Under pressure my hands sometimes balloon to the size of small waterbombs, now that I’ve been travelling across 8 time–zones, and haven’t slept in 26 hours, or haven’t slept in 3 months, ever since I started working at an invitation for the second '06 issue of Nypoesi and the invitation had read or haven’t slept in 8 months for many mysterious reasons please write a piece in Norwegian–
noe i noen
Taking the bissextile leap year into account, and imagining that I started on January 3rd, I‘ve been developing for the past 89 days, we’re April 2nd, a complicated network of pages designed to stage or otherwise demonstrate my sense and senses as a diasporic Norwegian poet, although strictly speaking I’m not diasporic, or rather so in an ambiguous free–to–roam White European fashion since I wasn’t forced by circumstance, this being debatable at a psychological level, but made the choice, chose to write in English, ever since I no longer could write in French, being acutely caught up, caught too acutely in its le-la structure, and having not so far developed work in Norwegian, yet both languages had initially shaped one’s physical and mental outpost, my linguistic physiognomy–
noen i noe
Now I look in my shelves for a book on the bilingual brain by Suzanne Romaine, a British sociolinguist who contends that born bilinguals develop resource allocation not brain damage, a different physiological brain and different cognitive responses from monolinguals and from those whose bilingualism takes place after having first acquired one language, but it must be in one of the boxes I still have in New York where I spent most of last year for I cant find it–
noe en finner i noe
My journey across was not traumatic, from Paris to Oslo to London with corresponding passports, the gaps appear not at entry, only with the passing years, I had immediately taken to London’s queer sensibilities and enjoyment of iconoclastic performance traditions, and the city had seemed to take to mine, absorb me into her, under railway arches, on the stages of late–night clubs in flamboyant and revamped South London pubs, in the rooms of local performing arts venues, in strange claustrophobic poetry rooms–
nå som en er kroppslig
When one arrives to language fully grown it’s fair to think, isn’t it fair to think that one’s past bodyshape can be left blissfully in the dark, that one can start at a new one, yet perhaps one should have imagined that this body would lack most of the somatic and cultural presumptions familiar to standard bearers of a language and a country where daffodils are not so much spring flowers as wandering clouds, indeed how reliable was this light-headed roaming, a state of cultural aphasia, and would one have to learn to embed the nursery rhymes, the cultural undercurrents and scaffoldings to sounds and sense, create a developing infancy, a 3D spec of my shape and skin, or could one simply forego this one and carry on from a poetic imaginary eerily free of white rabbits, split instead between Norwegian trolls and French childhood songs about bridges and ladies in medieval gardens–
som en stadig er
How does one keep one’s body as one’s own, what does this mean but the relative safety of boundaries, could I make sure that what I called my body would remain in the transit from other languages, that it would hold its progression into English, and because I didn’t know and wasn’t sure, and since for a great number of people, for an overwhelming number of persons, for an overwhelmingly large number of persons, for an always growing number of persons, this is far from self–evident, this is not self–evident, this is impossible, this does not apply, this doesn’t even begin to figure, I never knew for sure–
som står for noe som står for noen
Some never had a body to call their own before it was taken away–
noen hadde aldri en kropp de kunne kalle sin egen før den ble revet bort
Some never had a chance to feel a body as their own before it was taken away–
noen fikk aldri oppleve en kropp som sin egen før den ble revet bort
Some never had a chance to know their body before it was taken away–
noen fikk aldri kjenne sin kropp før den ble revet bort
Some were never free to speak their body before it was taken up and taken away–
noen var aldri frie til å si sin kropp før den ble løftet opp og revet bort
Some tried their body on to pleasure in it before it was taken up beaten violated taken away–
noen tok sin kropp på for å nyte den før den ble løftet opp slått krenket revet bort
Some had their body for a time then it too was taken away or parts of it–
noen hadde sin kropp i en tid så ble den også revet bort eller deler av den
Some thought they had their body safely then were asked to leave it behind the door or parts of it–
noen trodde at de trygt hadde sin kropp bare for å bli bedt om å la den bli igjen bak
døren eller deler av den
Some hoped they had one safely only to find it had to be left across the border or parts of it–
noen håpet de trygt hadde en kropp bare for å innse at den måtte bli igjen over
grensen eller deler av den
Some wanted to leave their body behind and couldn’t–
noen ønsket å legge sin kropp bak seg og kunne ikke
Some could neither take it with them nor leave it behind–
noen kunne verken ta den med seg eller legge den igjen
Some are laughed at some spat out some are dragged into the crowd–
noen blir ledd av noen spyttet ut noen blir trukket inn i mengden
Some bodies are forgotten in the language compounds–
noen kropper er glemt bort i språkmassene
Some immense pressure is applied on to the forgetting of the ecosystems some escape from–
et grenseløst trykk legges på å glemme økosystemene som noen flykter fra
Some bodies like languages simply disappear–
noen kropper liksom språk blir simpelthen borte
Some or many are being disappeared–
noen eller mange er blitt borte
Some or many disappear–
noen eller mange blir borte
Some or many that disappeared arise in some or many of us–
noen eller mange som ble borte reiser seg i noen eller mange av oss
Some arise in some or many of us–
noen reiser seg i noen eller mange av oss
Some that arise in some of us arise in many of us–
noen som reiser seg i noen av oss reiser seg i mange av oss
Some that arise in some of us arrive in each of us–
noen som reiser seg i noen av oss kommer frem i hver av oss
