Une fois il fut demandé devant moi en quoi consistait le plus grand plaisir de l'amour. Quelqu'un répondit naturellement: à recevoir, -- et un autre: à se donner. -- Celui-ci dit: plaisir d'orgueil! -- et celui-là: volupté d'humilité! Tous ces orduriers parlaient comme l'Imitation de Jésus-Christ. -- Enfin, il se trouva un impudent utopiste qui affirma que le plus grand plaisir de l'amour était de former les citoyens pour la patrie.

Moi, je dis: la volupté unique et suprême de l'amour gît dans la certitude de faire le mal. Et l'homme et la femme savent de naissance que dans le mal se trouve toute volupté. (Baudelaire 1191; cited in Derrida Given Time 139)

[Someone once asked in my presence what was the greatest pleasure in love. Someone naturally responded to receive, -- and another, to give oneself. -- This one says: pleasure of pride -- that one: pleasure of humility! All these shithogs sounded exactly like The Imitation of Christ. -- Finally there was an impudent dreamer who claimed that the greatest pleasure in love was to create citizens for one's country.

As for me, I say: the unique and supreme pleasure of love consists in the certainty of doing evil. Men and women alike know from the day they are born that in evil lies all pleasure.] (my trans.)

Ben--I suppose sooner or later we ought to fuck.

Sera--Whatever that means.

Clark Coolidge's The Book of During investigates a fundamental area of human experience: fucking. We could say instead, sex, but that would involve certain choices.

"And of course they immediately get down to the fucking"

In looking at the notes I wrote when I first read During I see that I crossed out the original title I had thought of, The Book of Fuck.

"Great scrolls of fucking notation lie around the yard."

Avital Ronell, in Crack Wars, investigates a hermeneutics of drugs. She says there, for example, "As such, drugs have accrued a meager hermeneutics in proportion to a considerable mobilization of force" (59). Or even more provocatively, she suggests, "While everywhere dealt with, drugs act as a radically nomadic parasite let loose from the will of language" (52). If this is true of drugs--i.e., that the investigation of meaning is underdeveloped, and the parasitic linguistic effects unleashed--which I believe it is, how much more so for fuck.

Coolidge's implicit strategy--and I don't mean his intention, which I can't know and don't care to investigate--in The Book of During, would seem to be to present a fundamental presentation of this area of experience, and here I would say, both actual and linguistic. It is not only linguistic, even if it is actually so in the textual presentation. In this way, Coolidge's phenemonology of fuck rhymes with the textual practice of William Burroughs in a text like Junky. Burroughs, in his first book, takes junk as both an experiential phenomenon and a linguistic one. From the next-to-last page of Junky:

When you give up junk, you give up a way of life. I have seen junkies kick and hit the lush and wind up dead in a few years. Suicide is frequent among ex-junkies. Why does a junky quit junk of his own will? You never know the answer to that question. No conscious tabulation of the disadvantages and horrors of junk gives you the emotional drive to kick. The decision to quit junk is a cellular decision, and once you have decided to quit you cannot go back to junk any more than you could stay away from it before. Like a man who has been away a long time, you see things different when you return from junk. (151).

If one were to substitute, or footnote, junk here by reference to heroin, or narcotics in general, an aspect of the linguistic phenomenon would be lost. Junk is what the word represents, on the level of signifier, signified, and referent, but it is more: it is excessive, parasitic, as Ronell suggests with respect to drugs in general. Paraphrasing Burroughs, we could say, "you see things different when you return from junk," whether you've ever tried junk or not.

"Do I know no way to fuck out of it?"

As the juxtaposed epigraphs to this paper suggest, the conflict of interpretations with regard to sex is not recent, nor confined to any single sphere. Baudelaire's reported interlocuters could just as well be the received wisdom of television talk shows or Reader's Digest or What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. His rage is well expressed in the term orduriers (what I translate as "shithogs"). And his counterposing of the term mal (meaning "evil" but so much more, perhaps most contemporaneously "bad") strikes a strong hermeneutic stance with respect to meaning, not the least of which is the built-in rhyme with his title for his lifelong collected poems, Les Fleurs du mal. And I have no idea at all why Jacques Derrida uses this epigraph in his stunning book on the gift, Donner--le temps (Given Time), except that his text is from one perspective one long interpretation of Baudelaire's prose poem, "La fausse monnaie" (cf. Baker, "Blackburn's Gift").

