Word Pharmacy
Artists are too sensitive for life, says Deleuze (somewhere, but can not find the source, does anyone know?). They are traversed by an idea that is too overwhelming for them. This is quite a romantic view; nonetheless, it is certainly the case that sensitivity (of different varieties, for example, anxiety, migraines, depression, psychosis, schizophrenia) is often linked to creativity. Writing, claims one study, is a top ten profession for likelihood of depression. It is unclear to what extent these correlations are always causative, but it makes sense that many people sensitive to their environment, will feel the compulsion to express the sensitivity creatively, if anything as a sort of cathartic process, to get the overload of perceptions out of their system.
For many artists this overload of perception is indeed too overwhelming & they turn to intoxicating substances, or fail to regulate their temperament & become, what is usually dubbed, mad. Of course, many artists claim they take drugs precisely to stimulate a derangement of their senses. Dutch–Moroccan writer Hafid Bouazza (who edited a book on the rush/intoxication (De Roes) & is well-known for his experimentation with drugs, after rejecting Islam when he was 18) half facetiously claims in an interview that many artists turn to drugs precisely because they are not able to attain a perpetual state of creative output. In other words, drugs are there to replicate the moments of intoxication otherwise experienced when making art (Csikszentmihalyi’s popularized notion of Flow).
Another effect of supposedly being so keenly perceptive is that artists’ creations can therefore be expected to be informative documents about the subtleties & symptoms of their time. Deleuze thought of artists as symptomatologists of culture. Let us list some writerly/artist types, on a scale from frail/sickly to intoxicated, to mad, between which, naturally, a lot of overlap occurs
Frail / depressed / suicidal
Woolf, Rothko, Proust, Beckett, Warhol, Anne Sexton, Tennesse Williams, David Foster Wallace, Michael Jackson, Sylvia Plath, Crumb brothers, Robert Walser, and last but hardly least, Rogi Wieg (Dutch writer/painter/poet/musician who wrote a beautiful book about his mayor depression (that is a clinical term, not hyperbole) called Comrade Razorblade)
Intoxicated
Henry Miller, Pollock, Dylan Thomas, Beaudelaire, Elvis Presley, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Malcolm Lowry, Jack Spicer, Tennessee Williams, Dylan Thomas, Dorothy Parker, Poe, Truman Capote, Kerouac, Faulkner, Hemingway, Raymond Chandler
Insane (clinically or otherwise)
Hunter Thompson, van Gogh, Stelarc, Alfred Jarry, Beethoven, Mozart, Michelangelo, Byron, Bobby Fischer, Dali, Caravaggio, Goya, Joyce, most HipHop artists
This is just an off-the-cuff, very roughly ordered list of writers and artists that come to mind right now; but by all means please help add more). It should be added here that Dutch (visual) poet Jürgen Smit has for some time now been compiling an already extensive and still expanding list of poets who died too young. Jürgen’s requirement for putting a poet on his list is that they died before the age of 35. Many of them committed suicide.
Are artists too frail for the world? What an unbearable cliché. & yet artists are statistically more likely to go mad. Perhaps they are mad first & then start making art. Perhaps everyone else is short of change? “There is after all nothing sane”, to paraphrase Krishnamurti, “about being able to live in an insane world.”
But sometimes artists take time out of their bouts of depression & apply their feelers toward the moment of their time, and create works that penetrate and distil some essence from some illness of our human ecology. Prescription drugs are surely, ironically, one of the most pressing, illest, symptoms of our Western moment. (They are no less a problem in Africa of course; but then, sadly, inversely so, i.e., for their disgustingly financially motivated, artificially maintained shortage).
Another illness includes the common person’s preclusion to pharmaceuticals (ok, am being facetious here. Although, I would take the drugstore cowboy’s lead if I had the right boots. (Incidentally, if you haven’t seen it, Burroughs makes a long cameo appearance as, well pretty much himself in this movie):
A third symptom of today is the still much too widely spread habit of the printed book. “Habit, however, is the chain that ties the dog to his vomit” (Brian Massumi). What, are we monks? No seriously, I love books, of course; think there should be more of them; but more alternative, experimental, unorthodox formats too, please. Of course many amazing alternatives are and have been & are being thought out. To name just a few examples:
Tom Phillips A Humument
Steve MacCaffery’s absolutely genius Carnival
The indefatigable derek beaulieu
Janneke Adema. Gary Hall, a.o, his concept of Liquid Books. Living Books About Life:
Multi-media & bio-poet Eduardo Caq, who recently created a new kind of poetry, Aromapoetry
Christian Bök. Most notably with his Xenotext Experiment
Danish poet Morten Søndergaard (1964) has contributed towards solving our problems with access or lack of pharmaceuticals, as well as our weariness with the common book. Word Pharmacy is Sondegaard’s proposition prescription; a portable pharmacy of words. Based on the Danish basic vocabulary of 1000 words (every language has such set, the minimal required for basic communication) containing 10 boxes for the most common kinds of words: articles, adverbs, adjectives, numerals, verbs, nouns, pronouns, interjections, prepositions, conjunctions. The always fabulastic Broken Dimanche Press
has recently brought out an English version based on the same basic word set for English.
The boxes are empty, apart from one user information leaflet each. Like Kamilla Löfström (review via Søndergaard’s website), I too was initially surprised & disappointed perhaps. Conditioned by my symptoms, I had expected & unconsciously perhaps hope for, strips & tabs of colourful pills. Of what possible use could instruction leaflets for words be?
Poetry can be lethal if not served in the right doses; unless, of course, if death is the desired effect. Jack Spicer’s last words: ”My vocabulary did this to me”. Either way, being able to decide on & apportion the correct doses of poetry into your poem is of vital importance. Unfortunately, most poetry makes most people sick, gag, or otherwise unwell. This is precisely because of the fatally misjudged distribution of ingredients by the poet, leaving the reader with barely any choice to properly treat herself. Some of the most common symptoms of a poetry that is already ill itself are the presence of an excess of ego, levitation, Beautiful Soul Syndrome, closed or false binaries, reification of nature.
Søndergaard prescribes us nothing but our own prescription. We are not beautiful souls. We are our own cancer no less than we are our own (medicinal) solution. Word Pharmacy enables precise treatment for one’s ailment right at the very root; where consciousness becomes expressed as language. Not the vague, melodramatic, ecstatic, lyrical language of the cancerous Poem of the Main Stream; but one of precise doses & detailed user information.
