IMMERSION
(e-mail conversation between Jim Leftwich and Jake Berry between 1/16/06 – 2/06/06)
LEFTWICH: i like handwritten elements in visual works, particularly
when those visual works take their final form as computer
images.handwriting is a trace of the human, very personal and
vulnerable. i see it - and feel it - vanishing, being
supplanted, not only all around me but inside as well.
thanks for sending these.
BERRY: I'm gravitating more toward handwritten work - definitely a trace of the human, the organic. I still tend to write all my poetry by hand first then type it.
Of course computers are an aspect of nature as well since they
are created by natural creatures - but it does get so abstract at
times that I have to take a long walk among trees and other animals
just to remember where it all started.
LEFTWICH: sure, our technologies are as natural as anthills and beaver dams, no argument there - but the relationship of human being to human hand is very different from the relationship of human being to keyboard. sometimes changes occur as cumulative processes, the new not only extends but also incorporates the old. other times changes occur as exclusions of what has come before, as if the new and the old should (or even could) be mutually exclusive. the idea that the new supplants what precedes it risks discarding some very valuable aspects of human experience. handwriting seems to be vanishing.
i'm not sure that's a good thing.
BERRY: being human is a very questionable condition. we
can be human in so many ways and there is so much
overlap between being human or being any other
animal that when we talk about being human, or take
into concepts like body, soul, dasein, and so forth
we already pretend to distance ourselves from
ourselves far enough to make an assertion about
our condition. In these situations what we are doing
is imagining ourselves in particular ways. I think
computers are the by-product of one these ways
of imagining. certainly for you and I our hands are
more a part of being human than our computers, but
what about Stephen Hawking and others who rely
on computers that respond to the slightest gesture?
they might feel almost as connected to their computers as
to the parts of the body with which they were born.
we are indeed losing handwriting, and a multitude
of other disciplines we were taught in school. we are
allowing ourselves to become so fascinated by
technology that we are crippled without it. Perhaps
Hawking's illness has presented us with what we
may become in the future, with computers hardwired
to our brains to perform all the functions we now perform
with our bodies. It would be tragic I think because
computers should be an addition to our capabilities
not a replacement. It isn't a matter or either/or its
both/and. I always want to do things, create works
that are dependent on nothing more than imagination
and something to make a mark with, or better yet,
voice alone is an infinite instrument.
LEFTWICH: i also want to create works that are dependent on
nothing - maybe not even imagination, just process
and engagement, clarity in the moment, making
marks or sounds.
BERRY: great idea. maybe set a sheet of manuscript
paper outside in the weather for a few days and
whatever marks result are the score. Or just as
it begins to rain let the first few drops hit the page
and where they hit are the notes. Or just making
marks on the page while distracted by something
else, or more to your point, while distracted by nothing,
not even the work you are doing, invisible clarity.
LEFTWICH: yes, let the weather write the score.
maybe this spring i'll go outside in a big rainstorm
with some manuscript paper, sit in the yard in
the rain, moving the paper around, as a kind
of collaboration with the weather.
any thoughts, from you or from hank, of musicality in
visual poetry (in collage poetry, for example)?
BERRY: musicality in visual poetry? that's one to think about.
I suppose the question would be: do you hear visual
poetry when you see/read it?
also I think of synesthesia, hearing images, tasting letters,
seeing sound, etc. I think most of us in the so called
"experimental" end of things are probably synesthetic to
some extent.
LEFTWICH: all the senses are varieties of touch. mostly what
touches us is one wave pattern or another. i think
synaesthesia is primary, and the categories are
secondary. as for musicality specifically - visual
syntax equates to visual rhythm, like a pulse,
or breathing - clear wave forms, and i think we
hear them if we want to - in the body, proprioceptive,
experimental, through the full sensorium. to my
way of thinking it's easier to get from visual poetry
to music than it is to get from conventional lineated
verse to music - but the music may be closer to
something by steve reich (or to a spaceweather song)
than it is to traditional delineations of melody and
harmony.
some so-called word salads seem to me very similar
sonically to contemporary music, with little or no
trace remaining of melody (or measure) or harmony
(or vowel and consonant correspondence).
the musicality of pulsing aggregates, perhaps?
BERRY: reading through several of the space sounds sites, in
particular one at the University of Iowa I believe, one
can see visual representations of the sounds as well
as listen to them. all of the sounds are the results of
the collision of forces - solar waves with electrons in
the jovian magnetosphere for instance. so it is the
touching of forces, which are simultaneously wave
and particle depending on the question you ask. and
the results of these contacts can be represented in
ways that can be experienced by all our senses - its
just a matter of transferring the data from one set
of equations to another.
I think, yes, visual forms, whether by the name of
visual poetry or painting or whatever are easily
"heard", or for that matter transferred to any sense
once we recognize that it is not only possible, but
probably already happening. It’s a matter of
conditioning.
Word salads, or long works like your Doubt or
Argüelles' Pantograph and others must be read
as a kind of ebb and flow, as clusters of sound,
vision and meaning. You can lift individual phrases
and try to infer something about the whole from
them but that would be like trying to explain the
entire ecosystem with only a tree branch. In the
face of those kinds of work one can only immerse
oneself and let the experience happen to you
in whatever way your senses are capable. Again,
it's a matter of forces colliding and the result of
their collision.
LEFTWICH: i bought some manuscript paper a couple of weeks
ago and used it to print some visual works. the
visual pieces become scores, whether useful or
interesting as scores is another matter, but they
are certainly scores. i sent them to jukka, just to
see what his response would be. he easily could
have come back with something like, this is not
how it is done. but he didn't do that, he responded
more positively than i could have imagined, and
he started generating notation from the visuals
which he then printed over my work, so my
visuals and his notations appear on the same
sheet of manuscript paper. still, the question would
be, what is this? is it merely another kind of visual
poetry, one which incorporates musical notation?
jukka thinks these are actual scores, performable
not only by computer but also by musicians.
you mention immersing oneself and letting the
experience happen as a strategy for reading, and
i agree entirely - but now i am thinking about the
same attitude and process as a strategy for writing.
BERRY: These sound fascinating. I'd love to see them complete
with Jukka's notation, and of course I'd love to hear
them! Jukka knows the people who could probably perform
them and now with Complex Lemon he has a label.
I think notated manuscript is always visual as well as
a charted music. I have often studied scores for their
visual beauty and I think Jukka had a revelation while
examining a score, though he should tell you the story
because I would leave out important details.
And I agree that immersion as a path to writing is
a wonderful approach. There comes with it the
notion of sacrifice, of baptism, symbolic death,
loss of self in the burial. The opening poems of
Brambu Drezi book one are all about that loss
of self, burial and what rises from that ground. Not
that I was thinking it through that clearly when I
wrote. it was more a matter of letting the old
structures pass by way of loss in the depths
of various musics, and the collective mind
generally.
LEFTWICH: i'm guessing you've seen the scores improvisations texts
blog, so now have a picture of what we're thinking about.
it seems like something you would be very attuned to, and
i hope you'll want to contribute to the blog.
i agree that scores are often a kind of visual art, and even
at times a kind of visual poetry. these distinctions get a little
blurry after a while. i was looking at a book about modern
dance the other day, specifically at a dance score by lucinda
childs, very delicate and geometrical, seems to me it could be
used in many contexts, to produce sounds or events or both.
this makes me think of the fluxus event scores, which are
all texts, instructions, though they function as scores in
that anyone can perform them, not only their author.
the early pages of brambu are certainly involved with
immersion - maybe even with a kind of annihilation, a kind
of psychic sparagmos, a tearing-apart of the self in all of
its constructed solidity in preparation for a kind of rebirth,
transformation in the body. i don't think many of us actively
seek that experience in full knowledge of what it is and how
it works. once we know it, it is even difficult to advocate it.
best to let others find it as they will, or be as it were overtaken
and given the experience - against their will, always against
the will, since it is the self, primary site of will, which is to
be utterly annihilated. early on, i thought i knew what i was
seeking, but i didn't know - and if i had known, i probably would
have stopped. now i really don't - can't - advocate such a search.
i'll try to help make the territory. i don't have any choice in
that. but that's it, at least for now. some will come upon it and
find nothing, or less than nothing. that's fine with me. others
will come and find what's there. i will not have had anything
to do with preparing them. we work in very strange territory.
there may be a sense of fulfillment, by which i mean only the
sense of being alive and in the world, but i don't often find any
sense of contentment, of being comfortable in all of this.
everything we do is a kind of failure, a necessary kind of opening.
BERRY: yes, I think I've seen most, if not all of what you have posted of the scores. extraordinarily provocative work! Jukka suggested I might actually try to perform some of these, so I'm looking at it both ways - as visual art that sounds, and as something I might interpret as sound in some way. What I am trying to do is sort through all these things and see which I'd like to try. Some of them are probably beyond my grasp - that is the notes are structured in such a way that I could not play them on guitar or piano because I'm not fast enough and I read music very slowly at best. So I might use pages or sections of pages as starting points and references for improvisation. That is, I might play or interpret the page and that would set the tonal range from which I could improvise. The point is that if I perform a piece I'd like it to sound similar, though by no means identical, each time I performed it. And I need to show these to the guys in the band I'm playing in right now, The Ascension Brothers, to see if we might perform some of them together.
