The Oracles of Water by Synonym Books

-The Oracles of WaterPatrick Healy

-Synonym Books-

The Oracles of Water

© 2011 Patrick Healy/Synonym Books Cover image: “The warrior with the skull trophy of a slain enemy”, engraving from H. Langsdorff, Bemerkungen auf einer Reise um die Welt (Leipzig, 1812) Design: Studio 338 www.synonymbooks.com

The Oracles of Water

Patrick Healy

21 October, 2011 Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam on the occasion of the exhibition Remain in Light Lecture on Hilarius Hofstedeâ&#x20AC;&#x;s De Markies van Water

Synonym Books Amsterdam MMXI

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Tonight, 21 October, 2011, I would like to examine the earliest complete book-length publication of Hilarius Hofstede, namely De Markies van Water. In order to do so, I will draw on material published in Paleo Psycho Pop, working notes from unpublished papers, some correspondence and previous critical responses, of which the latest is from three weeks ago with the appearance of the work by Chantal Maljers-van Erven Dorens, Hilarius Hofstede: Paleo Psycho Pop, for the opening night of the exhibition â&#x20AC;&#x153;Remain in Lightâ&#x20AC;?, on 23 September 2011, at Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam.(1) Hofstede had commenced work on the text from 1987. The earliest published fragment of this would be some 5 years later, and was included with commentary in The Modern and the Wake.(2) The questions which will surely occupy us here are, among others: what were the intentions of the author at that date? What was the challenge he had set himself? And, how can we gain access to a work which, as he has later claimed, is the generator of everything Hofstede does?(3) 1

This claim of the centrality of De Markies van Water is of wide significance when it comes to considering his overall activities in the course of the last two decades. What is of immediate interest is that the text, whilst considered by him as crucial, remained largely unknown, some few pages having been published in a book with a relatively limited circulation, and some fragments in a journal in New York and another in Dublin, again with relatively restricted circulation.(4) Thus, many of the exhibitions and manifestations with which he was active during the 1990s had behind them an extraordinary textual base which itself had been wrested from his responses to visual and written sources that were the direct inspiration and ultimately consistent themes of his art, and indeed an analysis of his exhibited work during the 90s would also allow one glean information on his writing practises.(5) Further, in the course of bringing De Markies van Water to completion, with its full publication in 1997 and the launching of Paleo Psycho Pop, we have a further source of material which retrospectively throws light on Hofstedeâ&#x20AC;&#x;s concerns and his fertile and inventive approach to text and image. Again, the publication of PPP opened up for a wider audience the range of his writing, and the recent publication of selected writings from Trashface has made these more accessible, thanks to the initiative of the Irish publisher Mr. Daniel Caffrey. It should also be noted that the full text has been uploaded to the internet, complete with an ingenious search engine which helps one find oneâ&#x20AC;&#x;s way around. I moreover understand that a critical edition is being prepared, with apparatus to grant the reader fuller access to the work.(6) * Perhaps the best introduction to the work is the text itself. I will draw directly on the first edition, which was published by Pallas Press -copies of which I understand are available here tonight at the cost of 10 Euros- and then look at the text page line for line. I will try to see how the commentary which was made in 1992 and the later detailed annotations published by Hofstede in Paleo Psycho Pop help us with the initial question with respect to the authorâ&#x20AC;&#x;s intention, or indeed show us that such a question is really redundant, and determines nothing essential about what is in play in the creation of this work. 2

WAN OWAH ONE OWAU BEFOAH HAW AURÂH ONE OWAU BEAFOA HOW AURÂH ANUS MUNDUS OURANOS SOLANAS SORANUS WÂWTÂW WÂWTÂW EVERYWHORE UNUS MUNDUS ANUS MOONDUSCH MÚNSHOWER OWAH-WAH OWAH-WAH W AN YOURANOS MÚNDUSCHAMPOOL UP TO CHIRHOSHIMA LE NAGRASOKEANOS MINNEOTOURUSH IN THE BIKINI THERE WAS THERE THE WORD ATOLL ATOLL ATOLL B ULBUMBABILLA TOUR DEMOLITOUR POOLABULLY BAAL ABILLÀ-BASS TERROR FUNK SHUI WIND OVER WATER AQUAVATARKOVSKILOTON HIROSHIMALAYA MOUNT KAI LAS MARQUESAS MILES DAVISHNUKU SHIVA COBRAHM ARQUISES ORANGEL FALLSDE MARKIES VAN WATER E XPLOSHIVA-DIONYS.O.S. OLLANDA ANADOLL EL MAR QUESAN MICHELORANGELEAU WÂWTÂW WÂWTÂW EVERYS HORE TABULLARTAUD BULGAUD H-BOMBARDEMENTIA P RAECOX UP YOUR ARSCHIZOFRENIAGARA FALLSDELIT TERRATIONILEXILE THE MOTHERTONGUE CONNECTION ONE OWAUDIONIETZSCHAMANTRA VENUSSUELLASERRUB SPACE BASSOLLEAUDIONYSOS PENISSUELLAS MARQUE SAS THE MAGICK FLOOD KING GEORGE WATERFALLSD EFUNKT THERMONUCLEAR SCHWITTERS MERZBAUBOMBO OTSHIROSHIMALE FIATMÜL FLUX H-BOMBUANDIONYSO SSMATOSS OFF ECCE HOMONO BIKINIETZSCHE ATOLL AQUAPOKA’ATEATEATEATEATEA URQUELLE DIEU BLEU VASERLAVER WATERLOVER MEET THE BLUE SEA HIRO SHIROKLITAURUS ORANGE WARHAMMERZBAUBOMBUANDY ONASSAU WAU WAU WAU MASTER BATESON DÉLA NAVE N VASSOULLINGAMPÈRE UUBUTTON PENIS PROTEXPLO SIVE MARQUISLOGANTRA IATMÜLTRAMONAVEN ORANGE ORANGE EVERYWHERE HOLANDA DARKENING THE AQUA FACE TONICCARROLLCLONE ALONE AT SUNSET H-BAM BA LAMPAPUASSUNSONG SUN RÀ THE BEGINNING PAL AEO FUNKADELIC BASSISM IN SUNSET MARQUIS HOT

