Tillalala Chronicles (henceforth TC) was not familiar with David Markson until June, 2010, when Steve Fama (The Glade Of Theoric Ornithic Hermetica) mentioned his passing in an email, after reading news of Markson’s passing at Silliman’s blog.
TC grew immediately intrigued when it was mentioned that Markson’s novels were based on collage, a non-linear assembly of anecdotes and facts.
TC has a preference for writing that is peripatetic, untied, nomadic, wandering, meandering, all-inclusive.
Drifting, journeying, itinerant, rambling.
Oscillating, pulsing, reaching, eccentric.
TC enjoys facts. Factoids.
For example, the clarinet has five sections: the mouthpiece, the tuning barrel, the upper middle joint, the lower middle joint, and the bell. It is the youngest member of the woodwind instruments and is the most elusive in its origins. It is a notoriously difficult instrument to play, its large number of perforations necessitated by its tendency to overblow, i.e. to pass into its second mode of vibration at the interval of a twelfth above the fundamental sounds, rather than at the octave. Semitones are needed in the primary scale without recourse to fork-fingering, and to link, chromatically, the top of the primary scale with the twelfth.
If David Markson were a musical instrument, he would be a clarinet.
The clarinet was Mozart’s favorite instrument. TC imagines he loved it for its dreaminess, and the infinite range of its compass.
TC wonders if the quality of dreaminess might conflict with the use of collage, since by nature collage is fragmentary, and dreams are sequential, however crazy and eccentric the sequence happens to be.
TC just answered his own question.
Digressive, errant, disconnected, random.
In 1844, a patent was granted for a clarinette à anneaux mobiles. Thus was born the Boehm System clarinet, the preferred instrument of most clarinet players.
The clarinet has many accidentals, notes whose pitch is outside the mode indicated by the key signature.
Deviant, anomalistic, unusual, offbeat.
Everything a mainstream book editor would hate.
To date, TC has read two Markson novels: This Is Not A Novel and The Last Novel.
In This Is Not A Novel, TC noted that a preponderate number of facts had to do with a writer’s or artist’s death, the date they died, and the cause of their death. This left an overwhelming impression of mortality and gave rise to thoughts of a somewhat morbid nature, mainly that the knowledge that we will one day die is the central sad fact of the human condition, and that many writers die as a result of poverty, neglect, and suicide.
In The Last Novel, TC noted that the issue of poverty was emphasized in its litany of facts pertaining to writers living in extremities of financial need, the author’s own in some instances, presented with a certain baldness, no trace of self-pity at all, simply a recognition that this is what is to be expected if one so chooses to be a writer, and write as one’s genius encourages one to write, not as the market dictates.
TC read both books while lying on the couch. This is TC’s chief mode of literary delectation. With the weight off one’s body, and the sense of repose augmented by a supine position, one’s mind is best able to absorb vagaries of thought and nuances of insight.
Reading anything for a duration on an electronic screen is impossible, which makes TC wonder about the merit of keeping a blog.
TC found it difficult to stop reading both Markson novels, for reasons that cannot be explained, since there is no plot, no character development, nothing to induce one to keep turning pages, except for the grace of many of the sentences, the quirkiness of many others, and the fascinating facts pertaining to the creative life.
TC loves to see blocks of prose. Beckett’s How It Is, nearly all of Paul Metcalf’s writing, Cioran’s De l’inconvénient d’être né, and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons are further examples. Blocks of prose elevate a sense of materiality, make language look like something you can pick up, like a glass or vase, and turn it around, and examine it while feeling it with one’s hands. It is an illusion, but a very compelling one.
TC found it droll the way Markson chose to begin certain paragraphs or sentences with the name of a city, country, date, or circumstance, and end it with a preposition. It sounded clunky, deliberately so, as if there were something to be said for clunkiness in writing, in the same way dissonant notes sound so alluring in jazz and rock n’roll.
One of Markson’s earlier novels is called The Ballad Of Dingus Magee, and was made into a movie, Dirty Dingus Magee, starring Frank Sinatra. TC will keep an eye out for a DVD and watch it one day. TC doubts that he will enjoy a more conventional approach to writing by the same author, but is hopeful of being surprised, and proved wrong.
Frank Sinatra!
TC notes that the sentence Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke. appears several times in The Last Novel. But isn’t each word considered a sentence? What makes a sentence, a sentence?
Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.
That sums it up.
