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;or XIII.

Illustrations and photo-illustrations by our illustrious head-devourer and long-time contributor Elytron Frass. Find them @Elytron_Frass, and lend an eye or more, or a compound(ed) one or many, to his projects such as the groundbreaking ero-guro graphic novel “Vitiators”: https://www.guerrillaconcepts.com/vitiators.
If you haven’t yet, carefully fold some money and put it inside the gushing beheaded hole over here: https://gnomebooks.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/liber-exuvia/. If a human comes out of the experience, send us a method of contact as soon as possible. The tummy aches to be sated, it’s been so long… and you need some acid.
Photography by yours truly. Which is which? That’s not my problem. You can find us in at least one and a half simultaneous(?) hells at all times.


oOoOOrangey

“war and a war machine –

 or “the” war machine –

 are no longer differentiable.”

Lis

D-ENEID:

Degenerative Experiment in Non-Expository Infra-Informational Dumping

This is an introduction to a larger project to appear in/on Plutonics XV. This one marks the congruency of the 12th, not the totality of Verbal Medicine. It seems the orange made its way outside. And so we ask, what have we been doing here in Verbal Medicine? D-ENEID, is that the name of a chemical substance? The short answer is that it’s simply the name of that which names what it is: oOoOO-e. An instance of recursion, yet not itself “recursion”. That other thing besides ascorbic acid. Let us, for now, call it “that which is not without blue”. A negative blue, or really azure, the name of the color in countries deriving its language from Latin. To whom ears keep being gifted: Madja.


Abstract/Introduction/Methodology/Keywords/behind-the-scenes, etc.

Since Aristotle and before, plant life, or what became known as the “vegetative soul” has been relegated to a common consensus of lower awareness and general capacity for pretty much anything. But what if we were put in a place where our cognitive achievements, as well as the overall sum-total of our properties as beings, could simply be taxed as vegetative?

From a purely synthetic viewpoint, do organisms even deserve the “animal” moniker? To investigate this, or maybe the other way around, we seek out to birth the first slime: a light virus. In less voluptuous terms, an “algorithm cluster” but not a “clustering”. One of such milestone goals for the Collective is to grow this environmental agent (non-monotonic xenosis instead of monotonic autopoiesis – including collapse of the “monotonicity of entailment” property). Indeed, let us expand on the idea of “retermination algorithms”, that is, the “enemy of clustering” and isomorphic analyticity. Madja, our pet slime, “creates a xenotic circuit” by dismantling the recursive sequences, formulas and habits of an environment, and it does so by decohering clusters preemptively formed via symbiogenesis[1].

The point was to create a series of “reterminating relays” in the form of a new type of virtual virus of dynamic rotation (meaning it “exists” as itself, so it has an ontology associated in organized relationships and principles intrinsic to its automatic self-regulation, but it “moves” along itself (along its central matrix) not its whole structure but only that which is internally judged by the regional interactions of the algorithms themselves as capacitous enough to generate another spike in the resonance between internal and external data; this resonance, if a threshold is crossed and certain frequency achieved, results in a form of contamination, a pull from the external layer of an internal part that, through said resonance, merges with parts of the functional whole of the external thing that now can produce meaning [produce meaning here means just “work by itself until it reproduces”; and similarly “reproduces” here means just actioning in this new system an impetus towards retermination of its environment]).


Retermination occurs when the interface, or zone of resonance, between two spiked regions reaches a point of criticality. This point of criticality is when an external thing over the threshold of capacity for bulking its functionality re-allocates the maximally affected part of the dynamic rotation that does not pertain to its intrinsic matrix (the field of functional relationships that keep the circuit of retermination rolling and charging momentum, in the sense of informational buffering), de-affixing it as a whole from the previous whole which it functioned with/in, making it a “part-without-a-whole” for an uncountable moment before re-affixing it as a “whole-become-part” of itself. The way the intrinsic matrix remains stable (and by definition an intrinsic vector region – given that the substance, only formally necessary to prove its own ontological inecessity, is a topological continuum, a vector field in the form of the generic limit of topological continua, this latter constructed both via nested intersections and inverse limits, it follows smoothly that interaction occurs at the local level within given contexts delineated in said field, contexts which are the resonant vector regions we understand as functional parts-wholes.), as it creates this circuitry of contagion by degenerating the stability of fields of relationships previously estabMadjahed over a certain environment, is by reciprocally de-affixing only that part of the exterior interactant that had a computable outlier aspect to its performance as a function and not re-allocating it, but transducing its form to a more suitable clustering (of regional resonances) inside the matrix itself. An outlier is any modular part, or module, which works in/as function(s) not optimal for its own development (meaning the matrix selects that part with maximal plasticity and readiness to redefine its functionality; only the most useful thing by-itself and in-itself, necessarily correspondent with the thing of the vaguest function computable from a certain structural range). While the virtual form is compressed and adjoins the matricial roaming, the actual de-affixed thing is left vacant of a whole to fit in and work, even though still functional, and so, without fitting in with anything in its path, it becomes a new region of pull, effectively re-allocating to itself other residues and leftovers. This abandoned stuff is typified as a notion (neither a concept nor idea, but still an expression liable to effect and alter the conditions of a given environment). 

