My Fears: My Need

I DO. I UNDO. I REDO

“What deal must I strike in order to be published by you? What pose, bargain, stance, is it I must make with you now?…

…you dance so good, you dance so good, you dance so good…???”

“language is still a bunch of sturdy, glittering charms in the astonished hand.

A utopia of possibility. A utopia of choice.”

-Carole Maso-

“One of the funny things about experimentalism in regard to language is that most of it has not been done yet”

-Donald Barthelme-

“I am huddled around the fire of the alphabet, still”

-Carole Maso-

Again, doubt again. Having never been taken, accepted, acknowledged even, by a publisher, by the system of makers of books for the world, for others, after all of these years and millions of words and thousands of hours, doubt again. Fear.

I undo.

What is it we want of language? Need? And what needs language do? Be? And where is it that I fail?

And you dance, you dance, you dance (but apparently no “so good”).

I undo.

Having done so much.

I do. In a needing language needing body needing language another body. To incorporate. This body, these needs, what surrounds and infests it, needing embodiment. “Everything happens and everything that happens is part of the story” (Ronald Sukenick). I thought. I do.

I undo.

Because apparently not. Apparently what is needed, what needs languaging in this world, this one my body needs in, is needed in, does not incorporate my languaging as what is needed.

I undo.

I unravel with questions, with doubts. Perhaps I was wrong? I am wrong. I fear. What needs in me has to search its needs meeting. But it finds, I do.

I do.

My language needs language finds every day – E. M. Cioran, Samuel Beckett, Macedonio Fernandez, Ronald Sukenick, Franz Kafka, Franz Kline, Raymond Federman, the great Quixote, Laurence Sterne, Gertrude Stein, W. S. Merwin, Helene Cixous, William Bronk, Edmond Jabes, Clarice Lispector, Jorge L Borges, Lynne Tillman, Anne Carson, Nelly Sachs, Cees Nooteboom, Robert Frank, Alberto Giacometti, Emily Mason, M. M. Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Bernhard, Paul Celan, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Jean-Luc Nancy, Janet Kaufmann…

on, on, on…

languaging needing languaging bodies languaging

I do.

I undo.

I redo.

Those “everything that happens” Carole Maso, Louise Bourgeois, Jacques Roubaud, Georgi Gospodinov, Julio Cortazar, Georges Perec, not abstracted, dissimilated, fantasized into shapes unlike our bodies, unlike our lives, with beginnings, middles, ends, developments and growths, tidiness and causes with effects, not like those “parts,” but “everything” the body needs, languaging, chaos and order, present filled with pasts opening into futures, “everything happens” continuing…

I redo.

Within moments I can feel unreality. In magazines, movies, in TV and books, in art. My body needs reality, realization, not escape, not lies and illusions, it is already made of them, honestly.

Beings needs languaging needs being.

I redo.

Hurt and joy, fear and calm, love and lack, pleasure and harm.

Not redemption, not heroes and heroines, not rights and wrongs or rites and songs. Not reasons or religions, but relations between, between true and false, between black and white, noise and quiet, living and dying, myself and my spouse and my children,

the “ethos of ambiguity” (Ilan Stavans), the dim and the grey-blue-black (Beckett), the marshes and steep climbs…

I do.

I undo.

I redo.

My body is experiencing, and to know it, feel it, sense it, be it, I need stories, I am looking for its languaging and I find it or I make it, I do, undo and redo.

If the codifying systems of bodies and languages do not share this body’s needs, then its needs are unique, but still met, what joy if the needs met needs might be shared.

I do.

I undo.

I redo.

The stairwells lead up and down, inside out, toward or away, each always and also their reverse, inverse, “other” – languaging bodies languaging…

I climb, I descend. I pass in and out, I move. I seek and find seeking,

do. undo. redo.

“closure is misanthropic”

-Lyn Hejinian-