Kelly's Dhikr

Once I asked Lama Norlha Rinpoche, But what is the self? He immediately and suddenly jabbed his fingers towards my eyes, stopping an inch or so away. I blinked. That blink is the self, he said.
~ Robert Kelly, in Chicago Review's *Stan Brakhage: Correspondences* issue

(As If) Beauty Never Ends (Dhikr)

after Jayce Salloum

Stop action
These petals open
Upon war
Their pure
White emerges
Not suddenly
Enough

Yet to this
Suddenness
The eyes dance
With the will
Now you see it
Now
You see it
Like the body
Taking a photo of itself
By itself
To conceive the
World again

Blink with me
Blink and blink
Blink and
Where we were
Happening here
Comes to mind
Mind constit-
utive of (((of))

Blink and with
Me blink
Where we are
And are again
Not among the
Dead
Barely covered by
The beauty
Of that cut

The Koran means *recital*

Went to Susan Sontag memorial at 92nd St. Y tonight where someone said Sontag once noted:

"The Koran means *recital*"

MIRAGE #4/PERIOD(ICAL) #138

I am very honored to be in the latest edition of Dodie Bellamy's & Kevin Killian's MIRAGE with Rob Halpern and with kari edwards' "last poem". The edition also includes poems by Ann Stephenson, cover art by Otto Chan and Kevin Killian's report from visiting Christina Wong Yap's studio.

"how many times
must I die
to know
I need not reach
to touch the sky"
~ from kari edwards' "Given the News"

Peace On A presents David Levi Strauss & Kyle Schlesinger

Peace On A presents

David Levi Strauss & Kyle Schlesinger

Friday, February 9th 2007 8PM
BYOB & recommended donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2 New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

Kyle Schlesinger is a book artist, poet, editor & founder of Cuneiform Press. Recent artists’ books include *A Book of Closings* and *Moonlighting*. His serial poem *Mantle* (with Thom Donovan) was published by Atticus Finch in 2005, and a forthcoming book of poems will be published by BlazeVox Books in 2007. He currently teaches poetry and typography at SUNY-Buffalo.

Meanwhile prolongs this observation.
Boarding trains this circular morn bet-
ween two points the sky – robin blue and
just for you. Declines night now. Waning
figures cast fishnet sentences. Lines dar-
ting here or there – sequence yourself.
~ from *Moonlighting*

David Levi Strauss is a writer and critic in New York, where his essays and reviews appear regularly in Artforum and Aperture. His collection of essays on photography and politics, *Between the Eyes*, with an introduction by John Berger, was published by Aperture in 2003, and has just been released in an Italian edition by Postmedia. *The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photography Books of the Twentieth Century*, with catalogue essays by Strauss, was published by P.P.P. Editions and D.A.P. in 2001. *Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art & Politics* was published in 1999 by Autonomedia, and *Broken Wings: The Legacy of Landmines* (with photographer Bobby Neel Adams) came out in 1998. His essays have appeared in a number of recent books and monographs on artists such as Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, Martin Puryear, Miguel Rio Branco, Francesca Woodman, Carolee Schneemann, and Alfredo Jaar. He was the founding editor of *ACTS: A Journal of New Writing*(1982-1990), and author of a book of poetry, *Manoeuvres*, before moving from San Francisco to New York in 1993. He has been awarded a Logan grant, three Artspace grants, a Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship from the Center for Creative Photography, a Guggenheim fellowship in 2003-04, and the Infinity Award for writing from the International Center of Photography in 2006. Strauss taught at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College from 2001-05, and is now on the faculties of both the Graduate School of the Arts and the undergraduate studio art program at Bard.

In his introduction to *Between the Eyes*, John Berger wrote, “Strauss, who is a poet and storyteller as well as being a renowned commentator on photography (I reject the designation critic) looks at images very hard . . . and comes face-to-face with the unexplained. Again and again. The unexplained that he encounters has only little to do with the mystery of art and everything to do with the mystery of countless lives being lived.” And Luc Sante wrote, “David Levi Strauss brings an eloquent and deep moral seriousness to his examination of photography. Again and again he makes the ringing point that trying to separate aesthetics and politics can only result in vacuity. He is photography’s troubled conscience.”

Half hope, half fear. Like when people who react against politically committed art say, on the one hand, that such art is pretentious, delusional, and dishonest, since art is powerless to cause real political change; and, on the other hand, that this kind of art is irresponsible and dangerous, since it inflames the passions of the already savage rabble. So which is it, dog or
wolf?
~ from *Between Dog & Wolf*

Peace On A is devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and scholars. Past presenters at Peace on A include Alan Gilbert, E. Tracy Grinnell, Cathy Park Hong, Paolo Javier, Andrew Levy & Eléna Rivera. Scroll down Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements, introductions and reading selections.