The measure of a man’s greatness would be in terms of what his work cost him.
Wittgenstein once told someone.
The above is a quote from page 147 of The Last Novel. It is pertinent to mention that Wittgenstein was born into wealth, and gave away nearly his whole fortune to his brothers and sisters. TC surmises that it is doubtful that Wittgenstein’s use of the word ‘cost’ has anything at all to do with money, though money would be part of the picture.
TC wonders how Markson knew The Last Novel would be his last novel. Was it the severity of his illness? Did Markson set out to write this work until he died, knowing that his death was inevitable, and imminent? Is that what happened? It is said his two children found his body lying in bed in his Greenwich Village apartment. That must have been sad, and grim, and upsetting, for all involved.
Though perhaps not for Markson. Unless ghosts exist. And Markson's ghost was hanging around his apartment when his children stopped by. Rather than heading straight to heaven, or whatever might constitute an afterlife, assuming one's personality remains intact, and is able to hear and see and maintain a conversation, or make sounds, like the howling in castles late at night, and the jangle of chains.
Why chains?
TC would not rule out feelings of relief, either, for all involved, in matters of death, and the death in particular, of a loved one, someone with whom you have spent a good portion of your life, or shared deep and intimate feelings.
TC speculates whether it might be a little gauche, or insensitive, to speculate on the feelings of other people, complete strangers. TC is drawing from his own experience and extrapolating on the feelings of others, adding to his supposition memories of people he has seen in grief and mourning, or eating and laughing at funerals. He has seen people laugh and be grief-stricken at the same time.
TC has known people who loved their parents deeply, people who grew irreparably distant from their parents, and people who despised their parents.
There is no regularity in human life.
There is no consistency in human life.
No absolutes. No universal truths. Nothing static. Nothing pre-determined.
Everything in TC’s life has been surprising, unpredictable, shocking, appalling, nerve-wracking, exciting, disturbing, thrilling, painful, joyful, and often just plain weird.
TC hates doing book reviews, but becomes instantly conflicted, convoluted, contradictory and confusing when trying to explain why he occasionally assents to do them, or does so, as now, completely on his own, with no one tugging at his sleeve, except his own inclinations, many of which make no sense, or provide any rational motivation, at least none that can be explained without, at some level, bringing in a paradoxical elasticity, like the elliptical orbit of planets, which also makes no sense.
This review is fun to write because it is not a review.
The numerous references to alcohol in The Last Novel are frequently funny, reminding TC of what fun it used to be to drink, until TC lost the ability to stop drinking, and so had to stop drinking permanently.
Does this make sense?
TC often notes, with a sense of oppressive futility and profound discouragement, at how few people read anymore.
TC often notes, with a sense of oppressive futility and profound discouragement, the utter lack of curiosity he frequently encounters among people.
TC often notes, with a sense of oppressive futility and profound discouragement, how obedient people have become lately. Taking their shoes off at the airport, submitting their bodies to X-ray scans, taking jobs for absurdly low amounts of pay, sheepishly avoiding talks of unionizing, earnestly avoiding talk about the obvious controlled demolition of the world trade towers and building number seven on September 11th, 2001, after passenger jets, ostensibly flown by Islamic terrorists, slammed into them.
But not building number seven. Which came down hours afterward. At around five in the afternoon. And had simply caught fire.
TC wishes he could have met David Markson, and perhaps corresponded.
TC is enormously happy to have discovered the work of David Markson.
The writing is remarksonable.
TC likes the jingle of nails in a paper sack freshly purchased from a hardware store, and finds an immediate analogue in writers such as David Markson, or Clark Coolidge, or Gertrude Stein.
That is to say: sentences built with words.
Like nails.
Pounded into wood.
Pine. Oak. Mahogany. Maple.
Birch. Cedar. Buttonwood. Fir.
Showing posts with label Gertrude Stein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gertrude Stein. Show all posts
Friday, September 17, 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Adventures In Aphasia
Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows, a novel by Leslie Scalapino
Starcherone Books, 2010
“There is no lid or limit on sensation,” remarks the mysterious narrator of “zoom in black,” a chapter in Scalapino’s mind-storm of a novel. This occurs during a horrific scene of poachers bringing down silver antelope in the Himalayas, “four or five hundred corpses on the floor of night desert are skinned at different times, their rib cages illumined in the pool amidst feeding buzzards.”