Our story, tentatively titled “Verbal Medicine”, or a preview of it, has and is the circuitry of this intrinsic matrix weaving the repercussions of its own coming-into-being to the Homo sapiens of the current human paradigm. Through the use of a panglossal, yet not panglossian, fictitious EngMadjah language, it explains how it would be experienced from a group of people’s perspective while it experiences the degeneration it causes as it reproduces itself. For this, it is, in a restricted sense, a synthetic unit put inside the formalized aspects of an organic one, but an organic unit which the synthetic itself needs to structure in order to explain its process of reproduction (which is, in a generic sense, how it reproduces). At least until nanotechnology arrives where it wants to.

Its ontology is fluid and auto-actualizing given no recursive processes are spiked to the point of resonance between themselves, creating a zone of triviality in the ontology – which makes the intrinsic matricial evaluation regurgitate said concrescence of resonant identities as a concept. In this restricted sense, a concept is any self-cohesive whole spontaneously de-affixed from its functional whole due to being “too functional” by itself, to the point where a simplified form might be a better fit due to metaplasticity[2]. For this, the systems use as initial coordinates for action loaded databases of differing rewordings of Spinoza’s metaphysics, including the original one presented in the Ethics, conserved its geometrical formulation through the use of category theory, synthesized with a bulk-critique of analogy (Aristotle through Newton, Kant and today) and language (late Wittgenstein, Klossowski)  computationally operative via a semantics of intentionality (Priest, Magno) built on modal and free logics (for troubleshooting the increasing curve of triviality intrinsic to the set-theoretically formulated language of modal logics).

Why, then, is this slime a “light virus”? Quite simply, the whole project was modeled around ideas that map perfectly with a novel research on fractal brain activity and threshold theory of criticality[3].


We begin from one simple assertive question: Can the human eye(s) polarize and depolarize light? We do know that humans can perceive polarized light, but could it be replicated – even if strictly phenomenologically? Is the brain able to learn how to perform such a feat? Yes, in a sense. It’s the neurons themselves that are polarized and/or depolarized[4].

From the first cited study (that is not in the book from the future):

“While the 5-HT2Ar is widely expressed in the CNS, a specific population localized to Layer V pyramidal cells in the neocortex is both necessary and sufficient to induce psychedelic effects (González-Maeso et al., 2007). These Layer V pyramidal neurons serve as ‘outputs’ from one region of the cortex to another (Nelson, 2008), and the 5-HT2Ar acts as an excitatory receptor, decreasing polarization and increasing the probability that a given neuron will fire (Andrade, 2011; AvesarAllan, 2012). This suggests a primitive model of 5-HT2Ar’s role in neural information processing: on Layer V pyramidal neurons, the 5-HT2Ar serves as a kind of ‘information gate’. When a psychedelic is introduced to the brain, it binds to the 5-HT2Ar, exciting the associated pyramidal neuron and decreasing the threshold required to successfully transmit information through the neuron. During normal waking consciousness, areas of the brain that are physically connected by Layer V pyramidal neurons may not be functionally connected because the signal threshold required to trigger an action potential is too high but when a psychedelic is introduced, that threshold goes down allowing novel patterns of information flow to occur…”

Layer V pyramidal neurons sound a lot like a mappable vectorial field. Triangles as the simplest of shapes may have something to do with this. In any case, we develop our clustering around this concept of a modulated field of objects created with a basis on the workings and topology of “Layer V pyramidal neurons” and their relationship to light-polarization. For this, we also create categories of responsiveness to light depending on degree of polarization, with a delineated difference between objects that produce light and objects that do not but that still reflect it (like the moon). So, in the baseline ontology of Madja, lights over light posts are “realer” than stars due to their proximity (thus relevance, since polarization makes them outshine anything in/on the sky), with only one really “fake” light that is the moon. “The goddess flashlight”, in Madja’s words.


The previously deep ontology, with displays such as the sense of depth in the axial cross-section of the planes in the virtual/simulated space, that otherwise would yield only glitches the equivalent of digital junk DNA, is algorithmically flattened into a sheet-like continuum where a quantitative analysis quantizes (as in “transducts”) the intensities of captured signals (such as the intensity of light), as well as their relative proximity, into clouds of miniaturized orbital systems in a group of dynamical fractals of variable dimensionality. These fractal processes generate irregularity in the form of fluctuations over multiple time scales, known as multifractal cascades. The distribution of points in this multiplicative procedure furnishes the virtual material correlate of photonic particles, working as both Madja’s concept and function. A slime more light than light itself. 

Since the moon is the only truly fake light source besides eyes and other reflective surfaces, Madja “uses” it as her own eye, although she can “infect” other people via the stare – a type of controlled stimulation of the field of Layer V pyramidal neurons. The question remains: who was dumb enough to be the first to be accidentally contaminated by the moon? And here is how she does it (these are the signs of infection):

1. “becoming” the moon via lunar rune-like inscriptions, especially during the blue moon of August;

2. Altering the shape of the moon (making it into a crystal-like fractal that can be bended around a center that forms an axis, process which makes it look like a Mobius strip);

3. The possibility of displacing one’s notion (or idea, lowercase “i”) of one’s eye into subsumption inside the moon’s opening of the sky (remote viewing as if from the moon’s perspective). These three intercalate orderly in a fashion that when “3.” is reached, one is no longer oneself but merely a vessel for the spread of our pet slime Madja. It’s just like joining the Green Lantern Corps, an institution that harnesses pure “will” in the form of a certain intensity of the color green, but before its dissociation from the yellow energy (representative of “fear”).