Measure a million million
Measure a million to margin
~ Susan Howe

*


Kyle Schlesinger : *Insofar As* a Metapolitics of Sense

*To eat and to be eaten—this is the operational model of bodies, the type of their mixture in depth, their action and passion, and the way in which they coexist with one another. To speak, though, is the movement of the surface, and of ideational attitudes or incorporeal events. What is more serious: to speak of food or to eat words?* (Deleuze 23)

*In which the big wig. In which a new broom sweeps streets. In which from wench I came. In which rain on rain. In which Lucy Lippard’s slippers. In which nouns, calendars. In which the garter belt & the Bible Belt. In which that fine central intelligence (agency). In which major & minor anus. In which height, semaphores. In which loose can-cans. In which Irving & Lydia. In which immiseration. In which union jack-o-lanterns. In which the swans of Okefenokee. In which deer surge. In which youth & consequences.* (Kuenstler 9)

I have known Kyle Schlesinger since 2000 when we both enlisted at Bflo Poetics. In the meantime Kyle has been an incredible friend, colleague, collaborator & confidant. He is also a poet, a valuable scholar and “critic,” and the publisher of many books that have been important to me thru his Cuneiform Press. Some of these books include Gregg Biglieri’s *Sleepy With Democracy*, Craig Dworkin’s *Dure*, and most recently Bill Berkson’s *History and Truth*. Cuneiform is incontestably one of the most necessary “small presses” working in the United States today in its commitment to the printed word, and intellectual facts.

Over the years I have witnessed Schlesinger’s development, his progress if you will, as a poet. This started when he gave me his *Idioics*—a chapbook he put out while still a student at Godard College. His next major publication as a poet—in the meantime he had clocked a review of Raymond Federman’s *Voice in the Closet*, a transcription of a lecture given by Charles Olson at Godard and numerous other scholarly offerings—was the “serial poem” we collaborated on and that was published as a book in 2005 with Michael Cross’ aesthetically heroic Atticus/Finch Press: *Mantle—for George Oppen*. The making of this work, along with an essay on Chris Marker, with Schlesinger brought me into my own as a writer. I am ever grateful for this initiation.

Schlesinger’s contributions to *Mantle* are telling of his commitments as a word-smith, a word “cabinet maker” in the tradition of Charles Reznikoff (who the term is taken after). There are few people I’ve met whose intelligence is so led by a transliterative ear, an ear that hears so many meanings struck together as they are being written or spoken—exposited as such. This comes across in the following lines from *Mantle*:

Speak it.

The libretto is unfit to print
or so we have heard
your hymn in the gallop.

March is the month
of curtains if this must be

If this must
be a comment on atrocity

Pure loss is not imminence
imminence is not patience

Cities come quickly
marooned at low tide

Sanding room only
futurity ensures one
interruption per event. (Donovan/Schlesinger section 20)

In the time since *Mantle*, Kyle has completed numerous works of poetry at a deliberate, if not plodding pace. These works include his “Parallax Letters” (published with Sarah Campbell’s P-Queue journal in 2004), a work where he has worked-over & condensed a series of letters from a correspondence he maintained while traveling in Europe and Eastern Europe. He has also self-published an artists' book called *Moonlighting* whose pages recall the poetics of the critically neglected New York City-based poet, film-artist and punster, Frank Kuenstler—a writer no doubt a kindred spirit to Schlesinger. In *Moonlighting*, and the work after, Schlesinger’s poetics seem fully formed, thus embodied.

What occurs to me reading *Moonlighting* is the way the designed book coheres with the words—the text. Among the book’s pages are Photoshopped & Illustratored takes on cloud-scapes and other vistas in “psychedelic” color schemes. These colored-scapes form a background to the text as they also blend with it, throwing foreground and background out of whack, giving “depth of field” to depthlessness—no less “deep” surface. The psychedelic makes sense given Schlesinger’s ultimate problem as a poet, at least as I see it: to give experience in all of its details and difficulties over to a “logic of sense,” a problem the poet shares with any number of 60’s artists & counter-culturalists, but also more recently with poets Charles Bernstein, Gregg Biglieri, Louis Cabri, Craig Dworkin & Judith Goldman. Schlesinger’s logic of sense constitutes what I must term a “metapolitics” inasmuch as non-sense in relation to sense is what grounds language as an enterprise ever between the representational and presentative, both above “a politics” and before political realities.

If *Moonlighting* posits a metapolitics of sense, it is also a daybook of felt enjoyments, relations, percepts, thoughts, facts, emotions and other actualities engendered in linguistic grappling. These actualities are conveyed through a propositional syntax at the level of the sentence—telegraphic periods and caesuric dashes. In the end, Schlesinger’s *Moonlightning* may be most like earlier works by Ron Silliman, as Schlesinger would seem to renew the New Sentence for himself, recovering from it a lyric sensibility after LANGUAGE poetry’s unsentimental assaults on lyric poetry’s associations with literary romanticism and representationality.