No lid or limit on sensation explodes the opium of reading into a peregrination of liquidationists, paregmenons, and the Melbourne tennis opening. Reading ceases to be reading and morphs into something else: a deeply focused meditation. A lexical gymnastic maneuver. A cerebral activity akin to mountain climbing, or bronco riding. It is, at once, difficult and exciting. But please. Don’t let the word ‘difficult’ put a crease in your brow; Scalapino is a dish served with piquant flavors, not all of them familiar. But it is tasty and it is digestible. And it’s good for you, too! It is high in protein and low in carbohydrates.
Scalapino has revealed that she based the writing of this novel on a form of language disorder called alexia, which refers to an acquired type of sensory aphasia where damage to the brain causes a patient to lose the ability to read. It is also called word blindness, text blindness, or visual aphasia. I find this deeply ironic, considering the richness of Scalapino’s text, and the inherently futile task of devoting one’s writing to a form of aphasia in which reading has been seriously incapacitated, but one cannot help be mindful also of the social, ethical, and political blindness by which we find ourselves surrounded here in the 21st millennium. And that reading, even among the population of people who do not suffer an aphasia, or illiteracy, is at risk.
Alexia may not mean total blindness. Sometimes comprehension is ok, but there may be some difficulty matching semantic interpretation to a sentence. An example is a sentence like “the water gushed from the pump,” which may be interpreted as “the pump gushed from the water.” In other words, an unintended poetry emerges. We see the world differently. Subject and object relationships become discombobulated. Control of the words feels tentative. They feel dazed and unsteady. Consequently, we find relationships between things and ideas that are often bizarre, creating novel perceptions, extraordinary images, such as “laced with swine jelly,” “flexing blue metal water,” “crocodile teeth spread in hatred,” or “an ear unfolds in hot night.” As bizarre as the associations can be, a peculiar, unexpected vividness arises, grips the attention, shows the world in a flare of brilliant hyper-reality.
Neurolinguists refer to a phenomenon called N400 (Negativity at 400 milliseconds) discovered by Marta Kutas and Steven Hillyard in 1980. This was a measure of how people respond to unexpected words in sentences. The N400 is characterized by a distinct pattern of electrical activity that can be observed at the scalp. Kutas and Hillyard used sentences with anomalous endings (i.e. “I take coffee with cream and dog”), to test their subjects. A positive or negative deflection in voltage indicates how the subject is responding to stimuli. A negative deflection indicates a delay. The subject is confused, and pauses to assimilate the semantic anomaly. The mind is hard-wired to make sense of things. Everything. This is what makes art, good art, so challenging and stimulating. And this is what makes Scalapino’s writing such a difficulty, and hugely rewarding.
We are not talking physics equations here. The sentences are odd, aberrant, screwy, the syntax eccentric, the words often large, exotic, and orchidaceous, but there is nothing so enigmatic it throws you off entirely. He peculiar phrasing very often has an exquisite sapience, a sharpness of perception that drives into you with the burning suddenness of a jalapeño pepper, or electrifying cold of an alpine lake. A phrase like “nerves inside muscles,” for instance, embodies a very real, proprioceptive circumstance, or “Anything has once been memory and can be placed beside anything” sends swirls of reflection spinning through the brain. Frequently, she will disrupt the waters by tossing a difficult, rarely used word into an otherwise familiar or pastoral context, such as “orexis is the waterfowl.”
Orexis is a male sexual enhancement product with “guaranteed results.” These must be very busy waterfowl. Or possibly frustrated male fowl and very pissed off female fowl.
Quite frankly, I’ve never read quite such a strange and invigorating book. We are beyond surrealism here. Scalapino appears to have figured out a way to access the entire world and make all of its beauty and hideousness, its violence and sublimity, its joys and indiscriminate burs, its pompous bureaucrats and toxic bullshit, euphoric buoyancies and defiant meadows, simultaneous.
Simultaneity is at the core of this book. It is a collage, but a very dynamic collage that feels harnessed to a team of very powerful horses. Consciousness rides each sentence with a handful of mane and the frenzy of unbridled energies. Each pulse of existence achieves its fullest expression as a part of the overall synthesis of creation, but without a concomitant incongruity, synthesis turns stale. We don’t know we’re moving if we don’t move against something. Hills, fences, mailboxes, doors. Simultaneity means everything happening at once which is what life is. All things are interrelated. There is propinquity between a milkweed and a swordfish. "But," observes Whitehead, "though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level."
