X|O (For)

~ for Emilie & Michael

The wrecks and the lives
never wrecked if not
for love a body blossoms
into it and is strangest

in this duration which
is it that moves every
one the balloon floating
in the train car today

reflects this flabby ho-
liday distorting and
wrinkled where a pattern
spells "xo" "xo" "xo"

somehow there was still
a locus for loving you
other things ineffable
done if only in time this

breath's shipwreck that
mourning may be our
joy afterall a friend wrote
to me writing *myself*

back into being that
'hollow ego' [Oppen] tears
shatter the numinous
no one has yet to kiss.

Coterminous (Regular Lovers)

If you were with
'No one' among so
many than truly
You were with me

Moi aussi! all I re-
member from the
French are con-
ditions of possibility

A 'language per se'
As pure means
Within eternity since
Caresses keep on

Giving--this is the
Book you would
Write and keep on
Writing where no

End should justify
Which lips hands
Seek our event so 'us'
Was always wasting

No time a 'grey-eyed'
Dawn saw it all be-
tween these lines
Athenas pray return.

Prosodic Body schedule

Daria Fain & Robert Kocik are unveiling the next installment of their Prosodic Body collaboration these next few weeks downtown on Wall Street. Below is the low down...

BUILDING A PERINEUM

The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has granted us (Daria Fain and Robert Kocik) a workspace in which to continue our prosodic research.

We will be using the space to design a building based on prosody. Some aspects of this residency will be public. For example, we’ve built a rudimentary anechoic darkroom. From 2/13 to 2/24, anyone can reserve time in this room. Suggested uses include: darkroom retreat, tracing the origins of language, wakeful hibernation, hypometabolic attention, swinging open the door of life and death. I call the
darkroom a 'perineum' not only because it has been built in a basement bank vault—but because the perineum (in the subtle body)is the still point and the point of entry for words, and thus the basis of a building based on prosody.

Tuesday February 12: we are having an opening from 6pm-8pm. We will be on hand to speak about darkroom, perineal practice and prosodic architecture.

Sunday, February 17: I will discuss WHAT IS A WORD--the 4 stages of speech and the cosmogony of phonemic emanation in nondual Kashmiri philosophy (particularly the writings of Abhinavagupta) as example of ‘word’ at its fullest)—in contrast to English, psychoanalysis (especially Lacan’s parole pleine) and the neurocentric problem-of-origins in contemporary linguistics (is language acquired or hardwired?). The talk will start at 3pm. The space will be open as a public reading room, with relevant reading materials provided, from 10am on.

Thursday, February 21: the above event will be repeated. The space will serve as public reading room starting at 10am. The talk will start at 6:30pm.

Sunday February 24: we will orchestrate ALL AT ONCE—a voicing of all the phonemes, using permutations such as exhaustion, resorption, forced, unforced, vocalic, consonantal, unstruck, etc. R. Steiner wrote: “The entire universe is expressed when the alphabet is repeated from beginning to end.” Even better (nonlinearly,
atemporally)—in nondual Kashmiri linguistics the phonemes are energies, awarenesses, atoms, that give rise to the objective world. Sound-sum, buzz-bundle, heard at once to see what it does. (I’m also in need of volunteers for the phoneme choir. English employs 40 phonemes!)

Lastly—I’d very much like to meet with anyone who’d like to talk about designing a building that meets the needs of poets.(To my knowledge, there is not a structure on the planet designed specifically for full realization of poetry.)

The address is 14 Wall Street. LMCC Swing Space, level B. Due to security, all visits require appointment. My cell: 718 503 4246.
Yours, Robert.

For (Three Valentines)

1.
Arrows make up the
rules as we go along

in the same spot ventursome
of what is if what is is not

cause for anthem nor
garrulous for forms

what should *not* be ethical
we had to have situations

night and day we had
to have some of it?

most of it? all quantity
became quality in our eyes

a merely projected sunset
the products would seem

too human more than
we’d like them to be

anyway, surplus value
notwithstanding your hands

dematerializes every-
thing it touches, my love.