These poems do not have to be, but can be used as a mirror of the self, somewhat comparably to the way Conceptual poets Robert Fitterman & Vanessa Place mirror our most evil selves by appropriating respectively Holocaust Museum & Statement of Facts. The former appropriates captions of Holocaust photos without the photos; the latter are a.o. court statements appropriated Place’s practice as a defence attorney for sex offenders (I had never truly been scared to read a book until now, but I postponed opening this book for weeks, no kidding, and could hardly bear to read it when I began).
Word Pharmacy is a toolbox of virtual poems for any occasion. With virtual here is meant a real potential (Deleuzian) virtual, not a fleeting imaginary virtual. One can heal self, detox, regenerate. But one can also choose to get silly, get high, overdose. This poem, these virtual poems, do not treat its reader like a mindless version of a drunk, or junkie, who only needs a shot of some simple, pre-packaged affect. Word Pharmacy is dangerous not because its prescriptions can heal you or make you sick (they can), but because they enter into a precise assemblage with the assembled parts of their reader.
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Some excerpts from the User Information Leaflets.
VERBS
”One of your first Verbs® might, for example, be the Verb® ’to be’, as in the sentence: I am hungry. Repeat this sentence. Continue on your own…You can use Verbs® if you would like to alter something, affect a condition. You would like to change the world. You can, for example, move a thing from one shelf to another… How to use Verbs®: Shout! Run! Shit! Sleep! Love! Die! Live! Get moving!”
NOUNS
“Generally speaking, however, Nouns® do however have a pleasant way of laying the world open, with their countless associations, recollections and concrete connections. Using Nouns® can cause your world to expand…Keep Nouns® in a dictionary, on a piece of paper, a shopping list, a wish list and well within reach of children.”
PRONOUNS
“Pronouns take a little while to work, usually about 14 days, but sometimes longer depending on who you are or are becoming.”
INTERJECTIONS
“Interjections® are your first words and in all probability also your last… and hey, you could interjection to hurl compact meaning into sentences. They are little work bonds. They are enough in themselves, they do not need to explain themselves. They carry their meaning within them, all pulled up and ready. Get it!?… shout. Screen. Whisper. Single. Do whatever the hell you like… they carried their fullest, but also the most indefinable meaning. You have to take them as they are. Okay!?
PREPOSITIONS
“Prepositions®… open and close. Not that positions are selfish, they are almost self-effacing, but make no mistake: they mean the world… in the sentence’ he sits on the beehive’ but he could just as easily be sitting on the underside of the beehive. Who can tell? Prepositions® can… despite being blind from birth day soon developed a piercing gaze. It positions in the eyes of language. They are invisible, but all seeing… trust them, but keep an eye on your back. Or under the table. Or above the door. Behind the curtain. They are liable to be wherever you least expect them.”
ARTICLES
“Do not use articles if: you do not want to be brought out of the indefinite and into the definite. Or: you do not want to be poured out of the definite hand into the indefinite … we do best in fog, in gas deposits, in transition and threshold areas, random regions, in terrain vague, borderlands, grey zones, in common, in the uncommon. We crop up and are found everywhere. We are articles®.”
CONJUNCTIONS
“Conjunctions® are very philosophical, they tell you what position to take in relation to something else… do not use conjunctions® if you are unable to integrate, coordinate or subordinates yourself… are subject to extreme mood swings or have psychotic tendencies.”
ADVERBS
“Adverbs® are the problem children of language. They are difficult and maladjusted, but they are also charming and artistic… not, cry the adverbs. They say: unfortunately. Again. Perhaps, naturally, nonetheless! Outside, here? Suddenly, never!”
NUMERALS
“Numerals®…tell and they tell… they know when you were born and they will know when you die… count to 10 if you want to control yourself. Or if you want to test the microphone. Numerals® can also be used for things such as hypnosis or hide and seek.”
ADJECTIVES
“Adjectives® have no independent existence. This means that they, like all others, must find a noun or a name to latch onto. They are akin to ticks, fees and other parasites. Or comedians, clerics and politicians. Adjectives® are there to add something. They say: look, there is much more here than you think!”
Polibek s rozvodnou
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Many thanks to Olga Peková and David Vichnar for compiling, translating and publishing an anthology of last year’s Prague Microfestival poets. And to Jan Těsnohlídek, who I believe was one of the people who came up with the idea, or at least was involved with it at its inception. The anthology consists of all Czech translations of the mostly English language poets, so can not really read one single word of it, but then, I remember most of the readings quite well, the poets were beautiful and the whole thing was very inspiring and fun and I was very happy to be there. This year’s festival has just ended today and the two days I was there over the weekend were, well, very cool, and happiness inducing. I was sorry I could not stay. Also sorry I can not find the name of the artist who did the cover art. Here is a table of contents for anyone who wants to try read some of these people in Czech
A try at soul jar
Disappears, almost before she falls, into Niagara. C sits on ledge erect & safe, full of fun & camera. She disappears before she falls. But she vanishes long, & she falls with different speeds; fast & slow & still & silent, & full of interruptions, with the roars, of massive, rushing water. A. does not know why she takes a photo, takes a photo of her falling friend. The falling girl becomes a part of, falls into, inside the imaged frame. (In another story, there is a girl stuck in a painting, slowly fading out of sight). C disappears almost before she falls, speedy, straight down, does not linger for a look around; the frame of the picture of C falling into Niagara falling, becomes the soul jar, for her soul. Her friend does regular fidgets, left pinkie, neck of tendon, left rear shoulder side, perform their minimal repetitions, with wild differences, twitch, jerk, pull, tear shift, growl. She starts to growl so hardly not at all, so full. She has not gathered in her mind the ease with which C fell, her body understands still, C as still sitting on her ledge, light as a feather falls from bird, light as a bird alights from perch, falls upward, humming, helicopter leaf. C does not flip flop, fudge or falsify; minces no words; does not make bones, does not wind up, spins no unnecessary yarns, she falls down, & does so properly, direct without delay; as one would tend to do. A., all flustered twitch & pull, all violent frozen blubber in the sun, all pudding nailed to wall, goes over to the famous ledge, stares down & snaps repeatedly the photo photo photo, picture frame of water, where C. fell, where it is not quite raging yet, yet flowing, on its way to raging tumble, over its own edge. A. snaps her pictures, pulls her image trigger, C. disappears before she falls, A. stands & trapped, compulsive her repulsive trigger finger clicks the snaps, snaps shots, shoots frames, pictures Kodachrome, reproduces its own movement, stammers stammer, stutters different shades of soul jar microtone,
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VLAK3
VLAK3 has been released into the world! I have not seen it yet, but have heard it is a right tome (nearly 500 pages). VLAK1 & VLAK2 can be read in full online, along with many other cool books from Litteraria Pragensia. VLAK3 has work by a.o. Louis Armand, Charles Bernstein, Edmund Berrigan, Johannes Birringer, Sean Bonney, Pam Brown, Allen Fisher, Catherine Hales, Vaclav Havel, D.J. Huppatz, Peter Jaeger, Pierre Joris, John Kinsella, Chris Kraus, Peter Minter, Marjorie Perloff, Joan Retallack, Lawrence Upton, David Vichnar, Mckenzie Wark, Carol Watts, Slavoj Zizek; to name just a few…
There is also a slightly revised version of my short essay on Stephen Walter’s artistic map of London. See here for a mini-documentary (would embed it but Vimeo appears not to allow that), sneak preview of Walter’s most recent work, another map of London, but this time underground, “London Subterranea”, which is on exhibit now, in London.