Curious you should mention fluxus event scores, earlier this evening while I was cleaning up my desktop (the computer desktop) I ran across some fluxus scores I had downloaded as .pdf file a while back and had forgotten about them. wonderful stuff. and Jukka has several compositions that work in the same way. They are written texts that almost anyone could perform. The distinctions do vanish, the categories are only provisional anyway - it's just that the categories get taught in schools generation after generation until we come to believe they that can be understood in only one way. I don't think that the artists, or even the first teachers, intend for this to happen. It's followers, people who need a basis from which to live that solidify the contexts and make an orthodoxy of them. Perhaps this is a biological inevitability, and equally inevitable that someone comes along to shatter the categories.
oh yes, the opening pages of Brambu are definitely what I would call immersion in the light of our recent discussions, though I probably would have called it something else at the time. I remember that I was so overwhelmed by certain experiences, and levels of experience that writing poetry in that mode seemed to be the only valid approach. looking back, and I was aware of this somewhat, I think the poem begins in chaos or hell - "legion swollen faces" - the seizures of hypnogogic anxiety at age ten. I was waking up to the origin myths at that age without the words to describe such a thing - it was a kind of primitive condition. And I agree, it is something you'd hesitate to advocate, especially to a kid, because just as you are developing an idea of your self as unique suddenly it is being destroyed by the full immediate presence of all these others. Nonetheless, it may be necessary. In a culture that is notoriously negligent of initiation rituals, we might invent our own, or more likely the initiation happens to us just as we are arriving at the threshold of identity. It is as if something inside is saying, "Not so fast, if you believe that you are so unique, if you are going to start creating an ego, you'd better consider the fact that you'll be living a lie."
In a culture where value is wealth and wealth can only be obtained and maintained with enormous self-confidence and ambition you'll tend to develop a fairly strong ego anyway. But there is always that doubt, all those others that make themselves present despite your best attempts to deny them. Eventually you have to make a choice, to believe the materialist paradigm or remain open to all possibilities. If you choose the former you might succeed, even on a grand scale, in the paradigm - but you will lose your own soul(s), so to speak. If you chose the later you will almost certainly be a failure in the society, but you will live a much more vivid life, and possibly even become aware of reality in some fundamental way.
I was reading the opening pages of the introduction to Hölderlin's Hyperion and Selected Poems, the German Library edition. The intro is by Eric L. Santer, who edited the volume. He quotes Walter Benjamin extensively, who arrives, by way of discussing Baudelaire and the beginnings of modernity at a term: traumatic shock - which he (Benjamin) stole from Freud for his own purposes. It's defined as a condition that results from a set of experiences, chief among them is the individual confronted with the urban mass in which no one returns his gaze. Without this immediate confirmation the individual becomes something very different, and may perhaps be annihilated altogether. And while we hear all about us the roar of the new information age, post-industrialism, post-modernism, I think the reality may be a bit more mundane. What we have is modernism plus. The increasing ubiquity of computer and internet technology around the world is similar to the spread of the printing press. The ideas don't change so much as the accessibility to ideas, modernism is perpetuated on a large scale. In this case it's a spread of the virus of modernity in the form of Americanism, which means commodification of everything. Anything that denies this orthodoxy, that is unsalable, is dismissed by the general mass so infatuated with the latest toys. It's a difficult position to be in because the only way to recover from "traumatic shock" is to surrender to the disease, the glory in possession, especially self-possession. However this is not actual recovery, but acceptance of an addiction. If you struggle against that addiction, and to the degree in which you struggle against it, you only intensify the shock and invite repeated daily blows.
Is detachment an answer? Probably not, because if you remove yourself from the world in the old sense of the hermit or monastic you carry the seeds of the disease with you into the wilderness where you can inflate the ego to god-like proportions. You can neither accept the disease nor run from it. Instead you take the blows but develop a means to react from the multiple perspectives that are probably closer to the reality of the human species is when it isn't playing these mind games of mass hallucination.
Ironically, clawing our way out of the jungle, we have recreated the jungle in abstract, resulting in a more physically comfortable jungle, but a more psychically dangerous one - in which it is impossible to discern reality from illusion. The beast that is out to devour us appears as a great consolation, a new hero, a new solution to our problems, only to reveal itself, once we are in its maw as the ravenous beast that we have recreated out of the old conditioning where we were always prey and had to defend ourselves to save our own lives and that of our kin and clan. Now the lives we are fighting for are the lives of our minds, constantly set upon by new beasts - the modern culture, which is itself just the intensification of civilization as city state: abstracted, specialized society.
The first thing to do is annihilate the self. This removes the delusion and provides the beast with a more difficult target. If there is no single you to market to, the market either becomes more multiple and complex or it dies. However, it is anti-intuitive for the market to do this. What the market wants to do is reduce to the lowest common denominator. One commodity with many names. One political party with many faces. Mergers. Acquisitions. The heroes and villains are simplified to caricatures that are easy to digest. There is no longer any need for imagination since that work is being done for us in exchange for a portion of the abstracted product that we obtain by full participation in the delusion. If the individual is annihilated, however, and the control mechanism is annihilated (i.e. words and images are torn from their roots in abstract culture and returned to sound and image floating freely in the active imagination) then freedom becomes a real possibility.
LEFTWICH: i think this is a good approach to these scores. you could
start anywhere and find something to serve as a kind of
theme for improvisational variations, probably not a melody
as that is conventionally understood, but maybe an aggregate
of notes with some consistently defined routes connecting
them. an aggregate of notes could be read or played as a
spiral in two directions, for example, or the notes in the
aggregate could be connected with diagonals, and the diagonals
could be connected to form a kind of constellation. all of these
could be used as routes, sequencing devices, for determining
the order of the notes. other markings on the page could be
used to determine other qualities - relationships to time
signatures, keys, etc. all you really need to determine how
you would like to read the page. then read it the same way
every time you play the "song".
4 or 5 years ago i wrote a series of event scores using a book
on ballet in french as source text and translating it homeophonically.
searching for similar sounds in english produced a kind of disjunct,
surreal text, most of which couldn't possibly be performed, but i
wrote it all as a set of instructions. perhaps not exactly what the
fluxus folks had in mind, but i suspect it isn't too far astray. however
that may be, it was fun to write. i published the whole series in a
magazine called bananafish. i think i sent you a copy.
i think you're right that the categories are a pedagogical convention,
not even necessary in that context, but useful for professionals in
the field. how things are done is not always even related to how those
same things are taught. it may be more of a cultural than a biological
inevitability, though humans generally do seem prone to it.
i think these initiation rituals you mention are absolutely necessary if
we are concerned to find out who we are and what we are living in,
but we really shouldn't expect much assistance with this from the
dominant culture. a society as complex as ours requires a extreme
homogenization of experience, and the immersion experience is
paradoxically an annihilation of the self and a radically subjective
experience. too much of this kind of thing would absolutely destroy
the society's ability to function as it is currently configured. while you
and i might see that a very desirable, we can’t expect the ruling elites
to share out point of view. thus the general lack of significant rites
of initiation into what should still be called the mysteries (the study
and application of which would be the alchemical great work).
i never was able to buy the materialist paradigm. i'm not entirely sure
why that has been the case, but it's been true since very early on. the
veil slipped just enough, it seems like even earlier than adolescence, and
the whole mythic master narrative has simply never made sense to me.
i didn't choose to go to war against it, as it must often seem to some of
the people i know. i just never could find myself at home in it, that's all.
i get the feeling, have since i first encountered brambu, that something
similar to this is also true for you.
your idea about modernism seems accurate. we have a kind of turbo-modernism,
modernity on meth. and modernism is increasingly americanism, the triumph of
commodification, the cycle of life reduced to the cycle of production and consumption.
i understand the idea that to struggle against traumatic shock is to participate in and
perpetuate it. the old remedy, the one i bought into in the 70s, was to get out of the
way, to cultivate a strategy of non-participation, specifically non-participation in the
normative economic formula. this has worked and made sense for most of the past
30 years, not all but most, but i'm afraid it has run its course as a practical or even
a reasonable strategy - much less as an ethical one, which was its original allure. now
there is no getting out of the way. the idea itself seems slightly obscene - absurd and
delusional. dangerously anachronistic, perhaps. it is something of a crisis currently for
me, figuring out how to navigate the near future, how to find a place for myself for
the next 20 years or so.
your idea of the annihilated self reminds me of the nomadological war machine, the
rhizome internalized. we might steal the military slogan, be an army of one, and
reimagine it through whitman as a one which contains multitudes. i think you're
absolutely right - the market will have no answer for this. the plural self will not
fit snugly into a demographic model of consumers.
i'm not at all certain what we are witnessing culturally these days. on the political
front, things are more transparently horrible than ever in my lifetime, worse even
than nixon and reagan. at the same time, and possibly because of the transparent
arrogance and cynicism of the current administration, people all of the world, even
in america, seem to be awakening to the underlying causes and supports of these
current abuses of power. things look ugly, quite often very ugly, but we may be
on the verge of a radical opening.
