Reading Barthes + the Hurricanes
by Terri Witek
Pre-Storm:
When 3 handsome Hill and Wang editions of Roland Barthes arrive, as I had never read A Lover’s Discourse I unsuspectingly take what B will soon call “le leurre.” And proceed to fall for it, as used to be said: “hook, line and sinker.”
1. Richard Howard
w/o French I’m no judge, but how nicely specific of Wayne Koestenbaum to note that when RH translates Barthes’ “se dépouille” (referring to the lure again) as what’s “shed,” the translator keeps letters s, e, and d. Mark and repetition as well as meaning-content (how things are s e d) will matter to this translation, then. Koestenbaum praises too RH’s way with the iconic “image-repertoire,” and today this combo-phrase + B’s “adhesiveness” seems right for the languages of both love and weather. An “amorous subject” waits out the blank space dangled on a chat string; meanwhile, in the same phone-holding hand, winds not yet here spaghetti out on a tracker app.
Reading the somewhat flashy intro and the riveting first figures in A Lover’s Discourse, though, I’m discomfited by surprise: why, so soon after opening the book, should I feel “shame”? Walking backwards from this feeling (these hours before the storm are already excruciatingly slow and tense), I recall a bead on a loop of Florida visits by the same poet and translator. Our first encounter was planned for an unfamiliar group at a steak house. For some reason, despite the fact I helped coordinate RH’s visit, I misunderstood the location and drove to a sign including “Steak House” 10 miles up the highway. This turned out to be a private club: J and I were turned back at the door by a stylish brunette. Further in, darkness prevailed–we heard clinking but saw no diners. We backed out and hurried in reverse to the town we had fled.
Something seems to catch on/in my tongue here. Can the repertoire be distracted via its own what Barthes +RH calls “lunatic project”? Another translating Richard, for example, might be Richard Zenith, whose wily work passing on Fernando Pessoa may be called somewhat “loose” word by word but it’s also great, really, and so generous (that 1000+ page biography!). Maybe it counts that I hear Zenith brilliantly but unpretentiously lecture each year in the same hot summer week (the stage once included his propped crutches after an accident on the metro) and that I can read some Portuguese. Or that I have an x baptized Richard or that I once traveled an hour up a highway to meet a blind date named Howard. Maybe such minor tick-throughs of personal context help decide, later, what will be gathered pre-storm. What do we hope to shed or to keep (blow one puff of breath over) from now’s particular stake house?
The way A Lover’s Discourse is helpful (+ profound) about name-slippage doesn’t need alphabetical dice rolls or the pratfalls of memory: “the more I experience the specialty of my desire, the less I can give it a name.” As it turns out, after the awkward dinner (for which the host both apologizes and obscurely blames me) we arrive at the reading hour. The college bookstore had ordered RH’s books and many volumes grace a table at the venue entrance. A lone woman holds up what looks like a self-help book. A moment of charged horror; as Barthes says: “I have received orders not to move.” The bookstore clerk expertly whisks away half the table. As we filter into the theater, the woman tipsily pleads: “but I want to see THAT Richard Howard.”
2. Some Hurricanes
It matters to the spot I’ve marked in A Lover’s Discourse that while I am reading, just a few days earlier Hurricane Helene, so devastating to Florida’s west coast, pretty much brushed past us in inland central Florida. Meanwhile North Carolina, hitherto one of the safest climate spots in the US, turns horror show. A writer friend powertools through fallen trees to escape–he will post his drive all the way home to Colorado. Meanwhile, where we are in central Florida, Milton bears down.
This time of year, the system of storm names are always re-explained. We never quite remember the rules: 6 alphabetical lists of names are in play for Atlantic hurricanes; these rotate through every 6 years (is it the double 6 that can’t quite stick?). 2024’s Alberto–William will re-appear in 2030, this to say. Some names are retired if the storm was particularly brutal, though, so who knows if we’ll see these latest (especially Helene) again. 2005’s Katrina has long been replaced by Katia, 2017’s Irma by Idalia. And of course just as no hurricane is identical, no name, even graphically exact in repetition, can be divorced from its personal and historical contexts. Some associations that slip past me as I read A Lover’s Discourse, hanging briefly before dispersing, include Helene Cixous, whose pleasure centers collided body+theory into shocked intimacy when I was in school. Milton (many repetitions of Florida =Paradise Lost slide by as pre-hurricane wit on social media) I sort of dismissed in that epoch, though the professor hired as a Miltonist was eventually caught up in a vivid sex sting (I first typed string) downtown. To couple Helene and Milton like this so long afterwards in Florida’s shallow sand and at my address feels suspicious. But even newscasters over-adamantly stress the storms’ names as if they struggle to keep the words from clutching each other. Why the difficulty of translating into/on air? The pattern of _I I _ (iamb + trochee) is easily voiced in daily US English. Names Helene and Milton don’t sink under a clutch of repeated consonants, either (one example: Emerald Mallard– a breakfast- to- lunch place that appears on my bank statement later as Bread Boys). Is it that not enough space/time passes between storms now, so _I I_ catch together ? A garbled notice about a post-Milton delivery arrives bearing the name Helene. I think spam until the package lands: a new batch of COVID tests from the government.
