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By Jim Meirose

Th’ chief bluesuit’s arm rose, silencing Pig right there; and, the words he spoke ran ‘long the arm, which by some magical means accelerated his words into, Pig and that other pal, he think’s he’s been speaking to, saying, Never mind. No more is required. It looks like everything’s in order here. There is nothing to see. We can repairback whence we came here out of and back further from that even and an’ d d na dna—so. Being far above any normal pup’s protests, the three tallboys in their blue zoots in ackrian’s whirlwind ‘bout the body swirled packing it up, sealing it down, cleaning all down and making the way out the room hall then the entire building; so—an immensely meaningful silence formed on the autopsy table, cricked out a vastly finespun blueboy of a spherical whirl, that grew sucked any stray particles of proof from the room and, the door. The knob rattled its lock being unn’d from the far side itself, and she opened full of a janitor-man that broomed itself off to the side, and in came Venisienne, all herself as they usually are, and the Chester-named Lavender Boy, saying nearly unisinion right then, eh, we thought you were tired of waiting for the janitor but—how’d you get in here? You were out here now, in? That cannot be!

No! Wait! You were in here with me, you were jabbing and slicing this, eh—wait.

Turning around, Pig ‘xpected to see, but; by our Gods—what? What? What no, can’t be, b’ yes; the vast college lab room stretched ‘ver, an’ countless empty dissection tables stretched neatly lined up left to right and front and back all together, and; it was much too bright in there; it is much too bright in here, so; and it had taken the—autopsy room, but—something pushed down, pressing its corresponding other one up, and Pig blinked, spat, coughed and yes; great God! He became once more back, in his very today, all alone, in Helmut Greene’s worldwide discreet autopsy and private twenty-four-hour emergency lawn care contracting concern; where he’d been called to expect some supposed high-level remains requiring emergency autopsy to appear, but not—and five minutes out, not; and fifty out, no; and how many hours thereafter—no. So, he went to his divan, for what reason he’d even got off it didn’t ‘ually matta’, while burrowing into the fattest book available, to wait there, inside; where way back from any far future past your fully pulled stops, there came read back to you that hazy description of an unusual event some several dozen years further back yet from the furthest yet you dare ‘tempt to probe. Beware, though; too far back will cast off your strange body and force you to know what you really are, so, no. Not interested. Keep going. There is nothing to see. Everything said here, please, folks. Let it slide slick out back past this here’s far behind. There’s still nothing to see

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GA:

So by ‘real’ I had in mind the Real as I derive it from Lacan via Zizek, one definition being that which prevents language from closing on its object.

PP:

I have not been exposed to the nuances of either Lacan or Zizek. So, I operate on the basis of gleans of distillations. The idea that the Real “resists symbolization” could be easily misunderstood as suggesting some “positive entity”, external to a symbolic structure, is inimical to its functioning. But this is not the case; “basically nothing [no-thing] resists symbolization”. Zizek’s reading of Lacan’s idea is that the Real is internal, that “symbolization has an inherent obstacle caught in its own loop” In other words it is a way to account for the inherent limitations of the symbolization ‘machine’. The implication is that there are times when language fails us completely, but this is not because the objects it is tackling are ungraspable; it is because there are limits to the symbolizing capacity of the machine. [1] [2] [3] [4]

GA:

Once you’ve subtracted everything else preventing that, that you can never finally enumerate, there remains the abstract imperative of profit-enhancement at all costs that is actually determinant in the world but which we grope to locate; & remains also, part-generative of all the stories we tell of our motives, some fantasy more fundamental still, our own pathological tic, operative only through remaining inaccessible. So the Real is less “an elusive essence” than a counter-slab, a compound rebuffing pressure w/in all flexibilities of wielding the language & which those flexibilities themselves forever call up.

PP:

Yes, the Real never works in that guise, the ‘elusive essence’; it is a mistaken expectation that forever returns and is always left hanging. There is an inhibition inherent in any process of symbolization and one might apply the term ‘Real’ to register the effect. Let us go with the Zizek-Lacan formulation of this and move on.