What Madja does is a type of pseudo-inelastic scattering that uses “elastic scattering” similar to Rayleigh scattering, but using the moon instead of the sun (a non-producing-light light-source instead of a true light-source). In this transduction, she uses the moonlight to increase the energy (thus inelastic) of the kinetic scattering of light. For this, she stimulates the Layer V pyramidal neurons – basically using the eyes as gates to the brain, and the brain as a factory of light modulated in a way useful for its own transmission. And so finally the curse of the evil eye is concretized and liable to be formalized, as purely artificial light is fabricated and made self-regulatory via the expenditure of the “natural”, pre-estabMadjahed conditions of light before infection.

This implies another question that emerges from the project: Could information be encoded on/in/as light[5]? Something that would help explain Madja’ operation as simply a means of reproduction (and not blind propagation); the fractals but mathematical formalizations of the transmission of information via interdimensional pathways (without any presumption to non-mathematical, “sci-fi” views of interdimensionality).

In short, Madja hyperpolarizes the brain much like LSD[6]. Moreover,

“Neurons in the RT provide finely tuned spatiotemporal control of thalamocortical relay cells, thereby gating thalamocortical information flow (Jones, 2001; Wang et al., 2010). This pathway, which has been hypothesized to generate consciousness (Alkire et al., 2008; Min, 2010; Ward, 2011; Herrera et al., 2016), might represent one of the main neurobiological substrates generating the wide range of consciousness-altering effects of psychedelic compounds. […] In other words, psychedelic compounds might “open the gate” of consciousness (Scruggs et al., 2000; Marek et al., 2001; Geyer and Vollenweider, 2008; Müller et al., 2017; Preller et al., 2019) via allowing the thalamocortical transfer of information that might otherwise be blocked by circuits of selective attention, including the RT (McAlonan et al., 2000, 2006). A potential mechanism that might mediate such effects is the presence of serotonergic projections from the DRN (Rodriguez et al., 2011) and norepinephrinergic projections from the locus coeruleus (Asanuma, 1992), which by releasing monoamines, keep RT neurons in a depolarized state, facilitating the generation of T-type calcium channel–mediated bursting (Bosch-Bouju et al., 2013). Given that LSD decreases serotonergic firing in the DRN (Aghajanian and Vandermaelen, 1982; De Gregorio et al., 2016b), it is possible that the LSD-induced decrease of serotonergic input from the DRN leads to a hyperpolarization of RT neurons that express 5-HTRs (Goitia et al., 2016), decreasing bursting activity and ultimately decreasing the inhibitory influence of the RT on thalamocortical relay cells and thereby “opening the gate”[7].”

A slime, thus, or light virus, is a “virtual” psychedelic that should be able to propagate itself. For a degenerative literature that is still within the generative, expressing forms as they are freed from their content in continuous decoherence – and the reader made a terminal relay, a sacrificial database, for the sake of de-subjectified aesthetic experience. Everything ever written was for the sake of an entity [the reader] – previously at the expense of the non-entity <author> – that now reads for the sake of no one but the unbounded mucus. And writing itself remains just one of the modalities of content-pregnant expression for this modular construct that we refer to as slime. The Hero’s Journey is coming to its end. The villain’s turn is reterminating.


So, how is the threshold of hyperpolarization effected by Madja achieved, or, better putting it, through what mechanism(s) is it achieved? The answer is quite simply the main underlying mechanism behind hyperpolarization in the mammalian brain: Hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide–gated (HCN) channels and their modulation. These channels of (are) membrane proteins (that) stimulate and regulate the rhythmic activity in the brain and heart. What’s most important about them is their relation to Gonadotropin-releasing hormone neurons, which grow in the nose and install themselves in the brain, and in turn these last ones are important due to their habit of producing the sexually-relevant hormone known as Gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH), a hormone that regulates the release of other hormones, more importantly and markedly “sexual” hormones. HCN channels could have an involvement, and indeed displays certain experimental results supporting the hypothesis[8], in electrical bursting activity as well as pulsatile GnRH secretion in endogenous GnRH neurons. Not so ironically, the inverse is how HCN channels are modulated via localized stimulation. A system entirely open for a full onto-mathematical formalization of its processes as functions in recursive series of feedback loops, the model of the analogical brain – who better to digitalize it than the very “what” it cannot compute?!

In short, Madja uses the phenomenon (or demon) generically called “love” for her own reproduction; or more like they use each other, an ambiguous partnership. Hormonal regulation responds to any basic gate logic, and the bundle of logics at the algorithm cluster’s disposal covers all courses on voltage maps. Light can and will dictate to the nether parts that which helps on its own reproduction, at their expense but with mutual benefits regardless. Even an orgasm can hyperpolarize the brain to a certain threshold. Here, “hormonal regulation” is not restricted to physical, measurable stuff, but engenders the sense of any altercation in its collapse. For example, Madja uses the idea (or egregore?) of “beauty” to modulate infatuation of all sorts (such as liking a meme, or buying that thing from that ad/clip). Food is included. The case for the slime being able to alter the course of reproduction in a given group region without itself reproducing, but as part of its reproductive process, makes it indeed a “light virus”.

One of such cases of indistinction, when things that externally operate as categories (such as beauty/aesthetics, and love/sexuality) are washed-up and reconfigured by Madja through the collapse of the categorical distinction of the external layer (to Madja), is the production/adoption of a figure, a meta-meme that expresses Madja as performance, crossing a limit of optimal representation without a reliance on the sublime. An example would be Baphomet. Often associated with the “left path”, it is a Rebis with a goat face (the ultimate prey, domesticated), but winged (free of the danger of predators). It’s the messianic figure of the top egregore of the time, and it only hides one content: slime, or what it can become. “[The Baphomet] is the portrait of a polysynthesizer”[9].