The opening page of MW

Let me begin then with a line by line commentary, and by line I mean not a syntactical unit identified as a meaning cluster from the collocation of words, but the actual line of text as printed on the page, which consists of 33 lines per printed page. With the first line we have a small indentation, and this suggests the beginning of a paragraph: punctuation marks are sparse, with some signs for interjections that also signal vocalic stops and exclamations, and it is not until page 11 that we have three small puncta that would suggest a reading break. Diacritical marks are used in a conventional way to indicate different shortening and lengthening of vowels, but this may also function differently, given the verbal inventions, and to what linguistic family one thinks the words are related; in some situations we can talk as much about verbal-thing-assemblages, as words in the conventional sense. Given the precise typographical indications, the justification of the lines often leads to single letters at the end, and they take on an ambiguous function as to whether they are stand-alone lexical items, or the beginning or part of the following word. Even if they are one or the other, they often have the function of creating a bouncing enjambment which also determines the rhythm of the text, and this feature of the rhythm is where the musical dimension of the work is most obvious: sometimes one can detect very jagged rhythmic requirements for the word units to be sounded, and in the absence of verbal links and semantic markers this feature moves sometimes between rap and syncopation. Elsewhere I have tried to suggest that the composition of the lines points also to contemporary musical practise.(7) I suggested, if I may go forward in the consideration slightly, that whole blocks of lines of De Markies van Water are like an inverted canonic structure, what the composer George Benjamin calls a â&#x20AC;&#x17E;crab canonâ&#x20AC;&#x;, with lines blurring and then reverting and inverting, as if in a piano composition the whole is being textured by the use of the pedal. In some sense, and this is still obscure, it is as if the text was a libretto to a pulsating soundscape of jazz and funk that is played in the authors mind as the lines are set. What is most remarkable, is that this most constructed and composed of texts, with a small number of guiding principles, gives one the impression of utter improvisation, and this sense of free improvisation is enhanced by the way in which the rhythmic structure, punctuation, line distribution and composition are shaped, which results in 4

a dense layered composition where all the elements, sound, line length, word-form, are a form of hypersensitive organisation and distribution. This makes the work intensely physical, I will even say, corporeal. Two features point to this writing as mobile â&#x20AC;&#x17E;bodyâ&#x20AC;&#x;: the layout, and the image or icon to which it responds and even mimics. The first and most obvious feature can be seen in the actual layout of the text, the usage of capitals throughout. This gives the work the appearance of a Roman inscription.

Inscription on marble dedicated to Sextus Petronius Probus, late 4th century.

The second feature is less obvious, but of deeper import. I want to suggest that the page of the book is no longer simply the inert absorber of printerâ&#x20AC;&#x;s ink, but rather the choice of layout and the use of the Antiqua letter is treating the page as skin and the writing is a tattooing, which the author derives from one principal iconic provocation that actually gave rise to the title of the work De Markies van Water; because this title derives from an engraved image of the tattooed body of a young Marquesan warrior.(8) 5

“The warrior with the skull trophy of a slain enemy”, from Langsdorff’s Bemerkungen auf einer Reise um die Welt 6

The engraving of the Marquesan warrior is entitled “The warrior with the skull trophy of a slain enemy”, and made its first appearance in a popular travel work published in two volumes in Leipzig in 1812, Bemerkungen auf einer Reise um die Welt. The author of the work, Langsdorff, had made a 10day stop with the Krusenstern expedition at Nukahiva, and there depending on a French informant, Cabri, whom they met on the island, the expedition became informed of the custom and manners of the Marquesans. The account is immensely readable in that it was meant for popular consumption, and impacted directly on the writing of Herman Melville‟s Typee, and Edgar Allen Poe‟s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.(9) The islands had been discovered in 1596 and named after then vice-Roy of Peru, the Marquis Mendoca de Canete. Thus it was known as „Las Marquesas‟, and also referred to as the „Washington‟s islands‟ at the time of Langsdorff ‟s exploration.(10) The main points on which Langsdorff fastens are the issues of taboo and tattoo. He thinks the phenomenon of tattooing understudied and remarks both on the process and the significance for the islanders of this practice. The scarification of the skin is prized for its beauty and as a mark of social status. Eventually, the greatest prestige is given to a body that is literally tattooed into black and blueness. With an effort at neutrality Langsdorff reports the relation of taboo and the eating of flesh as part of the warrior rites of passage and a form of gourmandise, which he argues was once of almost universal practise, citing Herodotus and Strabo, and even referring to Strabo‟s view that the Hibernians and Scots practised anthropophagy.(11) He adds some telling details that his informant Cabri, who hailed from Bordeaux and had settled on the island, whilst denying that in „going native‟ he had eaten human flesh, nevertheless mentioned the tastiest parts were the inside of the hand and the foot. The engraved image of the young warrior also indicates the degree of initiation achieved, which started really towards the age of 20, and the rituals associated with this practise belonged chiefly to the island magicians, who were rewarded with hogs for the exercise. The initial tattooing took place in a taboo house and in order for the punctured skin to heal several weeks were needed for the operation. The Marquesans 7

accompanied these rituals with music, mostly in a minor key, and with a preference for the minor third. This was something which fascinated Langsdorff and which he could not explain, as it sounded melancholic and funereal and contrasted with the incredible physical agility of the islanders in swimming and dancing. And he observed, reminding one of the remark of Chesterton about another people, â&#x20AC;&#x17E;all their wars were merry, but all their songs were sadâ&#x20AC;&#x;.(12) What comes through clearly in the rambling report is the fascination with the bodies of the young male warriors, who are lauded in terms to have kept classicising aesthetes in a state of considerable curiosity. One of the males was measured in detail and it is reported that his measurements were exactly those of the Apollo Belvedere. Further comments on the darkness of the hair, the glow of the skin, the shapeliness of the body, explain the strange classicism of the pose of the warrior, which is indeed set to a Polycleitian canon. The engraving and the sea voyage tales were to have diverse and fascinating impact. The engraving almost certainly acted as a source for the famous painting of Friedrich, with the flaming red-haired, emerald green frock-coated gentleman leaning on a walking stick looking out into the vast horizon or beyond. Both warrior and middle-class gentleman occupy the same height in the pictorial space and representation; both are placed in the same posture with the weight thrown onto the right leg, and the left slightly akimbo; both face out in the same way and at the same angle, with slight contraposto. The extruding jagged rock to the right is compressed in the Friedrich transcription, and the walking stick balances at an angle, since he has elided the spear and the skull of the original source.(13) The tattoo of the Marquesan warrior on the shoulders and haunches can be read as protective ornament, or what repels evil spirits, daemons, or the mal occhio. These roundel forms are taken by scholars of this material, von den Steinen and Handy, as apotropaic ornament.(14) Langsdorff, in his account, is at pains to describe the magical process of tattooing, and also the beauty and symmetry of the forms, noting that one of the roundels may suggest a human face, and clearly giving further consideration to the holding of the skull. An account of the decapitating of an enemy, the immediate drinking of blood and devouring of the brain, is related in the text.(15) 8

