Semtext (Plastic) 3

SEMTEXT PLASTIC 3

The work of madmen is always based on a law that has ceased to operate. Madmen are men who have lost their imagination. Their manual memory belongs to a realm of rigid mechanism. It is an infernal machine that breaks down and not an intelligence that progresses and constantly creates in order to progress … The work of a madman is dead work; the poetry it contains is like the ghost which refuses to give up its corpse • Picasso Georg Mertens

der begriff

John Kinsella

vested interest: staging hamlet in-time

two terms, or maybe words were taken out on a leash by their little doggy masters. since they were walking side by side, one of them asked: “hello, who are you?” “table,” said the other “and who are you?” the first one said: “i am also table, but how is that possible, that we are so different, that we don’t even realise one another are the same?” then the second one said: “if you only knew what my master gets up to with terms like me!”

John Tranter

Red Cruise The Captain nods off in a deck chair behind a copy of the Workers News.

You lot, playing deck tennis, had your injections yet?

“They were drinking gin in the journo’s bar,” said Major Wilson, “when a MiG jumped the hill, guns blazing, and shot a rocket through the plate glass.

Gone in a flash, it was!” I say, Major, Isn’t that a naked sailor in the pool?

Spearing up from the unconscious, ploughing through the amourplate of a thousand Marxist preconceptions such a vision can deconstruct a whole epoch, as it were. To jettison your spouse, sink your memories in Nembutal, these soft options get you nowhere, said the Captain, grinning cruelly, poking at the underbelly of capitalism.

That old rat with the twitch fought bravely in Borneo, the blue rinse wimp is an entertainment executive.

Plus a change, old boy. Who’s that who dares to tango with the Captain?

Flirting with the Mystic East: “You Westerners, you’re all the same.”

for t.m. and s.y.

in bell-hook, or shakedown verbal tussle—the adjective is perspectival increasing the noun-value of chair & chime notation exeunt seems not i know i know the grave eye annotating this final say: this case the fact this case i was hard winter berries, we notice the desert beyond this cold window form visuals: field percussion and companions noted: cento, clastic instrument ear-bite pranks the queen approaches poaches dearly the poor phrase tendered dearly betting a ducat betting a stack of staged responses, one sound never moved hard-packed mistletoe halo, disprized hymn veils an eyelid, a lid of steam: i see the case, the chair, the snow about the dialect, whiling words heartily heartily heartily perchance a window

a block of sound that’s overfull with space empty all around Peter Minter

Beige Lately, what have you, my arrogance, been writing in The Pieces, the sense of you in That Library on the shore one of me let’s say come out of it & pull myself together, the long dust these years from which some kind of formal statement might stay fairly anchored but, well, a larger view accumulates & finds itself some altitude toward the world presents me with insinuations, at first inviolate and extemporising what tunnels or outpourings I’m selfishly disinterested in Words (as if it were Plastic shape! O Wallace, O Jackie, the fire delights in concrete roneo the phallus in I–talico! of course, in the park, as it were, this is my drop of water and that’s your drop of water so sick again with art we list lies &, specifically, killing sprees, pamphlets, posters, billboards, all signal to excellence & the Signorina, sleeping under the book, legs over feet, considers Dis course Iscario; OK, they return & apologise for a State of Feeling, the addenda that if an elephant were Not standing on your foot, Ginsberg, yeah, well, sure, but reverent feathery references and particulate anguish shower us, Very Alert & In Drag with the new suit, Sans Mostachio.

Susan M. Schultz

Postmodern Promos Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Perloff, Marjorie. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

1. Archibald MacLeish declared, “a poem should not mean but be,” but of course he didn’t mean it.

MacLeish’s poems meant perhaps too much, and sang too little, to submit to his definition. Marianne Moore wrote of a poet’s ability to create imaginary gardens with real toads in them, and so to create being out of meaning. More than any of the other moderns, Hart Crane self-consciously created poetry as MEDIUM and wanted language to spring us to somewhere beyond language. This unmediated medium remained, however problematically, “natural”; the poem was an organism that grew on its own; it was the poet’s truly born child.