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London Subterranea, Stephen Walter, 2012
A try at raising raven
She grips the death of the bird lying bent out of shape, on a patch of grassy root; she has the bird by the wing; it has her by the fingertips; the wing folds back out as if one half lazarus; she calls it crow but does not know its proper name. An air, full with vacuum, from taut brightness of all sun. The feeling like her deep-inside shrill goddamn Descartes-man. The cloudless sky, tired, languid; the open sky, the openness around of field, and space for endless traveling sound that comes in flits & streaks of crisp, broken, horizontal sheets. She hangs herself. She climbs a partway tree; rests the broken raven onto a gnarling branch; two wings out for balance; expedited take-off. She hangs her front half back half over of the branch; angles from drapery to stiff upper body, knees tucked slightly inward, rudders; stretches flaps & wings her arms. For learn to fly, for learn the bird, for fly within the sky,
A try at cracking raven skull
Whether, if, might; whether it might. She is trying for a certain noise. The bones of the thing were already cracked; to the dust of the bones of the thing. She is testing, for one, a certain sound and, too, a grind of dust; a strip & slide of what does happen. It means, she cracks the skull against a root, she smacks the skull against a cement pavement. she does not do it for discomfort; this comfort; she rattles wracks & rats the skull; runs rats right thru, flit fast than said; the crow it twitches tenses; all she only did at first, is only look at. She cracks bones, shuffles dust, breaks her big bird test stuff. She cracks more bones, she shuffles dust, she mucks up big her bird test stuff; patches, smudges of big bird, flatter into a muck of shuffled dust; desists, interlaced with quiet panic, she tries to calm the goddamn open sky, it only widens vertigo, as if the sky at same time, zooms in, & steps mega back. She wishes at this juncture, near this root & concrete patch, a murder of crows, like feathers of a bird, was spread, in such an epileptic style, so she could try, in many times, the many ways a crow’s skull cracks, the dust grinds bones, the sun gets caught in beads, or twitch, or flitted feathers. Fatigued with bore, she gets; lands belly first, nose, forehead, flat on a patch of grassy root. Spreads arms flattens arms, outwards, flat into the dirt. Stretches legs, pushes toenails, into topsoil. Forgets her mind of mess of mucky feathers; becomes instead all twitcher, feeble flap, turtle flipping on its back; vacillations out of whack,
Twist / knot
A try at untangling a twist
Fumbling fingers stumble into a knot, unwanted, they had been looking for. She puckers cheeks, pucks up her lips, & plucks at the stuck tight knot, of shoelace, tied around a laundry bag; uncrumples, unfurrows, unfolds, the rumpled parts of different clothes; why she all bunched? What you plicated for? Why you so ruffled? Maybe deflate yrself? C prostrates herself onto the tiles of Laundromat, pushing before her, stretching cloth of her jumper & her skirt. C presses her belly concave into the roundness of a streetlamp post, she planes down grass smooth, leaves an impression of her body trunk pressed into the grass. Tucks, gets up, turns, tucks shirt & skirt, pulls bowtie straight; pulls at a wrinkle in her shirt, flattens a fold of belly (which gathers back of course into some pleats, following immediate on stroke of hand); C plasters with her forehead, a sticker back, flat onto a window, of a tram (sticker depicts forbidden headphones); C picks from a curb a squashed umbrella & straightens best she can its metal ribs into even, parallels (some somewhat remain bent, but mostly the thing looks). C collapses her newfound parapluie back in, shatters with this umbra out the sun, pointing the ferrule to 01 of the clock; as well she, maneuvers, her left hand right up the crook handle, clicks with her thumb the bottom spring, slows down the runner’s sliding up the tube, by slightly following or leading, alongside with her thumb & index finger. Thus-how inflates umbrella, stretches its skin across its ribs & taut, rolls back & forth the tube between her hands, as if a child, or magic trick. Rolls back & forth & points the thing a satellite, at roughly 9 o’clock, tracing from centre to perimeter, of a solitary cauliflower cloud, flattening its fluff towards the centre & its edges, stretching its thickness, spreading the form flat across the depthless sky; transforms the Cumulus cloud into a Stratus cloud, & planes it such that the sky complete is covered; both rubbing out & birthing again the sun, as faded, sharp-edged tinny, lunar disc.
