with Djuna Barnes (on the left)
My heart is abode of terror and a snake
An essay on the Baroness
does not violate the rules
but enters a realm, Bodenheim said,
into which they can’t pursue her …
A realm without rules
that could appear as Dada
but Dada could also be a desert,
a dead realm of dry distance.
It is not even that she alone
of all the Dadaists “lived Dada,”
lived Dada as Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia
did not, but that the Dada she lived
was never quite Dada, was
overtly apocalyptic, was in fact
pure Expressionism, that
final vision to which
she bore such true witness
in an earlier, European life,
when she was a baroness only in spirit,
a baroness purely of the spirit.
And so in all matters
regarding Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
there resides what can only be
called a spiritual quality
though one never so evident
as in the most violent of
her antagonisms,
where she shone forth
as the living instance of
“a principal of
non-acquiescence.” (Pound)
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