from Action, Number, Silence, Work
05.27.2018 (Silence)
I had second thoughts earlier, when I was in the bookshop,
on whether or not I should get a copy of Simon Hanselmann’s Megahex. Finally decided,
I went back to purchase a copy. It seemed quite an interesting addition to my
variegated readings for later in the afternoon and towards evening. A reading
list which I imagined (imagined – for at some point the attention span is bound
to break, and did break) to include Jacques Roubaud and his interpolations in The Great Fire of London, the sonnet
sequence in Geoffrey G O’Brien’s Experience
in Groups, and Guy Davenport’s short story on the Lascaux cave paintings.
(Maybe I should spend time to think about the activity of reading on some other
day?) So I headed back to the shop and left some of my things -- a blue notebook,
a 0.38pt black-blue pen, and Susan Howe’s That
This -- with my friends K and A, at our table in the café. As I went out, I
noticed that A flipped through pages of the Susan Howe.
When I got back, A said: “K and I were wondering how you
would read this”
Half-jokingly, I made noises that contained L, T, W and
several vowel sounds.
*
It
is now late evening, and giving more thought to the occurrences earlier in the
day, I note that I chose to give the Howe collage a sound. Several things led
to my choosing to give it a sound – That
This is a poetry book, the specific section with the collages is sandwiched
between an essay chapter and a chapter of lineated verse, further, I was asked:
how would you read this? But I also
want to take note of illegibility, how certain collage works, such as Susan
Howe’s, made of language-material, take place in the area between the legible
and the illegible, and how illegibility is something that a work gains when the
textual becomes visual. Thinking
about illegibility in this particular sense makes more apparent the limitations
of thinking about (i.e. reading) visual work using structures modeled after
language.
But
even poems that are obviously not visual poetry still carry with them various
aspects of illegibility. If in visual poems the illegible aspect is introduced
via the foregrounding of language’s graphic elements, in verse and prose poems
this aspect seems to be made through sound – when expectations one may have of
normative logic are unmet, or are differently met through a prosodic logic. “I
placed a jar in Tennessee” writes Wallace Stevens “And round it was, upon a
hill. /It made the slovenly wilderness/
Surround that hill” and it is quite clear that Stevens placed the jar in
Tennessee for Tennessee’s three syllables, its s followed by a long e
sound, and for its particular distribution of stresses, as much for its hills
and slovenly wilderness.
Or
in an example from Lyn Hejinian, a prosodic and rhyming logic drives a
semblance of a lyric I, so much that
the didactic manner of saying which occurs in every third line, rather than being
aphoristic, becomes a comedic slapstick made possible by rhyme:
“I thought I saw a rhubarb pie sitting on the stove
Then I saw it was the tide receding from a cove
But although I have strong emotions when I watch a movie,
jealousy is never one of them.
I thought I saw a bicyclist racing down the road
Then I saw it was a note, a message still in code
But sense is always either being raised to or lowered from the
sky
I thought I saw a gourmet chef smear himself with cream
Then I saw it was myself just entering a dream
But we all know that the imagination when left to itself will
brave anything”
(from Lyn Hejinian’s The Book of A Thousand Eyes)
*
Last
night, I dreamt I was in a gathering of friends1. People2
were speaking with each other. I thought that they were simultaneously people
and friends. In my mind in the dream, I knew them, but I was also aware that I
didn’t know any of them in waking life3. Then I woke up, and
realized that in all the gestures of hands, and laughter, all the talk and
nodding of heads, I didn’t remember hearing any sound4, 5.
1.
“Reading shares this necessarily
unsanctioned intimacy,” writes Lisa Robertson “I have the strong sense that
reading chooses me, as have my friendships.”
2.
From Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming
Community:
"What was most striking about the demonstrations of the
Chinese May [Tiananmen], in fact, was the relative absence of specific contents
in their demands. (The notions of democracy and freedom are too generic to
constitute a real goal of struggle, and the only concrete demand, the
rehabilitation of Hu Yaobang, was promptly granted.) [...] In Tiananmen the
state found itself facing something that could not and did not want to be
represented, but that presented itself nonetheless as a community and as a
common life (and regardless of whether those who were there in the square were
actually aware of it.) The threat the state is not willing to come to terms
with is precisely the fact that the unrepresentable should exist and form a
community without either presuppositions or conditions of belonging (just like
Cantor's inconsistent multiplicity). The whatever singularity -- this
singularity that wants to take possession of belonging itself as well as of its
own being-into-language, and that thus declines any identity and any condition
of belonging -- is the new, nonsubjective, and socially inconsistent protagonist
of the coming politics. Wherever these singularities peacefully manifest their
being-in-common, there will be another Tiananmen and sooner or later, the tanks
will appear again."
3.
The first section of That This is titled
Disappearance Approach where Susan Howe writes about her husband’s, Peter
Hare’s, death. Thinking about CS Peirce and the moment of her husband’s death,
she writes:
““It could have been the instant of balance between silence,
seeing, and saying; the moment before speech. [CS] Peirce would call this moment,
secondness. Peter was returning to the common course of things – our world of
signs.”
4.
John Cage enters an anechoic chamber and
hears two sounds: the electric buzz of his nervous system, and the beating of
his own heart.
*
5.
I remember another dream, one set in a
very particular kind of light. It is a light that makes one doubt the realness
of people and of things, a light that makes me doubt even the music that I hear,
the one that is playing now.
******
Raymond de Borja is a writer and visual artist from the Philippines. His book of poems and collages, they day daze, is published by High Chair.