"After all after the fuck we had no place to live anymore."

Leaving Las Vegas's Sera is a sex worker, hence her cynicism, but still her meta-discursive comment moves in the same area of interpretive indeterminacy that the Baudelaire quote opens up.

"This fucking is hands down the neck of a semblance."

I've seen reference to Coolidge's The Book of During as a novel. And while it is true that most of the book with this title (Clark says there will be more) is in unjustified lines that go all the way to the right margin, Coolidge is on record as saying he doesn't like the distinction between poetry and prose.Notably in a letter to me regarding the work of Bernadette Mayer where he derides the decision by New Directions to make these distinctions in their publication of The Bernadette Mayer Reader. This letter will be published in ONWARD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, an anthology of various works on and around poetics. So I'm going to treat it as a long poem on the "subject" of "sex."

I can't think about what I think, loss of ready memory. Piercings

precise as forgettable as your own talent. I could take you along

with me down there but it would do no good. What things you

would see there. Lights in back of heads, perfect pencil flights

betrayed. Perfect bending stalks glazed in winds of breath. You

apply gummed stars and moons and flakes to your chest and

breasts. Shaken. Bold and bended. Bowed and left. Empty lights

in the dream shadows of fucking and tearing. Leg in the way,

rip it out. List of stations on the way to the cunt. I lick your

staring eyes, never their lids. You are crying in my dream and I

make to stop you with a whistle, crying in. Stopping the window

from imagining us. And then (now) I don't know when to stop

anything. (Coolidge, The Book of During 52-53)

Of course, as with any text by Coolidge, this one embeds its own level of commentary so insistently that any second-level analysis comes to seem an impertinence (cf. Baker, Obdurate Brilliance 155). The initial line presents an interesting aporia, one that could be taken as a guiding strategy in the poem as a whole: Hey, what do I know? The book begins: "Hell, I don't know anything but I'll begin. I stain these pages" (9). Sex drifts across the surface of the text as an always indeterminable component to the real or imagined descriptions, until the short, forceful words appear, as in: "Leg in the way, rip it out. List of stations on the way to the cunt." But this same element of indeterminacy also suspends, I would suspect, reader judgment, so that the most direct, blunt language also starts to drift, both linking up with other elements of the poem and blurring in the reader's experience of the poem.

"The instruction, coming late, will be to stand and fuck."

The Book of During's open-ended meditational structure could be compared with that of another meditational chef-d'uvre, Coolidge's The Crystal Text, and therefore probably becomes one in a series with other long, meditational works like Mine and American Ones. Whereas these works are structured around Coolidge's longstanding interest in the mineral, During is very clearly animal (opening the question of when he will get to vegetable). The crystal in the poem of that title is both an incitement to meditation--referred to several times as a specific crystal Coolidge has on his desk as he is writing. The interpenetration between the crystal and the writing also allows the poet to concentrate on the aspect of the quotidian, the repetitive, the iterative. The element of time stressed in The Book of During, notably in its title, would seem to be duration, though its repetition of fuck and its various forms, as well as the other short, sexual words also point to sex as an activity characterized as well by its repetitiveness.

"Like when you fuck in a lock so close you want, but you want to see and can't, the closing body."