Simultaneity also means there is no plot. Not a linear plot anyway. Scalapino has taken Gertrude Stein’s aesthetic of a continuous present to its maximal level of synchronicity. “Synchronicity,” the narrator remarks, “as determining characteristic doesn’t exist in that all actions are random as synchronous anyway.”
This is an aesthetic that begins, at least in the western world, with Cézanne, and was developed to its fullest in the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. Stein was Cubism’s most salient literary exemplar. Tender Buttons stands as one of the first examples of literary Cubism. In four years it will be one hundred years old. That makes me feel old. For me, Tender Buttons is still a very new and modern work.
Tender Buttons also makes me grateful that such an accomplished writer as Scalapino has carried that Cubist aesthetic of simultaneity into further excursions, and has left so many wonderful books behind her.
However enigmatic its plot may be, and I do feel there is something of a plot plotted among its pages, Floats Horse-Floats or Horse Flows does read very much like a novel. It has characters, many with strange, colorful names: “powder monkey,” “Chrysanthemum,” “Detective Grace Abe,” “Fujimori,” the “orphan girls,” “Violet,” and “Sister Serena,” who appears to be the tennis champion, Serena Williams.
And they do things. The powder monkey pops “the air of the edge of forest’s flocculation but in his speed on the horse ship the forest-edge almost an osculation of him leaving it closes in its quiet.” “Red chrysanthemum not having a realistic sense of time or mortality usurps it of others wasting them.” “Grace mumbles walking lying in the trees. Looking down she sees, having followed the poachers at night, the forest mirrored in green, red, and black corpses, dermoid without skeletons or organs.”
There are numerous references to cattle, “the black guiltless cattle are like dogs in someone’s description,” “the cattle née dogs with a wah-wah muted bawling sound begin to wander budwoods,” “Guiltless black cattle are only half-winged.” Sometimes an invented species will emerge: “Wallables, some no larger than rabbits, grazed on the orange mail…” The animals, as they do in the so-called real world, feel under constant threat. “Driven to extinction, the few elephant-herds remaining are pressed to the surface the outskirts of cities where the jockeys sleep in trees, in which the elephants feed.” With the exception of a “white wolf,” who has dazzling, hyperphysical powers, the animals occupy a world full of poaching, theft, cruelty, and war. There are also numerous references to corpses floating in the Euphrates, an obvious allusion to the war in Iraq, and drones “cruising and killing citizens née insurgents’ resistances have sounds they halve the people running.”
The real antagonist of this novel is capitalism. “Capitalism’s separating us from reality,” says the narrator. She identities conventional narrative with the noxious delusions of capitalism:
Separated oil burns 4 as another day begins on water they’re speaking it’s seen by being that’s slowed as if they’re removed from their actions’ occurrence and there’s only just as it occurs. Ron had (friend who’s feudist) blistering the hides of others said abridgement or any plot means “transparency” as a negative wherein all interwoven seems real. The individual is consumed in capitalism by their actions being (and seen by them in) the outside’s delusion of a whole reality as the individual sees events fed to them in as [while] [being] the outside’s ordered certainty. The origin as authority. In a given, a plot is or transpires as this transparency, he says silkworm, in which wired only receiving we’re quiet. In mine, a plot is only later, is events to see, a vehicle unplanned any actions unknown [going on] before their being known 2. But he says plot is any action, in it is already description (even if known before it occurs?) and creates this delusion of our being contained: capitalism’s separating us from reality.
How do we regain reality? How do we regain a sense of ourselves being alive, structured in bone, enveloped in skin, capable of movement, closer to our own actual needs rather than those imposed from without by a mechanized, totalitarian society? For “totalitarian,” observes Herbert Marcuse, “is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.” To actualize an opposition may entail the employment of a pathology, i.e. an aphasia in the production of poetry. Perhaps poetry itself has become an aphasia. There is a vital element in all artwork that works contrary to the volition of the artist. It is what makes the work alive, a living pulsing breathing entity of words or paint or stone or clay. A Pygmalia. A fast horse. Which carries our sense of inner connectedness. As a being. As an opening. “As one’s waking mind.”
Starcherone Books, 2010
“There is no lid or limit on sensation,” remarks the mysterious narrator of “zoom in black,” a chapter in Scalapino’s mind-storm of a novel. This occurs during a horrific scene of poachers bringing down silver antelope in the Himalayas, “four or five hundred corpses on the floor of night desert are skinned at different times, their rib cages illumined in the pool amidst feeding buzzards.”
