SW: Could you read a bit? Can you read from this book? Or the part where he falls in love?
EM: I mean, I just can’t find things, but I’ll try …
[Eileen flips through pages of the book and then begins to read. Please note: the excerpt below may not match the original grammar and punctuation.]
‘Love is a remarkable thing. So is its ability to shorten long roads and to unite terrestrial worlds with celestial ones. It is a reconstruction, a bridge building, a greening of glassy deserts devoid of water and dust. Love is a remarkable thing. The guide for believers in the shortest Path to God with love colours dance across your melodies, reconciliation and tolerance expand within you. You forgive the one who is wrong about you and the one who does you wrong. You plunge right in without fear of drowning. You soar. And if you fall, you fall upward.’
It just goes on for pages, and it’s a work in translation [by Luke Leafgren]. So, we’ve got to give him that, but still, I was like, ‘I know where you are, dude.’
SW: He wrote this in prison?
EM: Yeah, and it’s interesting a few days ago, a Chinese poet, Lao Yang, who wrote a great book called Pee Poems (2022), just got here after spending two years in jail in China for being an activist. He’s passing through Marfa, his publisher lives here, and he’s heading to a monastery in New Mexico, and he’s amazing. He has such sweetness. I have a group, and we meditate together here once a week, and he joined us and what was amazing was I had just finished reading Abu Srour’s book. Then Yang was in town and wanted to meet me as I had blurbed his book earlier, but he had just been in jail, and last night I was watching The Battle of Algiers (1966) …
SW: I haven’t seen it, but I always go to watch it.
EM: You have to see it. It’s such a good film. It’s fantastic. It’s like Pasolini, the way Gillo Pontecorvo uses human faces and the agony and the ecstasy of revolution. It’s really beautiful. But we’re in it – we’re in jail in there too, you know? So, I feel like the interior state of revolution has been right in my face lately.
SW: One thing kind of follows another …
EM: Yeah, hope.
SW: Last night I watched Pasolini’s Arabian Nights (1974). And I fell asleep, admittedly, before the end, but the night before, I watched Salò (1975) for the first time with a friend who is staying with me.
EM: Amazing.
SW: What do you think of Pasolini?
EM: Pasolini is great. He’s a poet. He’s a novelist. He’s a filmmaker. He’s revolutionary.
SW: After watching Salò, we were like, ‘Should we feel this way?’
EM: Of course. And it was his last work. It’s so important. That’s the last thing he did.
SW: Appalling but beautiful.
EM: Hold on. I’ll read a love poem …
[Eileen gets up, walks around, and sits back down with a manuscript.]
I’m thinking of this one poem because of where I am in the novel.
SW: Have you been writing by hand, or do you type it out?
EM: I tend to write by hand.
SW: Even for a thousand pages?
EM: Prose, mostly I don’t. Mostly.
[Eileen flips through pages of a manuscript.]
Um … where the fuck is this poem? Oh, yeah. Okay, cool. It’s called, it’s called ‘No No’ …
SW: Oh, I have screenshotted this one as one of my favourite love poems.
EM: Oh, cool. Oh, great.
[Crosstalk about the coincidence of both choosing the same poem.]
SW: But go ahead. You can read it.
EM: Yeah, of course. Fantastic.
[Eileen reads ‘No No.’]
No No Look I don't know about getting things back a woman stands in a room & it's winter she sees herself there are 3 hot things to tell her lover soon the day changes shape not this bird but it's different the box stays the room in her head soon both heat & winter are gone I want to live in my thoughts of you, I believe in you like a door that returns
SW: The ending’s great. It’s fun. I think about the last part a lot when I think about love poetry; I think about the poem you wrote: ‘ … I believe / in you like a door / that returns.’ Is it a revolving door, or like a door that swings back and forth, or what kind of door?
EM: I think a door that closes, but then a door opens. I think it’s all the things that doors do.