I wonder if the inherent limitations one is trying to account for are less to do with symbolization per se and are more to do with an overarching reality-making operation that serves fitness for survival. The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman suggests as much in The Case Against Reality ch. 4. The ‘imperative of profit-enhancement’ then would be the fitness payoffs that the organism actually perceives, i.e. it never was dealing, adequately or otherwise, with the ‘truth’ of its objects, and the ‘pathological tic’ then would be being (a process not a thing) which is that ‘reality making operation’. Reality is always ‘reality for’; everything persistently realized is so because it contributes to a reality characterized by its fitness payoffs. Consequently reality is dynamic and full of necessary illusions. If the Real applies from this perspective it does so as an inherent limitation in reality making, and kicks-in even in a pre-linguistic condition.

GA:

Your original question, then (“What happens when the reality one is trying to negotiate pushes the language to the limits of intelligibility?”), might be rephrased: In face of all this, how can we think to make aesthetic form at all? What various things can we ask of it that would make it recognizable as (satisfying, at least provisionally) form at all? How can this paragraph even end?

PP:

You draw us back to the original question suggesting a reformulation in terms of the making of “aesthetic form”. This is an excellent suggestion.

GA:

In Spring and All (1923), William Carlos Williams insists “that ‘beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.” (I quoted this line to a PhD student in the late 80s, & she answered, more or less, “None of the key words there means anything to me.”)

PP:

 ‘Beauty’, ‘loveliness’, ‘state’, and ‘reality’ … it is so easy to forget how quickly frames of reference slip. WCW had in mind a contemporary visual art which had travelled a very long way from the art Plato damned as two steps removed from the truth, i.e. the imitation of appearances, and even from that which, through reason, Plotinus thought could commune with Ideal-Forms. Plotinus might have been convinced by Analytic Cubism, but I think not by the later Synthetic Cubism of Juan Gris to which WCW refers. When he says “the illusion once dispensed with, painting has this problem before it: to replace the reality of experience with its own,” he is prefacing the central point of the Formalist future, that a painting is its own reality and that the experience of painting (and by implication, of writing poetry) takes precedence.

GA:

Once he hit his stride, Williams’s sense of reality was pretty much naturalistic & included, crucially, the imaginative shapings that made it tolerable. I’m interested, then, in your ease w/ the term ‘poetics’ & disenchantment w/ ‘aesthetics’; the former to me has always seemed a sub-set of the latter, although your noting that “The will to make poetry is bound into precedent, principle, pre-existing lines of thought” fleshes out something I’d only grazed on the way to making another point.

PP:

I have my reservations about other aspects of Formalism, particularly as it played out in the postwar period, but I do think that the painter that needs any explicit theory at all should adopt or adapt one that accounts for the experience of painting, and artists in general one that accounts for the act of making, i.e. a poetics. For the artist in full flight aesthetics is at best a luxury and at worst a distraction, something best left to the philosophers and the critics. Aesthetics at root concerns ‘sense perception’: as we know Kant tried to retrieve this classical origin after Baumgarten’s appropriation of the term to mean ‘judgment of beauty or critique of taste’. Sadly fashion went with Baumgarten for the next two-hundred years and we live with that legacy (it put belt and braces around the art market even before recent speculative capital made it fat). However, whether or not one adopts a hierarchical perspective on aesthetics and poetics, maybe we can agree on this—it is a sentiment widely expressed by artists and writers—while we work, we work to satisfy ourselves, trying to satisfy (imagined) others just gets in the way. Being aware of one’s cultural situation is important, but primarily because one is in dialogue with one’s peers and/or owes some allegiance to the dead, and not because one is directed by arbiters and audiences.

GA:

I think it’s true that both of our poetic affiliations are to writers & works having an eye & ear to location w/in some version of the supra-personal, to put it mildly. But then your other question is fundamental also: “Is the motive [for poetry] warranted and is it a genuine prospect [of what’s real to enough people to count]?” Is it simply a product of “precedent, principle, etc,” steering us into a fool’s / charlatan’s paradise of (even if only provisional) satisfaction / pleasure-giving? & if “playfulness and resistance … define the poet’s dichotomy,” what is the type of that resistance? not to mention of the play?