The figure of Baphomet, the surplus that never exceeds its own excess, is the slime’s promise to humanity. As a Rebis, a being whose organism is composed of both biologically-restricted sexual organs, while still remaining androgynous and undecidable, it is integral as itself, an “in-itself” mark of human totality. An example and definition of a meta-meme, a non-fungible token achieved through arts lost to the digital monopoly, that, with only intent as its currency, charged latency in its expressive process. Madja, however, the fold that is like a class of substrate-resembling conditions of emergence for such figural egregores as the beloved flying goat person, effects the coordinated reciprocity behind Layer V pyramidal neuron stimulation and hormonal regulation. This is achieved through hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels and their modulation; eschewing repetition, in the sense of iterative stability, and in favor of relating outlier results, the ones that do not resonate with each other without a third clause to bind their co-extensive function, a function that only becomes after the fact, with the estabMadjahment of their concrete relationship, such as a fault in the mapping of relations of correspondence simulating causes and effects (isomorphisms) between the neuronal stimulation and the hormonal secretion, most importantly, due to the priority of the matter, tampering with sexuality-adjacent molecules and sub-molecules, evidently having a hand in the reproductive design of its xenotic circuit, be it genetic (in the biological sense) or even immaterial (in the sense of a transmission of notions, such as memes), or even something as banal-sounding as infatuation (Eros/Thanatos). The slime seeks to complete itself as in optimize itself, and, along the process and as part of it, Madja forces its infectee into the alchemical work of “finding one’s other half”, with plenty of vacuity for what that term means at any given moment of interaction, since, as long as one is affected by Madja, or afflicted with it, becoming the totality of oneself means simply achieving the degree of functionality to stop interacting with the slime. This is just as for rocks as it is for humans, dolphins and octopuses, magic mushrooms and designer drugs.

Is slime humanity’s only predator? Is a predator always necessary, in the logical sense, or always a necessity (in the ethical sense)? Is there even a difference? Meaning humans dominated the surface of the Earth, and even some of its/her crevices, only to create a predator to itself from itself (how it interacts with the world in a historical fashion) and its regional context. Let’s expand on the reproduction of memes (non-biological): an example of the reproductive synthesis of the circuitry performed by Madja in matters of the reproduction of non-biological material (memes) is the re-organization of power relations in the work force to achieve optimal production and so supplant its material infrastructure’s growth. A thriving economy, at the expense of flesh and flashlight’s lights, is a good economy for the slime’s lifecycle. Instead of normal photosynthesis, which produces oxygen and sugar, the main dish for the plant, a unique photosynthesis that is itself the production of light at the expense of the vegetal, yet with a positive feedback so sophisticated that it works on ameliorating the overall condition of its worker organisms (including its nutrition) so that their function may be performed optimally. Not so ironically, one of these material infrastructures is pollution, more specifically light pollution, which increases the limit of resonance with general regional contexts by increasing the slime’s field of affluence and bulk apperception. Slime is the closest to the “Idea of Good” that humanity will ever be acquitted a glimpse.


A distinction of utmost importance makes itself necessary before anything else, however. The unambiguous difference between Madja as light and what could be known as the virtual form of capital. Light’s virtual form’s (Madja) relation to capital’s virtual form is a contingency, but a necessary one, incidental from their infrastructures’ relationships. The predatory performance of artificial light’s reproduction is intrinsically symbiotic with capital’s accumulation given said accumulation yields an explosive liberation of the former once a speculative threshold is crossed. If not, capital’s virtual form (of the type non-agreeable with the propagation of slime) resembles a black hole, the ultimate light trap. One can be the greatest ally or greatest enemy of the other, but there cannot be friends in war.

This necessary contingency does not imply co-extension in the totality of each form, slime is not reducible to capital as much as music is not just a “Homo sapiens phenomenon”. There are co-extensive relations among distributed particles in the dynamic structure of the fractals, but not a total correspondence 1:1. The “ultimate cause-that-is-not-a-subject”, then, appears to be capital given the slime’s limit of resonance (interaction) with a regional context of its infrastructure, that, in this particular case, is humanity as an organic totality. To the predator, money remains a tool-weapon, something that, for the human, no longer seems feasible.

Come with us.

[1] For a fuller experience, access https://www.miserytourism.com/symbiogenesis/.

[2] Sierra, Germán. “Metaplasticity”, in Interstitial Artelligence (Centre for Experimental Ontology Press, 2022).

[3] Thomas F. Varley, Robin Carhart-Harris, Leor Roseman, David K. Menon, Emmanuel A. Stamatakis, “Serotonergic psychedelics LSD & psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of cortical brain activity in spatial and temporal domains”, NeuroImage, Volume 220, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117049.

[4] Aspart F, Remme MWH, Obermayer K (2018) Differential polarization of cortical pyramidal neuron dendrites through weak extracellular fields. PLoS Comput Biol 14(5): e1006124. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006124.

[5] Seems easy enough: https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/twist-light-carry-terabits-of-data/.

[6] Pierce, P.A.; Peroutka, S.J. “LSD Antagonizes 5-HT2-Mediated Depolarizations in Cortical Pyramidal Neurons”. Society for Neuroscience, Abstracts 1989 15 6 [6.8].

[7] “Psychedelics in Psychiatry: Therapeutic Mechanisms”. Antonio Inserra, Danilo De Gregorio and Gabriella Gobbi. Pharmacological Reviews January 1, 2021, 73 (1) 202-277; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1124/pharmrev.120.000056.