A try at tying knots
Footnote
Foot pulls herself up out of the margin. People call her Footnote because her name is Foot. Sometimes nicknames are longer, sure. Long stripes of sun as well, & stretches of her own shadow (a strip of arm a strip of arm a strip of body trunk). Margin of a street a pavement, ditch, a sideways walk. Foot disappears her arm by inching it toward alternatively her torso shadow then the shadow of the cypresses she passes in the thin sides of the road. Torso shadow, cypress. Foot tears a fringe of elastic, hem from off her skirt. The road itself turns into a perimeter & from periphery into an open field, dusty so much, the dust was in the shape of grass. Foot thinks with comfort library, lye-berry, lie-bury; in a lie-bury should be lain down, should be buried with grace, with movement as the sun as seen from here, this open field of dusty grass. Should be floated, some scales of skin, onto the carpet, mixed with the dust blanketing books, circumscribe complete lie bury surface. Footnote describes some limits of some books, by lightly feeling, slightly moving fingers, or pressed (into) by palms, ridges, backs of hand; by sliding across barely surfaces, both sides of forearm, frontal forehead. Foot sits her butt unto her sole of foot & top of foot, kneeling alternatively left / right armpit, unto right knee, steadying herself, uncomfortably comfortably from toppling into too far of one of many sides, such that, enabled begins to tear some margins out of some books (she sits at novels, section A & Z, she occupies beginning & the end of bibliography, & rips most quietly thru all biography). Foot gives allowance for some text to come off with the margin white, but only marginalia & accidental parts of letters here & there. Foot mostly tears, straight down the page, an edge where text snuggles up to edges up to margin; elbowroom allowed only hardly only for traces of some letters’ remnants; some strips of fringe Foot rips, come with remains of ink, partial limbs of crippled letters left behind. Rip up down, left page right page; variation. Rip up down two pages same time; rip down up, up down. Markoff, neighbour, outline, rim. Markoff, neighbour, outline. Foot sits at the novels section, letter Z, a bookrest for the other books; Zazie dan le Metro she works her way through, randomly the Zs; rips in no meditated order Zwink, Zweig, Zonderland; Župančič, Zúñiga, Zimmerman. She tears off all the lonely characters at novels’ end. Flapping tail ends, wandering off into a space, parts of their letters, sometimes coming off the page; turning corner, jumping trains, jumping into out of, long lost long found, lover’s arms; dissolution into sentence, of a language, of a house of prison, of the many plotted lovers; staring out of windows despite the rain both being & not being there; vanishing point, horizon, rim; bounding in a back of bus; walking alone, away, on frozen water; carried away on a thick, big jag of ice; lines an alone girl traces with her fingers airborne, around magically objects; a boy or girl alighting, barely or just not, from a train, as running comes a girl or boy to ride with it; fitting a lead, perfectly straight-line, into a click pencil; Footnote, sometimes, she dislocates a word or two; cracks off a patch a triangle of words. Foot gathers all her strips of paper margins; selects them into bundles & in piles, Foot rolls her surplus up into a ball & sidles out the empty lie-berry so careful & so quiet, leaving it empty silent sullen. On her way home Foot eats some margin calls up whole, she saves some latitude allowing some papers somewhere to fall; at home she plasticises a book covered with margin white; delineates the edges of a decorative windowsill, creates a frill a trimming for her TV; she stuffs some slips into between her big round lips; she crops her head, wraps her wrist as if a bandage; Foot stuffs margins into cracks, stops holes, counter mouse, counter smudge, smoothing over every edge. Foot manages to lose her stolen margins, stick them up her holes her cracks, locate them into places where they merge with boundaries & surfaces, salvaged from their stasis, librarinazation, having about to be become edges enplaned, the surface & the close of frames, a frame and backboard, sideboard and its weight. Finished sticking, pushing, crunching, squeezing, fitting; finished finishing her flat with paper margins. Foot, fatigued, tries to skirt the edges of her flat, hem & lines that are no longer there; Foot makes open attempts at opening an inside door, inside her flat but does not really open it just tugs a little pulls a little, hanging paw. Foot hangs her shoulders, arms, hands, fingers. Foot sidles sullenly to where there used to be a line, transition from one somewhere to another. Escapes or cracks or corners are no longer visible, but Foot in horizontal mode rolls over & again over, then with her shoulder feels a verticality, a wall. She rolls one half an iteration more, so that she pushes with her face & forehead into a cool unflinching wall, (or floor, she is no longer sure)
‘Fidgeting with the seen of the crime’
Beaulieu, Derek. Seen of the Crime: Essays on Conceptual Writing. Montreal: Snare Books. 2011
When we drop a stone into water, we see a wave emanate outwardly in a plane. We agree that it is not water but that we are seeing a wave in pure principle. It is not simultaneous: therefore to conceptualize we are using our memory and afterimage.
The knot is not the rope; it is a weightless, mathematical, geometric, metaphysically conceptual, pattern integrity tied momentarily into the rope by the knot-conceiving, weightless mind of the human conceiver – knot former. (Buckminster Fuller, Conceptuality, 228, 231)
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This post picks up picks from previous ruminations on derek beaulieu’s recent book of essays Seen of the Crime. In the book’s final installment, derek beaulieu catches Kenneth Goldsmith trying to fidget away from the crime scene. Or rather, Goldsmith’s fidgeting simultaneously constitutes the scene of the crime as well as his absence thereat.
June 16, 1997: Bloomsday: Kenneth Goldsmith performs a systematic perambulation through & around his body, not skipping any of the bodily organs that make up part of James Joyce’s schema save the womb of Ulysses’ most impossible (yes Ulysses presents gradations of impossibility) to read episode, ‘Oxen of the Sun’. This is probably fitting because beyond Goldsmith’s & (Ulysses’ protagonist) Leopold Bloom’s respective meanders around the human body & the city of Dublin, neither of the two characters, or books have much in common.
Goldsmith’s project Day (2003) would more fittingly have been written on Bloomsday. Day being a transcription & publication of a day’s copy of the New York Times as an 800-page book, an epic tale of the world as told from New York city in one day. If anything Fidget is rather more Beckettian in sensibility (as Marjorie Perloff has already argued). It also reads more as a Whitmanian song of the self; an important difference being that, in contrast to Whitman’s more externalizing direction, Fidget presents an inwardly directed, auto-proprioception.
An earlier post explored this idea – of a kind of inverted / empiricist lyricism – which might similarly be posited about a work by Kenneth Goldsmith’s peer, conceptual writer Vanessa Place’s novel La Medusa. She explains the book’s genesis:
The book began as a procedural piece: to write down everything that occurred to me for 41 consecutive days, in 15 minute installments. As I was reading in cognitive science at the time, I had a suspicion that if I kept going after that time, narratives would begin to emerge. Or narrative fragments, some of which would ripen (or bloat) into narratives, some of which would simply stay shards.