These ornaments have later been interpreted as protection against the „unskinning of death‟, which relates to the cosmogony myth of the Marquesas islands as having been created by the tattooing of wind and water of the dark volcanic and dense valleys and mountains of the island, an action which also takes place on the body of the warrior as he is increasingly initiated into the social roles of this cannibal society. It is also worth mentioning here that another significant source, and one more readily available, is the fascination of Gauguin with the Marquesas islands, and what for Hofstede would have also had direct resonance, was that Jacques Brel had asked to be buried in these islands. I do not need to mention here the emotional impact of Brel‟s rendering of the song on Amsterdam.(16) What is then immediately obvious is the whole issue of layering with one surface being inscribed on another surface, which itself, namely the skin, can be taken as the boundary of the body, or the protective casing. The skin is a wrapping which itself is wrapped by image, and so the activity of the surface can be seen as chiasmic, and sharing the glissando of wind over water, or light on the surface of a mirror. In this suggestion we also have the narcissistic interiority of the writing itself, where the patterning of the shape of two letters as mirror image, namely M and W, is also given as key to the work. MW is the „Markies van Water‟; the word „Markies‟ for Marquise is a direct translation in Dutch of the French for the Marquesas islands, known as the „isles marquises‟. The title can be translated as „The Marquis of Water‟, and later in an interview in London published as “Lord O”, where the vocalic O is homophonic with the lexical item in French, eau, the word for water, we have a reprise of manner in which the verbal collocations are generated from single discrete items that are ranged paronomastically against diverse linguistic units. The interview is extraordinary in that many of the mythic elements of Oceania are mentioned by the personage Lord O, and linked also to further material from Haitian and voodoo material, which is most explicit in the work “Pop-Rise” with Ernst Ris.(17) The movement is not into some total signification, where everything that is said is meaningful by the definition that it is within a system that is linguistic; rather, language is generated out of collisions and collusions, as much ornamental pattern and surface effect as signifying items, and so 9

depends on the weight of the actual echo chamber of associations to reengage as sensuous and suggestive items which relate as much to expressive feeling as to direct meaning. Merleau-Ponty was fascinated by this feature of linguistic newness and generation in his work The Prose of the World, some of which is very valuable for situating the level of invention and the way in which Hofstede‟s making holds throughout the text. I will return to this point towards the end of the lecture.(18) So here the inscribed skin and the petrification of inscription in stone seems to me to exemplify the sense in which Walter Benjamin understood the notion of „shock‟ and the device of montage in his account of the dialectical image at a standstill. This feature in Benjamin‟s theorising also explains his notion of surreal and phantasmagoric perceptions; even in a materialist historiography he gives to the material notions of organisation a form of animistic presence. This remains indeed a kind of magical resource in his thinking, which is explicit in his Little History of Photography, where the image is literally said „to look back at one‟ and where the technical combination of certain structures is thought of as a dream work of commodities imagining the future.(19) It can be further observed that what Benjamin understands by the meeting of disparate things and directions within the image necessarily seeds new constellations, so that one is not within the repetition of the same; rather, the same is always anew. This he derives not from Nietzsche but from the short prose text of the great agent provocateur Blanqui on the Eternity of the Stars, which Benjamin says anticipates the Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence. More directly significant, given Hofstede‟s early training as a student of cinema in Paris, is the interplay between the objects and things that gather up and disgorge new meanings, not simply acting as recombinations. There is something new given out of the crash and crisis that is essential as genesis, which must be translated as process, not „beginning‟.(20) The relation of stone and petrification to the arrest of transformation is found in classical literature in two very precise settings, studied in some detail with ample references in Forbes Irving‟s Metamorphosis in Greek Myths.(21) We can refer here to the various extremes of metamorphosis, which moves into two directions: one towards petrification, the other liquidity. Mythic thinking grasps something which is more foundational 10

than the notion of substance, and categories with predication. There is the question of the foundation and processual dynamis and energeia, which allows everything to come into being and change. The movement of the text also consists in the form of explosion. We could also add that the very layout on the page creates between the words, when looked at vertically, the sinuous movement of a river. Indeed, when it was being printed, the compositor Mr. Byrne in Dublin commented on the „rivers of space‟ on the page, which he found compelling and disturbing at the same time.(22) These rivers of space which slither in curves over the inscribed skin, and are arrested in the fixing and petrification of language, give us a precise physical analogy of the „mythic‟ elements which also orchestrate the linguistic material: snake, skin, stone, water. We can add other elements, and especially the sun setting in water. Explosion is the very activity of the mythic fluid element, the shape-shifting metamorphosis, which is given to avatars of the Dionysian in the form of Funk musicians, pre-eminently George Clinton, and the characteristics of water itself. Thus, if the warrior of the Marquesas is the emblematic figure also of the artiste engagé, the domain of his power is that of the most mysterious element with its intrinsic marking of life as passage.(23) The liquid element is also the element of Dionysos. He is, as Forbes Irving remarked, unlike other shape-shifters -Proteus, Nereus, Metis, Nemesis, Thetis, Periclymenus, Mestra- a major god, and young. Thus he is in stark contrast to the Old Man of the Sea. His changes are not means of escape but rather a route to victory. We can also see the way in which the god is linked to turning into animals as apparitions, information given in the “Homeric Hymn to Dionysos”. The variety of transformations in the Bacchae of Euripides is also startling, and sex-change and transvestism, empowers rather than weakens him. Indeed, in the Bacchae his very effeminacy leads to his display of enormous magical power: and his weakness and marginality is the launching site of a savage reprisal; a mocking snare to trap the patriarchal Penteus and lead him to his destruction at the hands of the „vessels of weakness‟ whose very marginality Dionysos echoes and champions, against the ruling power, against the old men, Tiresias and Cadmus. Tiresias has twice changed sex and becomes a seer. He is, however, doomed to prophesy in Hades, without the power of sight. Ultimately, the devotees of Dionysos, at least 11

in the Orphic-Bacchic cults, are promised an eternal reward, and a return to heavenly existence. This can be seen from the text of the Derveni Papyrus, with its distinct eschatological promesse de bonheur.(24) Irving makes the other significant point that the relation of Dionysos as a xenos is tied to the sea, and to liquid products, and further that he is the subversive outsider, who is actually successful in overthrowing the established order; and it is to this he owes his unusual characteristics. I cannot forebear quoting here the wonderful passage of Joyce in which the question is asked, â&#x20AC;&#x17E;What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range admire?â&#x20AC;&#x;, to receive the answer: Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercatorâ&#x20AC;&#x;s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam Trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downward-tending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, watersprouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, 12

whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and in latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the premier inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.‟(25)

Stephen Dedalus, who does not like to wash, „distrusts‟ such „aquacities of thought and language‟, and thinks there is an incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius. Stephen is hydrophobe, having had his last bath 8 months previously, and as he had mused earlier in the book, has no need to wash, as all of Ireland is washed by the Gulf Stream.(26)

* 13

Two pages from Hofstedeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s notebooks for De Markies van Water, undated.