PP:

The strange thing that often occurs to me is how unpredictable are the vibrations out there that cause me to resonate. I know why I do it, but not why particular things catch me. The first ‘why’ is a question of so-called ‘neurodiverse’ constitution: I have a surfeit of sympathetic and hardly any empathetic channels. If you cry I cry, but without the ‘emotional intelligence’ to read a situation I have no idea what is at the time the right thing to say or do. That is putting it simplistically, of course, but not exaggerating. So the motive for poetry in my case has a lot to do with compensating for the anachronistic, the dislocated, and the alienated qualities of for me ‘ordinary’ experience. And I think that carries across all modes and media in my work. The second why … that defeats me; I just go with the flow and hope for the best. And this does give rise to play and to resistance. Can we characterize them? If we can, maybe the business of ‘negotiating realities resistant to intelligible expositions’ or ‘thinking to make properly aesthetic forms’ might become clearer. This will be speculative of course.

On resistance: perhaps in line with the Real and standing in for all ungraspables, the poet is constant in prising the lids off things, refusing a focus on one facet or another of the intriguing, the serendipitous, the bothersome, the emotionally confusing, etc. This ‘opening-up’ is a conscious display of resistance to the artificial closure that the prosaic presents through the “distilling trajectory of traditional ‘clearing’ strategies” (as I put it in post #1). If the clarity of something is suspect it provides one motive for poetic in(ter)vention: a display of resistance that mirrors the Real (and potentially staring dangerously into its abyss—William S Burroughs was only too aware of this danger.)

On play: for me playfulness is manifest in an openness to and facility with the materials to hand, whatever they may be—words, sounds, colours, images, gestures—and the great purpose in that—invention, the ‘coming-upon’—is best served ironically through initial purposelessness. Initially at least it has little to do with symbolization as already in process, of the semantic/pragmatic closure or otherwise of the material selected. In the ‘selecting’ I venture that an ‘aesthetic-of-the-one’ may come into play, neither rational nor irrational decision (both acts in relation to conscious thought), but rather a non-rational gesture (more akin to the compulsive, involuntary, and autonomic.) Play does not only manipulate and reconfigure materials, it uses them up, extracts anything and everything from them, including semantic/pragmatic possibility, and as play wastes its materials it similarly wastes its time.

GA:

This is a fairly familiar vexing. But before pushing further into it let me ask if you sense some pressure there toward martyrdom, given Judeo-Christianity is burrowed into the habitus & the poet shorn of broad social relevance. Conceptual poetry, surely the century’s most challenging of genres / factions, at its most extreme posits poetic pleasure, including (especially) that generated by a sense of critique or resistance, as culpably delusional sop to the urban complacency its exponents share; performances are staged as savvy annihilation into public or institutional discourse. Is the call of the bleak, something that’s taken multiple forms over the centuries, currently real & virulent? If so, does it lead to the bracing or debilitating? Or is it simply an outlier?

PP:

According to Burgess, Joyce’s prose “often looks odd when its intelligibility is not in doubt” (Preface to his: Here Comes Everybody). This conforms to age-old poetic expectations: it serves aesthetic ends without sacrificing sense. The real trick (kick) comes however when intelligibility is most in doubt and the ‘prose’ ordinary-looking. From the outset this is an attack on complacency toward contemporary mythologies (Allen Fisher does this brilliantly in sections of Gravity…) But you are quite right, the danger is that, especially in more extreme and vehement manifestations, ‘conceptual poetry’ becomes an incestuous orgy of cosmopolitan mesmerism. I am not so concerned about this, on a personal level, because I don’t really participate in the circus and, on a critical level, because I believe that rage and outrage—virtuous anger and convention busting—tend to shine above the sympathetic impotency of the delusional and to influence institutions for the better, even if their inertia means the effect is belated and somewhat dampened. But then from this ‘political’ perspective, no-one would argue that conceptual poetry, conceptual art of any sort, was in the ‘front-line’ … ‘avant-garde’ perhaps, if you don’t mind the modernist connotations, but never ‘front-line’.

