign and as such foreignness is an unreliable and useless category. Our words are vagabonds drifting through the place that their mother so desperately tried to keep bound.
my words are under words
I want to tell you what I think of as success. Over the more recent centuries I have become acquainted with the concept of progress. Which many poems seem to bind to the practice of success. Whilst I speak here from an admittedly dated point of view, I think success and progress are different concepts and are related only insofar as they both insist on pulling the body forwards. Progress is compulsive, success is intuitive discipline. I have come to think that the desire of every poem is to remain say-able and yet unknowable. This is what I would call success. The hope of every poem is to find out exactly what they mean. Which, we could call this progress and equally: death.
Since I was written everything has changed. Amongst all of this going on of time and change and war and war and innovation and money and abstraction, I’ve been lost and found and read and discarded. And I’ve remained the same more or less sayable and yet unknown thing. I have been terribly successful and made little to no progress. This success is largely due to the fact I was written for the purpose of documenting the many ongoing things that, in order to keep existing, needed to remain largely unknown, or generally unknown. For centuries, I have held within me a community of words known only to those who need them. When I made the transition from mouth to print, I opened myself up to be read by those who don’t need me. I became something else, or became for something else. Yet, the words with which I was built have resisted the usual exposure of publishing and instead made the flirtatious suggestion that, given the right reader, I could one day be undone.
my accent is unreadable
Despite being variously spoken, written, printed and thought, I have remained largely consistent throughout my life. I have become known for my obscurity, a character trait that seems to spark some kind of excitement in particular readers and often eventuates in long term relationships. This difficulty means that no one can ever be fully done with me: I am not a well-behaved poem. I pose a challenge to each of my readers and offer a title to claim: Will they be the one to finally solve my troublesome body? I often find myself in obsessive relations with readers whose love language is that of a forensic investigation, whose desire is for my flayed body. I will admit that I do get a certain satisfaction from being pulled apart and scrutinized in endlessly different ways. If I didn’t enjoy these obsessive relations, there would be no reason for my difficulty. One could say that obscurity is my erotic inclination.
I want to tell you what I’ve been told, because my readers have imbued in me a sense that was not of my making alone. Over the years, various kinds of text workers have been putting many different things inside me and claiming that they have found them there. I refrain from saying that they know more about what is inside of me, than I do of myself, only because it would seem vacillant. Although it could indeed be true.
I have been told I hold a manifesto under my tongue. A call to action in the bends that my words take. I seem to hold my sense in obscure places: not in the center of words, or contained line by line, but dripping down, catching somewhere above and below. It is there that I was told I make a firm claim against the accumulation of wealth, the family as an economic unit, the solidification of the nation-state and what many poems now call: capitalism. Which, I’ve been told, was a system only in its infancy when I was written. Or rather, we were sowing the seeds for capitalism to take over our bodies, and when I say we I really mean they. I myself—as a poem written in a language filled with jargon used by thieves, fraudsters and a community of general outcasts—was not sowing the seeds for capitalism. Instead, I was purportedly circulating in the mouths of the ones trying to poison the soil—if we continue with the seed metaphor, which I thought it best to do, since I seem to still be a poem, and as such, I take pride in following through on my metaphors.
our understanding is only a temporary agreement
The person who I am currently seeing seems to be obsessed with the fact that I repeat myself four times at almost but not quite regular intervals. She thinks there must be some kind of logic in this that would, if understood, undo my entire body and reveal some kind of inner secrets. The words LACUNAE / LACUNAE have been written, or rather scrawled down the side of a piece of paper on which I’ve been printed. She, the person who wrote them, read another text in which she found that word and decided that if she would study this other text when she came back to me she would be able to “reconfigure our relationship”. She said something about gaps, anachronisms and ‘the straight-mind’, none of which I understood. So I stayed exactly as I was until her return. When she did come back she seemed rather different. The parts of me that she fixated on changed. She was no longer interested in my unevenness, she dismissed my core repetition as a decoy and she seemed to have forgotten or lost interest in anything resembling an inner secret. It seemed she was simply taking pleasure in reading me. It does often happen that I am left and then returned to by an entirely different person who is in fact the same person, and yet, each time I find it utterly surprising. Especially when my readers think that it is I who changed in their absence.
at the center: a decoy
When she returned her reading had changed, it was more upbeat and rhythmic. She was sliding her fingers over me, drawing lines across my body, circling in on a word and then departing again. She was pressing her fingers down and down and tapping and sometimes pausing in one spot and pressing so hard that her finger would tear right through me. She would furrow her brow and then release it into a high pitched sign. She would close her eyes and keep reading, she would exhale before inhaling. She would tilt me over, hold me up to the light and fold me in various patterns. After one particularly long session she withdrew her hands, and shouted, YOU STUPID RIDDLE. As the word riddle hit my small recoiling body, I felt shame shiver across my words. I responded quickly by hardening my edges and reclaiming the composure of a poem.
Over our next few encounters she was furtive and made sharp quick glances, as if she was worried that I would change in the space of her blink. She accused me of undermining the reputation of other word bodies who hold their sense readily and precisely. She claimed my persistent obscurity was a narcissistic strategy, an endless seduction technique. She claimed my words were decoys, which I found strange because I thought that’s how almost all words play themselves out. Redirecting attention and then disappearing.
This text was written as part of Ballades Infidèles a research group working around the Ballades en jargon–eleven poems composed by 15th century poet Françoys Villon and written in the secret tongue of the Coquillard·es, a posse of French rogues–in conversation with Simon Asencio, Diana Duta, Chloe Chignell, Loucka Fiagan, Cee Fülleman, camille gerenton, Anouchka Oler Nussbaum, Francoys Villon, etaïnn zwer et al.