Chum with a cheshire lining. Living
ink saunters through the couter-coun-
ter thickets in the trickle spot where
brambles never cease. Culture imp-
lied? Its engrained. The fact of your
feelings. To say nothing in as many
words as possible–you call that *poesis*? (from *Moonlighting*)

In the most recent (and unpublished) work, *Insofar as*, Schlesinger wears his metapolitics on his sleeve, taking up Frank Kuenstler’s punstering poetics towards the horrible events of our era: the second Iraq war; unprecedented American imperialisms—Gitmo, Abu-Ghraib; the reactionary from all sides. The words Schlesinger incants—“Insofar as”—as the initial words of each sentence of his poem, bear witness to language’s own complicity and simultaneous resistance to all forms of authoritative, invested address. As Schlesinger mentioned to me when he was starting to write the poem, he was searching Google and realized that politicians across party lines tended to use the phrase “insofar as” far more than almost anyone else on the internet. So to begin each of his own sentences with “Insofar as” is to indict language in its uses and abuses, and to infuse such deployments with a sincere sense of incoherence (non-sense or instability) utterly opposed to political deathtraps, blind alleys—diatribal tyranny & communicative stagnation. What anchors *Insofar as* at the level of language is the pun—what I consider to be Schlesinger’s greatest tool *towards* and *in* thinking. In punning is a logic of sense that evokes what Gilles Deleuze called “points of indiscernibility”—those linguistic, passional and existential thresholds most between what is *actual* and *virtual*, established as reality and potentialized towards new realities. The pun is that which sends a listener (for we of course do not only read language) and reader in as many linguistic directions as possible, that segments and cuts becoming as such like that archetypal cartoon animal torn at a crossroads—its figure literally elasticized. *Insofar as it*...

takes two to Google. Insofar as you're not going to de-
mocratically stop people from wanting. Insofar as “un”
is a salient prefix for the polis. Insofar as this claim is
warranted. Insofar as bipolar bears. Insofar as any psy-
chologically healthy person is able to ignore a
confluence of crossings (x-mas x-ing). Insofar as again
and again. Insofar as the old mannequin penguin pun.
Insofar as the required answer is denied. Insofar as what
we need now are more underproductive members. Inso-
far as they relate to Code Section 6213(a), eh? Insofar as
insofar as a form is necessary? Insofar as China is under-
stood fundamentally as the abstract Other. Insofar as it
elicits militant conviction. Insofar as sounds convincing,
perhaps even professorial, wouldn’t you agree? Insofar
as is caught up in a material transfer of invisible reifica-
tion. Insofar as visceral expectations of the next sentence
are circumscribed by the preposition erotica. Insofar as
the movement moves you. Insofar as my fidelity, twid-
dle-dee-dee. Insofar as I observe the same tensions in
Vertov. Insofar as is. Insofar as was. Insofar as can be. (*Insofar as* 3)

Schlesinger is of a singular intelligence as a writer in that he is someone who actually can not think before he thinks language’s indeterminacy, the infinite directions language takes the mind—that mind which may be made of language itself. Such an event is the beginning of proposition for him—transliteration, homophonics, neologism, paronomasia—as it parses our indiscernible points. What happens after this may be a matter for sense, but is never a matter for sense alone. It is what remains before sense as that which must become political and social, ethically committed, exterior as such in a world of common language experience—language’s being “the case” of anything whose existence could be told. So few people now are working diligently, arduously in fact, at the limit of such a linguistic-experiential mode in our world today with the pressures of “the day”. So few thinking in a language before what becomes expressed as “thought” or “meaning”. I find this tendency of Schlesinger’s mind, his person and will, both daunting, admirable and, most consequentially, generative. I hope this tendency will survive increasing cultural pressures for vulgar communicability, compromised efficacy, “direct-actions” so-called, and results as I value it more than almost any other.

works cited:

Deleuze, Gilles. *The Logic of Sense*.

Donovan, Thom & Schlesinger, Kyle. *Mantle—for George Oppen*. Buffalo: Atticus/Finch Press, 2005.

Kuenstler, Frank. *In Which*. NY: Cairn Editions, 1994.

Schlesinger, Kyle. *Insofar as*. [unpublished].

____*Moonlighting*. Berlin, Germany: Cuneiform Press, 2005.

*

David Levi Strauss : A Poetics of Fact

*In the poem this very lighted room is dark, and the dark alight with love’s intentions. *It* is striving to come into existence in these things, or, all striving to come into existence as It—in this realm of men’s languages a poetry of all poetries, *grand collage*, I name It, having only the immediate event of words to speak for It. In the room we, aware or unaware, are the event of ourselves in It. The Gnostics and magicians claim to know or would know Its real nature, which they believe to be miswritten or cryptically written in the text of the actual world. But Williams is right in his *no ideas but in things*; for It has only the actual universe in which to realize Itself. We ourselves in our actuality, as the poem in its actuality, its thingness, are facts, factors, in which It makes Itself real. Having only these actual words, these actual imaginations that come to us as we work.* (Duncan vii)