BERRY: I remember the homeophonic translations of the ballet book in bananafish. It's still here among the piles of books and papers. (Sometimes I honestly wish I had a find command for the contents of my office/studio.) I remember being fascinated that that were set up as instructions and thought that you were pushing the instructional composition to its radical limit - a performance that could not be performed. And since the text was matching sounds instead of meaning, it was, from the usual perspective (what Tim Gaze calls the particle aspect of writing, the semantic aspect) also impossible to mean. In a sense it came from a semantic nowhere, but had its full meaning in sound, yet there it was printed. A nice tension there. So perhaps it could just be performed as vocalization or sung. I think its very important that people understand how the piece was created - as much so as the way, say, Cage's mesostics were created.
Regarding categories, Bob Grumman and I used to argue about this. I don't want to try and repeat his argument because I know I'll get it wrong, but I was very much opposed to categorization and he thought it was necessary, and yes, perhaps biological (I think, forgive me Bob if I'm putting words in your mouth). I suspect we'd have a similar argument today. Categories are useful as a way of breaking things down to make them easier to assimilate. For instance, you learn all the parts of the body, all the systems, then how they all work together. Unfortunately it seems like we get stuck somewhere along the way. You go to the doctor with a cough and he gives you medicine for your lungs, but the medicine has horrible side effects that wreck your stomach. Knowledge by way of category alone at some point forgets that reality is not made of categories, that it's just something we do as a means of analysis and intellectual understanding. No single thing exists of itself - which is another reason why there can be no singular self. That concept ignores reality. How often have you stepped outside to discover that everything had vanished except one tree? Everything else was gone, all the houses, grass, bushes, whatever. It won't happen. The world is either there or it isn't and it can only be disassembled in the laboratory or the laboratory of the abstracting mind.
Which beings us back to the initiation rituals. One thing an initiation does is simultaneously affirm the reality of the individual (the rite of passage into adulthood) and by the same means integrates the individual into the community, one is an individual because he or she is part of the community. But this only works on a very small scale. In a global culture dominated by an obsession with material wealth there will be rites of passage but they are so poorly articulated and subconsciously driven that it manifests as mutual antagonism. Even though almost every adolescent will rebel against adults as a means to becoming an adult everyone involved becomes disturbed. When they seek guidance they are either handed an old script, a dictatorial creed, or a bottle of pills. These remedies invariably fail so we struggle through until it runs its course. The same applies to middle age, old age, death. The rites are there, we actually live them, but we stumble through them blindly. We grasp for the fix, the remedy that will return us to the previous state of relative comfort instead of accepting the changes. Perhaps this is always the case with mass culture. I don't know if its feasible to study past mass cultures, their sociology, because our information is going to be too limited, but it would be interesting to know if the citizens of the Roman empire, or the Chinese dynasties had similar problems; if, at the height of their power and wealth, they abandoned what amounts to tribal rituals.
So there is Benjamin's appropriation of Freud's "traumatic shock" - the self as confronting the others who refuse to return his gaze - the isolation of modernity. There is a passage in the first book of Brambu about listening to AM radio late at night, a station in some distant location, and knowing that all over the country people were listening to the same station at the same time. We are alone, we cannot see one another or speak to one another, but we form a "community of isolation." We are together - a tribe in the darkness, sitting silent and listening to the same sounds - but we are also alone. These days I often listen to a small short wave radio, so I am part of a planetary community in my aloneness. As I write this I am listening to a radio station over the internet that originates in Venezuela. It's like you say, a turbo-modernism, hyper-modernism. Yet we are not really so distant from the tribe. One could make the case that as we sit alone in the dark and type our e-mails and listen to some distant radio station we are participating in an initiation ritual that requires us to behave as if we are individuals but which opens that individual to all possible others. By over reaching the individual collapses into the others, and more fundamentally, the individual is driven to participate in this ritual because there are, in reality, no individuals at all, just an enabling mechanism that allows all the selves and possible selves to rise, to appear. (Ah, here he is, Mr. Heidegger!)
The first time this struck me I had been reading William Barrett's Irrational Man, the Heidegger chapter, and had been sitting there for a while trying to make sense of it when suddenly I noticed the room around me. I fell out of my thoughts, out of that kind of thought blindness, and there was the cat, and the rug, and the furniture and bookcase - it was all rising into being before me. So I got a dose of what Heidegger was talking about. And although Heidegger is dealing with "being there", (dasein), there is another sensibility that comes with it. Time becomes irrelevant. Materiality is real, but it is not the material that matters, it is the presence of a thing. The way it takes life, opens up and the divisions vanish. It isn't as if you disregard names, categories, they are quite useful, but they are not the presence of the world.
Materialism seems to depend upon this sense of the world, as a group of so many things, of so many atoms, quarks, whatever, assembled to create reality. This seems awfully simplistic - and a very singular way of looking at the world. It is as if we have decided to read the world the way you read a book, by combining the letters to make syllables and words and then agreeing that these words have particular definitions - and this is called meaning. Again, very useful if you want to build a model, but it seems to do more to distance us from the world, to isolate us than to bring us into the world.
You mention the Great Work. I think this "bringing us into the world" is not different from the prima materia that is said to everywhere available and so on. But I'd like to take this discussion further by asking you how we might image, imagine, the Great Work today, without resorting to those wonderful old drawings and paintings and arcane manuscripts? I have an idea that we'll both answer this in the same way, but I think it might be important to state it explicitly to clear the air.
I was discussing the possibility of metaphysics with Gregory Vincent Saint Thomasino a couple of weeks ago - actually I said we were far too metaphysical for our own good relative to current philosophy and science. He agreed and proposed setting up a blog for a public discussion, which is what initiated the Conversari blog. So at some point I want to get Gregory into this because I admire the intensity and detail of his thinking. But for now, let's play with the Great Work a bit. Let me know what you think?
LEFTWICH: there are some big cats in this bag. i suppose
now is as good a time as any to let them out.
one thing at a time, very slowly. as slow as i
know how to go.
here is robert kelly on homeophonic translation:
“The point of the homeophonic: to hear the other as own.
“As to the homeophonic (not homophonic, not same sound, but like sound,
like enough, just like enough to get something started).
“Here there is no hegemony, no appropriation of the humiliated original text,
no bluster of meaning, no flag-waving of accuracy, no fascism of ‘what it
really means’. Instead, the substantial energy of one poem, in all the lucidity
of its sound and form, generates a resultant structure in your hearing,
another poem, and you hear.
“Language is a prison, writing is a door.
“The point is: to hear a poem that means, a poem that is as serious as
the causal poem. Causal and resultant poems — that’s a better way
than ‘original’ and ‘translation’.
“The great moment comes when you begin to read and study the
resultant poem that has come to expression through your ardent
listening. You are studying a text that no one wrote. It is pure Revelation,
a true and urgent Niemandrose of the mind. Here, more than anywhere
I know in all of literature, is the embodiment of what we can learn by
the act of writing.”
i think he's got it.
i think everyone should try this at home.
repeatedly.
for years and years.
think of it as a kind of yoga.
english-to-english translation works as well as anything else.
for the arts, categories are essential as pedagogical tools
and for curatorial purposes. for the artists, for the during
of the making, these same categories are irrelevant at
best. it's barely a point worth arguing, unless we are
discussing the classroom, the museum, the library or the
archives.
traditional functions of initiation rituals are now performed by
mass consumer culture - on a global scale. there has been a
gradual, recently accelerating, progression - degradation - of
initiation rituals, from the archaic, as you describe (small scale),
through the socialization process (on a larger scale, enacted as
rites of passage through insitutional systems - eg., the public
schools, the military), and now to a homogenization of experience
accomplished primarily via the corporate media, but also in the
form of the omnipresence of cultural icons such as wal-mart,
macdonalds, starbucks - and also, very powerfully, the forms of
popular culture - pop music, the movies, television. consensus
reality is being very carefully constructed - packaged, marketed,
and sold to the global population. this process has supplanted
the archaic initiation ritual - and its function, from the collective
perspective, is very much the same. what has been diminished
to the level of insignificance is the unique, subjective quality
of the archaic initiation experience - individuation, the sense
imparted of substantial empowerment - all of that kind of thing
is simply too dangerous, it threatens the hierarchical structure,
so it must be weakened, diluted, or eliminated altogether (thus
the packaging of rebellion and defiance marketed to youth
culture as an authentic experiential rite of passage).
any way out of this will be extreme. the extremes of the arts,
as in the practice described by kelly - psychic extremes, let's
say - blake as a precursor, along with many others, of course
- it will by definition seem a form of madness to deviate in the
extreme from the consensus reality of one's culture, even if
what one deviates into is a more complete and accurate - a
full - experience of reality. anyone who expects to be rewarded
by the dominant culture for refusing to participate in it, for
determining that one's time and energies are better spent in
the pursuit of something like self-transformation, is simply
delusional - and is probably not very far along on the path to
this transformation. even the archaic shaman was ostracized
and exiled, brought into the community for ceremonial purposes,
then returned to his hut at the edge of the forest. the great
work of the alchemists is the transformation of consciousness -
which means, by definition, the transformation of the world, of
reality (consciousness is a causal reality). the spiritual disciplines
historically are practices designed to produce transformations
of consciousness. in this sense, the writing of poetry is a
spiritual discipline. the threat of the poets to the state is that
of setting a bad example - too much freedom, insufficient
subservience, extreme deviations from the homogenized norms
of consensus reality. elimination or exclusion is unnecessary, it
suffices to simply discredit the poet in the minds of the majority.