* Let me now turn to examine the opening page of De Markies van Water. We have from the author an annotated account of this page, and I will go directly to this to open up our reading this evening. A full page of the De Markies van Water, the opening page, was reproduced in Paleo Psycho Pop number 15. Along with this Hofstede contributed his annotations of the lines, based directly on his manuscript notebooks, with a commentary and annotation supplied. It deals with each separate verbal unity as a lexical item, and indicates how the semantic field could be understood, as well as how the various meanings and associations carried by the word might be flagged. After all, for any item, depending on the range of linguistic knowledge brought to it, one could make more and more associations. In that sense the situation of the words with each other is what grants the highest probably of the dominant expression being communicated, and further there are always different acts within the reading, in other words a kind of translation to the normal usage of the base language, which in this case can be taken to be English, and the increasing awareness that the presence of words on the page is simply keyed to the phantom presence of the various multiple elements that can be said to be condensed in each linguistic unit; that is to say, new words are created which gain their semantic currency within the system of the text itself, and this largely because of the controlling ideas and associations which are in play. Expression preceded communication. It should also be remarked that among the abbreviations used to indicate meaning Hofstede has given as sources: I for image, S for sound and I.M. for moving image. That last abbreviation is for the French of image mouvement, and again he often criss-crosses from French into English without making any note of this, so for example the â&#x20AC;&#x17E;paleoâ&#x20AC;&#x; of Paleo Psycho Pop uses the French and not the English designation for the palaeolithic. Thus musical and cinematic references are given. The distribution of the various elements is consistently overlapping and dynamic. Various languages are abbreviated, including Papuan New Guinea, Haitian, Malaysian, Japanese, Chinese, French, Gaelic, Creole, Swahili, and also, it might be noted, languages spoken in former areas of Dutch colonial rule. However, in one case, as we shall see, what looks like and is a Latin phrase, is interpreted across other verbal weaves. 16

WAN - At first this might just be the pronunciation of the word one in a less than RP way, think of the idiom used to speak of a parent in HibernoEnglish as „the oul one‟. The word, if it were simply English, would have the meaning of „wan‟, as in „pale‟. Hofstede indicates the following conglomeration: the Chinese wan, meaning „sun-wheel‟ or „swastika‟; the New Guinea pidgin usage wan for „one‟; from Bootsy Collins, the bass player of Parliament Funkadelic, the record title The #1 is given as a sound source, and from the Marquesan one is given as the meaning „sand‟. The other musical reference is indicated under „S‟ as Funkadelic‟s One Nation under a Groove. These musical references are critical throughout, and whilst one can agree with the later assessment of Gijs van Koningsveld, in his “The Wahnsyntax of Pop”, on the role of much of Hofstede‟s satiric critique of pop, nevertheless in the composition of the De Markies van Water individual musicians and the importance of Funk are keyed throughout to themes and the desire of the writer to make of the whole work a vivid acoustic and musical movement with hallucinating possibilities for speed and rhythm, rests and simple sensuous abandon.(27) It would be very useful to study the programme of the Paradiso in Amsterdam during the late 1970s to mid-80s, to track what was the place of Hofsede‟s urban experience of the underground and his musical preferences. The world of vinyl has now itself become a kind of fossil of the musical world, or at least a second-hand collectors‟ market, but for Hofstede many of the record covers were sources of direct inspiration to his visual imagination, as the work on display here tonight shows. With their bright, highly keyed colours and usage of photography and design, all in square formats, they offered an image out of the abstract and almost spaceless surface of Mondrian. They are also cumulatively the active everyday of pop and the music world, and in many cases a betrayal in Hofstede‟s mind of the revolutionary energy and subversive and creative genius of his preferred Funk. His current work with Joseph Bowie can be seen to flow directly from these earliest loves and commitments. Crucially, Hofstede also provides a clue for the presence/absence of a phrase which tracks alongside the text. One can speak of the text and its double, since he gives „one hour before our hour‟ as a phrase circulating through radio from the pilot dropping the H-bomb into the Pacific Ocean, 17

on 1 July 1946. This annotation also puts us in the spatial-temporal framework with which De Markies opens. We are in the South Seas, and specifically the Marshall Islands, where the Bikini Atoll is situated. A quote from Oppenheimer from 1948 is cited, and he is described as the H-bomb‟s godfather: „Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds‟. This astonishing personification of the speaker and the figure, physical agent of death, also helps us understand another usage suggested, which is the Malay awan for „cloud‟. Hofstede also cites slang from American English, for example „Number one‟, as a term for urine. The expansion of such slang today has to be checked in the online Urban Dictionary, and shows a remarkable versatility in the range of expressions which have been developed even in the last ten years, much of them associated with the Afro-American musical scene and its urban base. The internal assonance of „one hour before our hour‟ and verbal mirroring is a key feature of how Hofstede generates, by Klangassoziation, his rhyming and often physically de-constructed and re-assembled portmanteaus; unlike Lewis Carroll, as in “Jabberwocky” the invented items are not supported by regular syntactical and grammatical features to frame their possible meaning. The usage of made-up compounds are often guided by just the formal patterning of sound, and the collocation is then multiple and always capable of chaotic flight in the surface of the text. It may well be a case of „take care of the compounds and the sense will take care of itself ‟! OWAH - For this Hofstede has glossed six separate but interrelated elements. There is the Creole o, given as meaning „nothing‟; the French eau, as in „water‟‟; the Creole wa for „tear‟, „to cry‟; the Japanese hawa for „water‟; the designation of a musical instrument, the wah-wah, as a guitar effect, and from Papuan New Guinea, wawa, meaning „bird of paradise‟. AURA - The primary sense given here is a reference to a term used in epilepsy to describe a hallucinative seeing before the fit. This reference is of considerable significance for the author throughout the work, as it also relates to his notion of the „sacred illness‟ that is epilepsy, and to the way in which the ritual and actions of the writer/artist are fundamentally shamanistic. The ritual repetitions are also part of the incantatory effect of language, where the joining of letters into syllables and sounds cannot 18

be shown to have any fundamental requirement. In other words, speech is always an act, and for Hofstede the act gains meaning through the repetition and expression itself: thus something can become a word. Word and thing both gather up, and show; they are the inner nearness of speech, and in some way can circulate virtually without either contraction or expansion. This virtual space has the capacity to direct the various heteroclite spaces that are shaped by prepositions, that belong to the restricted spatiality of common grammatical forms. The phoneme is the crucial agent of linguistic action, and has no „meaning‟. It has all the variety and ambiguity of „zero‟ in mathematics. If a digression can be allowed, there is valuable information in Stol‟s Epilepsy in Babylonia to the way in which this illness or sacred action in the human body was understood.(28) One of the earliest associations of epilepsy with the moon is found in the Gospel of Matthew 17: 14-18, where we read the term seleniasmos, the NT Greek term for „lunacy‟ and here for epilepsy:

And when they came to the crowd, a man came up to him, and kneeling before him said, “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is an epileptic (seleniazetai) and he suffers terribly; for often he falls into the fire and often into the water.”

