hanaϡelah and the chair

when hanaϡelah was invited to meet with the chair, it wasn’t as though she were trepidatious, through callowness or cowardice, but more probably, as some would have it, as if she were not indifferent exactly, but something that resembled indifference, not entirely dissimilar to when the world considers a woman to be one of its ten most beautiful, when this is only the case because she is rich and famous and the star of a recent blockbuster movie and the daughter of the senate majority whip and the lover of the winner of this year’s triple crown and a citizen of the earth’s sole superpower and a reputed descendant of the aztec pipiltin.  It is, most assuredly, not as if she resembles a squashed wombat, but, even so, naked, upon waking, random in a nameless bed, hundreds of thousands of others would be equally aphrodisiacal.

she spoke about it with her brother.  The reason or reasons for the request to meet, while not unfathomable, she said, remain opaque.

to you or to others? he inquired.

even that’s not wholly clear.

to you?

well.  To those who consider such things.

of course.

she stretched her limbs, not unlike an athlete preparing for a sport not yet invented, thinking to herself of the bitter tree she used to exist for in her youth, but without wishing to bring this into articulation due to associations she thought best not left unburied.  The chair isn’t known to be of the type that is unacquainted with the matters that we are.

i’ve heard roughly the same, though with some qualification as to the nature of the lack of unacquaintance.

yes.  This, frankly, is what disturbs me.  Not simply this orientation—or lack of it … it’s hard to tell … — but the basic fact of its existence.

i understand.  More than might be realized.

hanaϡelah paused in her thinking, and considered her approaching thoughts from another sphere.  Nevertheless, i’ll attend.

when are you called for?

three days hence, at fourteen-thirty hours.  I must begin preparing.

certainly.  Since you have decided to not absent yourself, an absence of diligence isn’t an option.  On that, at least, we’re in agreement.

hanaϡelah picked herself up, followed the departure protocols, and left toward the preparatory tasks which were, as can be imagined by the imaginative, substantial. 

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intermezzo 

⅟       the sky is incipiently turbid, almost macabre in its dissipatings

⅟       rooks the size of american footballs raucously mate in the air, broken infinities fall from the highest firmaments

⅟       a coach pulled by nine performs night’s pulchritudinous transport

⅟       do we not, announcing to no one, don the foreordained fashions, taken by that coach through tributaries of tribulation til deposited under destiny’s door?

⅟       “phhszzt, no! nothing! not lady szetto under the tumescent tree!”

⅟       i have heard it said that you said that i said that franz, the scornful bastard, whom i loved like dangling lemons under an atavistic sun

⅟       your interpretations are as paracetamol plunked into the pacific

⅟       being welcomed, being mannered, being been, having being

⅟       lairs are liars and words are truthful and minnie hummed a little song through the history of her sweetling crack 

end of intermezzo

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 now, said the chair, settling into itself, it is seen that you have not been absented.  Beyond the question of why this might be—or, rather, setting such questions aside, placing them, as it were, in time’s stinky incarnadine compost, along with newtonian geometry, garburators and catholicism—or even be might this why (as my ancestors would ponderously intone whenever fat-bottomed guests were guested), beyond the question of the beyond, beyond even questions, beyond beyonds, not questioning questions, why are you here?

hanaϡelah had not been unprepared for this approach.  She watched the chair, its cornucopia of vicissitudes, its stolidity, questioning her next move.

regardless, said the chair, have you not been told of the riddle of the multitudinous legs and the albatross, how they flopped their way to glory in porto alegre just moments before being undone.  The last time i told it, not disundone myself, of rancid disposition, shellac’d most miserably, i almost wept if i had not been past weeping and weeping passed me.

as the family of hanaϡelah had adumbrated on its vatic verandah, 7 of its 117 two-bys faulty, none of them unflawed, a descendant, gross in fame, would eat her way to glory, without a stitch in time.

ponderously.  We can’t escape it.  Said the chair.  Some have spoken, speaking of the dreams of the ancients, of dreams, the itch of seeming.  We would not.  Your ancestors, for example {and here, how could not hanaϡelah twitch, remembering the simulacra.  Nought was not, she thought, but then corrected herself, knowing better}, living in the wood near dover, never would have.  Why would you?

hanaϡelah pondered her options.  She could neither assent to nor pursue the why.  This was certain from her preparations.  Yet, disturbingly, as she had glimpsed, neither could she avoid it.  This was not some simple either-or, some dialectic in a stream, a frosty maiden.  Something else.  Like a minisery, or a bapterasmima.  Or a thong.  She dug deeper.  Time still timed.