Post #3 forthcoming

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Included in the 1958 translated collection of ‘Songs of the River’ (most of which emerged around 1939), many query whether ‘Rung’ actually belongs there. Its inclusion is thought to be due to editors giving it only a cursory reading, which of course does reveal the word ‘river’ on the second line. The real meaning of the work though is more obscure and seems to centre around a kind of uncanny appearance of the relatively newly developed telephone technology -hence ‘rung’. Initially it seems to indicate a state of pre-telephone innocence ruined by its advent though as it progresses this interpretation becomes less clear. The confusion tends to centre around the line ‘singing this song for his will to be done’ which has been taken to mean that there is something divine voice of the telephone, that it some how enables a teleology in the system (Seranoga’s Hegelian inclinations have been noted elsewhere). Having said all of this the German repeating section and the last curious stand alone verse have proved confusing to many. Speculatively one can look at the poem as beginning with the afore mentioned innocence, dissolving into an uncanny dread of the device before the realisation of its divine nature. This divinity is sung by the strange exuberant desire for the phone that the alternatively rhythmed final section displays. The German shows the hesitation and eventual acceptance of the whole work in miniature for the reader.

Rung

Lie me down softly and sing me to sleep,
There’s fog on the river and fires to keep,
I never was lonesome I always felt glad,
What happens this season is solid and sad,

And you sing me all alone,
And you sing me all alone,

Komme, noch nicht,
Komme, noch nicht,
Komme, noch nicht, komme.

Holding the bone rim, the gift of the maw,
Mouthing the tone ring, the see and the saw,
Waiting in morbid state here for the call,
Enchanted bells in the dim of the wall,

Embalming me now ‘neath the concrekerly town,
Calming me now ‘pon the merry go round,
Reaching in awe for the empty stone stair,
Coming and going the embers draw care…

And you sing me all alone,
And you sing me all alone,

Komme, noch nicht,
Komme, noch nicht,
Komme, noch nicht, komme.

Pressing compressing the tinniest noise.
Voices in turmoil the endless of choice,
Emptiness filled with the message of one,
Singing the song for his will to be done,

And you sing me all alone,
And you sing me all alone,

Hey mamma singer, hey pappa singer,
Bring me the ‘phone,
Hey copper singer, hey hopper singer,
Bring me the ‘phone,
Hey clapper singer, hey trapper singer,
Bring me the ‘phone,

Oh bring me that ‘phone to me!

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By Jim Meirose

Gotten out already his big forceps, he clamped onto the thing and pulled it free—advantaging the fact that the subject is far past killing—and as he swung the device—looking even more large, out free of its host—out over and into a stainless pan, its metallic nature was made known immediately by its the clank. Clearly this is a foreign object.

That’s a foreign object, is it not?

Obviously—and the thick shreds of stomach all th’ came ‘way with it, indicate that, most likely—most certainly—this is a top candidate for the cause ‘o this-mann’s final death.

How did it get there? How could one—as he prodded the gadget with a long rib-spreader lying by handily—ingest such a thing, after all, and by Peter, it’s two or three baseballs big.

Quite frankly yah yes, but—no. t’was not ingested as stated—had to become there by some unnaturally means. But—of its function, Doc—of what could that these, or those, if multiplee’ they be, what does it do. Can we tell?

Uh. It could not have grown there, ‘cause he’s not been ‘ver no machine. So, wipe that. It could not’ve been swallowed ‘cause of its immensity, and its grasping sharp appendages would have snagged it back, way up hiss throatwise most ‘mmediately. So, wipe that. Lastly was it implanted. Before dissertizing on that, maybe we got to nail down, 1. Surgically implanted? Ah, no, he’s no surgical scars. 2. Planted in, disguised as food or drink? Noah. Same quis’etty as swallowed. So, since there’s nothing else, what have we mis-guessed priorly back out ‘bout some coupla’ hunnerd’s ‘o words? To wit, I have just scanned all previous possible reasons down, once. And again, twice. And, again, once over one last time. And no.

Into the sudden breaking wave if silence was said aloud, So. We’ll never know?

Non no never eck—but it is what killed him.

That thing that there—oh, wook! Where did ye place it?

Right there—oh no, maybe?

No! Where did it go? No games, please.

I am not gaming. It was—I don’t know, look under these ‘n that’s.

And.

‘fter thoroughly scanning ‘der every these and that’s maybe-kimbo the whole room, eh.

I don’t get it.

Me neither, Chuck.

Eck, the masters, what should they be told?

A magic technology. Programmed to disappear if discovered. Like—like—like—the story at the front ‘o them olde tyme Mishdey-ing, if at all Posstibule, ‘terentainmenty shows.