No lid or limit on sensation explodes the opium of reading into a peregrination of liquidationists, paregmenons, and the Melbourne tennis opening. Reading ceases to be reading and morphs into something else: a deeply focused meditation. A lexical gymnastic maneuver. A cerebral activity akin to mountain climbing, or bronco riding. It is, at once, difficult and exciting. But please. Don’t let the word ‘difficult’ put a crease in your brow; Scalapino is a dish served with piquant flavors, not all of them familiar. But it is tasty and it is digestible. And it’s good for you, too! It is high in protein and low in carbohydrates.
Scalapino has revealed that she based the writing of this novel on a form of language disorder called alexia, which refers to an acquired type of sensory aphasia where damage to the brain causes a patient to lose the ability to read. It is also called word blindness, text blindness, or visual aphasia. I find this deeply ironic, considering the richness of Scalapino’s text, and the inherently futile task of devoting one’s writing to a form of aphasia in which reading has been seriously incapacitated, but one cannot help be mindful also of the social, ethical, and political blindness by which we find ourselves surrounded here in the 21st millennium. And that reading, even among the population of people who do not suffer an aphasia, or illiteracy, is at risk.
Alexia may not mean total blindness. Sometimes comprehension is ok, but there may be some difficulty matching semantic interpretation to a sentence. An example is a sentence like “the water gushed from the pump,” which may be interpreted as “the pump gushed from the water.” In other words, an unintended poetry emerges. We see the world differently. Subject and object relationships become discombobulated. Control of the words feels tentative. They feel dazed and unsteady. Consequently, we find relationships between things and ideas that are often bizarre, creating novel perceptions, extraordinary images, such as “laced with swine jelly,” “flexing blue metal water,” “crocodile teeth spread in hatred,” or “an ear unfolds in hot night.” As bizarre as the associations can be, a peculiar, unexpected vividness arises, grips the attention, shows the world in a flare of brilliant hyper-reality.
Neurolinguists refer to a phenomenon called N400 (Negativity at 400 milliseconds) discovered by Marta Kutas and Steven Hillyard in 1980. This was a measure of how people respond to unexpected words in sentences. The N400 is characterized by a distinct pattern of electrical activity that can be observed at the scalp. Kutas and Hillyard used sentences with anomalous endings (i.e. “I take coffee with cream and dog”), to test their subjects. A positive or negative deflection in voltage indicates how the subject is responding to stimuli. A negative deflection indicates a delay. The subject is confused, and pauses to assimilate the semantic anomaly. The mind is hard-wired to make sense of things. Everything. This is what makes art, good art, so challenging and stimulating. And this is what makes Scalapino’s writing such a difficulty, and hugely rewarding.
We are not talking physics equations here. The sentences are odd, aberrant, screwy, the syntax eccentric, the words often large, exotic, and orchidaceous, but there is nothing so enigmatic it throws you off entirely. He peculiar phrasing very often has an exquisite sapience, a sharpness of perception that drives into you with the burning suddenness of a jalapeño pepper, or electrifying cold of an alpine lake. A phrase like “nerves inside muscles,” for instance, embodies a very real, proprioceptive circumstance, or “Anything has once been memory and can be placed beside anything” sends swirls of reflection spinning through the brain. Frequently, she will disrupt the waters by tossing a difficult, rarely used word into an otherwise familiar or pastoral context, such as “orexis is the waterfowl.”
Orexis is a male sexual enhancement product with “guaranteed results.” These must be very busy waterfowl. Or possibly frustrated male fowl and very pissed off female fowl.
Quite frankly, I’ve never read quite such a strange and invigorating book. We are beyond surrealism here. Scalapino appears to have figured out a way to access the entire world and make all of its beauty and hideousness, its violence and sublimity, its joys and indiscriminate burs, its pompous bureaucrats and toxic bullshit, euphoric buoyancies and defiant meadows, simultaneous.
Simultaneity is at the core of this book. It is a collage, but a very dynamic collage that feels harnessed to a team of very powerful horses. Consciousness rides each sentence with a handful of mane and the frenzy of unbridled energies. Each pulse of existence achieves its fullest expression as a part of the overall synthesis of creation, but without a concomitant incongruity, synthesis turns stale. We don’t know we’re moving if we don’t move against something. Hills, fences, mailboxes, doors. Simultaneity means everything happening at once which is what life is. All things are interrelated. There is propinquity between a milkweed and a swordfish. "But," observes Whitehead, "though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level."
