it seems, I am growing less and less pre-
cise, this desire to live, to continue to live,
and without demonstration, in a night of
infinite reversals between the I, and the 2,
and the afternoon, having established its
yesterdays,
between the poor day and the great night,
at two in the immoral afternoon,
the island swam toward me and peeled off
its dolphin skin, this legendary business
of cracking eggs with a laugh that pinches
the anus, the cloaca, the miniature coffins,
at the point where reality is, except for that
rivulet of saliva reflecting the Milky Way,
and there, in the dishpan, catch a glimpse
of you,
Lynn Xu’s book-length poem And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight was published by Wave Books in early 2022. The result of ten years of work and life, Xu’s text bridges the most intimate and most universal aspects of being—birth, death, abjection, sublimity—in a voice that is both incantatory and irreverent. I was familiar with this voice and its power, having witnessed a performance the poet gave in 2018 at Marfa Book Company, run by Tim Johnson and Caitlin Murray, where she experimented with reading over a projected slideshow. In this performance, Xu moved between English, Chinese, French, and Spanish, with her voice and the text on the slides diverging and synching. At one point she stopped speaking and cued a distorted video of her mouth intoning the poem, moving onlookers into several different temporalities within the space of the reading. The play with time, shifts in proximity and rhythm, and the choreographed tension between listening and reading in translation that registered in this performance showed up for me again when I read Xu’s book this past spring.
Both the performance and the book drove me forward in time, striking a cadence like a brisk walk, creating momentum, triggering something metabolic. With the book, I found myself flipping pages hungrily, moving through the entire volume in an hour and then returning to different sections of the book, out of order, to read more deeply. Many decisions in the book caught my attention: to have a large section on black pages, to make text big enough to take over entire spreads, to include mysterious stills from the video Xu played during her performance. Almost immediately I could envision the book as an exhibition. When space serendipitously opened up in our schedule at MOCA Tucson, I knew it should be occupied by this tremendous work, which spoke to the shows adjacent to and following it beautifully as well.
Often, exhibitions beget books, but in this case the reversal felt exciting and opened up many questions. In what new ways can we read when our bodies are able to move through texts in space? Could the large volume of the building hold the capaciousness of ideas and movements in the book? Could we translate a book into an exhibition while the book was already translating itself? Now that we’ve made it, I can see that the show is not a faithful representation of the book, it has a “promiscuous” relationship with the source text, a term I’ve heard Lynn use many times in relation to her work. The alchemy of our collaboration, as friends, as mothers, as interlocutors, along with the many talents and contributions of my colleagues at MOCA, Alexis Wilkinson and Dominic Valencia especially, made another small branch in the river of this profound ten-year poem. The show is a place where listening, reading, and looking (all at different proximities and in different languages) co-exist, creating an unusual state of attention that I’m not sure I can name precisely yet . . .
The show plays up the promiscuity that the author encourages, by making space for many different readings and for the interchangeability of writer and reader. In the exhibition the text is arranged in grids and circles that can be read a million different ways—possible readings spiral out as each reader moves differently within the text. It is possible to read the exhibition with some faithfulness to the linear order of the book, but the obedient reader must follow amusingly convoluted vectors on a paper map to achieve this feat. But isn’t this a suitable allegory for what reading poetry or looking at art is about, or how certain kinds of translation function for that matter? Attempts to communicate something that can survive the distance between subjectivities, but that ultimately becomes enmeshed—the writing, reading, and meaning-making all forming an undifferentiated whole? Lynn’s practice both shatters and tends to this most essential sense of communicability.
In many ways, the exhibition was made in the same way this interview was conducted, in the short bursts of time between acts of care, very late at night or early in the morning, picked out on a mobile phone while pinned under a young child, or between meals, endless meetings, baths, and bedtimes. The compound nature of my questions and the meandering of our thoughts might have to do with the fatigue and tenuousness of being a mother of young children, but what Lynn’s work and, moreover, way of working have opened up for me is that from the bare ground of exhaustion, in the darkness of the womb, or the latest hours of the night, there is the possibility of dissolving the distinctions of our fictional separateness, there is the “endless mother” who makes the spell and breaks it.
