tentatives,
Ellen Dillon
Pamenar Press, 2023
Reflection can be fascinating. Never mind the Greek myth's cautionary tale against staring at oneself in a pond for too long, and the unending cry (still?) against selfies. Never mind the long theses which now sit in electronic repositories, and the monologues of slightly inebriated or high and very deep people. We know the draw of the image and of the word from experience, their incantatory power, the movement into self and around self they draw us into – a draw with which readers of poetry may be too familiar already.
In her incisive book tentatives, Ellen Dillon interrupts a reflection that goes too far in its treatment of… reflection. The premise is delicate: Fernand Deligny, a very influential French educator, writes a movie, Ce gamin, là, about his attempt to create an idyllic setting for the lives of autistic children and adults. In this setting, he maintains silence in order to keep them away from nothingness. The self of these nonverbal children is, to him, absent. As they follow circular lines, they circle nothing, remaining lost.
Dillon's poems cut through Deligny’s reflection – and its pretense at saving people from reflection by keeping them away from language: “In the years since first watching that film,” she writes in her opening note, “I’ve never been able to come to terms with a grammatical sleight-of-hand that whips the reflexive pronoun se/ oneself away from a non-verbal autistic child. These poems are my first tentatives, attempts to bridge or find a way around this abyss.”
This premise is vital to those who are so often still seen and treated as below humanity and kept outside of language or conversation. Rejecting the possibility of any absence of reflection, Dillon wanders around herself and through her surroundings, and around Deligny, responding to him. She explores the grounds of the film and of her own immediate settings to find a way back to ideas and work that remain important to her.
Deligny’s fascination with the reflexivity of certain verbs in French leads him to think about selfhood, le soi, the self of the reflexive pronoun se, the self of Dillon’s oneself. Because Dillon watches the movie in French, with captions, she is able to find these distortions of reality through language; distortions of language through ideas; and distortions of spoken language through automatic captioning. Although she confronts the problem directly, she also uses the inadequation between French and English to highlight it and destabilize it.
The first section, or first tentative, is fully bilingual, with the same poems existing in French and English versions side by side. Dillon opens on the affirmation that reflection is never completely developed or attained, nor complete. A title already indicates this lack of limit: “I Reflec.” The French title is even more generous: “Je réfléchi” is missing the ‘s’ that would make it into the present indicative; this lack also places grammatical meaning on the phrase, where “je” becomes a noun rather than a pronoun, a “je” that is “réfléchi,” an “I” that is “reflected,” like Rimbaud's “Je est un autre.”
We find allusions to “nouning” throughout the book. While Dillon generally gives close translations between her versions, she changes “nouning” to “adjectivation” in French (pages 20-21): “it’s this kind of nouning that’s got us where we are wherever that is & really we should stop” / “ce genre d’adjectiver nous a mal servi en quoi que ce soit et il est bien temps qu’on en arrête.” Nouns give way to adjectives, and this transfer changes the operation that poetry leads upon language, makes the operation more total through its different actions in the two languages. Loss gives way to uselessness, bringing us back to her hesitation and opposition to Deligny’s supposition that nonverbal autistic children are lost, perhaps because in many relationships, language is of no use to understand many aspects of one another.
Movement is also a common point for Dillon’s reflection: “L’eau qui coule rafraîchit / mais ne réfléchit pas” / “Flowing water refreshes / but doesn’t reflect” (pages 26-27). Small differences in sound here do the work of displacement, the a and aî for the é, the fresh for the flect, an r swapped for an l in both languages. Even in singing like water, in repeating the sounds water makes, we find ourselves closer to ourselves than we might think: “on dit qu’on est ce qu’on dit” / “they say you are what you say” (26-27). There is a chiasmic structure in the proximities between to say to one self “water” and to say oneself water, opening the possibility of making oneself water. In refusing to settle, Dillon opposes what she feels most intimately, that which Deligny inherits from a Lacanian philosophical formation (despite his uneasy relationship with Lacan’s ideas) – that is, the position that language makes us say things, that we are said by language, that “ça parle;” that the unconscious, it, speaks.
Even as – or perhaps because – she places the two languages side by side to undo the equivocations proper to one language through the other, Dillon is aware of the inability of either language to fully hold the other to account. Staying with the idea and equivocity of reflection in English, she writes (page 18/19): “je réfléchis / je reflète // comme l’eau // ces phénomènes” and “I reflect / I reflect // like water // these phenomena.” Here, by insisting on the difference between the two meanings by using the word “reflect” twice in English, she states clear;y that she does not only give a reflection of phenomena like water does (without precision, with movement), but also reflects upon phenomena like water does, leaving it up to the reader to decide how water might lead a reflection (perhaps throw light on what is above it?).
The second section, which is mostly in English, features poems in prose whose development is logical in a more traditional fashion, and where we find a commentary and a response to Deligny – but also a response to her own poems, as in: “I know that réfléchir and refléter are not the same / yet here I insist / on trying to make them / do the same work / to fold them / into English / on reflection.” (41) In this section prose poems can be found side by side, or facing poems in verse reassembled to make them look like prose, as in the quotation above. The prose poems tend to be hurried by a staccato, where commas and periods doing the work of the slash, thrusting the reader forward while interrupting the absorption into reading.
Short bursts of words and meaning take hold of the page, creating parallels everywhere. “Kingdom of things” becomes “thingdom” and “we never pace it out / each installed / in a stall of our own / stalling for time.” (47) And even then, Dillon interrupts this rhythm before it achieves its own hypnotic effect, giving us “Words that shake the kaleidoscope and unsettle scarlet and emerald paillettes to form a dazzling fractal mirage, a place that time will make for us if we can just keep up the tiring and the holding up.” (50) She refuses any set pattern, stops repetition before it becomes regular, granting a measure of freedom from the hold of the gestures that impose themselves on us from within, from our obsessions and difficulties of fitting within the world – but also those gestures that others impose upon us, failing to recognize what exists before their gaze and words. This section, titled “a cloud of eyes,” deepens a spiral of repetitions and lateral shifts to attain an emancipatory activity through language. It is truly beautiful in its destruction of expectations.
The third and final section, also in English, mixes stills of Deligny’s film and words. In presenting fragments of sentences, it shows that reflection is always broken, to be pieced together, mended – without either state (broken or full) being natural or pure. Dillon builds around slightly different repetitions of words in regular type (“Noting will come of nothing” … “Trying again” … “Gaining nothing” … “Noting gains” … and so on) to let revolve around them clouds of words in italics associated with these words, but without a thread, containing their own repetitions as well, which challenge and compete with those that drive the poem along (68). She thus recreates with words and their disposition and rhythm the effect of someone spinning on themselves, moving in irregular spirals, undoing the regularization of language and motion brought by Deligny’s practice – but really only pushing this practice further than he did, or could. She remains fully aware of the limits of her own undertaking, acting solely on herself and her readers, against the direct effects of Deligny’s practice on those in his care, and against the side effects of his film and writings on their viewers and readers.
Dillon brings the imperfections of reflection into Deligny’s fall back into the search for purity even as he argued for the impossibility of purity. The book is named after Deligny’s attempts or experiments, which he named “tentatives” instead of taking on the scientific language of educational psychology. Dillon uses many modalities of reflection to distort, elongate, complexify, reframe, and add to Deligny’s words and images, without ever losing sight of the presence of Deligny’s film and being. And she shows that that critique, rather than destroying its object, can only move our focus so close to it that we will have no choice but to look elsewhere.
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), is not-so-newly out with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome.