*I studied in the Poetics Program from 1980 to 1983, and I realize now that everything I’ve written in the ten years since then has come out of that instruction in poetics: the study of how things are made. Though we concentrated in the Poetics Program on the poem, our investigations (certainly Duncan’s investigations) were not limited to that. As Duncan said, “the seriousness of the study of Poetics we intend is the seriousness of the study of creative events.” I’ve had no trouble extending these principles into the study of photography, film, television, sculpture, paintings, performance, propaganda, ethnography, tattooing and body modification, pranks, drugs, war, and virtual reality.* (Schelling/Waldman 448-449)

The statement just cited, from David Levi Strauss’ essay addressing Robert Duncan’s pedagogy—“The Poetics of Instruction: Robert Duncan Teaching”—pretty well sums up how I understand Strauss’ work: where he is coming from & what he does. Whatever subject he chooses to write about—tho most often art, culture & politics—revolves around a single axis: the axis of Poetics, from the Greek *poesis *meaning “to make”. As a reader of Duncan myself, and student of Poetics, I feel closer to David Levi Strauss than almost anyone “out there” writing about said subjects. Like Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, Susan Howe, Charles Olson, Robert Smithson & Susan Sontag before him Strauss’ concerns are equally those of the artist & ethicist as they are of the “critic” so-called. In fact, in the face of Strauss’ work I propose the critical clarity Strauss brings to his work—like a microscope zooming in so closely that it breaks the glass holding the specimen it would otherwise like to examine, and know—is poetry, and, for that matter, some of the best and most useful poetry currently being produced.

Last week I attended a memorial event for Susan Sontag at the 92nd St. Y where I currently work as an archivist. One of the common ideas running through all of the presenters’ works was that Sontag was ultimately an aphorist. As I consider Srauss to be one of the major figures filling the void that *is* the loss of Sontag—for both our moral consciousness and aesthetic conscience—this got me thinking about a crucial difference between Strauss and Sontag: Strauss does not seem the least bit invested in aphorism. Why is this? My guess is that aphorism—in the lineages of a Nietzcshe, Emily Dickinson or an Emerson—is an aristocratic discourse, an effort, as one of the Sontag presenters put it, to have the last word in a discourse. Strauss eschews the excesses and adventuring of the aphorist for something else: for an unaffected lyricism of fact, citation, proposition & hyper-clear description. Against an aristocratism of the aphorist-essayer Stauss presents a populist, common sense driven project in the most difficult and least vulgar senses of these terms: a gathering around an object, an image, percept or event that in its fidelity to addressing these facts lead a reader outward to common concerns and struggles—the exigencies of social, ethical, political, & moral relation.

Perhaps Strauss is part of a new movement of criticism, a critical poetics that is finally overtaking theory (the need to see, grasp, com-*prehend*, reflect inactively) as well as the tendency in the academy to wax bibliographical (the bread & butter of academic conferences) and the tendency in popular journalism and other culture industries to merely make fashionable— and often turn a buck. I look for this movement in a lot of the “poet-scholars” that have come out of Buffalo Poetics—that latter Poetics program; I also look to it in the scholarship of an Ammiel Alcalay, Craig Dworkin, Alphonso Lingis, Martha Rosler & Jalal Toufic among others. Poets & artists consistently need to take back thinking both from theory, academic frivolities and complacent commerce, and this is exactly what Strauss is doing. What this amounts to is both an ethics and an ecstasis of the factual (and actual) worlds as they are felt, perceived, and inquired after.

works cited:

Duncan, Robert. *Bending the Bow*. New York: New Directions, 1968.

ed. Schelling, Andrew & Waldman, Anne. *Disembodied Poetics: annals of the Jack Kerouac school*. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.

~

Reading Selections

David Levi Strauss:






Kyle Schlesinger:

For Leslie Scalapino (Non-Site)

But we must take care: this vision is given not to the eyesight (it does not even reside in the material "data" of the past) but to the vision of the heart: what the heart sees is pure Light...
~ Henry Corbin

...as if a diremption had begun but had not made itself complete.
~ William James


Preposition now/& bombs again/Unsteadied/
The site before before began/The site/Before
the eyelids sight/Was lost/ Now was then the
dead/On our eyes//An afterimage/Thought

was when/Intestines floated/Stray organs in
actual eyes/Astral/Simple vantage of this body
here/In it not simply interior/Insider outsider

outside inside says/What it sees to again/Where
we're gone is not lidded seer/Click on on off
off thought fluttering//Shudders to think this is
not/Simple division/Mind the simple/Imponder-

ables and moving move/Or march no simple
others feet/Soldiers totalled in the forgone/
Eyes nights forthcoming//Night says the news
page oil that actual night/Say this no simple im-

ponderable real/Fray far away near a way in/
To gods reportable contact men//Inside this
real cage the mind came and went/Inclement

when "we" is not virtuous/Say no border coevals
/Separate division from division/Insider exit
strategy//From/To these disasters/Cross hybrid
double crosser gnomic/Stray crops syncopate/

Global "ghoulish propriety" fee/Foolish wizardry's
wisened progency/Legendary//Buildings develop
everywhere/But here in my eyes oil says/No sim-
ply delayed/Angel demonstrate a way in situ/