—Laura Copelin
I wonder if you can locate where And Those Ashen Heaps began. The tempo of the book is quite fast, as if it all came at once in a great burst, but you’ve said that it was written over ten years in fits and starts. Can you speak to your process and if there is a clear origin point for this work in particular?
The poem began as experiments in projection. I was interested in Duchamp’s concept of the inframince—the infra-thin—and I was making these experiments where the English is projected as the Chinese is read. I wanted to think about and play with the time-difference between languages in general, and English and Chinese in particular. I spoke to Tim Johnson recently about this for BOMB. The inframince was helpful for me to conceptualize the dimensional shifts between languages as well as between the movement of reading, looking, seeing, and hearing, where an almost imperceptible difference is felt.
I was also “writing” differently during this time because my eldest daughter was born. Like many mothers in these first months, I was not sleeping very much, and I was also not conscious enough in these hours to make use of them, so I would lie there in a kind of twilight state. And then one night my body began to write. Just one or two lines at a time. And I would type them up on the typewriter in the morning. And, at night, my body would recompose them. And then it was happening during the day too, and I would find myself making the poem, little by little, the same lines, made smaller and bigger by the changes that were happening. The “great burst” you describe seems to correspond to the momentum of this kind of writing, which came with its own totality—as one continuous instance of folding and unfolding.
I am talking specifically about the first ninety-three pages of the book. The flickering of English and Chinese having to do with this magic lantern of language and night, and the aperture of birth that was held open just long enough for the poem to arrive.
The great benefit of making something slowly, over a span of many years, is that I have the freedom to forget what I am doing. And every time I do it (the writing) I have to learn it again.
I like how you phrase this nightly “recomposition”—can you say more about that? It sounds like in this exhausted postpartum state, you were almost involuntarily conceiving words or phrases, and then refining them, recomposing them, specifically at night. Creating a darkened space was an important element of the exhibition, which connects back to this confusion and play between light and dark, day and night, that is so characteristic of early life with an infant. The way you describe writing in this space, it sounds involuntary and reflexive. Do you have a sense of your own linguistic reflexes? Is your translation propelled by reflex or by this process of recomposition and refinement?
You are right that this kind of writing is only possible in that opening. In those first months, it is impossible to know where the mother’s body ends. It is a sprawling arrangement of activities, a voluptuous endlessness that moves purely in relation to the child, who is the teacher. She, Issa, was teaching me, and we were playing together.
Saying this reminds me of a book that I’d forgotten but is very important to me, and which I’d read many years ago, before any thought of children entered my life. The book is D. W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality. Opening the book again, this is the passage that disarranges me:
In another language, the breast is created by the infant over and over again out of the infant’s capacity to love or (one can say) out of need. A subjective phenomenon develops in the baby, which we call the mother’s breast. The mother places the actual breast just there where the infant is ready to create, and at the right moment.
Next to this passage I had written: timing.
Reading this now, it is clear why the opening sequence is multilingual. For one thing, it is a moment of intersubjectivity and entanglement. And, for another, it seems that what I’d wanted to play with (within the time-difference between languages in general, and English and Chinese in particular) is also their perfect meeting—this “right moment” in which creation happens, and which creates the illusion of omnipotence. It is a moment of self-possession that is not tied to the self but to the other. The “right moment” tells us it is about spontaneity and improvisation, a moment of freedom that has to do purely with relation and the singular-plural.
The exhaustion you are talking about also introduces a different kind of aliveness, in which what is lived is not necessarily experienced and can be a clearing of ground.