2. Crane incorporated advertising language into his myth in “The River” section of The Bridge as if prepackaged language could also be used as a springboard to a non-linguistic realm. But what happens when the order of transmission is reversed, when advertising copy coopts poetry, when the medium becomes the media, when the only poetry that most people encounter comes in the guise of slogans like “I wanna be like Mike” (which refers us to a basketball player and culture hero whose very style is “poetic”)? In this contemporary example, of course, advertising language is so strong that it has the ability to change the names by which we know our heroes—no one though of Michael Jordan as “Mike” until Gatorade (not, unfortunately, the company with the sight-rhyme, “Nike”) needed to transform the hero to make him rhyme, make him even more friendly (is it possible?) to consumer culture.

3. Marjorie Perloff’s provocative claim in Radical Artifice is that advertising language is that of Modernist poetry; advertising’s tenets were not laid down so much by Madison Avenue as by Ezra Pound.

“Exact treatment of the thing, accuracy of presentation, precise definition—these Poundian principles have now been transferred to the realm of copywriting” (94), she argues (and I wonder it we might not find more irony still in the word itself, “copy write”; “copy right”; “copyright”). Perloff, ever an exact and able close-reader, takes the following billboard message in hand to show that, “as the ‘look’ of the standard poem begins to be replicated on the billboard or the greeting card, an interesting exchange begins to occur” (100): O. R. LUMPKIN. BODYBUILDERS. FENDERS STRAIGHTENED. WRECKS OUR SPECIALTY. WE TAKE THE DENT OUT OF ACCIDENT.

“Surely,” she enjoins, pointing to the lineation of this “free verse” bit of advertising, with its clever wordplay and enjambment, “the next time we have an accident, this memorable punning will stick in our minds and draw us to O. R. Lumpkin rather than some other body shop” (100). This “standard poem” might well be printed in The New Yorker or Poetry or American Poetry Review (the latter with a photo of Mr. Lumpkin himself, no doubt). The punning begins, of course, with Mr. Lumpkin, who takes our lumps and makes them right again.

4. Advertising’s power, of course, lies in its simulation of authenticity; the potential consumer may know that the American Express card ads that show the familial love between father and daughter are “artificial,” and still wipe tears from her eyes. Hence Dan Quayle’s insistence that television should show us a more authentic version of ourselves. And so authenticity becomes a form of nostalgia. Crucial to this sense of authenticity, Perloff would claim, is its presentation—as in the Lumpkin ad—through the medium of free verse, which we think of as “natural” and unmediated through the artifice of traditional

forms. “Free verse = freedom; open form = open mind, open heart: for almost half a century,” writes Perloff, “these equations have been accepted as axiomatic, the corollary of what has come to be called, with respect to poetic language, the ‘natural look.’“ I suspect that she means us to hear the conflation of poetic language with hairstyle, and the attendant confusion between image and “self,” whatever that is; Perloff’s persistent attacks on the univocal lyric over the past ten years or so are based on a profound distrust of the “self” created through it.

She writes: “Most contemporary writing that currently passes by the name of ‘poetry’ belongs in this category which [Jed] Rasula wittily calls PSI, for ‘Poetry Systems Incorporated, a subsidiary to data management systems.’ The business of this particular corporation is to produce the specialty item known as ‘the self,’ and it is readily available in popular magazines and at chain bookstores” (19).

Need one add that there is a magazine of that name: Self?

5. While Modernists worked from a dualist model that set in tension “the image and the real,” and believed that one was related to the other, Postmodernists, according to Perloff, see that relationship replaced by one “between the word and the image” or between “the simulacrum and its other” (92). In this new poetry, the image itself is deconstructed, because after all, who can trust advertising to tell us the truth about ourselves, whoever those selves are? If advertising has become our mirror, then the poet’s goal is to distort that mirror in such a way that we see the inherent distortion in images—reflection must give way to refraction, deflection.