People no heaven but also here/Is there in second
reflection/Spoons bend minds then//Nihilists a-
foot wlll chop/Off "our" heads suture doom to

truth & capital/Oil the way we/Roll Rome not bar-
baric/Enough/For the autonomous/we were/
Never here so/Let's trade these con-/Ditions/For
a body monadic diction/If only to be the Real

Blood Noise

after Kiki Smith
with Betsy Bonner

"intestines in eyelids [...] while still living"
~ Leslie Scalapino*

If we see this holography
"Intestines in eyelids"
As nothing less than being
Vascular or clawed to

We were a fault our own
Mothers of all types
Of wolves woman nearby
In this sense singing a lullaby

In blood *blood noise*
All this welling-up like we
Were here the heart
Exterior as *see* itself

Mould me to your claws
You who sing me out
Woman as far as we are
Known is me like a bird-

Song attached moulds
Distant the blood pumps
Like wax out of this
So we can see then circulation

Above & outside & on high
The tears falling from
Their outlines nothing wanting
Nothing but this body told

To look at while we were not
Here while a below
Animal is for not inside
Next sequence head cleaves

Penitent or sacrificial or witnessed
The black & substituted night
Of form the skin worn from wood
*Waxen and everywhere*

We can see while we range thru
Every wood sequence head
Where does the human come from
*I've come so far steeped*

Clearly we are from iron &
Wax and anywhere plaster
We make a pun on forms
Of the earth in the material air

Strike the frame to flesh
From figures blood
Out like sound
Outfits the wounded skin

Cells void just before without
Stirs a night of forms
Elongated simulacrum in shadows
Tears where jars are kept

What is left of us to fill
The animal fills as it sheds
Its own separate within
For whom this meant the little

Objects of desire
That make up the rest
An immaculate percept stained
To *sign* within *within*

Sounded the bone mimicked
That separates divide
Makes series because the word
Is a series of patterns repeating

Like body thinks its mind
Duration is this coupling Pieta
Act immitates nature
Nature immitates act

Acts replicate structure
And structure mimics caw
Given to shallow shade
Given to burst cells

Tears and excrement of wax
Of wax the wax scratched
By substance a distant idea
Of this what's that in your mouth

The failed absolute bird
String or song like a field
We can't enter my heart can't hold
All this blood my hands

Are a mould bejeweled for no one
Distance from whence we began
In blood monsters your ridinghood
Animal within wounds

We are foregone stamps
Of simulation & death masks
All the animals started dying
All we could do was continue

Drained of blood my heart
Can't hold it all my heart can't
Hold it all I've come so far steeped
What is left of us to fill.


*trascribed from Scalapino's reading at St. Mark's with C.S. Giscombe last Weds.

Can't Night Be Saved

Can't night be saved night
Of deer Oppen summoned
All teeth or rocks water
Underneath his boat sailed

Among night should be saved
For itself those deer we actually
Saw walking grounds in winter
Under stars beams like dark itself

Moving in dark saving night must
Be like this to grasp night moving
For itself sufficient and peopled with
Its own creation those animals

Desires whose eyes grasped us
Actually teeth flash tufts through
Trees appearance eyes adjust
Just before they were gone into.

The Affirmative and the Infinite

If the situation is as we say it is--the disjunctive synthesis of two nihilisms--then, as we see it, it is a frightening one. It announces the repetition of disasters.

As such, it is incumbent upon philosophy to welcome into thought everything that distracts itself from that synthesis. Philosophy must make the condition of its own existence everything that affirmatively seizes something real and raises it to the level of the symbol.

But to do that, it must break with whatever leads it through nihilistic detours, that is, with everything that restrains and obliterates affirmative power. It must push beyond the nihilistic motif of the 'end of Western metaphysics'. And more generally, it must de-link itself from the Kantian heritage, from the perpetual exmination of limits, from the obsession with critique, and from narrow forms of judgement. For a single thought is far greater than any judgement.

In a word: it is essential to break with the motif, omnipresent today, of finitude. With origins in the critical as well as hermenutical traditions, as well regarded by phenomenologists as by positivists, the motif of finitude is the discrete form by which thought crumbles in advance, by which thought is forced to play the modest part of conserving, in all circumstances, the fierce contemporary nihilism.