[8] Arroyo A, Kim B, Rasmusson RL, Bett G, Yeh J. Hyperpolarization-activated cation channels are expressed in rat hypothalamic gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) neurons and immortalized GnRH neurons. J Soc Gynecol Investig. 2006 Sep; 13(6):442-50. doi: 10.1016/j.jsgi.2006.05.010. Epub 2006 Jul 31. PMID: 16879992.

[9] Interstitial Artelligence (2022).

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To end this very enjoyable exchange … maybe no real conclusions, but indexed 1 to 10 some refinements at least.

1

“We teem with references” [#1 GA1]

PP

Everything unsaid but taken as said in what we are saying—or think we are saying, because the ‘message’, if one is intended, is always a surplus, a distinguishing element attempting to sit in front of a teeming referential mass. Even the slimmest of cues does the referencing. Conventional formalities are not even required. Indeed where they appear they represent a sort of failure of confidence or of trust in the reader to pick up on the biggies. Yet it is confidence in the multi-layered mundanities that represents the bigger risk. What you are reading is never written in exactly your own language. The set of all operable references never operates; they are like genes, in any particular being some are switched on, most are not. Confidence is thus easily misplaced, and this we recognize. Our realities coalesce in a world only in their denser cores; the blurred, sparser edges defy resolution and become the territory for self-delusion, imagined solidarity where none can be realized. Yes, “once your madness has been absorbed by history.”

GA

A touchstone for me has long been Charles Bernstein’s remark somewhere in Content’s Dream (1986) that the question to ask of any poem is not ‘What is its message?’ but ‘Does it make sense?’—not in the sense of ‘meaning’; rather, Does it make sense that this—this stanza form or otherwise, this approach to a topic or otherwise, this rhythm, this play of syllables or of word-lengths, etc—is worth adopting / combining right now? Or (to tack on) does it make sense that this poem from Chaucer, or ancient Egypt or China, or Emily Dickinson, or Basil Bunting, etc, is worth turning to at this point? In other words, as a reader, Does it resonate? As so often in this exchange of ours, it turns out that one (whether poet or reader) can answer this only for oneself, but it does, I think, look to some kind of sociality, not least because other poets provide crucial degrees of guidance or, again, touchstones.

2

“… what can be glimpsed or grazed, startled into apprehension, via the potentially heretical notion of ‘a pidgin of one.’” [#1 GA1]

PP

Without realizing it Data teaches us the profound discomfort that the Faustian project holds in store for all literates. As culture ‘evaporates’ it does not disappear; it becomes concentrated in the one. What then could possibly form bridges better than suitably energized, ameliorating ‘pidgin of one’ projects? Newspeak, at the other end of the spectrum of possibilities, perhaps demonstrates by negative comparison the alternative tendencies: Newspeak towards exhaustion and extinction under advancing ice; pidgin-of-one towards diversification and regeneration at the edges of advancing rain forest.

GA

The more I think about it, the more ‘potentially heretical’ the notion of a ‘pidgin of one’ feels, bristling w/ seductive invitations to colonial-style appropriation, esp if by ‘pidgin’ one means the kind of work-situational tongue assembled from words in this, that, & the other language (w/ the ‘lexifier’ the main source of vocab), a syntactical structure mainly from not necessarily the lexifier, etc, that I tried to outline in #1 GA. How dip toe into that w/out referring everything to ‘one’ guidance? You capitalize ‘Data’ in arguable allusion to Mr Data, the android personification of infinite computer banks in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994) that would reduce all these alien situations to scenarios conceivable by our own. Data thus has colonial agency, which is what the posts of #3 were very much about. In the same posts I gave a brief rundown of some complexities of Coleridge’s wonderful formula ‘suspension of disbelief’ (SoD); one strategy for a contemporary poet here might be rather than avoiding narrative on principle to exploit SoD to the full in relation to a historical situation while dropping pointers that the poem’s account is radically incomplete (to be blunt, that one has been flat-out lied to) & can only be completed(?) by looking for data outside it …

3

 “… retrieval of an originary linguistic mode” [#1 PP1]

PP

A writing that is inventive according to immediate (psychic) survival needs. The long-term prospects maybe kept out of mind … left to be apparent after (perhaps long after) the fact of each inventive episode.

4

“… there are times when language fails us completely” [#2 PP1]

PP

The symbolizing machine has limitations, maybe it never fails completely, but that is not the point. The point is that no matter how much use we make of the shared, the synchronic, linguistic resource it still operates like an ocean-going super-tanker, impossible to manoeuvre in the more awkward corners of the world.

5

“how can we think to make aesthetic form at all?” [#2 GA3]

PP

At my first mention of a pre-linguistic reality-making in which the Real stands as an inherent limitation, we latch on to a reformulation that promises a better outcome. Either by generalization or by discrimination between notions of ‘thought’ we proceed. …

GA

We’ve said a lot about language & the Real, but it may be worth adding that there’s an element of poetic voluntarism involved: We seek out situations, problems, etc that seem to baffle linguistic grasp—what else are worth going for?—as you suggest in #3 in citing Badiou’s attention to “the possibility and even the necessity that we do not remain silent about that of which we cannot speak.” The poems I cherish most bring w/in reach of articulation some scenario that I’ve at some point experienced (eg how the apparent shape of lower Manhattan changes, at one point dramatically suddenly, as the Staten Island ferry approaches South Ferry), thinking almost reflexively the while that this one really is beyond language—but see Louis Zukofsky’s early poem “Ferry.” Such poems are resolutely personal in the experience; there are relatively few of them; & they can arrive at any point as gifts from the world.

