You take in the tables the light damped atmosphere no voices but whispers the boxes rust and dust the smell of old paper ancient times coming back after long years of just staying un-allowed to speak.
Most people come to find traces of family members, genealogy of blood ties is a popular activity, spicing the banality of existence with ancient roots, hoping to find traces of nobility, salvaging a life almost passed with the graciousness of a name to be added to the tree of relatives that no one has known —loneliness has many ways to make us move.
You are here to uncover but all you feel is burden the piles of history do not ease they confuse it’s a fuss your hands moist at the beginning dry and itchy when you leave.
A train passes outside and you look at traces of someone who made the ministry of justice become the ministry of fools Bureau du Sceau changed into —Bureau des Sots the sounds stay but the orthography becomes critique.
You take notes your pencil sharpened and you think of the language making up the people —Albert leaving again and again, walking into fugues his urge to travel and come back trapped in the language of medical science, labels of multiple personality disorder in the order of things.
And you start to understand why genealogy does not lead to graciousness but to the existential quest to reconnect what has been disconnected.
Somewhat lost in the literature on affect, I decided to switch gear and try to grasp “affect” in free poetic writing. The idea was not to craft a high quality literary poem, but to allow a different register to guide me in the process of understanding affect. My departure point was to make affect the main character in the poem. The rest followed. Here it is.
~~~
Affect is
the voice that dares bring the illogical into the frame; that dares make claims
with no arguments.
Affect
tells the story of the unsaid and is there to contain.
Affect is a
space of silence ready—or unready—to open up.
Affect
knows the body just as well as it knows the interspace between bodies.
Affect
knows the guts; it knows blood pressure; it knows muscle tension, and the
nervous system.
Affect
knows the touch of a skin against another skin. It knows the release; it knows
the abandon—both may be confused but affect knows the difference.
Affect
knows when it knows, and affect lets go when it doesn’t.
Affect
colours the voice.
Affect
reads the ungraspable, and signals it knowing in return.
