On By Alias HarlequinIn Writing5 Comments

keeps going and… going and…

Alias Harlequin's avatarSpoondeep

II.

 

“Each syllable an instance

of ourselves bodied forth in the

dimness…

—

…the voice which occurs all the time

while everything else is happening”

-Ron Loewinsohn-

Here I am drawing on Zukofsky

on Wittgenstein, Blanchot

all the others too

because language

is that pre-fab tool

that we fabricate

for ourselves

as it manufactures us

.

            Help outside

no help

coming through, as it does

inside, after all,

helping to shape

and discover,

lending forms

and definition

to experiences

otherwise improbable

ineffable

unknown

.

            remaining still

outside words’ purview

but almost communicative

almost expressed

anyway, all ways

that come down to

into, as possibles.

.

            Rearrange.

.

            Bakhtin, semiotic Ecos,

Sebeok, Halliday, Firth and Peirce

not forgetting Uexkull

nor leaving him aside

in his thousands of worlds

circling our own

so Susan Howe and Lyn

Hejinian, Arakawa and Gins

add…

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SnapShotting Summer

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes, Photography2 Comments

I lived for awhile in Grand Rapids, Michigan, attending graduate school and being regenerated and grown in-vitro like a culture into the family, religion and industry of literature.  I’ve recently stumbled across a photographer’s blog who shoots many subjects in and around that West Michigan area.  If you browse her photos over the past week or two it will provide you a feel for snapshotting summer…and here are some verbal renditions…

STRASSENFOTOJOURNAL

“Dozing in the Heat: Grand Haven”
by Cornelia Lohs

Snap-shotting Summer

 

Ever the distortion of mind.  With emotion, contortion.

At times, a necessary snap.

.

.

A young woman peddling her bicycle, unclothed for summer.  Body moving like taffy on its paddles.  Just as pliant, just as tight, and just as supple.  As salty, as mouth-watering, as sweet.

.

.

Tumbles in the machinery like loose screws, clanking and rattling around.

A clicker, a habit, desire.

.

.

Sun sears glares upon moments, lasering trains of thought.  Dis integration.  You stumble, you wobble, you very nearly fall.  Erasing inspiration with foul mood.  You adjust.

.

.

Scars like the outside, on the surface of the brain.

Called memory, called dreaming, called thought.

Or so you imagine.

.

.

Pool or sprinkler, sweat and breeze, you forgot.  Moment’s season’s change, and you were happy.  Somewhere in mountains, or North by the sea.  Without belongings.

.

.

It emerges like a wire, a monster’s bite.

You’ll call it “me” or “I” and it’ll stand for something.  Continuity.

An inventor’s dream.

.

.

Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

.

.

“I” continues to sit and walk, lie and stand.  To eat.  To breathe.

On By Alias HarlequinIn WritingLeave a comment

Alias Harlequin's avatarSpoondeep

The following is the first section of an extensive poem-making that I’ve been working at for some time now.  I will release some of its sections over the following weeks.  I would love commentary, critique, this pseudo-confessional area is not one that I feel confident in, and is difficult work for me.  An attempt to be open to tunneled and tunneling desires and dreams, presuppositions and perspectives that I’ve formed and have been formed in me…in shaping this particular way of being in/toward/with the world.  Thank you for caring enough to read, and in advance to the generosity that would involve your commenting/responses.

The Engineer of Himself: A Poem

“Thinking is willing you are wild

to the weave not to material itself”

Susan Howe

“a new music of verse stretching out into the future…”

William Carlos Williams on Louis Zukofsky

 

I.

I have tried to tell this story time…

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Friday Fictioneers – July 6, 2012

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes23 Comments

landscape

I labor steady, slowly, surely.  Block after block, hewn from my ruin.  This hapless task at hand.  Construct a habitation of words.  I use whatever I come by, wherever I happen to be.  With an eye for the concrete and a feeling for sky.  I’m a weedy terrain, dried up from AA and a searing of spurn.  No smoke, no rain.  I’ve been looking for signs or instructions:  there are none.  Or far too many.  So I set out simply to make.  A noun, a verb, an adjective; pasting with participles and pronouns.  Tedious, thankless, alone.  I build, it crumbles.  It cracks, I evolve.  Not much of a shelter, but it holds.  And remains, opening up to the night.

Thanks for Madison Woods et.al. and the continuous production of prompts for this weekly challenge and exercise: Friday Fictioneers

The Underlying Theory

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes2 Comments

The Underlying Theory

What we found on his desk was a drawing.  A very lightly penciled sketch of a woman from stomach to throat, as if seen from above to the side, one arm flung out in the viewer’s direction and her breasts provocatively displayed.  Underneath were the words “underlying theory.”