when you and i—if you and i—had been of the sort to sort, would we have sorted sordid swords in sardinia, would we have tangled two—or more?—tangentos in tartufo?  You know we wouldn’t.  Instead, we would have remained as we always are, in the limbo of our in-betweenness, in grace and reverence, in a rhyme …

there.  The chair had failed.  Hanaϡelah saw it clearly now.  The work had paid.  She reached out her tongue beyond its usual extensions and performed the diligence required of her by the codes.  When she returned to her brother, later, offerings in the wake, the clouds hung far below the sky, their ground and benefactor, songs were not unheard.

the impropriety of a hand of bananas

it takes centuries for words to separate themselves from the human that produced them, from the accidents of the living body, and become free.  So our judgements of contemporary writers are unstable and we must leave it to the yet-to-be-born to see the words apart from flesh’s faults.

heresiarch uzasoz

hallucination is a form of biographical transformation

                  why don’t you write sensible books that people can understand?

            ill-informed anyone who would announce himself his own contemporary

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop …

my drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

i can’t understand why people are frightened of new forms. I’m frightened of the old ones.

it is the pen which dreams

apologia

Do i need an apology for the pieces that will follow?  No, of course not.  Creation, like its destructive twin, doesn’t apologize.  It presents.
 
I do not need one, but one is required, so please accept this disingenuousness authentically, as we do the endless artifices we live within.  A caprice on my part does not have to be a caprice on yours, for those on opposite sides of what is pleasantly called the communication chasm rarely share intent, aspect, or effect, but only signs.  Signs, and a certain mood.

Some nine years ago, in one of many fits of madness, i envisioned an intricately structured collection of 81 pieces entitled mirror mirror; they were to be radical excessive even garish experiments in language, most of them starring an elusive franz von vemeer, an urban dilettante of unknown origin, a disbeliever in mirrors.  They were, if nothing else, tectonically-rupturing descents into language, into grammars of barely contained intelligibility (or barely contained unintelligibility—on the edge i work, it makes little difference).  I completed slightly over half of these, at which point i stopped—as sometimes happens, even the fragmentation began fragmenting, the sovereignty of icy exploration began seeking its impoverishment and death, producing a continent of silence, and i left the collection, wandering in other kingdoms, until the wind that evoked mirror mirror blew me back to its malefic bounds.  As the mirror is bottomless (or, rather, its bottom is not discernible), i expected the requisite forces to converge at some point, enabling me to complete the work. 

This re-convergence began happening, as is not unusual, before i began recognizing it.  And once the recognition had begun, the forms were so different (the kingdom had so changed)—and yet shared such a deep geological structure (certain distinctive linguistic-cultural proclivities)—that, if not delighted, i was at least motivated to stay a while and see what happened.

So i placed the new forms (of which there are about a dozen so far) in the second half of mirror mirror.  But due to their difference, the inevitable changes, i felt they needed a name (or a sub-name) of their own; it became obvious that this must be exercises in saying nothing.  A work called mirror mirror should exit very differently than it enters, similar to the difference between how we approach a mirror when examining our face and how we leave.  Here are but a few (too many french, it’s true [but have not the french excelled beyond other races in saying nothing?]) of its influences (the well-read among my readers, if there are any remaining these hashtag days, can easily name more)—

erasmus’ copia (chapter 33 particularly)
queneau’s exercices de style
baudelaire’s le spleen de paris
foucault’s sexuality and solitude
bataille’s literature and evil
chevrier’s l’hallucination artistique
wood’s beyond the simulacrum of religion versus secularism:  modernist aesthetic “mysticism” (in religion and literature)
de lautréamont’s les chants de maldoror and poems
 

Here are but a few of its intents—

1. to proclaim my passionate unshatterable love for the detached compassionate capricious divinity coursing through human flesh—tappable, growable, limitless, renewable—and my faith in its ability to transform devouring flesh (not its mortal attributes but its fear of the infinite finite mortalities), not primarily through technology (though using it), but through itself.
2. to create forms that go nowhere, surprised, surprising; dramas that emerge from outside routine human drama, from these things themselves, from their forms—forms of the marrow of language:  not of us, our marrow, our gains and losses, the palpitations of our hearts, but of language’s anxieties, its holiday gatherings, family dysfunctions, its incests and love affairs and lonelinesses, quests and deserts, madnesses and laboratories, prizes and ecstasies, drugs and highs and suicides, its laughter … not about inhumans, aliens, but about humans – to modify the dominance of the human.
3. to map a land without borders, names or technologies:  uninhabitable, uninhabited, infinite and beautiful and eternally empty; to map quests for maps for such a land.
4. to build language pieces as abstract paintings, building them up with layers, achieving an effect, a mood, a collectivity of sensations and ideas, a loose confederate of images:  for all art is abstract, abstraction simply being the aesthetic term for interiority—or the perception of lived experience.
5. to attempt to reflectively sound out what most societal sounds (which we euphemistically call communication) sound like to me.
6. to describe the process by which we are forced to accept the process by which we are forced to accept living within ourselves …
7. to be frustrating pieces to learn to read, in the way that the goldberg variations are frustrating pieces to learn to play.  One might say, Well, with the gv at least once one has learned to play them they at least sound good but your exercises—they clunk like nepalese trucks falling off the mahendra highway.  But this is not true.  You have just not learned to read.  Even if you learn to read, you may yet say, Well, ok, i have learned to read, but, still, i don’t know what it means.  Sure.  But what do the goldberg variations mean?
8. one could say i’ve sought a space that is uncrowded, undesirable – desserts of deserts.
9. isn’t it at some point less that we care about ending life and more that we care about joining the dead—that’s where the action is?