A clearing of ground feels accurate . . . the exhaustion and the entanglement seem to be part of the mechanism in your work that allows it to move between very concrete, discrete, subjective experiences to universal, timeless, shared realities. Like the experience of motherhood, these altered states, the warping of time, and the dissolution of singular notions of identity empower you to dissolve binaries and to make radical shifts in temporal and spatial scales. This way of working, at the convergence between creativity and care for life, feels so consequential to the realities of motherhood in our current moment, which is antagonistic to life-giving or sustaining processes.
My own experience of motherhood and work feels like these two activities are often, if not always, in direct opposition to each other. The practices and motions of care for a child are in conflict with the practices and actions needed to sustain an income, a profession, a voice. Can you talk about how your work is situated in this locus of experiences, or if that is or isn’t interesting for you to consider in relation to your work?
It’s so hard to find peace there.
Tonight, for example, I am moving slowly through time. I can feel every particle of air expanding into the darkness around me.
And the thing I keep coming back to is consciousness. With motherhood, consciousness is no longer closed. It was never closed, of course, but now, more acutely, it is open, and this is part of the phenomenological sensation of the endless-mother (the endlessness of the mother’s body) because it simply cannot be closed. The fact of caring for life requires that you and the infant are (in Winnicott’s terms) working to build the subjective phenomenon of the breast—a co-creation that has to do with consciousness opening. And this consciousness becomes a way of working: I must learn how to write just as I must learn how to care for the child; and I must learn to do simple things too, like sleeping, eating, reading, thinking, and working, in the proper sense of fulfilling my obligation to others. This is very difficult, because you can get lost in this opening, which in the negative sense becomes undifferentiated time; and in this time warp you cannot experience life, because it is lived in its totality, with nothing remaining.
And I fight very hard to not get lost in this opening—which, again, can be a form of freedom, as long as you do not get lost. So, it is this freedom that I fight very hard to achieve.
And I do think that the book holds some of that freedom, but this does not mean that I am able to sustain it across time. I am often lost and days pass one after the other with no difference. In fact, if I am honest, I would say that most days are like this. But it is important that the book can keep this promise, because the poem has its own sovereignty.
Yes! The poem drives itself forward despite the pull of undifferentiated time. It’s a felt momentum. Thinking in this direction, your treatment of time in the text feels singular to me and I’m interested in how you choose to render its irregularity. At one point the text counts itself, spelling out the cardinal numbers from one to nine across several pages, which surprised me when I first read it. It is such a simple gesture, but very big and bold on the page, like you are asking the reader to count their existence with you, or at least to notice time. Or like you are acknowledging the primacy of counting, the necessity to learn time in a rote way, against the grain of our relative experiences of time.
In the exhibition, time-based media underscore some of the allusions to video and audible voice that appear in the text. Did the exhibition give you an opportunity to literalize some of the experiments with time that you were making in the text? Can you let us in on your formal decision-making in the book and exhibition around time, and how you approached warping it, with and for the reader?
What you say about the counting, the way you phrase it: “the text counts itself . . . like you are asking the reader to count their existence with you”—this is beautiful. I cannot say much beyond that. By saying that the “text counts itself” you are endowing the text with its own subjective phenomenon, and if I can reach across my life to enter that moment, with you, to create this time of living, if somehow, I have managed to do that . . .
In my mind, the numbers hold open the question about the unanimous mother, and they are very big because we are alive there, in that meantime—in the meantime of the book and the meantime of existence—and it has to be a moment of counting because there is nothing to translate. The one is a one and the two is a two, and we know the order. We are alone together in that moment, and we are waiting.
Perhaps it is surprising because it is also a moment of nudity. There is nothing hidden, no meaning to interpret, we are just there.
As for the formal decisions I made, they’re really very simple decisions mainly to do with typography and font size, and they can be thought of in relation to the inframince because I wanted to pose questions about the phenomenological experience of reading. The shifts in scale help also to create a sculptural sensation and reserve a place for the body of the reader. In the pacing of the opening sequence, for example, you experience the turning of the page, both as an act (made by your hand) and as a fact of the book (that it is made of pages).