Our work was to plunder his study.  An author, famed for fiction and poems and writings on art, had died suddenly, and his wife had contacted us to go through his things, evaluate its worth and preserve for posterity.  There were boxes of manuscript pages, notebooks and loose-leaf, letters and typescripts, recipe cards full of quotations.  The library was extensive, each book filled with scribbles and markings, a signifying system of importance and reference for use in his various projects.  His mind was displayed like a trail left in woods.  Here the path to food, here the one to water, here the building nest, here the safety hideout.  It overwhelmed us.

I had written numerous critical studies on this man and reviewed professionally most of his books.  He’d written extensively in philosophy and aesthetics, with compendiums of writings on particular artists and particular works.  He’d produced over a dozen literary novels and twenty or more books of poetry.  He was prolific and known for the depth and acumen of his thought, the cavalier ways he used language, and the breadth of his interests and knowledge.  No one knew he made visual art.  None would have tagged him “erotic.”

I wondered what this drawing might “mean.”  What did it refer to?  Was it drawn from a picture?  An image from memory?  Was the subject herself the underlying theory, or was it something about representation?  Desire?  And what theories did this mean to evoke or give rise to?  His wife did not recognize the sketch – not the body, nor an artist her husband might have copied – and it was interestingly tucked beneath blank open sheets, at the middle of the desk – the ones always ready when he came to compose.  It was worn, wrinkled, as if indeed, it underlay everything inscribed above it and served as inspiration or focus, an impetus to his work.

I’ll note that the form seems composed, not a doodle.  It appears to be representative.  No one knows of him having a model or lover, in fact no other drawings exist from his hand.  Perhaps he had need of a form to describe, an image to imagine, some desire to propel.  The figure is finely proportioned, both busty and lithe, fleshy yet thin and shaped like the currents of rivers.

I’m not certain what draws me to this.  In an office literally stuffed with fine books and odd trinkets, paraphernalia of printing, and stacks of diaries and drafts.  Among paintings and stones and figurines of the Buddha, historical writing utensils, family photos and legal documents dating throughout his life.  There is so much to uncover and know.  But “underlying theory”?  That grabs me.

As I’ve mentioned before, this author was a reader of depth.  Fiction, philosophy, poetry, science; criticism, essays and cultural studies.  There are tall shelves of monographs of particular artists, but nothing gives hint to this sketch.  I am struck by this rendering – baffled by image and text.  An erotic drawing is always of interest, all other concerns of this man are abstract.  It beggars the biographers “who/what/when/where” yet the text writ along the arch of her back stirs me in a different direction.  “Underlying theory.”  What the hell?  What’s it for?

A theory is made for a function, something “underlying” proposes a cause.  This drawing, these words must explain something, but what?

Is it cosmic?  Like what drives human vocation is desire?  Or epistemological?  Ethical?  Aesthetical?  Metaphorical for apprehension of form?  I can only guess at this point but am open to ideas – I’d love to find some consensus for the book I’m contracted to write.

I ask you – how would you piece this together?  I’ll share a scan of the drawing and request that you submit your hypotheses below as comments.  I thank you so much for your thoughts.

Sincerely –

Weekly Photo Challenge : Fleeting Moment – street scene(s)

On By Alias HarlequinIn Photography1 Comment

There was one I liked best…but then when I got them uploaded…I wasn’t sure!  But I promise they all were fleeting….

Leonhardt Conspiguous

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes3 Comments

Leonhardt Conspiguous

 

Leonhardt Conspiguous would have known the difference.  Between, say, BWV 161 and BWV 173; or a trunk or tail if he’d been born a blind mouse.  LC always knew the differences.  But he found similarities difficult to trace.

In conversation Leonhardt once encountered a man who’d read the entirety of his library, (the titles so resembling his own as to appear indistinguishable), drawing the same conclusions as LC in the shared vocabulary.  LC was unable to devise a category or designation for this phenomenon.  It was like looking in Leona’s eyes.

A concave lens forms a sphere of reflection, and hers – of grey of green of blue – mimicked Leonhardt’s so completely both in color and tone, that he’d instantly felt something farther back, back behind, any place he’d ever felt before.  In himself or another.  As time went on and her desire gained in details – their fancies so colluded he could not decipher whose were which – not in content nor expression.  The similarities baffled him.  And frightened.

But Hunter Green from Forest?  LC would know even the percentages and numbers.  Like every kind of sparrow, every human’s skin.

Leonhardt believed that what we come to know is inherently unique, but that same is imperceptible.  What startles us in those with whom we feel alike, is not the magnitude of what we hold in common, but how specifically each possesses it.  “To see eye to eye,” in Leona’s case, made visceral sense to him, but could not be understood.  “To see in or around” is what he labeled “comprehension.”