6. So we abandon the Imagist image and return to language, but language understood in a new way, not as mediator but as medium (in the material, not the psychic, sense). Where the modern imagist free verse poet would write the Lumpkin ad as it appears above (and as the ads flash by in Crane’s “the River”), the postmodernist poet would begin not from the image of a wreck, and the message that the wreck would be fixed, but from the words used to convey that message—whose real import is mercantile. For the language of advertising, above all, sells. The postmodernist poet might play on the name O. R. Lumpkin, its relation to lumps and kin and lumpenproletariat, and in so doing, unmessage the message by making the medium the subject. It bears quoting the three ways in which Perloff sees Postmodern poets deconstructing the image: (1) the image, in all its concretion and specificity, continues to be foregrounded, but it is now presented as inherently deceptive, as that which must be bracketed, parodied, and submitted to scrutiny …

(2) the Image as referring to something in external reality is replaced by the word as Image, but concern with morphology and the visualization of the word’s constituent parts: this is the mode of Concrete Poetry [.]

(3) Image as the dominant gives way to syntax: in Poundian terms, the turn is from phanopoeia to logopoiea. “Making strange” now occurs at the level of phrasal and sentence structure rather than at the level of the image cluster so that poetic language cannot be absorbed into the discourse of the media … (78)

7. The real strength of Perloff’s book is in the narrative it elaborates as a way to understand the NEED for Language poetry in a now unfolding literary history. Thus, “[i]f American poets today are unlikely to write passionate love poems or odes to skylarks or to the Pacific Ocean, it is not because people don’t fall in love or go birdwatching or because the view of the Pacific from, say, Big Sur doesn’t continue to be breathtaking, but because the electronic network that governs communication provides us with the sense that others—too many others—are feeling the same way” (202-3). In other words, poems about great vistas can already be found— either in the Norton Anthology (see Keats) or, in their fallen form, in a Hallmark shop. This passage, which expresses Perloff’s yearning for a unique and unsullied perspective on (past) nature, sounds to my ear transcendentalist in its idealistic paranoia, its yearning for, yes, authenticity. Perloff’s defense, like Whitman’s, would be to celebrate self-contradiction, knowing that nothing else is possible. Like her allies the Language poets, Perloff would claim with Gertrude Stein that repetition is actually insistence, and that to sound the transcendentalist note in the 1990s is to say something new. Yet it’s hard for her to do this without somehow worshipping the unsullied and autochthonous “self” that she so easily dismisses in rear-guard free verse poetry.

8. Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman and other of the Language group of poet-critics agree with Perloff on this—as on most—points; our particular way of seeing such a vista has been pre-determined, so the argument goes, precisely by the Norton (at best) and by Hallmark (at worst) or by the more likely (con)fusion of the two. This way of seeing insures that we do conform with others, also programmed to buy Hallmark cards and do other good deeds for capitalism; the only way to be a good Emersonian these days is to de-form the language, which is also to reform it. As Bernstein says it (he, too, sounding a lot like someone who has found the original Waldo amid a crowd of faces): “Poetry is

Louis Armand aversion of conformity in the pursuit of new forms, or can be” (1); and “I care most about poetry that disrupts business as usual, including literary business: I care most for poetry as dissent, including formal dissent; poetry that makes sounds possible to be heard that are not otherwise articulated” (2). These claims are not, in and of themselves, radical. The Language poets’ means of acting on these claims ARE more radical, but their attempt to create once against a language that has not been coopted by the media, an un-transparency that is transparent, puts them squarely in the line of American idealists that includes Emerson and Gertrude Stein. Their quest for originality, a writing free of all quotation, is at once as admirable and quixotic as was Emerson’s.