One of the challenges about bringing the book into the museum (which I’d realized while talking to Tim Johnson) has to do with a shift in axis. If, let’s say, the sense of dimensionality is in part the invention of the book, then what do you do when it is simply a given in the museum? In other words: If the axis of the book is time, what do you do when the dominant axis of the museum is space?
And the answer is voice. I knew, while we were planning, that there had to be three different instances of listening in the exhibition, but I did not know why, and I did not know that voice would be such a powerful conductor of time. It introduces the temporal axis but also extra-temporal ones.
Another interesting phenomenon has to do with the Chinese voice that plays throughout the hall. Because of this—almost, unanimous—voice, every act of reading in the exhibition becomes a possible site of translation.
Your insistence on acknowledging the reader in the act of reading I find very generous. Although the text issues many challenges to intellect and attention, your attunement to the experience of the person on the other end of your words and voice feels like a key into a different space. You’re insisting on centering the experience of the reader, of thinning the membrane that separates and dilates the consciousness. Isn’t that a kind of birth? And your concern with another's experience, isn't that a form of attachment? You're calling attention to the space and time between you and the reader (disillusioning them perhaps) while also concerning yourself with their experience while they are immersed in your world of thought.
For me, as your fortunate reader and collaborator, I see the process within your work being driven by the unknown in relationships guiding an openness to the world of experiences. I’m stumbling to say it, but I wonder what you think about the processes of relating (from familial relation narrowly to the capacity of language or art to relate all things to each other endlessly) as a process or possibility of translation?
Perhaps what Winnicott helps us to understand is that every act of reading is an act of co-creation of the subjective phenomenon: both writer and reader are involved in the co-creation of the breast, of the illusion of a subjectivity that is inextricably twinned and promiscuous. To sustain the illusion as long as possible, this is the event of the poem.
To speak to your question about translation, I want first to make the distinction between translation as a craft and translation as a figure for writing, and the latter is what I think we are talking about; although there are certainly confluences between the two, I don’t presume to speak about the craft of translation. But I can say something about translation as writing, because this is my practice. Here, in the figure of translation, the act of reading is an act of writing. And, of course, the processes of relation are tied to that. For me, this is precisely the place where kin-making happens. The act of reading is the act of making kin. And making kin is an act of recognition. For example, when I read César Vallejo, I recognize that he is my mother. I hear my mother’s voice, which is the voice of Vallejo, as he is himself and as he is translated by Clayton Eshleman. I have many mothers in this way, and many mother tongues.
And in the mode of translation being a figure for writing, what sense do you have of the multiple instances of translation between the form of the book and the form of the exhibition?
As for the exhibition, I am still thinking about it. I am a very slow thinker, and I don’t understand a lot of things. I like it this way, but it is difficult at times, like now, when I would like to say something that is meaningful.
The exhibition was a collaboration with you, and I learned a lot from the decisions that we made together. I felt, while we were working, that I could communicate with you without using a lot of words. That we have been friends for many years was useful, but I find it had more to do with a way of working which is built around questions rather than answers, and the fact that we were searching for a kind of precision that can be made without understanding. We go about this differently, but it was clear we were both comfortable with not knowing exactly what we were doing and also doing it.
And then Dominic would translate these decisions into material experiments, into measurements, figures and costs—it was very alchemical his role. And Alexis I felt was keeping me on task, having a very clear sense of time moving. And when we both got sick, they had to bring it all home (is this the idiom?) and I trusted them completely.
I wonder if you have more of a sense of what we made together?
I like how you put it—a sense of being guided by questions and not having a totalizing plan.
Although I could picture the book as an exhibition when I first read it, the particulars weren’t clear. One of the things I find interesting about making exhibitions and commissioning new work is that it is a co-creative process like we have been talking about; one that is led by the artist, facilitated by art workers, and completed by the viewer. It is a multidirectional conversation and negotiation of meaning-making.