Simultaneity also means there is no plot. Not a linear plot anyway. Scalapino has taken Gertrude Stein’s aesthetic of a continuous present to its maximal level of synchronicity. “Synchronicity,” the narrator remarks, “as determining characteristic doesn’t exist in that all actions are random as synchronous anyway.”
This is an aesthetic that begins, at least in the western world, with Cézanne, and was developed to its fullest in the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. Stein was Cubism’s most salient literary exemplar. Tender Buttons stands as one of the first examples of literary Cubism. In four years it will be one hundred years old. That makes me feel old. For me, Tender Buttons is still a very new and modern work.
Tender Buttons also makes me grateful that such an accomplished writer as Scalapino has carried that Cubist aesthetic of simultaneity into further excursions, and has left so many wonderful books behind her.
However enigmatic its plot may be, and I do feel there is something of a plot plotted among its pages, Floats Horse-Floats or Horse Flows does read very much like a novel. It has characters, many with strange, colorful names: “powder monkey,” “Chrysanthemum,” “Detective Grace Abe,” “Fujimori,” the “orphan girls,” “Violet,” and “Sister Serena,” who appears to be the tennis champion, Serena Williams.
And they do things. The powder monkey pops “the air of the edge of forest’s flocculation but in his speed on the horse ship the forest-edge almost an osculation of him leaving it closes in its quiet.” “Red chrysanthemum not having a realistic sense of time or mortality usurps it of others wasting them.” “Grace mumbles walking lying in the trees. Looking down she sees, having followed the poachers at night, the forest mirrored in green, red, and black corpses, dermoid without skeletons or organs.”
There are numerous references to cattle, “the black guiltless cattle are like dogs in someone’s description,” “the cattle née dogs with a wah-wah muted bawling sound begin to wander budwoods,” “Guiltless black cattle are only half-winged.” Sometimes an invented species will emerge: “Wallables, some no larger than rabbits, grazed on the orange mail…” The animals, as they do in the so-called real world, feel under constant threat. “Driven to extinction, the few elephant-herds remaining are pressed to the surface the outskirts of cities where the jockeys sleep in trees, in which the elephants feed.” With the exception of a “white wolf,” who has dazzling, hyperphysical powers, the animals occupy a world full of poaching, theft, cruelty, and war. There are also numerous references to corpses floating in the Euphrates, an obvious allusion to the war in Iraq, and drones “cruising and killing citizens née insurgents’ resistances have sounds they halve the people running.”
The real antagonist of this novel is capitalism. “Capitalism’s separating us from reality,” says the narrator. She identities conventional narrative with the noxious delusions of capitalism:
Separated oil burns 4 as another day begins on water they’re speaking it’s seen by being that’s slowed as if they’re removed from their actions’ occurrence and there’s only just as it occurs. Ron had (friend who’s feudist) blistering the hides of others said abridgement or any plot means “transparency” as a negative wherein all interwoven seems real. The individual is consumed in capitalism by their actions being (and seen by them in) the outside’s delusion of a whole reality as the individual sees events fed to them in as [while] [being] the outside’s ordered certainty. The origin as authority. In a given, a plot is or transpires as this transparency, he says silkworm, in which wired only receiving we’re quiet. In mine, a plot is only later, is events to see, a vehicle unplanned any actions unknown [going on] before their being known 2. But he says plot is any action, in it is already description (even if known before it occurs?) and creates this delusion of our being contained: capitalism’s separating us from reality.
How do we regain reality? How do we regain a sense of ourselves being alive, structured in bone, enveloped in skin, capable of movement, closer to our own actual needs rather than those imposed from without by a mechanized, totalitarian society? For “totalitarian,” observes Herbert Marcuse, “is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.” To actualize an opposition may entail the employment of a pathology, i.e. an aphasia in the production of poetry. Perhaps poetry itself has become an aphasia. There is a vital element in all artwork that works contrary to the volition of the artist. It is what makes the work alive, a living pulsing breathing entity of words or paint or stone or clay. A Pygmalia. A fast horse. Which carries our sense of inner connectedness. As a being. As an opening. “As one’s waking mind.”
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