9. Bernstein is perhaps the most intelligent and most consistently interesting of contemporary thinkers on poetry and poetics; he is also the most self-contradictory. His work bears the kind of confused (nay, panicked) attention that Emerson’s does; like Perloff, his argument against the Romantic and Modernist image owes perhaps too much to the first American Romantic. He is at once aesthete (he adores Swinburne and Wilde) and proto-Marxist; purveyor of claritas and obscuritas; deconstructionist and fetishist of the word; preacher and skeptic; fiction-writer and disseminator of truths—the train could go on, derailing itself as it goes. This is, of course, part of Bernstein’s world view; his is a vision that tries to leave the binary behind (by containing multitudes), and engage in the polymorphous multiplicity of things. Yet I wonder if many of these contradictions are not, in fact, incompatible; Bernstein’s Swinburnian poems seem somehow at odds with the needs of a leftist politics, for example. Yet Bernstein’s prose is, for the most part, clear; he would pass a university course in argumentative writing. It is far clearer than his poetry, and serves (ironically) to advertise the poetry by explaining its purpose, if not its content. In fact, the content of the poems seems to me to be the elaboration of the prose, as if poetry were a “proof text,” rather than the proper subject of our so-called science.

10. Bernstein’s claims for poetry are in many ways even stronger than Perloff’s, although he begins from the same starting blocks with (an all-too-easy?) attack on advertising culture, arguing that poets should display a willingness to engage in guerrilla warfare with the official images of the world that are being shoved down our throats like so many tablespoons of Pepto Bismol, short respite from the gas and the diarrhea that are the surest signs that harsh and uncontainable reality hasn’t vanished but has only been removed from public discussion. (3)

Bernstein replaces Perloff’s creators of false “selves” with the purveyors of what he calls “official verse culture.” That these are the purveyors of a political, as well as a poetic, message Bernstein makes clear in his argument that the notion that “we can ‘all’ speak to one another in the universal voice of history” is a “disease.” His heroes, then, are poets who work “in opposition to the dominant strains of American culture” (6).

11. These dominant strains, for Bernstein as for Perloff, are evidenced in the strains of the American lyre. But where Perloff’s poetic heroes are those who replace “form” with “artifice” —who replace sonnets with numerically generated bits of language that have the virtues of formalism without any of the taint (and what a taint there is!), Bernstein erases the differences between all forms of writing: if there’s a temptation to read the long essayin-verse (“Artifice of Absorption”), which follows these opening notes, as prose, I hope there will be an equally strong temptation to read the succeeding prose as if it were poetry. (3)

Whether prose or poetry, his writing is meant to be taken as fiction; in a Steinian way he writes, “when Content’s Dream was published I wanted that to be classified as ‘essays/fiction.’ People sometimes ask me if I’m interested in writing a novel. I say, well, I did, that’s it” (151).

12. While Bernstein persuades me that the categories by which we write and read literature no longer do us much good, it seem to me that he himself holds to these categories, and needs to hold to them to

make his argument fly. I find “Artifice of Absorption” the most compelling piece in A Poetics—Bernstein’s verse “Essay on Poetry,” as it were. For here is an essaypoem that contains the virtues of the essay form (it is readable, cogent) and of the poem (it relies on enjambment for its rhythm and drama—the same kinds of enjambments, I might add, that make poets such as Amy Clampitt such easy targets for critics such as Perloff). Bernstein begins from the question that springs “naturally” from his work as a poet-critic (or poet-poet or critic-critic); in so doing, he refines Perloff’s discussion of “artifice”: A poetic reading can be given to any piece of writing; a “poem” may be understood as writing specifically designed to absorb, or inflate with, proactive—rather than reactive—styles of reading. “Artifice” is a measure of a poem’s intractability to being read as the sum of its devices & subject matters. (9)

For Bernstein, artifice is not so much a new kind of form, as it is for Perloff, as a way of writing that foregrounds technical devices over and above “content” and “meaning.” To paraphrase Bernstein’s discussion of “voice” in the Language Book, “content” is but one possibility for poetry.