Writing might also be said to be characterized by its quotidian, repetitive character, as well as by its duration. One of the ways we have of experiencing duration is through an analogy with space. And it certainly does seem that by opening up the area of sex to investigation, Coolidge is rather consciously working with not just the corporeal space, but the physical space in which these various acts take place. He will say, for example, "I enter the book of sex" (76), or in the last line of the book: "Whatever I have done over and over again has been done in the form of a door" (238). In a passage reprinted on the back cover of The Figures edition, this thematizing of space and writing comes to the fore:

In every way room, but could I describe it, ride around its

edges, never quite pushing through the perimeter wherein we

spent so many fucking afternoons. Terrible picture of all the

words waiting relentlessly outside. What after all is the activity of

telling beyond the fate of act? A feeling as if I had only heard

about the teeming presence of my own life. And is your fucking

a telling? Everywhere wandered around in here while we were

doing it. But we hardly noticed, we were too palmed into our

past decide. Will you tell me about it while we are doing it? Will

you find yourself able to tell what we were doing while we are

doing a thing similar? Can you relate to me. Will you say

everything you can recall from it, the act of saying of a fucking

previous in a fucking present? And then you put yourand I

lifted my. And then I came, and then you came, and then

will we come? Or are these only as thoughts of a room, its light

and walls?

As with Burroughs' repeated use of junk, Coolidge's insistence on fuck and its derivatives allows him considerable combinatory power. As one instance in this passage, "fucking afternoons" instead of being read as only a clichéd irritable adjective, becomes, as well, those afternoons spent fucking. If the words are waiting outside the room, does that mean that he has to finish fucking before he can go back to writing? And how does one relate in language the archetypal nonlinguistic experience of sex? Certainly not through a simple description of you did this, I did that, he seems to say here, even exercising a certain authorial reticence.

"We forget about fucking while we're fucking."

Coolidge's syntactic strategies vary widely, from descriptive to abstract, some making a great deal of sense, others not. At times, the clarity of the form of the proposition recalls the "wisdom utterance."I discuss Barrett Watten's reliance on the wisdom utterance, the logos of the Poundian triad, logopoiea, phanopoiea and melopoiea, in "Code of Communication: Conduit or Crypt." As when he says: "And so sex rushes in, for sex is so present that it is practically death" (44), or later, "Sex equals death plus youth" (192). I wouldn't want to accuse Coolidge of doing anything so academic as reading Jacques Lacan, but the first formulation rings for me with the Lacanian formulation of the Real. The Real, for Lacan, is that unattainable something around which desire turns, and which in turn structures, among other things, our ethical thinking (cf. Baker, Deconstruction and the Ethical Turn 76-77). The second dictum rings a change on the first, with the potentially critical stance regarding sex and youth.

"All fucks are failures."

So, might we say, are all interpretations. It is in the nature of the interpretive activity to fall short of adequation with the object of inquiry. But then the model of adequation itself, as Heidegger among others has pointed out, stems from deeply held beliefs in the substantial existence of those objects of inquiry that reflects back a reified human subject. And, of course, there is no object more critically viewed as such than the sex object. If one were to pursue a line of feminist analysis (that I myself would hold back from for various reasons) we could ask if Coolidge entirely escapes such an objectifying perspective? Or does his phenomenology of sex discover in its "return to the thing itself" (Husserl) an approach to subjectivity that is also open to the experience of the other? Or is this exactly what Baudelaire was approaching when he dismissed all enlightenment or psychosocial reasonings, and proclaimed sex evil?

"Break the logos down on your femur not to cease from the fucking."

Peter Baker

Towson State University

All quotes not otherwise identified are from Clark Coolidge, The Book of During.

.

Baker, Peter. "Blackburn's Gift," Sagetrieb 12:1 (1994), 43-54.

__________. "Code of Communication: Conduit or Crypt?" Aerial 8 (1995): 250-258.

__________. Deconstruction and the Ethical Turn. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1995.

__________. Obdurate Brilliance: Exteriority and the Modern Long Poem. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991.

Burroughs, William S. Junky. New York: Penguin, 1977 (1953).

Coolidge, Clark. The Crystal Text. Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures, 1986.

__________. The Book of During. Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures, 1991.

Derrida, Jacques. Donner--le temps. Paris: Galilée, 1991. Translated by Peggy Kamuf as Given Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Ronell, Avital. Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.