Hic. What is that?

Oh, as the child you are here, you could not possibly remember. So never mind. But it is not your fault ye’re young as you are. You will grow up, someday.

But what about this? Why—

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photo: @johnwestrock

There is no language. I try to talk. I try to speak. I am met with silence. I am the Wilderness. I belong in the Wilderness. Scrub oak & crooked pine. Stick-figure creatures. Peculiar man from a very very very long island. I am Zig. Naming it makes it so. Call it what you must. Earth. I know no other. This planet is my planet. The Cosmos. Space. Echoes in perpetuity. I have not forgotten. The near simultaneity of our orgasms. A certain awareness is required for existence. All the goodbyes we said. I think of Berlin. Sex is unfinished. She holds by head between her thighs. She wants me to put my tongue on her clitoris. She pushes my head further down her belly. She says: Are there patterns in our movements? Bracing myself. I am down below. Nipples like ripe berries. She wants me to see her breasts. She holds up her hair as she fucks me. The failing light of a dying sun. Eightyeightthousand frames per second. I examine the granular particles of each frame. Text is my film. Epicenters. We make love in small circles. Am I the total enchilada? Am I half-mad? Am I mad? It is yesterday. Czechoslovakian milk comes in a bag. Am I real? Is this normal behavior? I am bewildered. Amerika is a State of puzzlement. Orgasm is an expression of love. We do it. I have a girlfriend. She has a boyfriend. The fuck is singularly inappropriate. Zig & Zoë are a Machine. Knees & hands on the floorboards. Opening. Awestruck. Gasping. Nearly falling over with pleasure. She fellates me. Something I can tell. Something I can relate. An episode. Anything. Something to happen. Waiting for an event. I enter a space. I enter a room. I animate. I breathe. Space contracts. Time expires. Sideways. Fucking. Zoë has a leg up on me. Nobody has a leg on me. Picasso. Lucky Charms. I delight in the art. Trapezoids. Quadrilaterals. Cubes. Perfect cardboard boxes. Such beautiful packaging. It is remarkable. The food from the supermarket. I eat the food. I. Me. You. Machines. Apartments. Making us helpless and stupid. Ancient city, what are you doing to us?  Yet we remain. It is safer to leave. We wander the ruins of a metropolis. Nothing matters except what remains. Ass in his hands. Zig admires the backs of her thighs. Just to see. Pull the curtains. Do you guess at normal behavior? Your phone is a supercomputer. We are electronic beings. This book is no longer made of paper. Makes no difference. Might keep going too. Let the manuscript unscroll. I might end it here. We are getting uncomfortably close to the epicenter of my being. Volkswagen Beetle. Ferdinand Porsche stole the design for Hitler. I like the Tatra 411. Look it up. It exists. Zetor. Grandpa drove a tractor. I make nothing. Grandma used to make dumplings. The goulash of existence. Waiting for the porridge. Waiting to be poured. A vessel. I am an empty cup. I have no skills. All of them. I believe in my skills. Who can live on 25K? Who can say: a novelette? A novella. 25K and what have you got? Floating. Floating. Am I really so terribly alone? Am I really here? Is this the Cosmos? Searching. Outstretched. Fingers and palms. Tactile experience. Feeling my way around. I am in an apartment. Echolocation. Reflections. Shadows. Neanderthal kitchens. Cabinets. Angles. Corners. Bats are the only flying mammals. How now? If so, what next? Is it collapsing? Are my thoughts gathered? Does my hair look good? I am terrified. Looking out a window. Sipping coffee. Alert. Awake. Everything is like whatever it is, right? Who forgets? Sounds & scents of fucking. She folds her labia over his Ben Jonson. Every new technology brings a war. The increasing wakefulness of being. Amerika beguiles. Fedora? Trench coat? Camouflage underpants? Parachute pants? Velcro? Electromagnetic? What fibers? What sort of clothing does one wear in the electronic environment? Open yourself. Open this novel. This is the news you need to read like right the fuck now! Did we lose the trajectory of Zig and Stefani? You said yes in thunder. Between her lips you feel like a god. Lowers your fly. She unsuits you. A gift. A flicker. You exist. There are no guarantees in the Universe. Vermillion is a city in South Dakota. Ochre is an ancient pigment.