But “content” and “meaning” are not the ends of poetry, just more means; they are not the same thing, either, for “content never equals meaning” (10). Artifice is, according to Bernstein’s jargon, non-absorptive; one cannot “get lost” in a Language poem the way one can get lost in a Harlequin romance—but the reader is also not in danger of losing her soul to the particular demands made on it by the Harlequin (which are fundamentally conservative, despite— or because of—the soft porn). And, as Bernstein sees it, much contemporary American poetry is based on simplistic notions of absorption through unity, such as those sometimes put forward by Ginsberg (who as his work shows knows better, but who has made an ideological commitment to such simplicity). (38)

13. Bernstein places himself characteristically at both ends of his artificial dualism: In my poems, I frequently use opaque & nonabsorbable elements, digressions & interruptions, as part of a technological arsenal to create a more powerful (“souped-up”) absorption than possible with traditional, & blander, absorptive techniques. (52-3)

He acknowledges that “[t]his is a / precarious road” that makes the reader more conscious of technique than of experience, but I wonder if Bernstein believes in the currency of terms like “experience.” After reading Bernstein’s work over an extended period, the world of language becomes THE world, always threatening/promising to dissolve into a chaos of no-definition. Finally, though, Bernstein proposes a kind of reading that is rather pragmatically critical, even as it is creative. As Perloff points out toward the beginning of Radical Artifice (and this is one of its least interesting moments), “Not only does the boundary between ‘verse’ and ‘prose’ break down but also the boundary between ‘creator’ and ‘critic’“ (17).

14. Like Stein’s language, Bernstein’s is always “foreign”—alien, confusing, and above all, never sacred. Bernstein’s most recent book of poems, Rough Trades, must be read in this way, as a celebration and cerebration of language in and for itself, and as an exercise in non-absorptiveness that is meant to refashion prevailing world political views. In the contradiction between these two purposes lies an abyss; Bernstein seems at times too much like a New Critic who attempts to change the world by ignoring it. But Bernstein, however much he seems to be the Pope (Alexander, that is) of the postmodern, means to undress us of our layers of expression in order that our means of expression can clothe us in new (and utopian) possibilities.

He and Perloff, in their complementary assaults on the common-places of the American language at this fin-de-siecle, provoke us to look past the image by way of the (small-w) word, and to re-invest our words with whatever ideals we have left. The poetry that they advertise is not written in a “common” language, but in one that we cannot yet think in, non-absorptive to the point of being non-sensical. It may get us to another world. But then again, that’s a soap opera.