2.
You were the thought-
balloon directing me

my words your faith
in materialism makes

what’s between
our ears like a wall

creates space stars
time as what is on

them crumbles like a
stencil to this sense

see me please oh as what
isn’t is a horizon or rim

not a mission here’s a book
eat it don't read it don’t

judge us for what we are
precariously put the

whole world would dis
appear if not for these

hands touching you once
the world felt heavier for

which color must discover
please tell me you felt

something too because
there was thinking a set

of terms that our love
was somehow necessary.

3.
"number there in love was slain"

No sunset of information or fa
shion or who-you-know or talk

to these glass buildings ugly as
you observe thank goodness for

love or love’s presentiment at
least this time of year even if

we should never be I wanted
to speak of it also its flickering

locatedness its discretion and
difference if we should not

finally say “desire” there are
children we must imagine never

having there are places and there
are place-names divisions like

time is a series of cells beneath
the shipwreck of our breath

could you for instance “kill time”
with me forever or "go to hell"

for love is it your lips the antici-
pation of them which made

the movie start and stop premo
tions of whatever one begins to

recognize as feelings obscurer
places in our screen-life how I

can’t stop thinking about them
once the movie’s started how

ever we decide there must be
blood--*number there in love*.

BIG DIG

for Kyle Schlesinger
after Lawrence Weiner

If quotation were subtle

and/or then →

a project arrows would point

to this and be arrows

diagrams

and/or this unsubtlety

material changing its mind

the more one looks at it

it looks at you

incanting there is

a logic to

whatever we dig

and/or that, in an effort

← to text you forget me

taking up all this space

holey moley! (not)

market forces what is

recognition to our cause

Every Name in History is I

While the precipitating event for *Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land* was the 2002 Chechen hostage crisis in Moscow, the piece is in no way concerned with its representation or with the fast kill—notions of the spectacle as they relate to terrorism as a mediated form of political address. Also not on the agenda is a neo-Brechtian foregrounding of theater itself as a metaphor for the presentational excesses terrorism generates. Destruction aimed at the surplus of the antagonists’ “way of life” and the symbolic regimes they hold valuable, are always the target of mutual agitation. Particular to this event is the vast spectrum of trauma existent even prior to the hostage crisis; my interest is more in forms of erasure and arbitrariness—some of the extenuating circumstances of an assimilating regime.
~ Catherine Sullivan, from "According to the Good Wishes of the Tlaxcalan People, Cortez Set Out on an Exhibition"

That all of Sullivan’s work is "political art”—a nomination Sullivan would herself resist—I have no doubt. But it is political mainly in the way that all aesthetic mediations of cultural content produce indeterminate political consequences and meanings. In *Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land* (2003 and 2004), Sullivan would seem to bring the problem of political consequences qua aesthetic determination to the foreground of her work. “The project itself is hopelessly immersed in an confounded by the painful trajectories suggested by the event, what is elusive about them as opposed to what is directly consequential.” *Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land* is partly based on the submerged massacre of Chechen terrorists and theater-goers in a Moscow theater in October, 2002. If terrorism, more often than not, enacts forms of hysteria through its immediacy, *Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land* would seem to embody this hystericism through its use of pantomime to reenact the event at the Moscow theater via the Russian Broadway-style musical, *Nord-Ost*—the musical that was playing in the Moscow theater at the time of the hostage crisis.

In a time when few public intellectuals or artists would seem to know how to adequately address the terrorist as a viable political subjectivity, Sullivan has done so by articulating both the actions of the Chechen terrorists and the brutal reaction of the Putin regime as the irresolvable effects of cultural struggle, and struggles specifically for political autonomy and agency. Whereas one might typically ask why the Chechen terrorist or the Putin government acted in the ways they did, Sullivan does not interpret through her art, and instead chooses to dramatize a struggle of forces as they present political antinomies after the fall of the Soviet Union. From Sullivan’s theater of effective antinomy result aesthetic works and events radically opposed to any foreclosure of meaning, a typology of individual and collective desires as they negotiate both wills to power and to ressentiment.
~ from "Every Name in History is I: Catherine Sullivan's *Triangle of Need* and works to date"