Here are but a few of its titles—

the difference between a tylenol 500, a gerund, and glory

            hanaϡelah and the chair

            the story of of

            haar lof and the space and twējē

At HP, we don't just believe in the power of technology, we believe in the power of people when technology works for you. We believe in applying new thinking and ideas to improve the way our customers live and work.

If you are going to do something, Make it Matter

(or [or and] ‘the fifty-move rule’)

            (or athpwe)

            hallibl and molok

            ulica lutk

            wawn wakes up

my əld leigh goshe

            andre the giant and the strawberry

            gilberta tedeschi eats her man

Here are but a few excerpts from its reviews—

1. The positive central idea of exercises is that the human psyche, or soul, really believes in itself, and in nothing else.
2. The author is simultaneously a terrorist of the plastic soul and a supervisor in its factories.
3. These nothing stories find resolution in different keys, at different pitches, than routine narratives, resolution revealing itself when sufficient pointers have begun pointing, when a sufficient web has been spun for literary spiders to run across and catch prosaic prey.
4. I cannot help but be reminded of rimbaud’s the poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense and reasoned unsettling of all the senses and mallarme’s i have no wish to pander to a reader’s need for simplification.
5. Much of this would have to do with the grammar of hiding, of hiding in itself, and of hiding in hiding.  Communicating in poetic caesuras, executive falters, journalistic gaffes, sleeps of the tongue, these exercises are prophetic—the only future grammar is a grammar of hiding. 
6. At best, a clandestine subjectivity; at worst, turds in a boardroom – as if lou gehrig’s disease had become spiritualized in the author.
7. During the late second and early third millennia, the task of interpreting the psyche and art through the written word was restricted to professional technocrats (the spiritual descendants of medieval patriarchy), specifically sanctioned as scholars, therapists and psychiatrists; to interpret the psyche and art through the senses and the body became the domain of artists.  Artists (the spiritual descendants of medieval female mystics) directly experienced the psyche and art in three classical ways: first, bodily visions, meaning to be aware with one's senses—sight, sound, or others; second, ghostly visions, such as spiritual visions and sayings directly imparted to the soul; and lastly, intellectual enlightenment, where one’s mind came into a new understanding of itself and so world.  These exercises belong to all three categories and transgress in the way that all mystics transgress when they futilely attempt to translate mystic experience into language.
8. Whitman’s song of myself has been changed to sign of myself – to what end? to what sign? to what self? to what song?
9. I see these exercises as exercises in saying it is as if—
   1. It is as if the author is translating from, say, ancient Hebrew to modern English, but trying to keep the grammar and cadences of the former.
   2. It is as if the author were given a set of random rules for each piece to establish a game inside a game inside a game – matryoshka dolls of language.
   3. It is as if Bobby Fischer came to me for advice, I certainly would not discourage him—as if anyone could—but I would try to make it positively clear that he will never have any money from chess, live a monk-like existence and know more rejection than any artist ever has, struggling to be known and accepted.
   4. It is as if the author is an unidentified thief in a global mall, in which all the stores sell language, in which a theft has not happened for ages, stealing willy-nilly, hiding his goods in the sable reaches of the night.
      

      
10. These nothing pieces are obviously attempts to translate communicative human experiences—superficially common but emotionally bizarre—into a precise emotional language, avoiding (while pointing to) the emotional shorthand which is expected.  These are rupturous rapturous expressions which stuff emotional clichés where they belong—in toilet tanks in museums.
11. The irony being that what is said in society that is supposed to say something says nothing and these exercises which appear to say nothing (and about which it is said they say nothing and may very well say nothing) say something.  What do they say?  They say that a formalism that says that language is not the servant of thought but thought the servant of language is not necessarily a formalism.

I shall post these pieces, at whimsy, over time.  But the reader should be warned that my intent, as always, is not to communicate (if by communication we mean anything like participate in the common transactions of the heart and mind).  But if we mean by communicate—work toward the failure of communication so that communication can be glimpsed— … well … that is another story.