The interweaving of lyricism with conceptualism & empiricism is interesting to make note of here. La Medusa is obviously lyrical in that it consists of episodes of unmediated subjective expression: “everything that occurred to me for 41 consecutive days, in 15 minute installments”. But it is not naively and uncomplicatedly so: it does not assume that the lyrical subjective position is separate from the world and observing the world from outside. Instead it is (among many other things) a study of consciousness, of how we are prone to make stories from randomness, and of the situatedness of consciousness in a particular historical moment (in this case an American moment, more specifically Los Angeles). “At the novel’s highpoints, an appropriately messy narrative of the contemporary City of Los Angeles emerges from its pages.”
In any case, consciousness in La Medusa is no longer a pondering on/of the real, it is written as (already part) of the real; that is, Place was interested in the pertinence of cognitive science when writing (about) consciousness; in consciousness as a physical/material process. Place writes of consciousness itself as a material phenomenon. If Whitman, in his poem Leaves of Grass, creates a figure who represents the ideal democratic man, a reflection of American society in the figure of one individual; Place, in turn, studies both her place and time by dissecting her mind ‘clinically’ (with empirical procedure) as part of the world, instead of the intuitive barbaric yawp, uttered from a distance to / projected onto the vast world (“I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.”)
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Place, in turn, herself locates a similar flattening, or inward-turning in Traffic (2007), another of Goldsmith’s books, in her own comparison of Goldsmith to Walt Whitman and Hart Crane. Kenneth Goldsmith for his 2011 reading at the White House chose to read
‘”three ways of looking at The Brooklyn Bridge—before & after—spanning a century and a half,” beginning with Walt Whitman’s 1856 poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” moving to Hart Crane’s 1930 work, “To Brooklyn Bridge,” and concluding with excerpts from his 2007 book, Traffic, transcribed radio traffic reports.’
Some excerpts:
What is it, then, between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not.
—Whitman
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
—Crane
Right now you’ve also got jam-ups on the Brooklyn Bridge,
bumper-to-bumper to Brooklyn but the lower roadway is
wide open. The Brooklyn Bridge is swamped.
—Goldsmith
Vanessa Place, in taut, nearly syllogistic prose, reads these three fragments as a transition from transcendence to immanence, representation to presentation, panoramically surveying to empirically reframing:
From to river as bridge to bridge as river to bridge as bridge, the movement in the triptych goes from Man as nature’s capital to the capital of Nature to the nature of Capital. In Whitman, the poet is God like Nature is God, the one that sees each in each, and in each, the same multifarious reach. In Crane, the poet serves, like the bridge, to tether earth and air, the breath that is here arching out-there. In Goldsmith, it is just the bridge that is. There is no ontology beyond facticity. Words are things like people are things. Things to be counted, if not weighed. Put another way, the singular soul that collectively appears to Whitman is sublimated in the symbology of Crane and gutted in Goldsmith’s gutter-work.
Gutting himself is indeed one way of looking at Goldsmith’s project(s). In this case, he turns himself inside out in search of his, to document his bodily movements. Goldsmith is a greedy, totalizing, completist when it comes to his language & projects (all of a day’s newspaper, all of the avant-garde on UBU, all of the traffic, the game, the weather, the schwa sounds, & in his forthcoming project, all of New York).
We might therefore assume, or at least hypothesize, that Fidget is Goldsmith’s version of all of his body. It is a snapshot of the crime scene that shows everything. And yet in Fidget Kenneth Goldsmith perpetually undergoes a sort of immanent out-of-body experience. What is left out is too numerous to name, what is not shown is an infinite number of alternative snapshots that could have been.
beaulieu cleverly & entertainingly adopts art critic / curator Ralph Rugoff’s criminalist reading of conceptual art. Fidget is read through the the “aesthetic of aftermath, as a place where the action has already occurred.” (Rugoff quoted by beaulieu). (Rugoff seems like an interesting character himself: his focus on the tension between signification, presence and absence is also expressed in his work as a curator, having once curated a “survey of invisible art that included paintings rendered in evaporated water, a movie shot with a film-less camera, and a pedestal once occupied by Andy Warhol.”).
In Rugoff’s own book Scene of the Crime, “the body is envisioned neither as an innocent repository of nature, nor as an existential symbol of isolation, but as an artifact that leaves traces and in turn is a surface for recording them.” (Rugoff, quoted in beaulieu 59)
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Chance (Peter Sellers) the dim gardener in Hal Ashby’s 1979 Being There, through all kinds of chance occurrences (& people filling in stories where there are none, what Ron Silliman calls the Parsimony Principle) becomes Chauncey Gardiner, advisor to many important figures, among whom the president. Chance is simultaneously both there & not there, an increasingly transparent presence in high society, appreciated for saying what is on his mind, & yet his straightforward words are continually interpreted, understood as metaphor. Thus, besides being transparently present, Chance is also transparently absent; being looked straight through, without really being seen or heard at all.
Kenneth Goldsmith (originally a) sculptor, chips away at his body one word or sentence and increasingly slur at a time: Goldsmith’s language changes as the day moves on. The process of chipping away, in turn also chips away at him: He is tired, & also increasingly inebriated from a bottle of whiskey he buys to ward off the tedium of the increasingly long hours, making the later chapters (marked per recorded hour) shorter & or inverted, homophonic, confused. Selected examples of this increasing unravelling in the later hours (the book going from 10:00-22:00):
19:00 – Little word little remains in front of mouth. Liquid elevator tongue. Going up on little place. Nerves feeling pressure from liquid again. Listlessly from back. Clenched hands move into throat. Be brow and periphery. Gondize liquid. Headless down, headless self. Bladder falls.
20:00 - Mind is taken. And in pockets taken. Eyes read truth forty one. Eyes stand island. To the bagger. So berkenrodgers el. Greens projectile. On ah squint. Elen crows on tongue. With muriss. Kush jimmyhands. Cinder hung moistened. Soldiers stable. Midgets in palm.
21:00 - eleven hours walking body moves arm swinging contraunison leg movements deep breath inside salivation nine pm left finger index finger rubs eye counterclockwise one two three times tip of finger moist from eye fluids deep breath mucus expulsion via spit deep breath yawn eyes view sky getting darker
22:00 – xaler swaJ .wollawS .pil fo cra gniwollof tfel ot htuom fo edis thgir morf gnivom pil reppu ssorca snur eugnoT Eyelids close.