it is very helpful if the traditional masters of the practice are
generally thought to have been insane. blake, for example -
dare we suggest that he was simply successful? i'll state it as
a fact, discredit myself in the process, and carry on laughing at
the consequences.
life is short. it's not a game and it's not a popularity contest. i
don't give a damn about william blake. i'm interested in what
poetry will accomplish during the time it is written tomorrow.
the ego doesn't believe in detachment. a part of me - what part? -
feels the need to teach it. writing helps. some kinds of writing
help. does this kind of writing help? i doubt it.
writing for the blog - for the public, let's say -
is so different from writing email to a friend.
i don't like it much, but i do think it's part of
my job, so to speak. what i just wrote has
the form of an email to you, but it is much
closer to an essay than it is to a letter. one
of the first things i encountered when i got
to the library at OSU a few years back, when
i was there for the symposium, was an email
i had written to you. it was in a vitrine. seeing
it in that context was not a pleasant experience,
but i learned a little from it. we have built an
inhuman world for ourselves, all of us. it moves
faster than we do. it eats us alive. i don't think
we need to pretend to feel comfortable with
this. poetry is a dangerous vehicle. it always
has been. there have always been some who
have known this, but most of those who claim
to know and love poetry don't even know what
i'm talking about here. you know. i know that.
i've traveled in some strange dimensions, riding
on the poem. so have you. we've been to the
same places. i'm sure of it. when i tell my
closest friends the truth even they treat it as
a kind of madness. do we really want to write
this, all the details of this, in clear declarative
sentences, and send it out into the world? i
think the answer is obvious. i haven't written
it yet. have you? the closest i have come is
the essay i published in xtant 2 - a few
thoughts on a few notes. i may never get any
closer than that in print. i leave clues and
hints, scraps of maps, in visual poems and
fractured texts. they function as opportunities
for remembering - that's all.
BERRY: I'm going to reply to last e-mail first and work my way back.
True, writing for the public, for publication, on blogs, in magazines, books, CDs or whatever is different. In some cases it requires some amount of preparation - performing a poem or song for a recording for instance, or publishing a book - the awareness of the public is forced into the process because of the mechanism of the process. In other cases you only become aware of it afterward. Pretty much all the poetry, songs, visual art I do is created initially without much thought of what a public will think, even the people that I am sure will take the time to read or listen to it. That would only check the process and prevent it from taking its own course.
What I am trying to do with the Conversari blog is break down that division between creation and preparation for presentation to the public. What gets posted there isn't art in the usual sense, but it is a revisitation to the art of conversation and letter writing that has been lost in the usual quick response of an e-mail. People used to place more value of personal communication. There was a sense of care in the words, not because they were composed for public consumption, but because the writer of the letter really wished to connect with, correspond with, the reader of the letter. I don't think that sense of care has ever been lost between people, but the awareness and appreciation of it has been drowned in the spectacle of the media onslaught. Letters have been replaced as well by phone calls from anywhere to anywhere at any time. Still, that sense of personal connection remains.
What happens when this is exposed to the public? We can't refer to the published letters of famous poets or other artists because by the time the letters are published they have already crossed the line into the public domain because they were written by people that are now public figures, even if they are long dead. The letters get framed as something unique because they came from the pen of someone famous and therefore, according to the rules of the society, are worthy of our attention. And they are usually well edited for publication to remove the dross, so we get a skewed perspective anyway. So there is no answer there.
I want to retain as much of the exchange as possible because 1.) it is spontaneous and captures us thinking "out loud" and 2.) it is substantive - at least for the people involved. We're discussing general subjects in a way that is unique to each writer.
You ask, "Do we really want to this in clear declarative sentences, all the details, and send it out into the world?" My response is that I'm not sure we can, and if we can we already have done so in our works. Someone once asked the film director Akira Kurasawa what the message of one of his films was. He answered that if he could answer that question he would write it on a placard. We say things, or rather, allow things to be said in our poetry that cannot be said in ordinary, conventional prose. What we can do is think about the work after the fact. Kandinsky said that theory follows practice. That has always been my experience. You can't plan a discovery or a revelation. All you can do is make yourself available to it. For example, homeophonic writing places you in a position to discover something by way of the process that you would never experience otherwise. Your comparison to yoga is accurate I think, and I think of the transmutation process of Abulafia and the other ecstatic kabbalists. The rational response is to dismiss this as meaningless play - but it is the element of play - the free play of sounds with different meanings in conjunction. In some sense you break the laws of literacy in this process. You release words from their singular modes of meaning. It is very liberating for you and for the reader. As you say, this is a spiritual practice. I agree and accept that and dismiss all the other things people project into that word.
Does this have any value in popular culture or even so-called literary culture? No, probably not, and given the state of that culture I hope it doesn't. You may have read Dana Gioia's essay "Can Poetry Matter?" In the initial version, written I think almost two decades ago now, he was concerned that poetry was vanishing from public appreciation and being swallowed by a kind of hollow academic mannerism. He revised the essay a few years ago and noted several areas that offered him hope - more public poetry readings, poetry slams, the appreciation of some sector of the public for spoken word events and so forth. I readily concede that these things and the others he mentions are a means in which something by the name of poetry is garnering more public attention. And I think the work of hip hop artists, songwriters and so forth is poetry. As with any other poetry, especially poetry eager for the spotlight, most of it is utter crap. It is designed from the beginning to be product. It has all the substance of a stick of gum. But all the ways in which poetry has re-appeared in the society hasn't altered my original, immediate response to Gioia's question - which is: Does it matter if poetry matters? Perhaps he has more confidence in society than I do. While I find many redeeming characteristics in contemporary society - qualities that might appear under certain circumstances in individuals or in the collective - I don't find much in the day to day that will be effected in any meaningful way by poetry, even the good work that somehow manages to break the surface. In the longer view philosophy, poetry, the arts and sciences - makes discoveries that gradually filter out into society and might nudge it, over a period of generations, in interesting directions. I'm thinking of the Theory of Relativity, visionary work like Blake, Rimbaud, Dickinson, Whitman, Thoreau, Stein, the whole long list in all the disciplines and their overlapping. But you can't plan to change society any more than you can plan to have a revelation or visionary experience. Not unless you're egomanical or part of a group led by an egomaniac or a mass delusion. It seems terribly presumptuous to suggest that anything we might do would have much of an impact, for good or ill. We will indeed be met with indifference and be marginalized. This is not a loss as far as I'm concerned. In fact, it's probably a blessing. As you know, the process of preparing a work for publication can be very distracting and then promoting it even more so. I'm willing to put up with it enough to make the work as available as possible to anyone that wants it, but usually the first thing I want to do as soon as I finally get a book in print or get a CD out is go to work on the next one.
The reason for this is, I think, is that the work we are doing is, I agree, about transformation. The Great Work. Not great as in exceptionally good, but great in the sense of being totally overwhelming, losing one's self. The alchemists and similar workers/playmeisters, mystics and so on, the ones that matter, were doing the same thing. When I read your work, in whatever form, I approach it with that knowledge - knowing that I am witnessing a process of transformation and often, if I pay attention, I will be caught in that process and experience the transformation as well. Obviously some of the alchemists, maybe most of them, were charlatans, and it is one of those words, like shaman, zen, or whatever that has become a catch, a marketing hook. The ads say, in essence, if you read this book, if you follow these steps, you will be happy and your problems will be solved. There are few things more repulsive. I'd rather read Hart Crane or Sylvia Plath at their most depressed and suicidal than read any of this self-help mysticism crap. And there's another level of it in academia - if you take the right courses from the right teachers you will be able to join the elite. This is an old trick. I am reminded of the poet Ikkiyu, who was a Buddhist priest, but after sampling life in the monasteries of his day decided to spend his time in the brothels and bars instead. You don't find redemption or happiness or transformation by looking for it, you just try to place yourself in its path and hope it runs you down, and so powerfully, that it transforms you before you can screw it up and start writing a book about it.
Work that invites or generates transformation cannot be contained in explanatory volumes. And critics, even sympathetic ones, can only hope to provide some kind of opening into the work. Jack Foley said recently that the work that he usually finds more interesting is the work of the failures, not the successes. To me, this is because the failures remain an open story and they always will because they failed - that is, they never measured up to what society expects of its "great people." We could go into a discussion about how to define success and failure, but it is neither the heroic individual nor collective opinion that finally matters, it is whatever compels us beyond what we believe to be the case. Truly, there is madness from the point of view of the collective, and the very real possibility of genuine mental illness, especially if you take yourself so seriously that you believe that you created the work instead of the other way around. Ultimately all that matters is the practice of the art itself. There's no final reward or great justification. It's just animal behavior, angelic behavior - the universe exercising its imagination and destroying and creating worlds every nanosecond in the process. We all disappear in that process every day. Why not celebrate it?