I think for the show, friendship and trust helped things flow and get realized with good timing. So much about producing exhibitions is practical in the end. For instance, making your video very large on the back wall, or deciding to adhere a large chunk of text to the windows without you getting to see it physically first. Those leaps require trust and precision. This was particularly useful when we both got sick during installation and were still able to make key decisions and fully realize the exhibition (thanks in large part to support from the exhibitions team and installation crew at MOCA). Being a mother demands a high level of flexibility and responsiveness, and certainly infuses creative practice with a stop and start quality, but also with resoluteness. I think it served us in this instance.
When I think about what we made together, I have two thoughts, one distinct, one indistinct. First, one of the successes of the show for me is this strange phenomenological experience of reading that it induces, where you are listening, reading, and looking simultaneously. I am still trying to understand this sensation . . .
The indistinct piece is about relationships, relationality—ours, our family’s, our collaborators and co-conspirators (our kin, as you say, via Donna Haraway, another mother of your text!). How any kind of making gets determined by some form of togetherness, and how authorship or authority gets really diffuse as you wade into the togetherness instead of tightening the screws of ego . . .
I think that’s another gift you’ve given me as a collaborator, the gift of being willing to be promiscuous with your own text. To crack your poem open to the exponential possibilities of reading within what seem like fixed text or authorship.
I say this to you in the early morning darkness, with a sound machine blaring and my daughter finally asleep (she has a cold and was up and down all night), having picked out half of this question on my phone while she nurses, trying not to move . . .
I am thinking about this experience of reading in the exhibition too. In the exhibition, you are reading with the whole of your body. And we are always doing that, reading with our bodies, because attention has a metabolic structure, but so often we think of reading as something done with our eyes (or fingers, if it is Braille). In the exhibition, the act of reading is expanded to include looking, listening, hearing, watching, walking and, of course, the parsing out of letters on a page—only that the pages are also walls and windows and floors and moving image and voice, as well as that stand of canvas pages in the middle of the hall—although, now they are enormous, the pages, and it is not entirely clear in which direction you should move. The exhibition disarranges the act of reading and, by doing so, expands the field of the body as an arrangement of senses.
I keep returning to the voice in Chinese that plays throughout the hall. Earlier, we talked about translation as a figure for writing—but it is a beautiful figure for reading as well; when every act of reading becomes a possible site for translation, then every time you read, you are listening for an: other. There is an aperture—within the fact of language itself—that opens, and becomes promiscuous, by which I mean: searching. A part of language goes out in search of this other, whether it exists or not, and an original language (or, to return to Winnicott: another language) is created (anew, each time) in that moment, in the event, that is called reading.
I am rereading your reflections now, and I love this word “pick” that you use: “and I’ve picked out half of this question on my phone last night.” I’ve never heard anyone use it that way before to describe the movement of a finger on the phone—I picture you pinned beneath the child—the child, alternately sleeping and nursing, whose head is on your typing arm—and you’ve got that arm up in the air—alternately thumbing with the phone-hand, and poking at the letters with the other, which is difficult, because it has to reach across your own body as well as the body of the child, who has grown.
And the answer is: Yes, she is your collaborator. And she is mine as well . . .
And we are here again in the deep fold of night. It is 2 a.m. I have gone back and forth to nurse my youngest collaborator, who is one. And it is one of those nights when she is very restless, and the nursing just goes on and on, and as soon as I think she is asleep, she is not. So it starts all over again.
But the exhaustion, of course, doesn’t have to do with this. The exhaustion has to do with the fact that we live in a society that does not actually give us time to live. Time to sleep, time to eat, time to think, to reflect, to dream, and time to reach across our own lives, to make connections that are meaningful across the many ways that we are divided. So we have to “make time” . . . what we are creating in the many hours that we do not have is, perhaps, this other kind of time.