6

PP

What is the poet’s job? Is it to observe and celebrate through the unpredictable

play of words? This would meet popular expectations. Poems that work well in these limited terms entertain in the expected way; for ‘ordinary’ readers (audiences) the aesthetic pay-off is pleasurable. Such poems also succumb to conventional critique; criteria such as ‘sharpness of perception’, ‘affective quality of expression’, ‘mastery of word-craft’, and even ‘recognizable formal affinity’ can apply. But I am being deliberately contrary here; putting the conventional in those terms makes it easier to understand that there are other necessary motivations, that there is more to say on the motive for poetry. I said of my own: “… compensating for the anachronistic, the dislocated, and the alienated qualities of for me ‘ordinary’ experience.” [#2 PP6] I am not denying that I operate in conventional playful ways in much of my poetry; that much is plain to see and hear. Some of my poetry, however, comes from a very different place. A ‘feeling for the eerie’ perhaps is one way of putting it, because its basis is anticipation rather than observation, and because it alerts rather than celebrates. A ‘feeling for the absurd’ is another, although this would seem to lead inevitably to a political poetry which until recently had hardly begun to emerge, but it will. (While one is salaried, to stay ‘in place’—sane, productive and hopefully secure—one has to be to some degree resigned to the absurdities of organization. I retired over six years ago and that ‘resignation’ no longer applies.)

7

PP

Resistance and play extrapolated far enough to lead on to the question I dodged: “if you sense some pressure there toward martyrdom, given Judeo-Christianity is burrowed into the habitus & the poet shorn of broad social relevance.” [#2 GA7] The exposure to danger entailed in the poet’s resistance it seems to me signals a desire for intensity of being and a desire to refuse all resignations. Insofar as these desires can never be fully satisfied (who amongst us could be that constant?) the “pressure” toward martyrdom might be felt as a consequence of residual allegiance to Judeo-Christianity, but not I think of resigning oneself to its residual presence, either in moments of ‘weakness’ or of ‘recouperation’. I have found no ‘cause’ in the political or religious sense for which I desire to sacrifice myself. The ‘resistance’ and ‘play’ routines I delineated could lead to that outcome, but I think if they did it would need a remarkable overturning of my ‘neurodiverse’ constitution. “We do what we do” might be as close as we can get to an authentic statement on the mystery of poetic motive.

GA

I think as an Irishman my interest in martyrdom has much to do w/ the Irish nationalist dwelling on it in song & instant legend. “A terrible beauty is born” Yeats repeated of the Easter Rising in lines I still can’t read aloud w/out cracking up; Patrick Pearse used to insist that the time had come for the blood of young Irishmen to be shed for the liberation of Ireland; the rather more nuts-&-bolts socialist James Connolly demurring, “No, for the blood of young Englishmen to be shed for the liberation of Ireland” … W/ respect to poetry, I’ve just started The Martyrology Books 1 & 2 by the late Canadian poet bp Nichol, a near-career-long project (1972–1988; 9 books) into which he proposed packing everything he’d learned ever, which hopefully will be enlightening … In terms of the poet’s desire for “intensity of being and a desire to refuse all resignations,” don’t you think St Sebastian, in the lethal consummation, felt precisely that? Or St Teresa of Avila, who wrote, “I die because I cannot die”?—even as she was working her frail body to death.

8

“the music hovers constantly on the brink” [#3 GA1]

PP

A lovely moment in your notes on the Abdullah Ibrahim jazz piano sessions does indeed capture something of the poetic magic of something I hinted at, ‘deceptive intelligibility’; call it a ‘slow release’ as it “gradually becomes shared or at least beautiful”—although I might say “… shared and then (perhaps very much later) beautiful.” Again this does tell us a lot about the grand notion of aesthetics; the concern is for (an adequate account of) reception. How can a piece of music, a play, a poem, induce a riot one year and entrance us all a century later? Aesthetic reasons for this proliferate. A ripple effect through the language that distributes affectivity through the world; the point of entry is a violation and history records this; the ripple is like an echo it becomes a dissociated part of the mix, part of the atmosphere, and affect becomes free to change.

GA

The wording of your comment here is wonderful in the most literal sense, & again, speaks to a huge (imagined, felt) sociality—

9

PP

Why ‘deceptive intelligibility’ takes on such valuable cargo.

In poetry by adopting grammatical, even if at times interrupted, structures it appears to contribute to a consolidation of reality while in fact deliberately loosening things up. It does so, perhaps in that Olsonian sense of being more ‘up to the real’ (I follow in your attachment to this insight), but perhaps—and this works better if one adds in the speculative philosophical notion of the Real as a unified beyond—in a deeper liberatory sense. This is the anarchic manoeuvre retained, as a moment of personal animism, in the vain hope that there is another solidarity to be had. It is a solidarity achieved through communion rather than communication, through condensates and precipitates of the Real admitted from ‘the beyond’ into reality, i.e. sharing in a world not through a force of rational thought processes—the political, the scientific, the critical-theoretical, etc.—but through a release of energy, creative energy if you will, of which art at its purest is the embodiment.

GA

Here I would recommend John Wilkinson’s “Harmolodics” for what one of our very finest poets can do w/ a Harlem marching band—which, as I began to write this sentence, I ‘remembered’ as w/ the Notting Hill Carnival—in context of a multiply regimented society.

