Hejinian, Lyn

English

Iowa Research Online

Masthead Logo The Iowa Review
Volume 26
Issue 2 Summer Article 43
1996
From "A Border Comedy"
Lyn Hejinian
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Recommended Citation
Hejinian, Lyn. "From "A Border Comedy"." The Iowa Review 26.2 (1996): 94-98. Web.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.4609
Lyn Hejinian 
from A Border Comedy 
for John Zorn 
A comedian is a foreigner at border 
Or comedienne?antinomian 
Performing the comedy known as barbarism 
This 
An encounter 
(Encounters, after all, are the essence of comedy) 
With forge and link 
Which dopplegangers (perfect matchers) match 
With whistling in the left ear 
And symptoms of melancholy?gloomy dreams, twitching, jerking, 
itching, and swift changes of mood 
With the capacity to transform an inaccessible object into something 
we long voluptuously to embrace 
And ourselves into an unquiet subject?at last! baffled! 
Change, then, is the exemplary connection 
Between romance and improvement 
The curvature of the pine in the pink of the snow 
Out of nowhere?uncanny 
And falling under a squirrel's frenzy 
The color of the sky is cast in territory belonging to "the public" 
Under spell part globe, part departure of a vessel 
Passing speech through law 
Turning south 
Where we're the oddballs and peppercorns 
Picking pace 
Like other comic poets 
I'll point out that tragic writers have merely to let their characters 
announce who they are for the audience instantly to know everything 
Whereas comic writers use original plots 
And start from scratch 
Shifting points of view with uninterrupted sincerity as in dreams 
94 
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But more specifically (comedians are always specific) in a dream of 
meeting Richard Foreman as an old man fond of me 
Who later, as a young man, when we are introduced, merely extends 
one finger of his left hand when I hold out my right to shake 
It's clear he doesn't like A Border Comedy 
It's an awkward chunk the size of a fist 
I (with the point of view of a man, so I am a man) refuse to laugh 
All night a woman (a spy) and I have been switching identities 
That way we can maintain inconsistencies 
In 
reality 
. . . 
Inconsistencies that are part of the world (or rather that are not part of 
the world, since they appear when one withdraws from the world or 
when the world withdraws from one) 
But anxiety in comedy comes close 
Like one's hilarious approaching fate 
Which is a worthy cause 
Asking only some small assuaging sum 
A terminus 
Okay 
Comedy puts an end to satisfaction 
It puts the fit to a mismatch 
Where the missing villain passes 
For the figure at its shoulder 
Who drops at that moment right down a well 
Under the eyes of some viewer 
And springs forth again?like the bride in the camera? 
At its shoulder 
Looking over, then under, then over again 
And then spinning on its head and taking off into the trees 
To change its name from Melody to Comedy 
For laughs 
But what is laughter? 
Hobbes (1651) laughed in "sudden glory" at recognition of his 
superiority over someone else 
Whereas Bergson (1911) saw it as "something mechanical encrusted 
on the living," 
95 
A punishment to all unsocial persons 
For Ludovici (1932) it gave evidence of his superior adaptation to life 
For Priestley (1777) it arose from the perception of contrast 
And for Leacock (1935) from perception of the contrast between a 
thing as it is or ought to be and a thing smashed out of shape 
While Schopenhauer (1849) laughed at the accuracy of a perception 
that confirmed a thought 
And Koestler (1960) at the transfer in a train of thought from one 
logic to another 
Spiegel (1984) felt it expressed ambivalence, a clash of incompatible thoughts 
Freud (1928) saw it as the "triumph of narcissism" 
And Gregory (1924) as a relief 
Laughter is a lesson in linkage then or in overlapping and belief 
Just last night I laughed 
At the waste of the time it took to attempt to ogle, tell, and rationalize 
At the very same time we lay on the same side of the squint 
We were hard on sentiment 
But soft on Buddenbrook 
On impact 
In allegory 
Or else as else, gregarious 
Foreigners as allegorists in a field allegorized 
As adverse 
But not contemptuous 
There were ferns, green and russet rocks, stumps, shadows 
Under the sun on this side of this coin or sheet 
Depicting a child falling from the roof 
Its wings blue and difficult to discern but opening magnificently at the 
window 
His mother later saying he had fallen in calm imagination 
But calm must take to an 'intellectual breeze' 
How could there be two suns? two identical dogs? 
Calculated?shivering 
The field was round so we went around it 
We did this with tedious, milch animal timelessness 
Since we were coming to a decision 
A decision on a top 
96 
The upper end, nearest the beginning still spinning 
And cream 
For wind 
And sincerities unknown 
And by the way produced an allegory about the impossibility of 
separating Granny from Little Red Riding Hood 
But asymmetry is unavoidable 
Face to face 
Between justice and anxiety, scruples and melancholy, paranoia and a 
compulsion to satisfy 
Without guilt 
By paying conscience money to "restore what's been wrongfully 
acquired" 
Between two worlds, the world in which one tells and the world of 
which one tells 
In passwords 
Overreach 
Against stone access 
The lidded horizon 
And strips 
The boundary then is circumstance 
Button 
Effect 
Entertaining outside talisman and anecdote 
Sir Walter Scott claimed to have noticed as a boy that his chief 
competitor in school, the boy who was always at the head of the 
class, habitually twisted a certain button on his jacket when called 
on in class 
Then Scott himself rose to the head of the class?just by cutting off 
that button 
Over the grunting lace 
Narration 
But narration in its totality keeps secret 
It surrenders its meaning to its listener's desire but covers its secret in 
shifts 
It is true that it makes but it moves sense 
So Bree Smith knew she'd never succeed in teaching cynical Devlin 
Hunt anything about love 
97 
After all, what chance did an angel like her have with a man who can't 
believe in miracles 
Are you counting syllables? 
Certainly nothing could get between Jessie Burke and her ranch, not 
even oilman Brett Murdock 
There he sat by the well with a witch 
To stare between her open lips as she was letting him eat maggots from 
her tongue 
The tongue so engaged is a shovel at a sapling 
The mother is always supplanted 
But don't worry, she'll be back to explain the same old things all over 
again 
In exchange for sex with her daughters 
Gender is useless in such a scene 
It offends the ear 
Or ears?time is the product of twins, boots, and difference 
Experience then is divided 
Without such division no rhyme could occur 
No repetition or sound recognition 
No names 
Love is an education through which standards are changed 
It provokes extravagant enthusiastic doubt and (sometimes) a tyrannical 
metaphysics 
And it encourages plagiarism 
So that one applies to one person's body strategies one can only have 
learned elsewhere 
But doesn't remember 
Developed in dreams or in the daytime working unconscious 
Which draws the finger unexpectedly deeper than ever before into the 
eye 
Which continues to see it 
98 


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