So Philosophy's duty is clear: to reconstitute rationally the infinite reserve of the affirmative that every liberating project requires. Philosophy is not, and never has been, that which disposes by itself of the effective figures of emancipation. Such is the primordial task of what concentrates on making thinking political. Instead, philosophy is like the attic where, in difficult times, one accumulates resources, lines up tools and sharpens knives. Philosophy is exactly that which proposes an ample reserve of means to other forms of thought. Right now it is on the side of the affirmative and the infinite that philosophy must select and accumulate its resources, its tools and its knives.
~ Alain Badiou

The Literal Hallucination

For the past year or so I have been making works with Photoshop software I have been calling literal hallucinations. While the term literal hallucination is taken from Louis Zukofsky’s *Bottom: on Shakespeare*, the actual works are indebted to my engagement with Susan Howe’s writing, as well as the art of Ed Rusha, the manuscript-texts of Hannah Weiner, the films of David Lynch and other sources. Something that has long interested me in Susan Howe’s work is the way she engages manuscript texts as visually based objects transforming them through diagrammatic and transcriptive forms. In the sense of these engagements I believe Howe hallucinates literally, or the literal: that is, she SEES radiantly printed objects in their object-hood, and translates this perceiving of objecthood from an “aural” (often) non-print based existence into a mechanically reproduced one—where her primary tools are the typewriter, photocopier, and (in more recent cases) computer/scanner. Such literal hallucinating is not only a vital way of subjecting textual-visual objects to mechanical transformation, but of expositing the original meanings of objects through description and diagram. Vision bears across in Howe’s use of the page where she often resorts to palimpsestual collages to display the noisy relationality of textual histories as well as in the poet’s significant inclusion of fascimiles; visions also of course come across in explosive uses of typographical and bibliographical elements. As literal hallucinations, Howe’s transcriptions themselves act as exercises allowing the poet both a closer identification (if not an invaluable *over*-identification) with her critical object, and a means of seeing that object more clearly in its information—whether “information” be penmenship, watermark, or illegibility (smudge, cross-out, ink-spill, etc.). In this latter respect Howe is not unlike Ed Ruscha who I’ve always found to have an uncanny way of laying bare the basic information of an object or objective relation to a point of revelatory estrangement; in the former, Howe is singular in her enthusiasm, and her determination to undergo the object of her perception and intelligence in order to convey that object’s actuality, therefore meaning. In this attempt to undergo there is a critical-aesthetic intelligence that trumps traditional literary scholarship in the latter’s neglect of alternative methods of study, and especially the investigation of visual-aural elements of meaningful emergence.

Non-Site

"Begin anywhere"
~ Louis Zukofsky

I've also kept falling in your lines
Wherefore elsewhere a *voice blown
From print* still pervades our singing
Scornful eyes still overlook Aton's
Light in the event horizon of our fears
For tears we always did a La Jetee

Like a corpse moved to its forgotten case
Sensitives discontinuously behold
The rap from the lock & mainly
Reprieve a love of eyes replaced
Smitten by construct your site goes here
A cite to see better the thought seized

By thinking itself kernel of all that eyes were
The subject dives to pitch-blend mixed down
Totalling totality again scrapping rates of labor
This must be the place of accelerated mistake
Making incommensurability an argosy of command
Or land a trace divided by irony flowered

To mental floss these trap doors in second
Reflection make video games all thumbs
In this Negativeland so-called the One
America facts bear witness against our dismissals
Their missiles want sites non-sensed
Cites sensed inwardly shuddering to felt

Cites sensed inwardly shuddering to felt
Their missiles want sites non-sensed
America facts bear witness against our dismissals
In this Negativeland so-called the One
Reflection makes video games all thumbs
To mental floss these trap doors in seconds

Or land a trace divided by irony flowered
Making incommensurability an argosy of command
This must be the place of accelerated mistake
Totalling totality scrapping rates of labor
The subject dives to pitch-blend mixed down
By thinking itself kernel of all that eyes were

A cite to see better the thought seized
Smitten by construct your site goes here
Reprieve a love of eyes replaced
The rap from the lock & mainly
Sensitives discontinuously behold
This corpse moved to its forgotten case

For tears we always did a La Jetee
Light in the event horizon of our fears
Scornful eyes still look on opposing Aton's
From print* still pervades our singing
Wherefore elsewhere a *voice blown
I've also kept falling in your lines

For Haskell Wexler

Look ma
I'm on TV!
Bleeding from
A truncheon please
Pay attention please
Stop these states
From themselves
Cameras seem to plead
Except when they're rubbernecking
A human interest story
Will not be interesting

Roll tape in the interstices
Of pityless flows
Number remains
To be crunched but
Multiplicity emerges.

from Laurel Harris (Correspondence)

If history, defined by its factuality, its extra-aesthetic relevance, imposes (or, perhaps, presupposes?) on the “mythopoetic” seal of Barney’s films, is this interruption a violent break? What kind of interpretation does it bring to the closed and total world of the films? Does it make the films, despite themselves, allegories of their world (to use Jameson’s language)? Furthermore, where is history’s interruption located--in the text, in the spectator, in a collision or collusion of cinematic and extra-cinematic histories and horizons?

I haven’t seen _Drawing Restraint_ yet, but I can’t help but wonder if the awkwardness of “appropriation” in the film is not only cultural, but might also lie in pointing to the problem of labor and work itself. In the preview I saw for the film, the Japanese ship captain comments on one of Barney’s more practically insane spectacles, only to shrug it off with a kind of helpless indulgence, adding that he knows nothing about art. In this film, it seems, you have the art works, the artist at work, and those whose labor is more “everyday,” the traditional worker, for lack of a better term, at work, and possibly this work coincides and does not coincide?