stemmata:mode d’emploi πρωτιστα χαος γενετ—hesiod

the rhetoric is all in its cast—or is at least in its cast—(bridges, machines: no longer what is read but imagined in the weld)—elliptical as ... [text? or pretended evangelicum—encapsulated, staring through plate glass la mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même / valium sundays in a haze of lightswitches / red beneath the membrane faking it / turn over & scan the wanted ads—practiced inversions / underground breathing becomes difficult—humidity—attribute this to psychæsthenia / a telephone voice particles, connectives—w/o which nothing makes sense. no meaning (echo does not politely wait until the speaker is done) how it all seems so significant trying to form words by hand ear mouth eye automatically & w/ o falling into sentences or barking like a dog conscience / framing motives / the reductio ad absurdum of who’s speaking or not / between the tympanum & the receiver (it flaunts its operations & integrates them into other desiring systems along strictly verbal lines: “heightened language,” “a pathos of traditional forms”) phonic substance doubling the translation of soundwaves back in/to voice simulation: “her hemispheres loomed above me” token & parodic ... in the streets’ demi-mundane terminus [add also <&, or comparison of subsequent a/versions> e.g. “only the hate turned the milk” (this passage is followed by random notes in x handwriting at the bottom of the page & carries on in y ... heavily crossed out in red ink, except for “thank you” & “close”—a catalogue of items found anatomically (he clutched w/ his hands & missed & turned away hopeless & unhearing)—in other words the nebulous sexual / linguistic sin imputed to him (he abhears: “& i turned to see the voice that spoke to me ...”))] q.v. the counter argument presented even by the appearance of other people—waiting at airports / bus stations / outside telephone booths / in hospital wards—enantiomorphic chambers like mirrors placed to reflect one another’s dis/appearance—torn silhouettes pinned to the walls or hanging from ceilings a dark sea of television screens / though loss of sensation & the news still leave you cold in midjuly (unseasonal weather they say)— millennial scenario ... filming la fin du monde from a pier at liberty island—architectural dis-symmetries in the lens, binocular or transtrans-sexed as “result angles” simulating morpho-genesis / a colossal drag queen shining a torch on the “big apple” (& paris is burning) / ash in the upper atmosphere red & smell of acid discharge—ambiguity mimicking the veiled intent in-different to antihistoricisms / “crimes committed against nature the state” / citing n[ew] y[ork] in quadrilaterals of savoir-faire [?]: space / deteriorating in parallel inertia as “it” bestows a point—conditions / of use—tying up with a telephone cord / & transparent wall to keep upright / dial tone “on the third stroke it will be x precisely” double-checking the transliterality of its [...]-figurations—the incredulous eye endlessly re-volving glass by lattice (alluvial or consumptive cityscapes / hyperbolean)—speculating on the purity of illicit substances—mind over matter? or «jeu de la vérité» feeling the ground slip beneath the feet & the prompter feeding you your lines on the way down / “thirteen flights of stairs ‘cos the elevator shaft’s jammed with shit” / crossing an ocean vomited up by someone burst capillaries in the eye “landfall” in a strange continent far south of assumed bearings / (when you’ve lost your map of the world & the actors all quit / “mutiny on the bounty” / left with just the walkon roles a list of stage names zip codes & social security numbers) shadow transmissions from the other side of the oneiric dumbshow—a flow of punctuation marks, periphrasis in the vein // itinerancy; an unresolved gesture towards n+1 conflicting destinations: “& although there are x there are sometimes no y” / hooked on the magic carousel (get a ticket buy the soundtrack got to keep the replay button pressed down) midnight—riding the subway to the infirmary / the sound of air approaching through the air-conditioning ducts & “no vacancy” radiant in the cancelled dawn—cinderella laughs through a gap in her side, pale fluorescent skin graphing the aftermath / divested of sentiment—cold hard reality waits around every corner but it’s difficult to see—counting the squares back to the start again / “at the antipodes of unity” / or slipping between the usual cracks on the sidewalk ‘cos you’re too sick & tired to jump any more / watching the rain dissolving in the monotrope

Rod Mengham

Allegory of Good Government The moments of political yearning occur in the shopkeepers’ vaults, where the gagged bystander is afforded a vision of the unaffordable.

Fine deerskin boots hang just beyond reach, while the elegant chain gang of crop-haired maidens is wearing out its daily shoe leather. Its coiling dance repeats the braiding or weaving motion of civic prosperity, all too evident in bales of fabric spilling forward, decorated with cartoons of vermin, images of giant worms, flies and moths that latch onto the cloth their real-life counterparts would instantly begin devouring.

The brushwork centres on the circle of a tambour, a frame for embroidering violence. The absolute focus of two conspirators is only just captured and separated from the heart of the commercial district by this harmony through percussion. Unknowing, unseeing but all-suspecting, a single merchant sits cherishing his many wares. A procession files past, ignoring everything but its goal, round the corner in the next street, where the passage from single to married life is a gliding into the current. Alternating gradients of before and after, identical gestures, begging bowls no longer decorative.

Children bicker unnoticed, setting themselves up for careers of endless reprisals, covered in birdshit. The animal cages are empty, their hinges ungreased, while the artisan strays from his task of fashioning a body-double for the orator and fitting it with a wired jaw. Suddenly the click-click of gnashing teeth reaches the corners of the lecture hall. The orator stands with his back to the costermonger, siamese twins of motive whose livery has to be tacked into place.

Then the angels arrive by parachute, a defence against falling. A goatherd summons his flock, horns cocked, and drives them onto the landing strip. Sing me the burden of that song in which all the birds politely fake their expertise. Everyone prods the hindquarters of some beast or other; either that or, turning the goad on themselves, they try to guess in which hoof or pastern the thorn will appear, for want of which a hideous trampling ensues.