3. Some minor bs
The slippage Barthes encourages collects little fetishes–a blue shirt? blue scarf? The amorous subject doesn’t recognize these from their lovers’ previous moments together. Before I ordered 3 Barthes books, my house was already fetish-collecting, nearly daily, a striped bee. It would drop into view somewhere in the kitchen. We preferred to believe they were the same bee rather than, as Barthes would say, X and then Y, but as we carefully discarded one each morning we know between us there were nearly 30. J would hear a tinny bzzzz from bed (how strange to think we were whispering there, just hours ago, about where to sleep as Milton most dangerously passed). A few mornings we even saw the bee drop, seemingly from a light fixture. Once it dangled on a spider’s filament outside the sliding door. Bee loud glade I started to say over and over: Yeat’s line ran together if I speeded it up with a throat push. Blow glade blow glad replaces what I type as I’m typing but like most corrective text, it misses. I can’t make what went down sound right here. Bloudddddglayd. I notice I’m clutching the ds, little b’s blown backward.
What happened to them during the storm? “Life consists of these little touches of solitude,” B offers through RH (soon I’ll be reading Camera Lucida). Later, J and I curl in bed but there’s no post-Milton bzzzz. Bent slightly inward, each alone and not long to live when we met—stunned little astronauts, where are you?
4. Pre+ post again
Where we live (at first I am uncorrected for typing “love”) there’s a distinct pattern to storm arrivals. So each hurricane season we gather paper bowls and bottled water and gas up for a seemingly inevitable blow-out. Flashlights. Documents. We plan where to go if we leave. Curiously (well, this time we are also recovering from illness), in the days before Milton we rush as minimally as we had with Helene, moving no furniture (or what the news calls “projectiles”) from outdoors. We bring in no plants. I do straighten a stone bird bath toppled by Helene that marks a pet’s burial spot: I’m just about well enough to manage it. Everyone who lives in Florida (+where+where+++) waits in the way Barthes describes in pages that by now bristle with so many little plastic markers they scratch my left wrist as I read. Of course only a no show can be desperately hoped for in storms–a reversal of Barthes’ longed for arrival. The appearance of the loved one at his table–always late–does bring a new set of tortures in A Lover’s Discourse, though, and something about a storm’s non-arrival feels a bit familiar, too, in this regard. The furtive relief when hurricane graphics move above or below the blue dot of home….I page back to the cafe scene in which two rivals quite pleasurably bring the non-appearing one back to life between them (see Gossip) because he never arrives.
But (Barthes, do you say this? RH, I can’t seem to find it) it’s also very hard to put into words how, as we wait in tension, worry and hope as hours drag into night, we are already waiting even more potently –we are more THERE FOR/E– the hurricane’s aftermath. Hard to say to those who frantically check in beforehand (yes, we’ve decided to stay) that we never quite believe this storm will be the end of us, though if we still have wi-fi we’ll see evidence (2 people die when trees fall into their roofs, 2 die by heart attack). But we are also waiting with still more longing and dread for what’s next. Flat stillness broken by sirens and saws. The weird smells and clumsy eating, the so humid heat and procedural arguments, the news about whether a berm at a local water treatment plant holds. Because my family’s repertoire also includes Katrina, which blew some of us away from New Orleans, the aftermath of this current hurricane will include, for example, technical exchanges about how electric cars fare in flood waters. Thus returns a drowned, unusable blue car, the cat which re-appeared to make 4 strange cats in the house, the 3 -year- old in a car seat at midnight (she’s now 22). These aren’t exactly memories. There’s not, either practically or aspirationally, a word or a sound or a taste I can muster here except for what happens. And as these things rustle through and past, as the floodlines rise or fall, we are also completely present to gripe about the power company, right up to the moment 3 Duke Energy trucks stop and we rush from our doors.
At last the storm passes, the trucks lumber off, debris leans stacked along curbs. A tree which fell directly in front of a cop car on Clara Ave vanishes: that was the vid clip on national news, shot on a street two over that bears the name of a childhood friend. The weather is clear + 10 degrees cooler. Last weekend they could run water for 5 minutes in St Pete. “Gray water” appears in general speech now and seems ready to stick.
We won’t mark this season by week every year, though in Florida we tense up at a certain point in the shortening days (the avocados are nearly ripe) and start waiting. But, if the system holds and this is due, after all, to the big, ultimately fatal change of our weathers, Barthes’ great A Lover’s Discourse may still hold and accrue. From now foreward, even pressed into a shelf, my blue and green markers curling against a dark wall, this wonderful storm book won’t ever quite close back to its unopened self. Maybe (why not include the hopefulness of doubt?) the next thing we love will match our yearning in what Barthes through RH beautifully dubs “coincidence.” Or maybe waiting’s our home. Maybe we are already both before and after, caught in the next storm’s approach just as we are already its sheds. Maybe nothing will happen for long unnamed months until summer’s festival fireworks arrive again and, to those who live here, the colored rockets sound both like gunshots and the buzz and pop of transformers in the dark.