From the Greek term the word became in later Latin the border-line description of lunatic/epileptic, and distinctions were made between idiocy as insania, lunaticus and furiosus. The relation with the moon was of some significance and fiercely resisted by the Christian apologists, who wanted to ascribe the source of epilepsy to an unclean demon, a case of spirit possession. Drawing on Arabic sources, Stol shows that the thinking was that epilepsy was tied to phases of the moon, whose waxing and waning had a clear effect on the blood and brain and all other humidities. Again the idea of humidity, sympathy, magnetic association and attraction, is also tied in by Hofstede to acoustic association and affinity.(29) 19

The other set of references confirms these views, where Hofstede gives the Old Icelandic aurr as having a primary meaning of „moist‟ and a secondary meaning of „earth‟; the Malay aurat for „sexual orgies‟, and he glosses the second syllable of the word Ra as the Egyptian for „soul‟. The German ur and Portuguese ra, words for „primordial‟ and „frog‟ respectively, indicate again the „mobilability‟ of the punning involved, which can ring the changes on vowel possibilities, and which then has to be decided in terms of the principle iconic reference. This is not unlike indeed what has been noted for the texts of the Egyptian New Kingdom rituals for The Opening of the Mouth, and shows that the word/image opposition collapses in this system; both are simultaneous and co-efficient. Further clusters of terms are given and they also point to the humid, the wet, music, hearing, soundscapes, and inevitably Miles Davis and his production Aura. The Dutch oor and Yoruba oro, one for „ear‟ and the other for „bullroarer‟ are coalesced, and in the splicing one arrives ultimately at Dionysos, the inner principle in this ludic abandon for all transformation. The association of Dionysos with the bull? One might wonder how a god associated with this animal is also the god of liquidity and transformation. In the Bacchae, he is invoked by the Eleans as „noble bull‟. The failure to grasp polytheism is probably our chief stumblingblock in understanding this. We are still in a monotheistic view, and do not grasp easily the „multiple‟ of the divine in a polytheism which interlaces and dissolves simultaneously. There is no inner structural logic, and recent research in Greek religion points to the problem of any structuralist interpretation. Indeed, as Marx had it in another context, „all that is solid melts into air‟. This can be shown in a variety of ways, and already helps us understand the webbing and meshing of meanings at play. In a rare lapsus the writer gives the source for The Frogs incorrectly. The actual play of Aristophanes is famous for its transliteration of frog calls, and for indicating the importance of marshes and low-lying places for the Dionysian cult. Of course it should be said that the transcription of animal cries is very different in different languages, and this points to the way in which no sound can be heard abstractly, and will always bear the weight of the cultural practises in which one has been raised. Joyce‟s transcription of the cat purring and meowing in Ulysses, as Bloom is having his breakfast, is a case in point: translation into French renders the meowing differently.(30) 20

ANUS MUNDUS - Here we have what is apparently a straightforward lexical conglomerate, which can be rendered as the name given to the entrance to the underworld. Immediately there is a complication however, as Hofstede is also interested in the individual letters as much as syllabic concatenation, and so gives for the first letter a two variant meanings, one taken from Old Norse as „river‟, and the second from Marquesan, the meaning „sun‟; from Hittite he takes Anu as the sky, god, moon, and the word in Gaelic mun as „urine‟, and the French douche for „shower‟, which depends on the last three letters or second syllable of mundus being pronounced as „dush‟, with a slight aspiration on the s. Such a sound for s exists in Western Semitic languages. Thus he has taken anus mundus and broken it into 4 parts: a, anu, mun, and dus, with the various meanings again relating directly to the direction given for wan, namely the sun, the moon, urine, cloud. In this way an amalgamation and inner activity of the words starts to resonate along similar object meaning: the spinning sun of the swastika, the liquid element of rain and cloud, or urine, the foaming in epilepsy, the movement of water and its relation to musicians and musical instruments, the underworld and earth, the South Seas, and the destruction of the world via the atomic age.

OURANOS SOLANAS SORANUS - We see the inversion of the earlier terms, and another re-combination which then introduces the world of culture and specific references to medical practice and current intellectual sources. This will also supply the first direct textual reference in mentioning the S.C.U.M. Manifesto of Valerie Solanas. This production, with „scum‟ standing for the „Society for Cutting up Men‟, made of Solanas a feminist hero, and the image Hofstede calls up is of course her famous attempt to assassinate Andy Warhol. Ouranos is „our anus‟, solanas is „soul‟ and „ananas‟, the French for pineapple; sol is French for „ground‟. The name Solanas is then placed alongside Soranus, another historical personage, discussed by Foucault in his study of insanity, since Soranus was taken to be the first to treat mental illness with immersion, the throwing of madmen into water. By way of almost Nabokovian parody, as in Pale Fire, Hofstede then simply notes „sore‟ as English for „painful‟. The theme of madness and water is sounded directly, and also that of acts of violence, cutting up, tearing apart, and murder of the famous (something to which Hofstede will return in his exhibition “Pop Gun”.(31) 21

Even with his annotations there is an eruption of humour, born perhaps of catastrophic boredom. The move to the anus introduces further points of bodily vulnerability and scatological relativising, with the various penetrations of the body seen as conduits for endless exchange, as if the body is not any longer a secure zone or boundary, but penetrable as it is capable of penetration, vulnerable as it is structurally protected, and eminently a kind of place-holder only for movements of flow and exchange. This points to the element of the grotesque in the work, which deals with excessive physical and ritual bodily actions culminating in frenzied orgies, and the twining and twisting of limbs as in the sculptural decoration of a Hindu temple. The body is an open sensorium, which ululates and breathes, flows and stops in the most fully physical way, and is indeed a kind of primal site for the experience of living being. It is certainly not in Hofstede a meta-signifier, not even as a kind of abject object. With these annotations on just 8 units of the text we already have the sounding of many of the features that work on throughout the whole. Then, in the phrase which actually headed the very first printed extract from the work, „WÂWTÂW WÂWTÂW EVERYWHORE‟, we have the most remarkable accumulation of reference, namely two letters of the Hebrew Alphabet; the term alphabet itself made of two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and so on and on, in re-iteration, with Hofstede signalling wau, and tau, and the line of Coleridge from The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, „water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink‟. I suspect Langsdorff as the source for the poem, as he has a section dealing with trying to catch an albatross and the sailors running out of water on the Krusenstern expedition shortly before they come to dock at Nukahiva. We are then given under „image‟ a feast of reference, to Visconti‟s Ludwig, Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola‟s Apocalypse Now, and Fellini‟s Satyricon, a name ending in „-icon‟, the icon of a satyr, sexual and wild figure given to rutting and priapic display. There is a direct reference to Conrad‟s Heart of Darkness, and with this one also has the probable source for much of the magnificent work “River” made in Florence, some of which we saw in the documentary of Robin van Ervens Dorens on its release only a few short weeks ago. The work was first exhibited in the 1990s and is currently in the Apeldoorn Museum. I think of it as one of the greatest of Hofstede‟s creations. It clearly relates so closely to the text here that one needs to consider them together, and indeed all his work, 23