(e-mail conversation between Jim Leftwich and Jake Berry between 1/16/06 – 2/06/06)
LEFTWICH: i like handwritten elements in visual works, particularly
when those visual works take their final form as computer
images.handwriting is a trace of the human, very personal and
vulnerable. i see it - and feel it - vanishing, being
supplanted, not only all around me but inside as well.
thanks for sending these.
BERRY: I'm gravitating more toward handwritten work - definitely a trace of the human, the organic. I still tend to write all my poetry by hand first then type it.
Of course computers are an aspect of nature as well since they
are created by natural creatures - but it does get so abstract at
times that I have to take a long walk among trees and other animals
just to remember where it all started.
LEFTWICH: sure, our technologies are as natural as anthills and beaver dams, no argument there - but the relationship of human being to human hand is very different from the relationship of human being to keyboard. sometimes changes occur as cumulative processes, the new not only extends but also incorporates the old. other times changes occur as exclusions of what has come before, as if the new and the old should (or even could) be mutually exclusive. the idea that the new supplants what precedes it risks discarding some very valuable aspects of human experience. handwriting seems to be vanishing.
i'm not sure that's a good thing.
BERRY: being human is a very questionable condition. we
can be human in so many ways and there is so much
overlap between being human or being any other
animal that when we talk about being human, or take
into concepts like body, soul, dasein, and so forth
we already pretend to distance ourselves from
ourselves far enough to make an assertion about
our condition. In these situations what we are doing
is imagining ourselves in particular ways. I think
computers are the by-product of one these ways
of imagining. certainly for you and I our hands are
more a part of being human than our computers, but
what about Stephen Hawking and others who rely
on computers that respond to the slightest gesture?
they might feel almost as connected to their computers as
to the parts of the body with which they were born.
we are indeed losing handwriting, and a multitude
of other disciplines we were taught in school. we are
allowing ourselves to become so fascinated by
technology that we are crippled without it. Perhaps
Hawking's illness has presented us with what we
may become in the future, with computers hardwired
to our brains to perform all the functions we now perform
with our bodies. It would be tragic I think because
computers should be an addition to our capabilities
not a replacement. It isn't a matter or either/or its
both/and. I always want to do things, create works
that are dependent on nothing more than imagination
and something to make a mark with, or better yet,
voice alone is an infinite instrument.
LEFTWICH: i also want to create works that are dependent on
nothing - maybe not even imagination, just process
and engagement, clarity in the moment, making
marks or sounds.
BERRY: great idea. maybe set a sheet of manuscript
paper outside in the weather for a few days and
whatever marks result are the score. Or just as
it begins to rain let the first few drops hit the page
and where they hit are the notes. Or just making
marks on the page while distracted by something
else, or more to your point, while distracted by nothing,
not even the work you are doing, invisible clarity.
LEFTWICH: yes, let the weather write the score.
maybe this spring i'll go outside in a big rainstorm
with some manuscript paper, sit in the yard in
the rain, moving the paper around, as a kind
of collaboration with the weather.
any thoughts, from you or from hank, of musicality in
visual poetry (in collage poetry, for example)?
BERRY: musicality in visual poetry? that's one to think about.
I suppose the question would be: do you hear visual
poetry when you see/read it?
also I think of synesthesia, hearing images, tasting letters,
seeing sound, etc. I think most of us in the so called
"experimental" end of things are probably synesthetic to
some extent.
LEFTWICH: all the senses are varieties of touch. mostly what
touches us is one wave pattern or another. i think
synaesthesia is primary, and the categories are
secondary. as for musicality specifically - visual
syntax equates to visual rhythm, like a pulse,
or breathing - clear wave forms, and i think we
hear them if we want to - in the body, proprioceptive,
experimental, through the full sensorium. to my
way of thinking it's easier to get from visual poetry
to music than it is to get from conventional lineated
verse to music - but the music may be closer to
something by steve reich (or to a spaceweather song)
than it is to traditional delineations of melody and
harmony.
some so-called word salads seem to me very similar
sonically to contemporary music, with little or no
trace remaining of melody (or measure) or harmony
(or vowel and consonant correspondence).
the musicality of pulsing aggregates, perhaps?
BERRY: reading through several of the space sounds sites, in
particular one at the University of Iowa I believe, one
can see visual representations of the sounds as well
as listen to them. all of the sounds are the results of
the collision of forces - solar waves with electrons in
the jovian magnetosphere for instance. so it is the
touching of forces, which are simultaneously wave
and particle depending on the question you ask. and
the results of these contacts can be represented in
ways that can be experienced by all our senses - its
just a matter of transferring the data from one set
of equations to another.
I think, yes, visual forms, whether by the name of
visual poetry or painting or whatever are easily
"heard", or for that matter transferred to any sense
once we recognize that it is not only possible, but
probably already happening. It’s a matter of
conditioning.
Word salads, or long works like your Doubt or
Argüelles' Pantograph and others must be read
as a kind of ebb and flow, as clusters of sound,
vision and meaning. You can lift individual phrases
and try to infer something about the whole from
them but that would be like trying to explain the
entire ecosystem with only a tree branch. In the
face of those kinds of work one can only immerse
oneself and let the experience happen to you
in whatever way your senses are capable. Again,
it's a matter of forces colliding and the result of
their collision.
LEFTWICH: i bought some manuscript paper a couple of weeks
ago and used it to print some visual works. the
visual pieces become scores, whether useful or
interesting as scores is another matter, but they
are certainly scores. i sent them to jukka, just to
see what his response would be. he easily could
have come back with something like, this is not
how it is done. but he didn't do that, he responded
more positively than i could have imagined, and
he started generating notation from the visuals
which he then printed over my work, so my
visuals and his notations appear on the same
sheet of manuscript paper. still, the question would
be, what is this? is it merely another kind of visual
poetry, one which incorporates musical notation?
jukka thinks these are actual scores, performable
not only by computer but also by musicians.
you mention immersing oneself and letting the
experience happen as a strategy for reading, and
i agree entirely - but now i am thinking about the
same attitude and process as a strategy for writing.
BERRY: These sound fascinating. I'd love to see them complete
with Jukka's notation, and of course I'd love to hear
them! Jukka knows the people who could probably perform
them and now with Complex Lemon he has a label.
I think notated manuscript is always visual as well as
a charted music. I have often studied scores for their
visual beauty and I think Jukka had a revelation while
examining a score, though he should tell you the story
because I would leave out important details.
And I agree that immersion as a path to writing is
a wonderful approach. There comes with it the
notion of sacrifice, of baptism, symbolic death,
loss of self in the burial. The opening poems of
Brambu Drezi book one are all about that loss
of self, burial and what rises from that ground. Not
that I was thinking it through that clearly when I
wrote. it was more a matter of letting the old
structures pass by way of loss in the depths
of various musics, and the collective mind
generally.
LEFTWICH: i'm guessing you've seen the scores improvisations texts
blog, so now have a picture of what we're thinking about.
it seems like something you would be very attuned to, and
i hope you'll want to contribute to the blog.
i agree that scores are often a kind of visual art, and even
at times a kind of visual poetry. these distinctions get a little
blurry after a while. i was looking at a book about modern
dance the other day, specifically at a dance score by lucinda
childs, very delicate and geometrical, seems to me it could be
used in many contexts, to produce sounds or events or both.
this makes me think of the fluxus event scores, which are
all texts, instructions, though they function as scores in
that anyone can perform them, not only their author.
the early pages of brambu are certainly involved with
immersion - maybe even with a kind of annihilation, a kind
of psychic sparagmos, a tearing-apart of the self in all of
its constructed solidity in preparation for a kind of rebirth,
transformation in the body. i don't think many of us actively
seek that experience in full knowledge of what it is and how
it works. once we know it, it is even difficult to advocate it.
best to let others find it as they will, or be as it were overtaken
and given the experience - against their will, always against
the will, since it is the self, primary site of will, which is to
be utterly annihilated. early on, i thought i knew what i was
seeking, but i didn't know - and if i had known, i probably would
have stopped. now i really don't - can't - advocate such a search.
i'll try to help make the territory. i don't have any choice in
that. but that's it, at least for now. some will come upon it and
find nothing, or less than nothing. that's fine with me. others
will come and find what's there. i will not have had anything
to do with preparing them. we work in very strange territory.
there may be a sense of fulfillment, by which i mean only the
sense of being alive and in the world, but i don't often find any
sense of contentment, of being comfortable in all of this.
everything we do is a kind of failure, a necessary kind of opening.
BERRY: yes, I think I've seen most, if not all of what you have posted of the scores. extraordinarily provocative work! Jukka suggested I might actually try to perform some of these, so I'm looking at it both ways - as visual art that sounds, and as something I might interpret as sound in some way. What I am trying to do is sort through all these things and see which I'd like to try. Some of them are probably beyond my grasp - that is the notes are structured in such a way that I could not play them on guitar or piano because I'm not fast enough and I read music very slowly at best. So I might use pages or sections of pages as starting points and references for improvisation. That is, I might play or interpret the page and that would set the tonal range from which I could improvise. The point is that if I perform a piece I'd like it to sound similar, though by no means identical, each time I performed it. And I need to show these to the guys in the band I'm playing in right now, The Ascension Brothers, to see if we might perform some of them together.