These changes, slippages, in Goldsmith’s supposedly neutral, impassive recording of his movements, are signs of the indeterminate emergence of the body. In this context, beaulieu cites sculptor/artist Barry Le Va’s claim that with the 1960s advent of installation art, “the stuff laying around the object… grew more important than the object itself.” (beaulieu 63); likewise, beaulieu astutely remarks, Goldsmith’s fifth of whiskey seeps through into the process of recording & ultimately the language of his poem (beaulieu 63).
Indeed, the fundamental indeterminacy of Goldsmith’s body & situation increasingly show themselves through the cracks of Fidget’s foundational concept of neutrally recording a day’s worth of a body’s movements. The immediacy of a materially given body is inseparable from the indeterminacy of what a body might become. As Brain Massumi puts it:
This is an abstractness pertaining to the transitional immediacy of a real relation – that of a body to its own indeterminacy (its openness to an else where and otherwise than it is, in any here and now)… The charge of indeterminacy carried by a body is inseparable from it. It strictly, coincides with it, to the extent that the body is in passage or in process (to the extent that it is dynamic and alive). But the charge is not itself corporeal. Far from regaining a concreteness, to think the body in movement thus means accepting the paradox that there is an incorporeal dimension of the body. Of it, but not it. Real, material, but incorporeal. (Massumi, Parables, 5).
But – unlike the ridiculous onto-theological ending of Being There (warning: spoiler) where we see Chance walk away from us over the smooth surface of a lake –
Fidget unveils nothing more than just the unrolling of the smooth, transparent surface (veil) of Goldsmith’s body; one that is in many ways more absent than present, yet at the same time fully present as the expressions of the movements and fidgeting of a body.
Goldsmith meticulously documents the banal and the insignificant “in an anti-space, a space of absence or negativity created by the displaced signifiers of the crime” (Wollen, quoted in beaulieu). We are not asked to read for the evidence of presence, but rather for the residue of absence. Goldsmith’s Fidget articulates the absence of narrative. Walter Benjamin stated that “to live means to leave traces” and Goldsmith dwells exclusively in those traces creating a narrative solely of traces without effects. (beaulieu 62)
A body present is in a dissolve: out of what it is just ceasing to be, into what it will already have become by the time it registers that something has happened. The present smudges the past and the future. It is more like a doppler effect than a point: a movement that registers its arrival as an echo of its having just past. (Massumi, Parables, 200)
Inspecting the Seen of the Crime
beaulieu, derek. Seen of the Crime: Essays on Conceptual Writing. Montreal: Snare Books. 2011
“Please, no more poetry”: pleas from the scene of the crime, as poetry does its irreparable, imperfect damage. derek beaulieu, barely survivor of poetry, recounts some moments of close encounter. The preamble to the thirteen short essays, interviews, meanderings, that make up Seen of the Crime, are the confessions of a victim of poetry, or perhaps the warnings of a perpetrator. It sets a strident, polemic tone that is somewhat at odds with most of the pieces that follow. The pieces that follow being short, intimate, essays, interviews, close readings, portraits, of many things poetry. Included are, among others: confessions of bibliomania, an interview with Caroline Bergvall, and many close readings, for example of works by Craig Dworkin, Robert Fitterman, Kenneth Goldsmith, and bill bissett.
Clearly poetry, writing about poetry and publishing poetry are beaulieu’s passion and foremost activity. He also appears to be a ridiculously active community builder; or more precisely one should say communities, considering his prolific and activity as a writer (of several books and over 150 chapbooks), publisher of many exquisite limited-edition art/chapbooks, post-concrete poems, editor of UBUWeb’s new Visual Poetry section, and as a critic and reviewer. As an example that seems typical of the energy beaulieu puts into poetic communities (& also a statement that has inspired me ever since I read it) beaulieu states in an interview with fellow Canadian poet Sina Queryas:
I think it’s a poet’s responsibility to review books. As writers, we have committed ourselves to taking part in a dialogue, a discussion about art, and as such it’s our responsibility to review other books – to look at and write about other writers’ work – in order to further a discussion of the role of art.
Bealieu certainly accomplishes that and much more with this book. For all its elegant sleekness I have been enjoying, reading and returning to the Seen of the Crime for many weeks now. The book is definitely slim at under 70 pages, but the essays and ponderings it collects are fun, moving, evocative, provocative, and inspire to think again and hopefully anew. As proof of how much food for thought these short essays provide: what follows is a response to only one (the shortest) essay in the book.
Becoming found: Rob’s word shop
Fitterman would appear to simply be adhering to a basic tenet of capitalism: make something out of nothing; value out of debt. “Poetry decreases the value of the page it is written on” (was it Charles Bernstein who made that facetious comment?), so Fitterman is raising the value of poetry one could quip, or at least making it worth more than an empty page, simply by charging 1 Dollar per word. Matthew Timmons’ book Credit, parenthetically, is a purely conceptual example of the collapse into itself of this notion of value from zeros, credit from debt. Credit consists – in two parts, ‘Credit’ and ‘Debit’ – of all the credit card offers he received in a period of three weeks, as well as all the debit letters he receives over another two week period. Timmons cannot afford the 200-300 Dollar cost of purchasing Credit himself, nor (writes Vanessa Place) has he ever seen a hard copy of the thing.
But Fitterman, surely, as a self-proclaimed Conceptual poet – & therefore situated in a tradition of experimental poetry that precisely resists the capitalist commodification of language – is not trying to simply make money from other people’s words by exploiting the model of capitalist exchange? It is an intriguing situation; on one level what is taking place is a straightforward exchange of service and money. How much more commodified can a word get than being produced in response to a direct order and in exchange for a pre-determined price?
However, this is not an essentializing, metonymical kind of commodification that reduces letters or words to mere references for a chain store, or brand name (Golden Arches, VW). The words in Rob’s Word Shop do not refer to anything beyond themselves. Customers’ letters, words or sentences are produced not in the inhumane conditions, long, repetitive, back-breaking (or literally life-ending) hours of a sweat shop; instead, each order is tailor-made, with care for different specifications regarding the letter, word, sentence. Fitterman takes the time to decide with customers on the preferred font, length, size & much more.
Bartleby once more is on the same page as Fitterman here: Deleuze as well as Jacques Rancière argue in different ways that Bartleby’s statement “I would prefer not to” is not referential, but self-referential, referring only to his own desire to not act.