including collaborations with artists later.(32) We could even speak about an „intensi-fiction‟ of reference, if I may be permitted a pun. So when we have ‘BILLUTSCHI’, we are suddenly told that this is the Kamachatkan belief that the world was created from the flowing urine of their first shaman, Billutchi. I can hazard a guess as to where the information on water, rain charms and other aquatic and liquid stories and myths comes from. It is fairly clear that as part of his research for the making of this prose-text, Hofstede had been reading Frazer‟s The Golden Bough very carefully. In his wide range of anthropological reading we can follow the material of what is called the Cambridge ritualists, for whom ritual and social and anthropological information explains myth and not vice-versa. The source for the Haitian chant „Wah, wah, wah, wah, O Bay‟ seems to come from French sources in translation and then further translated by Hofstede. He is constantly engaged with voodoo sources. I would like, if I might, to step out of this deluge of references for a moment, and ask some questions which relate again to the way in which Hofstede thinks of the act of writing and inscription. Earlier, the difference of inscription of skin and stone was mentioned, and I think we can also see that there is another major act involved with its precise physical resonance, namely the cutting up and editing which is essential to montage, and which is part of the way the double movement of the pun and the act of montage occur in this text. Here Hofstede differs very much from Joyce in the procedures of Finnegans Wake, and both writers clearly have learnt a lot from the work of Dada and surrealist authors. Indeed, it is also clear that there is a commitment to what amounted to a manifesto for writers published in transition, which took pains to emphasise the new departure for literature and writing called the “Revolution of the Word Proclamation”. There are some features of this manifesto which are of direct interest in our context. The manifesto, using language curiously reminiscent of Carl Einstein‟s literary theory elaborated in his The Fabrication of Fiction, maintained that the autonomy of the imagination needed to understand its creation of pure poetry as a lyrical absolute which sought a priori reality in the self alone. This is the kind of rampant nominalism at the heart of modernism, where the subject as substance must bear the weight of truth 24

and the imaginary without much possible distinction, other than by reiteration. Narrative has to do with „metamorphosis of reality‟, and this was achieved by the „rhythmic hallucination of the word‟. The literary creator had the right, according to the manifesto, to dis-integrate the primal matter of words, imposed on him by text-books and dictionaries, and thus be free to fashion his or her own words, and concomitantly ignore grammatical laws and syntactical conventions. A writer such as Hofstede took easily to such an anarchic, revolutionary set of injunctions, and further saw from within his cinema studies how such a form of explosion and de-structuring could occur. Thus it is clear that he has Joyce in mind, but it can be shown from indeed PPP 15 that he is capable of writing what is called „Finneganese‟ with highly amusing consequences, as in the text which ostensibly is about Bono Vox and U2 in the language of the Wake, and there one sees how different this is from De Markies: Go to it agitator! It‟s a bossifuld dag. Popped his Bonny Voice......Bapshaps bumslinger to you, his everpresent Highup Big Cockwocky, our Boneless Foxrock, with the Mime of Mick and the Korps of Kerr and his humbodumbones sweepalongs. And thank God, as Salaman said, there were no more of him … It is fairly straightforward to see the meaning of what is being said here, and most of the compounds are straightforward and would work as ordinary syntax if they were dis-associated. However, with De Markies van Water the matter is much more about the folding in of the text on itself, along with the re-intensification of each and every element which is taken to bear different multiple meanings that nevertheless are keyed constantly to his thematic. This works on the basis of their repetition in different and different variations, and it has the effect of meaning only as the structure of a sonic milieu. It is what can be called „polyagonic‟ and „polyphonic‟, as if the cantus firmus is actually only created out of the various voices coming towards a point of articulation, and as in montage, meaning and text explode out of this cutting, endless découpage and re-situating of the words. It is difficult to get to this technical difference, but it changes the polysemous function of the pun, or of ambiguity by default; I would like to use the term „acoustic montage‟. 25

The Revolution of the Word Proclamation published in transition 16/17 (1929) 26

Kurt Schwitters: “ppppp - Pornographisches i-Gedicht”, 1923

There is no final ambivalence as the work becomes the „De Markies van Water‟, the surface, the skin, the stone, the moon, the snake, the cannibal feast, the rain, the urine, cloud, ocean, river, frogs, sun, anus, shampoo, Duchamp, she-males, mushroom, bombs, snakes, Minotaur, water, memory, even „THERMONUCLEAR SCHWITTERS MERZBAUBOMBOOTSHIROSHEMALE‟, which includes his references to Kurt Schwitters and his Merz writing, Bootsy Collins, she-males ... it becomes selfreferential, reflexive, hermetically sealing itself until it must explode, and this is the dominant metaphor of the bomb and the sun, the thermonuclear cooking of everything in the world that creates all change and transformation. 27

Hofstede hammers away, punctures the skin without breaking through, keeping the tiniest depth on the surface, patterning and making associations belonging to the very material of sound, which re-create a new and consistent sense; it is drumbeat and lustful liturgy, verbal abandon and constant renewal, eternal return. The writer brings us closer and closer to the word he creates; there is a wonderful textured and layered activity, folding and unfolding in his mesh of signs and meaning, what is itself a return of meaning to a form of just primal naming and personification. In concluding this introductory lecture to reading De Markies van Water, I would like to return to Merleau-Ponty and his work The Prose of the World. There he considers the mystery of language and writing, which is not simply a matter of communication already known within the institution, as he calls it, of language, that is le lange parlé, as opposed to le langage parlant. The first is language after the fact, which effaces itself in order to yield the meaning which it conveys. In the second, le langage parlant, it is language which creates itself in its expressive acts, which according to MerleauPonty sweeps one from the signs towards meaning. In approaching this second language, the reader must, as it were, „catch fire‟, and in bringing the match to the piece of paper, everything seems to enter intot the combustion, as if waiting, and suddenly a few words move me, and it is as if there is nothing in the book I can overlook, and the fire „feedsoff everything I have ever read‟.(33) The author brings me along, he varies the ordinary meanings of signs, and I start to dwell in him. The „reader‟s sovereignty is only imaginary‟, since he draws all his forces from that infernal machine called the book, the apparatus for making significations. For Merleau-Ponty, in an exquisite metaphor, the relation between the reader and the book is like those loves in which one partner initially dominates because he was more proud or more temperamental, and then the situation changes, and the other, more wise and silent, rules. „The expressive moment occurs where the relationship reverses itself, where the book takes possession of the reader‟. In that relationship it is I, the reader, who is ultimately transformed, I grasp and make the significations for myself. I can even imagine having grasped the language that I could have understood it by myself, because it has transformed me and made me capable of understanding it.(34) 28

