Mina Loy, Being Alive. Mina Loy Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. YCAL MSS 6, box 1, folder 20, undated typescript. Read (by AN)(likely a passage) during The Poetry Project‘s 51st Annual New Year’s Day Marathon, January 1, 2025.
… is a “queer coincidence”
This passage echoes a remark from Loy’s unpublished autobiographical novel, “The Child and the Parent,” in a chapter entitled “Being Alive”: “[Being alive] gives us the impression of being the witness of our own experience, of witnessing that witness and of witnessing that witnessing, until there is no end to the multiplication of the witnessed witness within us”
Diane Drouin, ““Some Issue of Little Consequence”: Mina Loy’s Neglected Short Stories”, Journal of the Short Story in English [Online], 77 | Autumn 2021, Online since 01 December 2023, connection on 01 January 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3646
‘Being Alive’ also deserves to be read as separate from Loy’s overarching project. On its own, these fifteen
Sandeep Parmar, 2007
typewritten pages outline Loy’s meditations on the phenomena of existence and her thoughts on how it can be portrayed in her writing. ‘Being Alive’ begins:
Being Alive gives us the sensation of using an infinitessimal [sic] amount of an infinite potentiality, of having an incalculable force driving through us into blocked up channels: of being a semi-paralyzed Hercules.
The toy
become the aesthetic archetype
As if
some patient peasant God
had rubbed and rubbed
the Alpha and Omega
of Form
into a lump of metal
A naked orientation
unwinged unplumed
the ultimate rhythm
has lopped the extremities
of crest and claw
from
the nucleus of flight
The absolute act
of art
conformed
to continent sculpture
—bare as the brow of Osiris—
this breast of revelation
an incandescent curve
licked by chromatic flames
in labyrinths of reflections
This gong
of polished hyperaesthesia
shrills with brass
as the aggressive light
strikes
its significance
The immaculate
conception
of the inaudible bird
occurs
in gorgeous reticence
Brancusi’s Golden Bird, Mina Loy
Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable, April 6, 2023 – September 17, 2023, Bowdoin College Museum of Art. March 19–June 8, 2024, The Arts Club Of Chicago.
Leslie M. Alexander, Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States.