Jacques Rancière argues that this original should be linked to the eccentric – there is no mimesis, he does not imitate and cannot be imitated. Bartleby is inexplicable, he is from no where. [This echoes Deleuze appropriation of Samuel Butler’s ‘Erehwon’ as ‘a disguised no-where [and] a rearranged now-here’] Edward Willatt
Fitterman’s production of words on demand, can be thought of as coming from no-where, or a now-here in the very strict sense of being contingent on the desires of and the interaction with his customers. Their genesis is no longer the no-where of mass capitalist production, but the now-here of what is each time a new unexpected yet specific situation.
“Looking closely at words increases their materiality.” (James Sherry, The Language Book, 165) Rob and his customers take their time to pore over, ponder over, which word, how should it look, what materials should be used, can be used, where on the page, how big on the page, in what way on the page, & what shape should it take? Customer 37, on the last day, tries to find a way around the problem that there are not enough stencils to spell out her desired word ‘ampersand’:
One customer is not even sure how her own word – interpellation – is spelled & asks for a dictionary (which Rob does not have, but they work it out together):
Words become process here, a process of objectification, but not the kind that pins the words down and makes them do things that go against their inclination. Rather, words are objectified in the sense that they are studied and scrutinized as mysterious, ultimately unknowable objects in their own right. Queer in the sense of their uniqueness, eccentricity, monstrosity, being celebrated instead of overseen or put to some vicarious use in a marketing scheme, business plan, company logo; uncanny, by continually evading the subjugation of being completely known by some person pinning it down with a stare. “On errands of life these letters speed towards death” echoes beaulieu’s 9 Dollar commission to Rob’s Word Shop. In bringing people together & creating community, through the discussion of letters, the very letters speed towards the death of their ultimate unknowability, their ultimate evasiveness in the face of (an attempt at) being read.
Rob’s Word Shop, in which words are sold, paradoxically becomes here an inter-subjective, inter-personal exploration and an opening up to the singular and withdrawn qualities of those words, something that will remain unnamable even after the words have been stamped, sealed and delivered. What will be named, however, is the event(s) of these meetings, these convergences of word-person-person. “On one’s own solitude, one only holds a dialogue with oneself to stylize oneself…One does not write in order to say something, but to define a place where no one will be able to declare what hasn’t taken place.” (190) Steve McCaffery elegantly formulates a similar thought about the community-building effect of the removal from words, of the fetish of capitalization:
to demystify this fetish and reveal the human relationships involved within the labour process of language will involve the humanization of the linguistic Sign by means of a centering of language within itself; a structural reappraisal of the functional roles of author and reader, performer and performance; the general diminishment of reference in communication and the promotion of forms based upon object-presence: the pleasure of the graphic or phonic imprint, for instance, their value as sheer linguistic stimuli. Kicking out reference form the word (and from performance) is to kick its most treasured and defended contradiction: the logic of passage. (McCaffery, The Language Book, 189)
(A brief tangential footnote to a beautiful passage: why speak of “the humanization of the linguistic Sign” when we could speak of its de-humanization? Christian Bök – arguably the most in-human poet active – apparently believes that “poetry in the future will be written by machines for other machines to read” (Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, 11). Be that as it may, or may not; I do certainly feel that it is much more interesting to include what is inhuman in us alongside all the humanizing. Not in spite of the ceaseless unimaginable inhuman atrocities we act out upon one another, but precisely because of them.)
A try at writing letters
Found, when dead, with pen in hand trailing off into an untraceable line. C, slid slightly, from her heavy chair, head back tilted into the air, mouth a small gap, pen on paper, in light grasp, as if both release & certain hold. Surrounding with, in death, her absence, the letters, in hundreds that surround her; the letters that verge, in piles, into where she be, as she has seeped into their ink or parts of paper where they cannot reach. Pointless traces of mutal-entanglement. C had sent letters to all kinds of friends. Her letters are not stories, ponderings, accounts; her letters are practices at single letters of a minimally shifting alphabet. C had not known precisely where to start, she started where she did not remember having had begun. Does also not recall when she stopped making sense. Starts creating, instead of paragraphs & sentences from letters; starts creating, letters & lines from letters. Copy-book schoolbook between-two-lines-letters; tightrope-trapeze line letters, electric wire safety-line letters. She swoops into a language she does not know. She begins with letters Roman alphabet; ends with partings of the, from the, page, the squiggle, hardly signalling a trace; or bold; or wildly patterned. Somewhere between the fully cogent epistle & instances of random seeming squiggle, C cleaves a speed enmeshed with sensible & possibilities for sensible. C plays with variations infinitely present in the alphabet that slowly becoming alphabet, become anew another alphabet. A tendency, as if infected by a fictional disease; concocted, yet one that people somehow believe. C is infected by her alphabets & in turn traces them into process of decay. C writes her letters into ruin, collapses her K into a ruin, doodles H’s into whispers, scrawls her C into a squiggle. The changes are not planned but neither are they abrupt or random. C writes outward; shifting overlapping seas of ripples, varying in minimal degree, affecting minimally, each other. Inversely, she is surrounded with, much of her room is buried under, piles of received, unopened letters; with more than unwound majuscules & minuscules. Her letters received remain unread. Her letters received have proper complex sentences, the paragraphs the arguments; & questions. C’s corners are padded by these unread letters, big patches of her floor are carpeted with letters. Why you write but no reply? Why you no reply? C, slid position, slightly outward, reckons negative, sunken into about to have sunken into. C’s correspondents smell already soon, a stink of absence, a correspondent phantom pain of amputeetered vacillation, vanishing of morphogenerating letters. C found, when dead, with pen hand trailing an untraceable line; her mouth a lovely grimace; its outline forming possibilities of letters, any number of,
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A try at breaking & piling, where C piles the objects of each room into the middle of each room
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Beginning finally when it was just about, to begin, too late, she could not not begin no more, C stacks her hopes against the odds, grinds her odds into a frenzy. Moving methodically yet without outline, without drawing board C enters a destructive tract, with firm & moment movements, her breathing easy, even, her eyes open unblinking; or shut & to corners wildly pulsating. Breaks what crushes, shatters, rips apart. Slashes with a knife, what is too tough for her skin-and-bone hands, hammers with a pounding. Mattress slash, the feathered room, heavy pile of wardrobe MDF boards, clothes torn hand by hand, curtain stripped from rails & ripped apart. Kitchen space a cloud of spice and herbal trace, a pile of spices, pans, pots, glass, cutlery & cups. C moves from edges of her living room concentrically more centrally. Turns over dinner table, hammers into table paws; pulls down curtain down, quarters the four chairs; vivisects & autopsies & guts two sofas; topples, onto top of the pile, in the middle of the room, her one bookcase facing her one other bookcase; topples onto middle pile her other bookcase facing no longer her first bookcase; rips slightly at wallpaper, dawdles indecisively, strays unwound, uncertainly, meanders into bathroom room, hangs herself, wet towel, for some time over an edge of a bathtub; locks the door and waits for an appointment to arise, a visitor to come and knock; C sits onto a closed toilet manually folding certain pleats into her pants’ pleats, presses with her hands and rubs direct down. Presses, rubs. Unbuttons up & rebuttons down her shirt; uncollars then folds down the collar of her shirt; unties thus reties very perfectly the laces of her shoes; speculates for a moment, had C long hair, she would braid her hair in two; nostalgia for a moment that was never there. C sits straight on the toilet, head high back straight, fingers pointing forward resting on her thighs. C waits to be beamed up; C readies for a visitor to come and knock.