Language, when it is functioning authentically, is not a simple invitation to the listener or reader to discover in himself significations that were already there; it rather is the way in which these significations already present to us, are turned into strange sounds by the writer or author. When this occurs, there is a „coupling‟ in which the complicity of speech and echo brings us to the harmony created. It is an encounter of spirit to spirit. The act of reading projects us beyond our own thoughts to the intention and meaning of the author. Not only have I built up in myself a strange expressive organism, but I can experience transformation endowed by the new organs of the book.(35) Language leads us to the things themselves. One has no idea of its power until one takes account of the constitutive language which emerges within the constituted language, suddenly off-centre and out of equilibrium, reorganizes itself to teach the reader, even the author, what he never knew how to think or say. Language leads us to things themselves to the precise extent that it is signification before „having‟ signification. Rejecting the way in which language is treated as a „to-handed,‟ or a tool, which can result in propositional and algorithmic operations, MerleauPonty makes the point that in its live and creative state language is the gesture of renewal and recovery which unites me with myself and others, and that we must learn to reflect on consciousness „in the hazards of language‟, and it is quite impossible without its opposite. (36) Perhaps the expressive animation of speech is central to what Hofstede achieves; it is as if the entire text exists to bring into existence the imaginary other, „De Markies van Water‟, like those known operations to create a Golem by several days of pronouncing in strict order and sequence the sum of Divine names hidden in things, and with this „other‟ to release the speech of creation and the domain of things beyond all instrumentalising of signification. Ultimately, it makes even much of this external approach of commentary and elucidation quite redundant. Perhaps, in conclusion, it is necessary to say „I have spoken‟, in order to know what I have meant, and so I would now like to turn to read some pages of De Markies van Water.

*** 29

ELLAR-LO-WAYS & WATERS SUNSET TRIP ORANGE SU NSHINE EXPLOCEAN MELT-THE-SUNDOWN WELT-THE-S UNDOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA ALLSDE MARKIES VAN W ATER PAPUTA’A TA’TACQUA NEU GUNNATRIX W/AR W /AR DOMINAVEN WATERFALLEN POE-FUNK A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTRÖM ORANGINASSAU DROP THE BOM B THE BASS GODDISSEA ORANGEL FIREFALLS LUNAS EA MWAN OWAURAPE EL MARQUESSUNNY SIDE UP HOL LAND AQUÀ CAM AQUÀ CAM BOOTSHIROSHIMMALAYSIA MESOAPOOL PAPUA NEW GUINEANDERTHALES ÎLES WA TTICKA PRICKACQUAPHONIAGARA FALLSDELUGEOMATE RRE INUNDADATA BASSPACE BASSOLLEAU & LORANGE ATOMIC BOMA YE MOHAMMED ALISUN IN WUNDERLAND NARANZJÉWAWA SMELL MY FINGER UP YA DIKE OWAU PIG PANGLADUCHAMP SUNSETBECKADELICATE BIKINI ATOLLAMOURQUELLE MARQUIS DE SADHU FREUDFONKI NG THE HÉROSHIRAKLITTERROR BUTT TO THE BUTTO N UNCLE JAMDUNKELNASSAU GRAND MALE MARQUIS E PILEPSYCHO UNDER THE SUN SPAESSIBASSI SPAESS IBASSI THE MARQUESSUMANTRA MOTHERMILK FLOWIN G INTO THE HEAVY WATERS HOLLAND DADALAI LAMA RANATHALATTA MARANATHALATTABOOTSHIVA-DIONYSO S & BOOTSILENUS STONE H TO SPACE H SUNNERSET MORONSON PLUTONICCLONIC BASS WATERROR SPASSI BASS SPASSIBASSEXPLOCEAN NORTH SEA DELTABOOT SHIROSHIMARQUESSOUNDTRACK MWOORDZEE BOMBORAN JEBOOM! MURDER MOST FOULTRANCE WATER WATER I VORYWHORE HOLLAND HERE COMES THE SUN MICHELL ANGELORANGELEAU MW DE MARKIES VAN WATER MÊMM ÊMMÊMMORY DAIMONDE LO LOW LEAU LÀ-BASS MÊM M ÊM MEMORY MÊM MÊM MELODY DIVE-INAKIN DEEP WA TER ARANCIA NÄSSEAU DIONYSOS FLOODING HOLLAN D FLOODING DIONYSOS HAMMERING THE SPACE ABYS

S M. COLLINS W. COLLINS EXP-FUNGWE POETAM HE AVY WATER EVERYWHERE ZURBARANCIAQUALIASPARAG US WE ARE GOING DUTCH HUANG HO HUANG HOLLAND URHINNERIVERRISE PIS’ EVE & AMSTERDAM’S ON T HE OCEAN DEEPILEPSEAS WELLECTROSHOCKWAVEFRON T JJ/FF/PP-FUNK ALL-STARKOVSKIWASSERBOMB FAB RICATION HÂPI HÂPI HOPI HOPI INSTANT SPERM B Y RADIOACTIVITY IN THE ELECTRONICCLONIC BRAI N CIRCUIT TOHOTAUA HAAPUANIJINSKI DIONYSOS F LOODING DIONYSOS ORANGE 9MM HIGH SPEED CHANG E COURANT DE FOUCOULT YOURQUELL’ORANGE UP YO ARSCHLOCHNESSAU FLOAT FLOAT ON BIG BANGLA DUTCH PSYCHOPATRIA TRANSSEXUALLSDE MARKIES V AN WETT WETTÈRAKLIT MW/ RATIONAL DISORDER IN THE VENUS HIGHWAY HOTEL GOD ANUS MOONDOUCHAM ANTRA EL MARKIESKIMOHAVE SCHIZIUMANIESMOUSSU CKSTRÖM CHAPPELSÍNASSAU OLLANDA ANADOLL 6000 ORANGES FLOWING ON WÂWTÂW WÂWTÂW EVERYWHORMO NDOUCHAMPAPUA NEW VAGUINEA WAU WAU WAU SHE-M ALE SEIZURE MICHELANGELORANGEL FALLSUCKSTEAM CHAPPELSIINILE WAH-WAH DE BAPTISMOHAVESITRÚN NAVEN MARANATHALATTABOOTSÍTRÓNASSUCKSTRÖMPAD ELICKAOS PORTAKALVINNENRAUM THE MARQUESSOLAR ANUS MÚNDUSCHAMPÈRE UBULLUTSCHIZOFROMMIATMÜL TRA WAVEMAKER NEW ATLANTIS! KUNG FOO-FIGHTIN G OH, GEORGE CLINTONTON JAMPÈRE UBOOTSZINÁSZ APPAPUA GAUGUINEA ORANGE H-BOMBASSONNÉORANGE UP YOUR ASSEXPLAUDDING IN ORANGADELICUNT NAZ ZALBERTEXTUALLITTERRA ORANG VAGINASSAU DE MA RKIES VAN WATER ONE MAN SHOWER P-FUNNAGRA TH E BOMBISONNEMILCHAMANIAGUARA GLITTORISE & FA LLSUCK OR FUCKALL ORANG-UTANTRA WAVE MEGA GO TT BRAINFALL UP YOUR ARSCHWEPPILEPSEA DRY OR