This representation of work itself might be a point of strange resemblance with Vertov’s Soviet film. What you have in these frames is a reflection, for Vertov in _Kino-Eye_, of cinema as a productive labor of socialist society. What is produced? A new way of seeing? Social and aesthetic possibility represented by the trope, as Annette Michelson says, of revolution as a literal revolving, as of machine parts, as of the camera itself? Is this the “total process” as, paradoxically, a means of reconstruction rather than an end in itself? And in the almost hypercapitalist counterpoint of Barney’s films, in which this “total process” might be cast as ends not means in this reduction I’m making, does the responsibility for reconstruction, an interpenetration of history and its reflection perhaps, then shift from the man with the movie camera to the spectator herself?

Siegfried Krakauer claims that film reveals through recording, but, because of what you could call an “ontology of images,” this revelation is also a dissimulation in relation to a lived world. Film becomes a self-justifying record defined by and outside of a precise identity between an image and its impressed object. What happens, I wonder, when the visual historical archive becomes film’s content, becomes aestheticized beyond its initial intent? I’m very interested in the Italian filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci’s work with archival material from World War I in this regard. They’ve restored war images from archives throughout Europe and aestheticized this archive, so to speak, through hand tinting and an original score. Reference is made to the original location, but the images themselves are inscrutable. For example, we see prisoners in an Austrian camp at work--men sewing, baking bread, butchering, dancing together, building carts. The images form a semblance, a viewpoint which is ultimately an anti-war warning, or even parable, according to the filmmakers’ intent. Yet, where does this inscrutability, this illegibility even, come from? Is there something in every image that won’t be given up, and how might this affect an idea of “total process”? Would it depend on the angle of perspective as to whether such an inscrutable historical kernal were the justification or undoing of this self-becoming and self-making?
~ Laurel Harris

Out of Manes?

for Gregg Biglieri & Judith Goldman...
sleepy with democarcy
vigilant at 24 frames per second

"Horses: who will do it? out of manes?..."
~ Louis Zukofsky

The history of Spirit is a flicker-bird
Or rather, a flick
Whose shadow crosses this flimsy narrative framework
For a twenty-fourth of a second
Vanishing from all but your sight

Allll-right...
We were young Hegelians in an American dream
Past its priming
The pump of New World Orders

But your shadow shows
And nicklodeans
Take orders from no one
Waiving our right
To gaze so metapolitics
Must have eyes in the back of its head,
no?

Since as you say "information is not enough"
The poem must be tactical reality TV will be
Like a wall unmended
Rerunning our quilting points 24/7

W is both a wall
& a black box
Whose ears hath not seen
The war dead
But we hear
Better when you point there
(THERE, THERE)
Unpolitely at the crowned
& uncovered

Disaster richochets with thinking
Poetry's not childs play but insists
No child riddled with bullets
Or labored for surplus value

Your ears score the horse
Racing out of manes to tease frames
Like Truth they subtract tears
From the place of our waking

Your eyes like logical proofs
Double-cross us
If only to shoot
Straight into a literal night

Text marks the site
Of hope and critique.

Shut Not Your Doors (Susan Howe @ St. Mark's)

Shut not your doors to me proud libraries,
For that which was lacking on all your well-fill'd shelves, yet needed most, I bring,
Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made,
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,
A book separate, not link'd with the rest nor felt by the intellect,
But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.
~ Walt Whitman

(Winds that enshroud us in their folds--
or no wind). So be it. Pull at the doors, of a hot
afternoon, doors that the wind holds, wrenches
from our arms--and hands. So be it. The Library
is sanctuary to our fears. So be it. So be it.
--the wind that has tripped us, pressed upon
us, prurient or upon the prurience of our fears
--laughter fading. So be it.
~ W.C. Williams

He
(not my father,
by name himself
with his face
twisted
at birth)
possessed of knowledge
pretentious
giving me
what in the instant
I knew better of.
~ Charles Olson

Last week at St. Mark's Church Susan Howe read with Kamau Braithwaite. Howe read two pieces: the first revisiting her poems "Scattering as a Behavior Towards Risk" and "Hope Atherton's Wanderings" from her book *Singularities*; the second, a longer poem soliloquizing the short-lived "New Bohemia" of early 18th century Maryland.

Throughout Howe's books, of course, so much concerns textual histories, and how these histories shape relations of power within cultures and Culture at large. Insofar as Howe's ultimate concern may be for how textual history constructs and constitutes Power, she often privileges academic libraries as crucial institutional sites for textual authority. In *The Birthmark* (1993) and *Pierce Arrow* (1999), for instance, one is struck by Howe's descriptions of Harvard's Houghton library where much of Emily Dickinson's work is held, and practically occulted from all but a few editor's and scholar's eyes. For Howe, libraries are places of esoteric possession and initiatory transgressions; they are also places where the self is continually interpolated by cultural-institutional authority: janitors, police and hermeneutic highpriests. In the preface to *Pierce-Arrow*, the library/special collections of the Yale Sterling library is also like a crypt, a tomb (or womb) space where works of the past remain buried, mummified and deliberately hidden by encoded social behaviors. Rituals of sacralyzing repression constitute a dialect of inclusion and banishment at the heart of the American antinomian controversies grounding Howe's project. Libraries are also part of an ongoing work of mourning pervasive in Howe's work since the earliest books. A work of "working through," of scared and sacred distances, of mediations and memos from a beyond of actualities: facts and percepts near as they are distant.

