The Connoisseur of Alleys, front cover photograph by Advaita Patel
The
Connoisseur of Alleys
Eileen R. Tabios
Marsh Hawk Press, 2016
ISBN 978-0-9964275-1-7
This review of Eileen R. Tabios’
extraordinary The Connoisseur of Alleys,
is a microcosm. Our focus is the chapter entitled “Nota Bene Eiswein” [4],
P.59. By isolating one section, the intention of our review is to illuminate
the grand ellipse that is The Connoisseur
of Alleys.
“I forgot we were swollen underground with
rain as certain elements erased their absence:
whisper
Song
stairway
I forgot the moving prop of clouds can
fall to soften the edges of dark architecture….”
Tabios burrows through the past. Her
elliptical remembrances of forgetting evolve as the rarefied dance of an
orthodox means to keep traditions alive for good or to the detriment of a given
history. History’s relentless descent as depicted, for example, by Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), is an
abstract Cubist detail in movement which renders the Nude as indescribable.
She’s a naked woman who is always pulled or scratched apart like, “a silver
platter on the beach.”
The sand immediately covers any image
rendered by a person, and presents spam as words-flow escape their capture by
context or by the luxury of forgetting “fingers poking through holes burnt by
epistemology.” The bride as a nude is metamorphosed into the archetype of the
woman as a Dada cube.
“I forgot we agreed to toss away the
blindfold so that our ears can become more than holes for burning stones tossed our
way by a cruel race….Or stones tossed our way by an incompetent health care
system….”
One may surmise that these Tabios “stones”
serve as a kind of proxy room from which, say a Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, could have been written as a concrete vault
for throwing stones into a pit. The stone thrower, via the Proust analogy, is
Tabios herself or Tabios ourselves—we, her and us who live during an age of
flower wallpaper comfort. The injury is our leisure, our right of return to the
“blindfold.” We are forgotten and justified in our broken rooms, in our “cruel
race.”
“Or stones tossed our way by a passive
bureaucrat wielding power over the education of the child we
will never have….Or stones tossed our way by that obscene combination of trust fund
baby and hedge fund billionaire….”
The frame of import is born a “trust fund
baby” within the “hedge” of a silver mirror. Reflection is an open landscape. A
beach is full of stones. We forget the accumulation. We forget to collect. We
forget that stones push the tide forward, that stones rattle like snakes in
high wind. Tabios reminds us that history is often exclusive in meter.
“I forgot a mirrored face only partially
owns its reflection….I forgot a long-haired woman exists, but outside the frame as has
been reality for centuries.”
In this small excerpt, Eileen R. Tabios explores
the objectification of women as the historian’s intrepid cliché. Who will see
past the body, past the skin, past the allure modeling itself for the pleasure
of others? Of course, “outside the frame” we are reminded, “a mirrored face
only partially owns its reflection.” The rest is owned by the strong poesis of
voice, a voice tuned to the spirit of the ellipse. It contains a multitude of how
we forget to remember, and in so doing fill forgetting with absence.
In “Nota Bene Eiswein” [4], P.59 of The Connoisseur of Alleys, Eileen R.
Tabios creates a terminus for the infinity of recall. We read her the way we
read our fading memory, half-chimerical in the distance like a faint semaphore,
but never completely dark. We are summoned to continue reading and become
connoisseurs of ourselves.
Reviewed by Daniel Y. Harris & Irene
Koronas