Curious you should mention fluxus event scores, earlier this evening while I was cleaning up my desktop (the computer desktop) I ran across some fluxus scores I had downloaded as .pdf file a while back and had forgotten about them. wonderful stuff. and Jukka has several compositions that work in the same way. They are written texts that almost anyone could perform. The distinctions do vanish, the categories are only provisional anyway - it's just that the categories get taught in schools generation after generation until we come to believe they that can be understood in only one way. I don't think that the artists, or even the first teachers, intend for this to happen. It's followers, people who need a basis from which to live that solidify the contexts and make an orthodoxy of them. Perhaps this is a biological inevitability, and equally inevitable that someone comes along to shatter the categories.
oh yes, the opening pages of Brambu are definitely what I would call immersion in the light of our recent discussions, though I probably would have called it something else at the time. I remember that I was so overwhelmed by certain experiences, and levels of experience that writing poetry in that mode seemed to be the only valid approach. looking back, and I was aware of this somewhat, I think the poem begins in chaos or hell - "legion swollen faces" - the seizures of hypnogogic anxiety at age ten. I was waking up to the origin myths at that age without the words to describe such a thing - it was a kind of primitive condition. And I agree, it is something you'd hesitate to advocate, especially to a kid, because just as you are developing an idea of your self as unique suddenly it is being destroyed by the full immediate presence of all these others. Nonetheless, it may be necessary. In a culture that is notoriously negligent of initiation rituals, we might invent our own, or more likely the initiation happens to us just as we are arriving at the threshold of identity. It is as if something inside is saying, "Not so fast, if you believe that you are so unique, if you are going to start creating an ego, you'd better consider the fact that you'll be living a lie."
In a culture where value is wealth and wealth can only be obtained and maintained with enormous self-confidence and ambition you'll tend to develop a fairly strong ego anyway. But there is always that doubt, all those others that make themselves present despite your best attempts to deny them. Eventually you have to make a choice, to believe the materialist paradigm or remain open to all possibilities. If you choose the former you might succeed, even on a grand scale, in the paradigm - but you will lose your own soul(s), so to speak. If you chose the later you will almost certainly be a failure in the society, but you will live a much more vivid life, and possibly even become aware of reality in some fundamental way.
I was reading the opening pages of the introduction to Hölderlin's Hyperion and Selected Poems, the German Library edition. The intro is by Eric L. Santer, who edited the volume. He quotes Walter Benjamin extensively, who arrives, by way of discussing Baudelaire and the beginnings of modernity at a term: traumatic shock - which he (Benjamin) stole from Freud for his own purposes. It's defined as a condition that results from a set of experiences, chief among them is the individual confronted with the urban mass in which no one returns his gaze. Without this immediate confirmation the individual becomes something very different, and may perhaps be annihilated altogether. And while we hear all about us the roar of the new information age, post-industrialism, post-modernism, I think the reality may be a bit more mundane. What we have is modernism plus. The increasing ubiquity of computer and internet technology around the world is similar to the spread of the printing press. The ideas don't change so much as the accessibility to ideas, modernism is perpetuated on a large scale. In this case it's a spread of the virus of modernity in the form of Americanism, which means commodification of everything. Anything that denies this orthodoxy, that is unsalable, is dismissed by the general mass so infatuated with the latest toys. It's a difficult position to be in because the only way to recover from "traumatic shock" is to surrender to the disease, the glory in possession, especially self-possession. However this is not actual recovery, but acceptance of an addiction. If you struggle against that addiction, and to the degree in which you struggle against it, you only intensify the shock and invite repeated daily blows.
Is detachment an answer? Probably not, because if you remove yourself from the world in the old sense of the hermit or monastic you carry the seeds of the disease with you into the wilderness where you can inflate the ego to god-like proportions. You can neither accept the disease nor run from it. Instead you take the blows but develop a means to react from the multiple perspectives that are probably closer to the reality of the human species is when it isn't playing these mind games of mass hallucination.
Ironically, clawing our way out of the jungle, we have recreated the jungle in abstract, resulting in a more physically comfortable jungle, but a more psychically dangerous one - in which it is impossible to discern reality from illusion. The beast that is out to devour us appears as a great consolation, a new hero, a new solution to our problems, only to reveal itself, once we are in its maw as the ravenous beast that we have recreated out of the old conditioning where we were always prey and had to defend ourselves to save our own lives and that of our kin and clan. Now the lives we are fighting for are the lives of our minds, constantly set upon by new beasts - the modern culture, which is itself just the intensification of civilization as city state: abstracted, specialized society.
The first thing to do is annihilate the self. This removes the delusion and provides the beast with a more difficult target. If there is no single you to market to, the market either becomes more multiple and complex or it dies. However, it is anti-intuitive for the market to do this. What the market wants to do is reduce to the lowest common denominator. One commodity with many names. One political party with many faces. Mergers. Acquisitions. The heroes and villains are simplified to caricatures that are easy to digest. There is no longer any need for imagination since that work is being done for us in exchange for a portion of the abstracted product that we obtain by full participation in the delusion. If the individual is annihilated, however, and the control mechanism is annihilated (i.e. words and images are torn from their roots in abstract culture and returned to sound and image floating freely in the active imagination) then freedom becomes a real possibility.
LEFTWICH: i think this is a good approach to these scores. you could
start anywhere and find something to serve as a kind of
theme for improvisational variations, probably not a melody
as that is conventionally understood, but maybe an aggregate
of notes with some consistently defined routes connecting
them. an aggregate of notes could be read or played as a
spiral in two directions, for example, or the notes in the
aggregate could be connected with diagonals, and the diagonals
could be connected to form a kind of constellation. all of these
could be used as routes, sequencing devices, for determining
the order of the notes. other markings on the page could be
used to determine other qualities - relationships to time
signatures, keys, etc. all you really need to determine how
you would like to read the page. then read it the same way
every time you play the "song".
4 or 5 years ago i wrote a series of event scores using a book
on ballet in french as source text and translating it homeophonically.
searching for similar sounds in english produced a kind of disjunct,
surreal text, most of which couldn't possibly be performed, but i
wrote it all as a set of instructions. perhaps not exactly what the
fluxus folks had in mind, but i suspect it isn't too far astray. however
that may be, it was fun to write. i published the whole series in a
magazine called bananafish. i think i sent you a copy.
i think you're right that the categories are a pedagogical convention,
not even necessary in that context, but useful for professionals in
the field. how things are done is not always even related to how those
same things are taught. it may be more of a cultural than a biological
inevitability, though humans generally do seem prone to it.
i think these initiation rituals you mention are absolutely necessary if
we are concerned to find out who we are and what we are living in,
but we really shouldn't expect much assistance with this from the
dominant culture. a society as complex as ours requires a extreme
homogenization of experience, and the immersion experience is
paradoxically an annihilation of the self and a radically subjective
experience. too much of this kind of thing would absolutely destroy
the society's ability to function as it is currently configured. while you
and i might see that a very desirable, we can’t expect the ruling elites
to share out point of view. thus the general lack of significant rites
of initiation into what should still be called the mysteries (the study
and application of which would be the alchemical great work).
i never was able to buy the materialist paradigm. i'm not entirely sure
why that has been the case, but it's been true since very early on. the
veil slipped just enough, it seems like even earlier than adolescence, and
the whole mythic master narrative has simply never made sense to me.
i didn't choose to go to war against it, as it must often seem to some of
the people i know. i just never could find myself at home in it, that's all.
i get the feeling, have since i first encountered brambu, that something
similar to this is also true for you.
your idea about modernism seems accurate. we have a kind of turbo-modernism,
modernity on meth. and modernism is increasingly americanism, the triumph of
commodification, the cycle of life reduced to the cycle of production and consumption.
i understand the idea that to struggle against traumatic shock is to participate in and
perpetuate it. the old remedy, the one i bought into in the 70s, was to get out of the
way, to cultivate a strategy of non-participation, specifically non-participation in the
normative economic formula. this has worked and made sense for most of the past
30 years, not all but most, but i'm afraid it has run its course as a practical or even
a reasonable strategy - much less as an ethical one, which was its original allure. now
there is no getting out of the way. the idea itself seems slightly obscene - absurd and
delusional. dangerously anachronistic, perhaps. it is something of a crisis currently for
me, figuring out how to navigate the near future, how to find a place for myself for
the next 20 years or so.
your idea of the annihilated self reminds me of the nomadological war machine, the
rhizome internalized. we might steal the military slogan, be an army of one, and
reimagine it through whitman as a one which contains multitudes. i think you're
absolutely right - the market will have no answer for this. the plural self will not
fit snugly into a demographic model of consumers.
i'm not at all certain what we are witnessing culturally these days. on the political
front, things are more transparently horrible than ever in my lifetime, worse even
than nixon and reagan. at the same time, and possibly because of the transparent
arrogance and cynicism of the current administration, people all of the world, even
in america, seem to be awakening to the underlying causes and supports of these
current abuses of power. things look ugly, quite often very ugly, but we may be
on the verge of a radical opening.