Earth tremors begin. The river stands still. A great slick of caviare collects on the surface. Builders swing from their trapeze, as tools and materials are showered on the streets. One late spring morning in Timisoara the roofs begin to migrate. Heavy corrugated sheets flapping from one square to another, the whole town brought to its knees, because a spirit level is not the same as a watched pot.

Above the smog, construction is erratic; the whalebone scaffolds slip out of joint. With each new wave of news bulletins, moonlighters add a storey to the creaking watch-tower, sliding the pots of geraniums around to keep it in balance. Townees head for the line of hills with battery chargers while drugged mowers enlarge their crop circles. A huge cloud of dust gathers on the highway. A distant hubbub. The charging contents of Noah’s Ark, a three-lane relay in a Parthian shooting match.

Only certain walls rebuild themselves. Certain others topple further into the pit of Hob’s End. Rent is demanded for piles of rubble, debt collectors stamp around with attacks of sneezing. Their demented clients are ashen on one side only, they turn the other cheek to police photographers. Flails and straw hats are reissued to the bomb squad, who outnumber the decommissioning board by three to one. As the crops die back the fatwah is discovered written in the fields. Birds of prey leave their solitary practices.

At this point, blisters erupt all over the projection screen. People avoid the bridges on both sides. Now the emblem of security is a hanged man whose blindfold has slipped, his calico pajamas billow in the freshening breeze, while the great scroll taken from its resting place fails to shiver and crumble at the lightest touch, scattering the fragments of its awful message. It can be rolled up into a militia baton and plied in the streets of East Timor. Noone sees the diaphonous safety catch or the subtle envelopes of restraint. They are more than likely to puncture your stomach if you get the harness tangled and pull the ripcord mistakenly.

On a narrow rock ledge high over the city a cadaverous wolf has been stranded, ferocity drained at last by the teething infants, foundlings that appeared in a dream, spectral and ravenous. The citizens are rehoused only after this period of complete abandonment to the savage guzzling of twins, moving together through selfish instinct. The ideal citizen is a twin; but a twin is always different enough and the founding myths are fratricidal.

The tiny figures standing at windows shrink from the light one after another; one by one they retreat from view and fade out, never to return, not even after the best efforts of government conservation spokesmen. Sentence after sentence, line after line, forever scrubbed bare.

Michael Brennan

Apogee Pressed between two atmospheres, fatigue swelling in your eyes you rise up and face day, the intrigue of chance cast in the air, a face you assume, a name of so many syllables, so much history. Erstatz-coffee drawn from chicory, azureleaves as bitter as morning’s current affairs: the interminable process of adaptation. You sort the ephemera of the real, loose leaf files, around some system, think of distant friends, sense the mutual gravitation of associated bodies, the logic of words forming syssarcosis, ill-defined ligaments that bind and underwrite the plausible. You breathe in as contingency allows. Close a door, a series of syllables expiring in the mind, fractals of thought rhythmic, language operating below itself, opening in ganglia, flowering toward an impulse to annihilate le travail de destruction. On the wall of the station the métro is a giant’s print, the concentric lines break through at points on the périphérique into the violence of unknown spaces. You press the green cardboard ticket between thumb and forefinger, and would decouple light from matter so that the universe grew transparent. You think of Kant unwriting God while a busker strums out a few lines of Brel je ne sais pas pourquoi le vent s’amuse dans les matins clairs. The woman opposite strokes a dog in a gym bag, stares, and you remember a girl in Maastricht now more distant than time and space allow, a name that returns in dreams of beautiful drownings.

You cross the wooden tiers, the library stacks tower over you, the premeditations of their architecture grimly wry now the librarians no longer recall the catalogue’s shibboleth and so, of course, you have a drink or sit by the river.

semtext / plastic 3 ©meltedplastix ink, 2000 lazarus@ff.cuni.cz