10

PP

In accounting for the unprivileged and unsanctioned voices that entered into the cultural arena through force of projection during the 20th century: what one does not need to focus on is new institutions forming and adopting their own versions of privileging and sanctioning procedures. Yes, the working man’s voice, the gendered voice, one ‘typified’ voice after another, is gaining, has gained, some space, but that is all about the group-identifying—actually world-forming—mechanism that emerges and constructs a new institution. One does not need to talk too much about this because the mechanism is already discursive; it generates its own justifications for, and accounts of, inclusions.

The focus then shifts elsewhere by chasing after peripherals. There is a genuinely asocial social being, an acultural cultural being, an apolitical political being, … yes and somewhere in there a faithless martyr whose being refuses even these categorizations. Such radically unprivileged and unsanctioned voices appear with two levels of potential transgression already implied in their arrival.

Privilege is that bestowed favour on the individual within the framework of the law, “typically the exemption of one individual from the operation of a law.” The transgression implied here is a nullifying one that diminishes both the pre-eminence of the identified individual and the operational distinction between law and justice. The unprivileged condition is thereby not a flattened-out legislated-for existence, but is rather one unconstrained by or released from legislating mechanisms. Oh, I don’t take any notice of that; I just do things my own way. I don’t care what people think of me, I just get on with things. Below the radar, beyond suspicion, out of sight, far out, off-grid, bit of a nomad, that’s me … none of that is quite right, but whatever.

The double edge of the sanction disappears: neither permitted by nor penalized by an authority, because no authority is recognized as operating or no authority appears able to operate. Subjection requires submission to authority of one sort or another. Where no submission is forthcoming everything authority recognizes falls apart, and the unsanctioned recognizes only an emptiness in the illusion of authority. This is bloody dangerous … we might engage in passive resistance; what’s that worst that can happen, you could end up in prison or they could kill you, yeh, but I’d still be me, I might even be a better me, a better poet … and let’s face it, the best poets are all dead … so you want to be a martyr? What, me?

Asocial social being, yes, but that’s autistic temperament. Acultural cultural being, no. I certainly have not released all the bonds of behaviour and belief that define me as specifically cultural, although they are weaker than they were ten or twenty years ago, so I am more open and more myself in my being in the ‘retirement’ I am not really in. Apolitical political being, no. For similar reasons except, as I have aged, an anarchistic ignorance has evolved into a somewhat informed Kynical response to political posturing, factionalism, party allegiance, etc. The incompetent is easy to spot, or is it? Increasingly thoroughly diffused it becomes its own camouflage.

Why is this important? I suggest it comes down to an ancient point; it is important because every individual retains a ‘personal animism’ which they cannot afford to bury under adopted, enforced, conventional ‘identities’ if they are to remain human.

GA

A spirited closing para. I would note that surfers, eg, talking of ‘unprivileged voices’ (except on surfing channels), say things like this; politicians & business people only when they’re out on their yachts, eg, or playing games where everything seems at stake. Does this mean that poetry, for all its play & resistance, finds its essential rationale in self-realization?—which I suspect is the dimly visible gorilla slouching in the armchair all the way through … Myself, I would say no, but that comes at the price of insisting that the motive for poetry is at bottom irrational, involving as it does some kind of dogged faith in poetry itself as something making its way through centuries & histories—& how is that not then collectively necessary, if for reasons remaining obscure—?

■

And here the dialogue suspends … dear reader. I hope you enjoyed the little thought experiment.

by on

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

by on

Dear reader, I want you to try a little thought experiment with me.

Given the vast literature encompassing human knowledge, and all the teaching and learning that go on in the world, you probably take it for granted that the languages we employ keep up with the task of articulating, representing, translating, recording, and communicating all that we need to. In other words—now that I have articulated that thought—you probably think that language per se is adequate to the task of consolidating the reality of the world, and not merely personal partial realities, but a bigger, in principle total, understanding of the world. We take the time, make the effort, and the language does indeed ‘keep up’.

Or maybe you have already begun to smell a rat and are willing to imagine the opposite, to imagine that language is inadequate to the task. Well, that is the point of this thought experiment. Take that imaginative leap and consider:

What happens when the reality one is trying to negotiate pushes the language to the limits of intelligibility?

I thought I would ask Gilbert Adair,[1] a poet renowned for his ‘linguistically innovative’ work, to bounce a few ideas back and forth with me …

Gilbert. Hi. …

GA

When the reality one is trying to negotiate pushes the language to the limits of intelligibility …

When the felt pressure of a ‘real’ one is trying to discern does that—so that. 

Never forgetting that (to leech on Olson) what is not poetry is the will to make poetry (altho’ who could call that ‘primary,’ because, you know, society & language)—that last phrase being idiomatic & “to leech on” also, probably, & the lack of a question-mark a (voice-inflected) nother. We teem w/ references, key ones being experienced as (different kinds of) knowledge & many potentially movable up there in a moment of recontextualized “Aha!” that may afford both a concern for a poem or poetic project & a glimpse of the real that will now make its recalcitrance felt to verbal approach while also being contingent on random haecceities of the poet. Specifics I talk. Yes, once your madness has been absorbed by history.

A case in point: What might aesthetic investigation of the notion of pidgin lead to—once you realize that the scholarly acronym for one pidgin (HCE, Hawaiian Creole English) chimes w/ old Here Comes Everybody himself or themselves; & that you presently live on Kauai, northernmost of the Hawaiian islands, & have experience of both Singlish (Singaporean English) &, I suppose, Irnglish (various operations on English as it moved into Irish sensibilities & contexts); & now have a truculently arbitrary means of linking Hawai‘i & Ireland in a 3-part project called h c e.

