THE COMMUNICATING VESSELS

Pain and loneliness imbue a poet's intimate revelations.

In two companion pieces, The Communicating Vessels and And I Shook Myself a Beloved, award-winning Viennese poet Mayröcker (b. 1924) offers a swirling collage of thoughts, allusions, and reminiscences elicited by the death of her longtime companion, experimental poet and translator Ernst Jandl (1925-2000). Both works are marked by streams and juxtapositions of language evocative of Gertrude Stein, whom, along with Jacques Derrida, Mayröcker cites as a decisive influence. “My reading of Gertrude Stein,” she writes, “had opened up all the floodgates and I was really happy because my writing was spouting, almost without any resistance, and from my memory previously unknown images appeared, and they begot others.” Like Stein—and many artists that Mayröcker mentions, including Picasso, Juan Gris, and Salvador Dalí—the author aimed at producing art that “does not depict reality, but the perception of reality.” Her reality is dominated by memories of her life with Jandl: “1 mirror of the other, 1 mind-comfort.” While thinking about Stein’s sentence, “I am I because my little dog knows me,” she laments that when Jandl died, “I lost the greater part of my identity.” Mayröcker and Jandl shared books, music (jazz, the recordings of Maria Callas), and art. Grieving, she found comfort in the works of Spanish surrealist Antoni Tàpies. “Throughout all the wild months,” she writes, “he’d become my favorite painter, he accompanied me day and night, I dreamed of him and his works.” Although Mayröcker’s effusive interior monologue is sometimes impenetrable, her overwhelming grief emerges clearly. “I went to the cemetery,” she writes, “and brought him five yellow roses and I thought he would speak to me, which he did not do, and I touched his gravestone and lit a candle and closed the lantern and left the cemetery saying to myself, everywhere different.”

A raw literary meditation on loss.