LC could see no further “in” to his cherished love Leona, than he could see within himself.  Which to some seemed deftly nuanced and unusually deep, but that was due to fierce attention and lots of time and mass filigrees of distinctions, not, Leonhardt insisted, to understanding.  “To analyze parts and fragments, was not to know a whole,” he was fond of telling himself, “and our lives are composed of fragments.”  Like arranging jigsaw pieces, separating by color and cut and number, and believing that they might fit, still never solved a puzzle, where new pieces are added all the while.

LC believed there was no whole, as far as humans perceived, just incalculable myriads of pieces arranged, rearranged, created/forgotten, damaged or lost in their fires.

He could never explain Leona.  Or synchronicity.  “Terms such as these synonym mystery,” he would say, “and should be kept in careful silence.”

LC despised religion.  The compulsion of the concocting of names, he called it.  A disease, an impatience, an anxiety of what is unknown.  Shuffling a hat full of vowels and consonants we look for what sounds as strange as our experience and assign it that – that which is odd to our senses, things we describe can’t explain.  A crapshoot or fancy, an oracle of chance.  Presuppositions he heartily derided.

 

We were left with description, he thought.  Of Leonard (his friend of shared library and thought) LC reported the odd sensation of someone other speaking words that more nearly matched one’s own ideas than the terms oneself could find.  And Leona, well, Leona.  Leonhardt preferred to call her by her body parts or textures, her language or beliefs, “Leona” ringing to him of the mystically unexplained, uncomfortable talisman, as if he were mumbling “YHWH” or “Zeus,” “Santa” or “Satan” or “Venus.”

(to be continued?  you decide…)

The “Right” Word

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes4 Comments

            What are we waiting for?  And why?  It’ll never get any easier, and this is remedial.

I had thought we were awaiting the word.  The right one.  Any one, but right all the same.

I had thought that.  But I didn’t know why.

Since any old word would do.  Being all we had.

Still we waited, not quite believing.

How many words do you suppose there are? we wondered.  Given multiple spellings and various languages all – how many?  And their requisite alphabetical sourcings.  I reckon we could figure it out in an equation, don’t you?  Only so many letters rearranged so many ways with up to twenty-six (or however many) letters equals = ?  For every tongue?  There are limited options.  It’s certainly not infinite, this isn’t rocket science here, or religion, so to speak.

Still, we waited.  Because, well, because we didn’t know.  Know which of the any was “right.”  By which we meant, well, by which we meant “worked” for whatever it was we desired.  Which, again, we did not know.  Leastwise I certainly did not.

I had a feeling for how it might, or that I’d like it to, feel, but wouldn’t be able to tell you how that was until I found the right words, any words, but, you know, the right one(s).  I could kind of hear the sound, how it would wrinkle into the ear and swoosh down their canals, troubling the waters.  Or what textures the air would take as it blew up out of the lungs trembling the throat and over the tapping tongue.  Some idea or sense of it, but nothing particular, not knowing the word, only the anticipation and desire.

That’s what waiting is, after all.  A hunch without a reason or cause or an outcome.  Guesswork with some directed hope.  A running of options, but unable to identify.

So we waited, not knowing what we were waiting for or on, exactly, but also because we didn’t know.

And waited.

I could imagine its shape, the work of the muscles, the grip and the tracing of lines, but I couldn’t know how to begin, not knowing what or which curve happened first.  And was it dotted or crossed or simply angles and loops?  I had no way of telling, without the word, the one I’d keep waiting for, any word, the right one.

So I kept still.  Well, actually we paced.  Walked to and fro and back and forth, ahead and around, and sometimes sat down, sort of listening I guess, looking and listening for an outline or scrawl, whisper or code, some rhythm or sound that might bring on the term, any word, but not the ones we were using, no, the next one, the “just” or “proper” or appropriate word to our intake, our output, a resonance you know, what we were waiting on.  The “correct” as it were, word, sound shape texture intonation field of references emotive trail and so forth…that one.

The discreet utterance or image that would hear us out, carry us on, would solve us.

I’m waiting.

Crushing

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading6 Comments

This is the kind of writing that demolishes me.

From Lynne Tillman’s This Is Not It

Writers Resources

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“Chekhov in his letters to his brother wrote: ‘Start writing from the second page.'”

“He was more blunt in conversations: ‘Tear out the first half of your story; you’ll only have to change a few things in the beginning of the second half and the story will be perfectly clear.'”

“The unity of a composition is not based on whether it has a beginning, a middle and an end, but whether it creates a unique interrelation between its parts.”

“The concept of unity (the whole) is historically changing.”

“Aristotle wrote in Poetics (Chapter 8):

‘Unity of plot does not, as some people think, consist in the unity of the hero.  For infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action.'”

[all quotations from Bowstring by Viktor Shklovsky]