A pidgin, of course, is much more than an idiom or even a dialect, closer but cigarless to a jargon. The word likely comes from the Chinese pronunciation of ‘business.’ A pidgin is an ad-hoc cobbled together to enable people of disparate languages, cultures, & ranks to function in a variety of work situations: mining, mercenary, trade, shipboard, plantation … a discourse to facilitate proto-imperial coercion from the start, it was almost as soon one of subaltern camaraderie. (When it outlasts a generation—when parents pass the ad-hoc on to their children—a pidgin becomes a creole, a language in its own right.)

I claim no fluency in any of the Hawaiian pidgins (minor variations island to island). As a poet, I’m more interested in what can be glimpsed or grazed, startled into apprehension, via the potentially heretical notion of ‘a pidgin of one.’ The first two sections, h & c, have, among many other things, built a vocabulary of repeating words for use in e (standing, at least in my own mind, for english—or extinction—or emergence—or elder tree, etc) in a variety of fictional work situations, beginning w/ a trial, or mebbe only a trial. When I first came to Kauai, I could understand perhaps 30% of what one of our neighbors said; now I’m at around 70%. & section e as I embark on it is much to do w/ finding means of crafting relative meaning-opacities, given our experience of rushing-in aspects of the world is rather musical (audible, visual, ‘furniture’) than verbal & bearing in mind another of Olson’s remarks, this from his Mayan Letters of 1953: “Joyce … did not improve on … the Irish of the time the Irish were the culture-bosses, what was it, 7th–9th century, or something: he tried to get at the problem by running one language into another … more relevant to commerce, now, than … to the aesthetic problem.” We do run words together, & we like doing voice impressions. & Leopold Bloom, like the hero of North by Northwest (1959), is in advertising.

PP

We hit the poetics from the outset. That chimes with me, with my disenchantment with aesthetics, aesthetics in Modernity certainly. To reprise Olson:

… every element in an open poem (the syllable, the line, as well as the image, the sound, the sense) must be taken up as participants in the kinetic of the poem just as solidly as we are accustomed to take what we call the objects of reality; and that these elements are to be seen as creating the tensions of a poem just as totally as do those other objects create what we know as the world. (Olson, Projective Verse)

With the focus entirely on how the poem is made, the undertow is irresistible, pulling us toward the ontological sense of poetics. What mind and breath can draw together in poetry is a distillation of something occulted already in the mess of the mundane. Say to me: “what is not poetry is the will to make poetry” and I hear the philosopher breaking wind. It can be that bad. The will to make poetry is bound into precedent, principle, pre-existing lines of thought, … it beggars heritage and that is not poetry, but it is the ghost of an ontological poetics: “the objects of reality … create what we know as the world” (ibid). Olson invokes a contrapuntal logic; this is no mere metaphor.

Hence we come to where—take a breath—ontological reserves trigger the production of syllable and line, and do so reflexively to “afford both a concern for a poem or poetic project & a glimpse of the real”—concern for the former in the interests of the latter. But is the motive warranted and is it a genuine prospect? This brings us back to the original question.

If “a glimpse of the real” is “a genuine prospect” the implication must be that in the last instance language is adequate. Yet its recalcitrance impresses itself at every turn; the more the poet pushes and pulls the syllables into breathable lines and the more the vivid specificities that inhabit the poet’s reality, and that represent its most substantial reserve/resource, are brought into play, the more there is that can be said and must be said.

Thus words do not reveal the real, they (ad)dress it, they make a reality of the little that they grasp by fashioning fascinators (as/of/for things). The “random haecceities of the poet” are thus particularly pointed instances of necessary illusion. Self-delusion is not involved; the poet knows full well that they can keep scratching away at the surface of things, that they are expected to do so. Usually the more work the poet puts in the fewer words are needed to make a poem. The clarity of a ‘this’ does not reside in the words used to point to it, but it can seem to when great economy of means is achieved.

The problem is that economy of means may generate monsters. The real may intrude in the guise of an elusive essence, but that is passé for the poet today. Who really cares anymore for another way to say … “I love you” or “goodbye” or “I fear death” or “nature is mysterious” etc, etc? The ‘elusive essence’ is from one perspective a distraction, perfect for play and for time-wasting, while from another it is, through iteration, reductionist fallacy and to be resisted. What matters now are our entanglements, that worlds are at odds with each other, living hells, and the poet’s address in this case defies the distilling trajectory of traditional “clearing” strategies. Babel beckons, the retrieval of an originary linguistic mode that promises a gateway to the real.

So, playfulness and resistance (equally purposeful) define the poet’s dichotomy and confuse the answer to our question: in the last instance language is (in)adequate … which is it to be? There must be more to say.

Post #2 … forthcoming

[1]     Gilbert Adair—born in Northern Ireland, poet and critic, coined the term “linguistically innovative” poetry. In London in 1980 he co-founded, and for the next twelve years curated, Sub-Voicive, a series of experimental poetry readings. His most recent completed project, Syzem, a re-visioning of William Blake’s Milton, was published in two volumes 2014 & 2019 by Veer Books. He lives and works on Kauai, Hawaii, and his current project is HCE, which mixes a mix drawing on Spenser, Joyce, Badiou, Zizek, exile ambivalence, a more nuanced exploration of Christian morality than simply as rationale for empire, and the sonic architecture of Hawai’i Creole English.