BERRY: I remember the homeophonic translations of the ballet book in bananafish. It's still here among the piles of books and papers. (Sometimes I honestly wish I had a find command for the contents of my office/studio.) I remember being fascinated that that were set up as instructions and thought that you were pushing the instructional composition to its radical limit - a performance that could not be performed. And since the text was matching sounds instead of meaning, it was, from the usual perspective (what Tim Gaze calls the particle aspect of writing, the semantic aspect) also impossible to mean. In a sense it came from a semantic nowhere, but had its full meaning in sound, yet there it was printed. A nice tension there. So perhaps it could just be performed as vocalization or sung. I think its very important that people understand how the piece was created - as much so as the way, say, Cage's mesostics were created.
Regarding categories, Bob Grumman and I used to argue about this. I don't want to try and repeat his argument because I know I'll get it wrong, but I was very much opposed to categorization and he thought it was necessary, and yes, perhaps biological (I think, forgive me Bob if I'm putting words in your mouth). I suspect we'd have a similar argument today. Categories are useful as a way of breaking things down to make them easier to assimilate. For instance, you learn all the parts of the body, all the systems, then how they all work together. Unfortunately it seems like we get stuck somewhere along the way. You go to the doctor with a cough and he gives you medicine for your lungs, but the medicine has horrible side effects that wreck your stomach. Knowledge by way of category alone at some point forgets that reality is not made of categories, that it's just something we do as a means of analysis and intellectual understanding. No single thing exists of itself - which is another reason why there can be no singular self. That concept ignores reality. How often have you stepped outside to discover that everything had vanished except one tree? Everything else was gone, all the houses, grass, bushes, whatever. It won't happen. The world is either there or it isn't and it can only be disassembled in the laboratory or the laboratory of the abstracting mind.
Which beings us back to the initiation rituals. One thing an initiation does is simultaneously affirm the reality of the individual (the rite of passage into adulthood) and by the same means integrates the individual into the community, one is an individual because he or she is part of the community. But this only works on a very small scale. In a global culture dominated by an obsession with material wealth there will be rites of passage but they are so poorly articulated and subconsciously driven that it manifests as mutual antagonism. Even though almost every adolescent will rebel against adults as a means to becoming an adult everyone involved becomes disturbed. When they seek guidance they are either handed an old script, a dictatorial creed, or a bottle of pills. These remedies invariably fail so we struggle through until it runs its course. The same applies to middle age, old age, death. The rites are there, we actually live them, but we stumble through them blindly. We grasp for the fix, the remedy that will return us to the previous state of relative comfort instead of accepting the changes. Perhaps this is always the case with mass culture. I don't know if its feasible to study past mass cultures, their sociology, because our information is going to be too limited, but it would be interesting to know if the citizens of the Roman empire, or the Chinese dynasties had similar problems; if, at the height of their power and wealth, they abandoned what amounts to tribal rituals.
So there is Benjamin's appropriation of Freud's "traumatic shock" - the self as confronting the others who refuse to return his gaze - the isolation of modernity. There is a passage in the first book of Brambu about listening to AM radio late at night, a station in some distant location, and knowing that all over the country people were listening to the same station at the same time. We are alone, we cannot see one another or speak to one another, but we form a "community of isolation." We are together - a tribe in the darkness, sitting silent and listening to the same sounds - but we are also alone. These days I often listen to a small short wave radio, so I am part of a planetary community in my aloneness. As I write this I am listening to a radio station over the internet that originates in Venezuela. It's like you say, a turbo-modernism, hyper-modernism. Yet we are not really so distant from the tribe. One could make the case that as we sit alone in the dark and type our e-mails and listen to some distant radio station we are participating in an initiation ritual that requires us to behave as if we are individuals but which opens that individual to all possible others. By over reaching the individual collapses into the others, and more fundamentally, the individual is driven to participate in this ritual because there are, in reality, no individuals at all, just an enabling mechanism that allows all the selves and possible selves to rise, to appear. (Ah, here he is, Mr. Heidegger!)
The first time this struck me I had been reading William Barrett's Irrational Man, the Heidegger chapter, and had been sitting there for a while trying to make sense of it when suddenly I noticed the room around me. I fell out of my thoughts, out of that kind of thought blindness, and there was the cat, and the rug, and the furniture and bookcase - it was all rising into being before me. So I got a dose of what Heidegger was talking about. And although Heidegger is dealing with "being there", (dasein), there is another sensibility that comes with it. Time becomes irrelevant. Materiality is real, but it is not the material that matters, it is the presence of a thing. The way it takes life, opens up and the divisions vanish. It isn't as if you disregard names, categories, they are quite useful, but they are not the presence of the world.
Materialism seems to depend upon this sense of the world, as a group of so many things, of so many atoms, quarks, whatever, assembled to create reality. This seems awfully simplistic - and a very singular way of looking at the world. It is as if we have decided to read the world the way you read a book, by combining the letters to make syllables and words and then agreeing that these words have particular definitions - and this is called meaning. Again, very useful if you want to build a model, but it seems to do more to distance us from the world, to isolate us than to bring us into the world.
You mention the Great Work. I think this "bringing us into the world" is not different from the prima materia that is said to everywhere available and so on. But I'd like to take this discussion further by asking you how we might image, imagine, the Great Work today, without resorting to those wonderful old drawings and paintings and arcane manuscripts? I have an idea that we'll both answer this in the same way, but I think it might be important to state it explicitly to clear the air.
I was discussing the possibility of metaphysics with Gregory Vincent Saint Thomasino a couple of weeks ago - actually I said we were far too metaphysical for our own good relative to current philosophy and science. He agreed and proposed setting up a blog for a public discussion, which is what initiated the Conversari blog. So at some point I want to get Gregory into this because I admire the intensity and detail of his thinking. But for now, let's play with the Great Work a bit. Let me know what you think?
LEFTWICH: there are some big cats in this bag. i suppose
now is as good a time as any to let them out.
one thing at a time, very slowly. as slow as i
know how to go.
here is robert kelly on homeophonic translation:
“The point of the homeophonic: to hear the other as own.
“As to the homeophonic (not homophonic, not same sound, but like sound,
like enough, just like enough to get something started).
“Here there is no hegemony, no appropriation of the humiliated original text,
no bluster of meaning, no flag-waving of accuracy, no fascism of ‘what it
really means’. Instead, the substantial energy of one poem, in all the lucidity
of its sound and form, generates a resultant structure in your hearing,
another poem, and you hear.
“Language is a prison, writing is a door.
“The point is: to hear a poem that means, a poem that is as serious as
the causal poem. Causal and resultant poems — that’s a better way
than ‘original’ and ‘translation’.
“The great moment comes when you begin to read and study the
resultant poem that has come to expression through your ardent
listening. You are studying a text that no one wrote. It is pure Revelation,
a true and urgent Niemandrose of the mind. Here, more than anywhere
I know in all of literature, is the embodiment of what we can learn by
the act of writing.”
i think he's got it.
i think everyone should try this at home.
repeatedly.
for years and years.
think of it as a kind of yoga.
english-to-english translation works as well as anything else.
for the arts, categories are essential as pedagogical tools
and for curatorial purposes. for the artists, for the during
of the making, these same categories are irrelevant at
best. it's barely a point worth arguing, unless we are
discussing the classroom, the museum, the library or the
archives.
traditional functions of initiation rituals are now performed by
mass consumer culture - on a global scale. there has been a
gradual, recently accelerating, progression - degradation - of
initiation rituals, from the archaic, as you describe (small scale),
through the socialization process (on a larger scale, enacted as
rites of passage through insitutional systems - eg., the public
schools, the military), and now to a homogenization of experience
accomplished primarily via the corporate media, but also in the
form of the omnipresence of cultural icons such as wal-mart,
macdonalds, starbucks - and also, very powerfully, the forms of
popular culture - pop music, the movies, television. consensus
reality is being very carefully constructed - packaged, marketed,
and sold to the global population. this process has supplanted
the archaic initiation ritual - and its function, from the collective
perspective, is very much the same. what has been diminished
to the level of insignificance is the unique, subjective quality
of the archaic initiation experience - individuation, the sense
imparted of substantial empowerment - all of that kind of thing
is simply too dangerous, it threatens the hierarchical structure,
so it must be weakened, diluted, or eliminated altogether (thus
the packaging of rebellion and defiance marketed to youth
culture as an authentic experiential rite of passage).
any way out of this will be extreme. the extremes of the arts,
as in the practice described by kelly - psychic extremes, let's
say - blake as a precursor, along with many others, of course
- it will by definition seem a form of madness to deviate in the
extreme from the consensus reality of one's culture, even if
what one deviates into is a more complete and accurate - a
full - experience of reality. anyone who expects to be rewarded
by the dominant culture for refusing to participate in it, for
determining that one's time and energies are better spent in
the pursuit of something like self-transformation, is simply
delusional - and is probably not very far along on the path to
this transformation. even the archaic shaman was ostracized
and exiled, brought into the community for ceremonial purposes,
then returned to his hut at the edge of the forest. the great
work of the alchemists is the transformation of consciousness -
which means, by definition, the transformation of the world, of
reality (consciousness is a causal reality). the spiritual disciplines
historically are practices designed to produce transformations
of consciousness. in this sense, the writing of poetry is a
spiritual discipline. the threat of the poets to the state is that
of setting a bad example - too much freedom, insufficient
subservience, extreme deviations from the homogenized norms
of consensus reality. elimination or exclusion is unnecessary, it
suffices to simply discredit the poet in the minds of the majority.
