Toby Altman, Series Contributor

Toby’s series “Bodies in Space” is about sustained thinking of the physicality of the body and its relation to poetry. Here, critical essay fractures, moves like poetry.

“But who asked you to swallow men like oysters, Prince Hamlet?” (Nietzsche)

I said that a house is an engraving that incites desire. But it is not enough to consider the house as an “object.” The house is a privileged entrail, transcending the anatomy of all the houses in which we have found shelter. In every digestion, even the richest, the first task is to find the shell of the essential: the intimate valve of inside space. For the house furnishes us. And the entrail deepens to the point where an immemorial domain opens. We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our entrails are perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that is loss.

What is poetry but the witnessing of a moment that causes one to say entrail? For some, the poem enacts and re-enacts queasy rituals of defilement and revulsion, an obsession with corporeality that reduces everything to appetite and excretion. The poem is then a desire for aperture coupled with a disgust at openness; a need for, alongside a rage about, bodily closure. And, the unction of lyric seals up the skin, leaving the diseased interior to fester “unseen.” One is left with a set of fantasies of access to the other’s interior—concrete fantasies of eating, purging, or penetration—and this is called, often enough, ethics.

Put another way, it is the essential myth of the lyric that the higher the art, the more one may capture that which is art, that thing that lies within language. Here in the graveyard, the soul (which Walter Benjamin calls “earth-bound”) comes to inaugurate the form, to dwell in it like the flesh in an oyster. But this particular creature is the object of Hamlet’s greedy love. He slurps it down, and the slurping is a kind of music. And thus only the eater seems to possess the ultimate truth of entrails: there are no oysters in Hamlet (or Hamlet); only the armor of the Ghost.

But, paying heed to “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is hair to” does not necessarily turn one against the body; on the contrary its very fragility may elicit a tenderness toward the facts of moral embodiment. For instance, there is no doubt that Rilke liked locks. But who doesn’t like both locks and keys? Gentle closing calls for gentle opening, and we should want life always to be well oiled, in the (libidinal) manner of the Eucharist.

Speaking of resurrection, let me start over. I said that a house is an engraving that incites desire, and the word is delicious with itself: in-grave-ing, [a] writing which is also [a] ritual of mourning. [A] ritual which is also the making of [a] place. A house for the body which is also an image of it. For the house furnishes us, and deepens the entrail until it opens on a reservoir of oil, black, Eucharistic, distilled from the body itself. I mean language, which is built to envelope and sustain itself. I mean: all sorrow is booty sorrow and all mourning is a form of eating. Praise its salvific unmaking.

The author would like to thank Gaston Bachelard, Vanessa Place, and David Hillman, for donating their language to this essay.

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Toby Altman is a conceptual poet. His poems have appeared. He is the author of and the recipient of. He currently lives in, where he works as and serves on the editorial board for. For more of his, please visit his and follow him on.