Since words are vibrations, patterns of activity, bodies prefigured and thought out, and since colour acts as a reminder that beings and objects are vibrations, in the end but vibration, intense attraction spreading and balancing in the volume, terrible conflictual resonance at the bounds, colour perception being one of the more primitive thus grounding components of the human visual apparatus, I imagined three texts that a reader wouldn’t be able to read but could perceive, three texts that would function perceptually, as perceptual texts, hand–coloured blotches, a mix of ink and coloured tint, gold leaf and colour that would force up a physical or sensory reading, a reading that would rest primarily on the experience of density and contrasts, and since according to the philosopher Irigaray, but I would need to check on this, colour remembers the womb, or an inseparate inseparable space, its knot of connections, much like language begins as a sensation of structured resonance, the texts would enhance linguistic recognition at the level of a neurological response, yet every day I am unable to complete the task–
noe rødt
I went on to imagining three visual texts, or visual patterns, each occupying a page and developed by counting and multiplying the letters of three chosen words, three Norwegian words, each chosen for their nodal effect on my personal experience of bounds, actually two substantive nouns and one Swedish name, a family name is a starting-point, organised on the page according to a strict and rigorous code, so that they could in fact be read but would by virtue of their seductive visual organisation, mostly be viewed glanced at, their visual look edging towards verbal meaning, and would favour more immediate sensory and responsive knowledges, like the work of visual artists and poets interested in the transformative aspect of hypnotic patterning as a release from identity that is a release into motion perception, or the work of meditation traditions that seek in the demanding refinements of repeated postures and arrangements a pathway to cultural engagement, yet every day I wake up uneasy and unable to complete the task –
noe orange
I went on to imagining three poetic pieces, to be written in English, yet I wondered whether letters from the three chosen Norwegian words might perhaps not appear bolded up in the English, and whether the dots of the i’s could perhaps be gilded as an acknowledgment of the prior illuminated work, written in a dry and lyrical mode of sorts, or let’s just say a mode that would allow me to call on personal events as well as on the writings of three writers, Marina Tsvetayeva, Helene Cixous, and Adrienne Rich, although in early versions, I had also wished to rely on Danielle Collobert, Reinaldo Arenas, Nazim Hikmet, twentieth century writers uninvited, unable or unwilling to function at its historical breaches, yet who did, whose function it was, and had in the end loosely settled for these three, to think about various forms of internal and external exile, two of whom alive at the time of writing, who’ve used their writing and writing–lives specifically in an intimately public way, to place their intellectual and poetic bodymass in such a way, as to block resist and bear witness to enforced forms of kinship, force applied to language, the eradicating forces of gender on individual and collective bodyshapes, yet every day I wake up angry and unable to complete the task–
noe gult
For three months I did this, sat at my desk, watched my hands balloon, and pondered on three perceptual texts for a physical placement and a sensory form of knowledge, three visual patterns for a reading locked into a contemplative form of structural participation, and three poetic pieces for an investment in conflictual language belongings written in the currently most globally assumed language of capital, each of these modes willing to address what it means to cross a border, a rule, a boundary, a limit, an edge, it all seemed consistent, yet every day muscles and nerves would shock me into an inexplicable procrastination, shame me with frequent incapacitating fevers, what is this inability to complete the task, these set tasks, is it a way of holding one’s breath, of closing one’s eyes, of looking away, of not going out, the eczema that is spreading on one’s skin, under one’s shirt one’s clothes, invisible mostly, seems to work analogically, clogs the fibres of one’s language, a literal way of showing that a body didn’t just add chunks of meat on crossing the tongue, on doubling or tripling the tongue out of tyngde into noise, but a tongue's mind, the inbuilt certainty of ground, now could the deployment of tentative forms, speechless patches, memory gashes, textual prompts, be made to circumvent, even circumnavigate this fever, this skinned unease, scrape at its allergic need, scrape off the need for soil for thick for tongue, don't produce ways of slipping that are ways of slipping of choking, of choking of jumping inwardly fearfully, falling fearfully out of step, from everything and many–
noen lunde
Now unbeknownst to me, my semi–nons, these clusters or heaps of nons that make one up, or sum one up, that is until this moment, at this point of writing, stretched at the very fine end of these months of a labyrinthine activity, something had shrugged and jumped, many things point to where she left off, the motion shadow, the ripple in the air that follows the jump, had she mistaken the line for a private refuge, skin warps or wraps around injury, adjusts to some new bulk, had she been hiding, hesitating on either sides of hyphenation had i mistaken a hyphen the dash of my cultures for a full stop, had I wished for it, to stop at it, to hide on it, no longer looking out for or following the connections, the urgent pathlines and the networks, critical forms of friendship, starshaped demand attention, public address tuned to a point of raw nerve of accentuation demands perseverance, as if one would be hyphen seduced and lost in tales of origination, rather than declare oneself jiving on it off it, having it for a plunge, a real dive, jump from the springboard, the diving–board, a capacity for sympathy, the kind of sympathetic structure that rests on mental stimulation and physical availability, emotional discipline and open-ended shapes drive the energy and see the sentence through, dive in the mid of the next and wake up mid–stream, wake up streaming, inside the skin, under the skin of her time, they are being marched off line–
noen brytes av