A try at organising things neatly
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C tries to organise the objects in her house. C lays out lines of objects, begins in one room, begins again, until in every room the objects have been laid out line for row. When entering there is a hall, with right a bedroom, left a bathroom, straight ahead a living room and through that on the left a kitchen. Wherein C opens all her cupboard doors, reaches in with both her hands at equal level equal pace, the fingers alternate to grab like tendons then like vices the foodstuffs living on the front row, or in hidden shadows. The best she can is what it looks like when C is done; label-facing spices two rows deep, multi-shaped cartons of teas bricked neatly as a wall, behind which baggy packs of flour, baking soda, sugar. C does not change the Seinfeld wall of cereal, she rearranges condiments, stacks mini-packs of multi-flavoured jam, places on top of peanut butter, peanut butter. Inside her fridge a puddle leaks unevenly to one side. So for her books & bookshelves, sofas chairs & table, desk, C creates the even lines of parallel and equanimity. C fluffs & beats her sofa pillows beats her carpet. Lays her carpet beater in the hall, parallel the sole left / right shoe, the doormat. C meditates on throwing out half-empty variations on a theme of shower gels, instead she hides them in ascending order, behind a bottle full of shampoo & a bottle full of body gel. Three toothbrushes, one unknown, are arranged on an only bathroom shelf, along with two toothpaste tubes, one plastic Gillette razor refill cartridge with one remaining blade. Ten rolls of toilet paper rolls sit in the corner of the bathroom shelf against the wall above the toilet. Before C lies herself onto her floor she opens up her wardrobe door she pulls open the drawers, pulls out her drawers. C folds her shirts and socks and drawers and pants & pieces onto their kind and into piles & piles. Having worked frenzy contra disorder C sits, by hardly denting, in the middle of the middle of the sofa. She thinks about the puddle in her fridge. The puddle & her body, the only objects left uneven in the house. On her desk, C eyes a row of pens, soldiers fatigued, unto death arranged. C lies herself onto her floor precisely alongside carpet lines, with arms straight down, with palms flat on the ground. C slides up her hands up, to where her elbows were, between two lines of carpet, 90° approximately, a strike-a-pose, a doll about to push upright. C’s one eye, lazy, weaves wayward between the straight(ened) lines, a drape threads dark, slant penetrating sunlight with slant grimy shadow. Trying to forget itself, C’s body presses into this rug, emerging and collapsing, nearly, in & out of trembling, unsensed. Regular as quantum clock.
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C edges minimally direction sofa armrest, rests her arm so slightly ever over barely type of sofa armrest, C strokes ever so ever. This feels workable, opportunity like. In the get up & rush out, C brushes her homeroom-plant, hallway-wall, her corner-door, her outside-door, with calves, shins, back-hands, shoulders. but from now, in several attempts, C tries petting, with her physical, in a more certain manner. On a street she turns the sun onto her face & still as a performance artist / mannequin, she stands, next to a lamppost, traversed by sounds of the construction of an urban street scene. C moves from one to one foot to crush precisely with a twist of toes a relinquishing fat moth & when it happens, C stretches out her hand toward, who happens by, a figure & who in that moment stretches, distracted, hurried, out her left arm to free her hand up to her head, to scratch her nose, to hear her phone, pull at her ear. C’s back of right hand brushes along the figure’s left three middle fingers & they exchange barely skin and touch. The figure almost distracted out of her distraction, continues, puzzled about Did something happen just? C’s hand remains for some full seconds suspended, partly, on its way back from fully stretched, uncertain if it had meant to friction against this figure’s fingers. C leans for inhalation into the meeting of her back & line of lamppost, she fondles very carefully her right-side little finger, she strokes, with her left-side middle finger, circles around, the little bone protruding from her elbow, presses ebbing waves against the underside of her right knee, pushes flat her tongue into the oxter of her arm,
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Wormrot & Dirge
Dirge hums for passing Wormrot, Dirge drivels, mournful, Wormrot moves, on. What is a neighbour called who vacates to two blocks down? Dirge sometimes screams in a street in a night (when there are no people around, when it is cold, with thick absence). This settles his one scream into a cold black like the spray of a sneeze drifts into air, like an aerosol of a spray-can dispersed, like a venom of snake into air. Wormrot crawls sometimes on the floor of his house, forgets his eyes of blind spot, becomes all over, the empty marker in his head. Sometimes Dirge screams into Wormrot’s belly, with his face pressed into Wormrot’s belly. Sometimes Wormrot writhes his body into Dirge’s face, writhes his belly or the inside of his thigh, or the cheek of his butt or face into the side or front of Dirge’s face; or his armpit or backside into Dirge’s face. Tend to, Wormrot & Dirge slide obscenely gently into each other. Tend to, Wormrot & Dirge stand on their respective patios, with a lookout across a partway-distance, slant either in or away from their other location. Sometimes when Wormrot remains, parsed, these two blocks from Dirge, Wormrot scribbles on the unsent postcard; sometimes Dirge places, alone, the cups of tea for two onto his coffee table.
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