(MW, pp.1-3)

Notes

1. The publication by Chantal Maljers-van Erven Dorens of her thesis on Hilarius Hofstede provides the first overview of his work as an artist. It is also an indispensable guide to the state of research on that work. The thesis of van Erven Dorens investigates De Markies van Water in chapter one, “Mythology and the Markies van Water”, raising several important points which are indispensable as background and analysis. Her research has as its focus that the book published in 1998 is a „myth about water, where the mystical, symbolical and ritual significations of water are explored, written in a newly created language of which form and content are reflected in many of his later works‟. For this see Mythology, Surrealism and Taxonomy in the work of Hilarius Hofstede (2010), thesis submitted for Sotheby‟s Institute of Art-London and Manchester University, as requirement for the Masters Degree in Contemporary Art. 2. Patrick Healy, The Modern and the Wake (Dublin: The Lilliput Press for Auriton Publishing, in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1992). 3. This statement was put on the wall of the Onrust Gallery space in Amsterdam, during Hofstede‟s show “Wordwall 3”, in 1997. 4. See The Modern and the Wake, op. cit., pp.89-110. It is not until the publication of PPP, from 1997 onwards, that one can speak of a wider circulation of Hofstede‟s texts. I have given an account of the circulation of PPP in the catalogue Polynesian Instant Geography, published in 1999. 5. The interactive reading necessitated is demonstrated by the fact that Hofstede‟s only direct written contribution to the reading of the De Markies van Water appeared in the early 2000s in PPP nr.15, which I discuss in the second part of this lecture. The information for my earliest commentary in The Modern and the Wake was communicated orally by the author. In the course of printing some errors crept in, for which I and not the author was responsible. 6. Private communication from Mr. Gijs van Koningsveld, and the author Hilarius Hofstede, Amsterdam October 2011. 33

7. For this see my introduction to PPP PALEO PSYCHO POP: WRITINGS 1995-2008 (Dublin: Trashface, 2009), pp.3-11. 8. See my article “Video ut non Videtur”, PPP, nr. 4. 9. Melville‟s uncle had met Langsdorff, and Melville had read extensively in the literature available, much of it reprised in Langsdorff ‟s writing. 10. This is directly from Langsdorff, whose travel accounts I have consulted online in the English translation for convenience, i.e. Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World, during the years, 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806, 1807, (London: Henry Colburn, 1813). The following depends directly on material from pp.89ff. 11. Langsdorff, op .cit., p.111. 12. Chesterton was referring to the Irish. It is remarkable to see how later ethnographic reports by Cook and others return to topics which had been made popular in early writing about the Irish by Stanihurst, and Sydney. For the shift in 18th-century perceptions and the theme of the „noble savage‟, see Henri Baudet, Het Paradijs op Aarde (Royal van Gorcum Ltd., 1959). 13. See note 8 above. 14. I have discussed this extensively in the first catalogue to the first P.I.G. show in 1999. For this material see van Doren‟s thesis, note 1 above, pp.44-52, which is amply annotated and reprised in her book publication of September 2011 in Amsterdam by d‟jonge Hond. 15. Langsdorff, op. cit., p.152. 16. There is a very dramatic rendition of this on youtube in black and white. 17. Chantal Maljers-van Ervens Dorens gives the fullest account of this material, see note 1 above. 34

18. I have used the English translation for convenience, The Prose of the World, which was originally published in French as La Prose du monde (Editions Gallimard, 1969). In 1973, Northwestern University Press first published an English translation by John O‟Neill, edited by Claude Lefort. All references in this lecture are from the Heinemann London edition of 1974. 19. For a full analysis of considerable interest see Jean Maurice Monnoyer, Walter Benjamin, Carl Einstein et les arts primitives (Publications de l‟université Pau, in the collection Quad, 1999). 20. The notion of process and emergence captures better the sense of genesis than simply a translation as beginning. 21. P.M.C. Forbes Irving, Metamorphosis in Greek Myths (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990). 22. Pallas Press was founded specifically to deal with the publication of De Markies van Water, on the initiative of Mr. Tyrone F. J. Clements and with the assistance of Brendan O‟ Byrne it was brought to press. The compositor‟s comment comes from a private communication. 23. The main source for this interpretation is to be found in the work of Handy on Marquesan tattooing, which I discuss in P.I.G (Amsterdam, 1999). See van Dorens‟ thesis work, from pp.52ff. 24. For the Derveni Papyrus see discussion in Fabien Jourdan, Le Papyrus de Derveni (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2003). 25. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Seamus Deane (London: Penguin, 1992), pp.783-5. 26. James Joyce, ibid., pp.586, 587. 27. Gijs van Koningsveld, “The Wahnsyntax of Pop”, PPP, 28 (2004). 28. M. Stol, Epilepsy in Babylonia (Groningen: STYX Publications, 1993).

29. Stol, op. cit. The theorising of this was further increased with Newton‟s discovery of gravity, and the details and time-tables are first set out in Richard Mead‟s De Imperio solis ac lunae of 1704, the revised edition of 1746 being plagiarised by Mesmer in 1766. 30. The French transcription is „Mrkrgnaô‟, whereas in Hiberno-English transcription the sound is rendered „Mkgnao!‟. See Gallimard ed. 1948, p.51 and 52, and Rose edition, p.53, 54 for further variants. „Prr‟ remains the same in both versions. 31. Pop Gun, catalogue (Copenhagen: Tojhusmuseet, 2007). 32. A full study of this remains to be written. 33. For details see note 18 above; here at page 11. 34. Ibid., p.13. 35. Ibid., p.15ff. 36. Ibid., p.37ff.