it is very helpful if the traditional masters of the practice are
generally thought to have been insane. blake, for example -
dare we suggest that he was simply successful? i'll state it as
a fact, discredit myself in the process, and carry on laughing at
the consequences.
life is short. it's not a game and it's not a popularity contest. i
don't give a damn about william blake. i'm interested in what
poetry will accomplish during the time it is written tomorrow.
the ego doesn't believe in detachment. a part of me - what part? -
feels the need to teach it. writing helps. some kinds of writing
help. does this kind of writing help? i doubt it.
writing for the blog - for the public, let's say -
is so different from writing email to a friend.
i don't like it much, but i do think it's part of
my job, so to speak. what i just wrote has
the form of an email to you, but it is much
closer to an essay than it is to a letter. one
of the first things i encountered when i got
to the library at OSU a few years back, when
i was there for the symposium, was an email
i had written to you. it was in a vitrine. seeing
it in that context was not a pleasant experience,
but i learned a little from it. we have built an
inhuman world for ourselves, all of us. it moves
faster than we do. it eats us alive. i don't think
we need to pretend to feel comfortable with
this. poetry is a dangerous vehicle. it always
has been. there have always been some who
have known this, but most of those who claim
to know and love poetry don't even know what
i'm talking about here. you know. i know that.
i've traveled in some strange dimensions, riding
on the poem. so have you. we've been to the
same places. i'm sure of it. when i tell my
closest friends the truth even they treat it as
a kind of madness. do we really want to write
this, all the details of this, in clear declarative
sentences, and send it out into the world? i
think the answer is obvious. i haven't written
it yet. have you? the closest i have come is
the essay i published in xtant 2 - a few
thoughts on a few notes. i may never get any
closer than that in print. i leave clues and
hints, scraps of maps, in visual poems and
fractured texts. they function as opportunities
for remembering - that's all.
BERRY: I'm going to reply to last e-mail first and work my way back.
True, writing for the public, for publication, on blogs, in magazines, books, CDs or whatever is different. In some cases it requires some amount of preparation - performing a poem or song for a recording for instance, or publishing a book - the awareness of the public is forced into the process because of the mechanism of the process. In other cases you only become aware of it afterward. Pretty much all the poetry, songs, visual art I do is created initially without much thought of what a public will think, even the people that I am sure will take the time to read or listen to it. That would only check the process and prevent it from taking its own course.
What I am trying to do with the Conversari blog is break down that division between creation and preparation for presentation to the public. What gets posted there isn't art in the usual sense, but it is a revisitation to the art of conversation and letter writing that has been lost in the usual quick response of an e-mail. People used to place more value of personal communication. There was a sense of care in the words, not because they were composed for public consumption, but because the writer of the letter really wished to connect with, correspond with, the reader of the letter. I don't think that sense of care has ever been lost between people, but the awareness and appreciation of it has been drowned in the spectacle of the media onslaught. Letters have been replaced as well by phone calls from anywhere to anywhere at any time. Still, that sense of personal connection remains.
What happens when this is exposed to the public? We can't refer to the published letters of famous poets or other artists because by the time the letters are published they have already crossed the line into the public domain because they were written by people that are now public figures, even if they are long dead. The letters get framed as something unique because they came from the pen of someone famous and therefore, according to the rules of the society, are worthy of our attention. And they are usually well edited for publication to remove the dross, so we get a skewed perspective anyway. So there is no answer there.
I want to retain as much of the exchange as possible because 1.) it is spontaneous and captures us thinking "out loud" and 2.) it is substantive - at least for the people involved. We're discussing general subjects in a way that is unique to each writer.
You ask, "Do we really want to this in clear declarative sentences, all the details, and send it out into the world?" My response is that I'm not sure we can, and if we can we already have done so in our works. Someone once asked the film director Akira Kurasawa what the message of one of his films was. He answered that if he could answer that question he would write it on a placard. We say things, or rather, allow things to be said in our poetry that cannot be said in ordinary, conventional prose. What we can do is think about the work after the fact. Kandinsky said that theory follows practice. That has always been my experience. You can't plan a discovery or a revelation. All you can do is make yourself available to it. For example, homeophonic writing places you in a position to discover something by way of the process that you would never experience otherwise. Your comparison to yoga is accurate I think, and I think of the transmutation process of Abulafia and the other ecstatic kabbalists. The rational response is to dismiss this as meaningless play - but it is the element of play - the free play of sounds with different meanings in conjunction. In some sense you break the laws of literacy in this process. You release words from their singular modes of meaning. It is very liberating for you and for the reader. As you say, this is a spiritual practice. I agree and accept that and dismiss all the other things people project into that word.
Does this have any value in popular culture or even so-called literary culture? No, probably not, and given the state of that culture I hope it doesn't. You may have read Dana Gioia's essay "Can Poetry Matter?" In the initial version, written I think almost two decades ago now, he was concerned that poetry was vanishing from public appreciation and being swallowed by a kind of hollow academic mannerism. He revised the essay a few years ago and noted several areas that offered him hope - more public poetry readings, poetry slams, the appreciation of some sector of the public for spoken word events and so forth. I readily concede that these things and the others he mentions are a means in which something by the name of poetry is garnering more public attention. And I think the work of hip hop artists, songwriters and so forth is poetry. As with any other poetry, especially poetry eager for the spotlight, most of it is utter crap. It is designed from the beginning to be product. It has all the substance of a stick of gum. But all the ways in which poetry has re-appeared in the society hasn't altered my original, immediate response to Gioia's question - which is: Does it matter if poetry matters? Perhaps he has more confidence in society than I do. While I find many redeeming characteristics in contemporary society - qualities that might appear under certain circumstances in individuals or in the collective - I don't find much in the day to day that will be effected in any meaningful way by poetry, even the good work that somehow manages to break the surface. In the longer view philosophy, poetry, the arts and sciences - makes discoveries that gradually filter out into society and might nudge it, over a period of generations, in interesting directions. I'm thinking of the Theory of Relativity, visionary work like Blake, Rimbaud, Dickinson, Whitman, Thoreau, Stein, the whole long list in all the disciplines and their overlapping. But you can't plan to change society any more than you can plan to have a revelation or visionary experience. Not unless you're egomanical or part of a group led by an egomaniac or a mass delusion. It seems terribly presumptuous to suggest that anything we might do would have much of an impact, for good or ill. We will indeed be met with indifference and be marginalized. This is not a loss as far as I'm concerned. In fact, it's probably a blessing. As you know, the process of preparing a work for publication can be very distracting and then promoting it even more so. I'm willing to put up with it enough to make the work as available as possible to anyone that wants it, but usually the first thing I want to do as soon as I finally get a book in print or get a CD out is go to work on the next one.
The reason for this is, I think, is that the work we are doing is, I agree, about transformation. The Great Work. Not great as in exceptionally good, but great in the sense of being totally overwhelming, losing one's self. The alchemists and similar workers/playmeisters, mystics and so on, the ones that matter, were doing the same thing. When I read your work, in whatever form, I approach it with that knowledge - knowing that I am witnessing a process of transformation and often, if I pay attention, I will be caught in that process and experience the transformation as well. Obviously some of the alchemists, maybe most of them, were charlatans, and it is one of those words, like shaman, zen, or whatever that has become a catch, a marketing hook. The ads say, in essence, if you read this book, if you follow these steps, you will be happy and your problems will be solved. There are few things more repulsive. I'd rather read Hart Crane or Sylvia Plath at their most depressed and suicidal than read any of this self-help mysticism crap. And there's another level of it in academia - if you take the right courses from the right teachers you will be able to join the elite. This is an old trick. I am reminded of the poet Ikkiyu, who was a Buddhist priest, but after sampling life in the monasteries of his day decided to spend his time in the brothels and bars instead. You don't find redemption or happiness or transformation by looking for it, you just try to place yourself in its path and hope it runs you down, and so powerfully, that it transforms you before you can screw it up and start writing a book about it.
Work that invites or generates transformation cannot be contained in explanatory volumes. And critics, even sympathetic ones, can only hope to provide some kind of opening into the work. Jack Foley said recently that the work that he usually finds more interesting is the work of the failures, not the successes. To me, this is because the failures remain an open story and they always will because they failed - that is, they never measured up to what society expects of its "great people." We could go into a discussion about how to define success and failure, but it is neither the heroic individual nor collective opinion that finally matters, it is whatever compels us beyond what we believe to be the case. Truly, there is madness from the point of view of the collective, and the very real possibility of genuine mental illness, especially if you take yourself so seriously that you believe that you created the work instead of the other way around. Ultimately all that matters is the practice of the art itself. There's no final reward or great justification. It's just animal behavior, angelic behavior - the universe exercising its imagination and destroying and creating worlds every nanosecond in the process. We all disappear in that process every day. Why not celebrate it?
posted by Jake Berry at 1:57 AM
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