And yet there is another library in Howe's work, and this library came across to me the other night in the poet's reading of a piece considering her work from the early 90's when she had first moved to Connecticut with her husband, David Von Schlegel, and their family, and, through her husband's position in the Yale Art department, gained access for the first time in her adult life to a major academic research library: the Yale Beinecke. Howe's description of her first visit to the library is poignant. For here the library is less a locus of cultural battles & evaluations, than one of an overwhelming creative clamor: a clamor of becoming, of a natural Univocalism. In her mystical encounter with the Beinecke, Howe appears to feel all the power of Creation itself, the books of the Beinecke stacks practically buzzing with a vital spirit of historical contingency. A dualism of chance and design are imperative for Howe in her descriptions. The books contained within the library stacks, Howe exposits, are the result of a cultural chance-operation, a becoming movement Gilles Deleuze called "disjunctive synthesis" after the philosopher's readings of Frederick Nietzsche's "dice throw". Like Whitman before her, or Emerson or Dickinson, the world is a text insofar as texts themselves are determined by the creative tendencies of all matter--that they are born from the same stock as it were, and extend into the world modally as such.

In the tradition of poets like Walt Whitman, Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams who highly valued the public and democratic spirit of libraries, I take Howe's natural mysticism to be a practical one turned towards actualities and social responsibility. In libraries exists Nature contracted from it's "total" freedom, born from the play of chance and necessity--from History with a capital "H". But the freedom implied by this creation is not enough. The turn in Howe's enthusiastic lyrical essay occurs where she imagines herself wanting to "free" texts from their imprisonment in material conditions of cold storage, and from the fray of confining interpretative permissions; to open them, to give texts back to their original condition of chance, chaos, potentiality. This sense of interpretive and existential opening--an anarchism not so much born from indetermination, as from extreme effort, rigor and sacrifice--I continue to cherish as a student and reader of Howe's.


A Behavior Towards Libraries

Red is a flavor
And blue a waste
That smothers sunlight
And converts us rivallingly

White like heat is not
Sighted or cited to
A blankety something
An everything as were

The words we're stuck with
They compose a library here
And not in the sky a system
Of numbers as arbitrary

As anything elsewhere
We care to call this "scattering towards"
What stacks recall us better
Delimiting Infinity in Fact.

Thought's Torsion

In the letter of March 1663 to Simon de Vries, Spinoza takes pains to declare that the word 'attribute' does not by itself constitute a naming of the 'there is' in any way essentially distinct from the naming of the latter by substance. Having reiterated the definition of substance he adds: 'I understand the same by attribute, except that it is called attribute in relation to (*respectu*) the intellect, which attributes such and such a definite nature to substance. Thus the attribute, as well as the multipliciity of attributes through which divine infinity is identified, is a function of the intellect. In the general arrangement of the 'there is', there exists --under the name 'God'--a singular localization, that of the intellect, upon whose point of view or operations depends thought's capacity for rational access to divine infinity, and hence to the 'there is' as such.

It is thus necessary to recogize that the intellect occupies the position of a fold--to take up the central concept in Deleuze's philosophy. Or, using my own terminology, that the intellect is an operation of torsion. It is localizable of an immanent production of God, but is also required to uphold the naming of the 'there is' as God. For only the singular operations of the intellect give meaning to God's existential singularization as *infinite* substance.*...
~ from Alan Badiou's "Spinoza's Closed Ontology"

Fortinbras

America comes in like Fortinbras, after the blood-letting is over, to take charge of affairs.
--Pat Buchanan

Children of Men (*Charis*)

The ontological import of this axiom is clear: the decomposition of a multiplicity always includes a *halting point*. At a given moment, you will come upon an element of the multiplicity whose own composition no longer belongs to this multiplicity. In other words: there is no infinite descent into the constituents of a multiplicity.... The existence of such a halting point stabilizes every multiplicity upon itself, and guarantees that in one point at least it encounters something that is no longer itself.
~ Alain Badiou

Faith and chance dance
In the lone Infinite's eyes
The singular infant's eyes
And the eyes of those soldiers born
Where they lay down their eventual arms

*Charis* or Grace what is this
Force that is not force
*Shante Shante Shante* towns
And compounds pounding
Refugees their sudden and
Unsurpassed truths?

What is this uncertain ship
We each long for TOMORROW
Which appears but never arrives?


We are all falling then
and write our names in these waves.

We are all falling to our graves
but rising from extension.

While intensity is this child
what should we call her?

What is our name
if not "the one from the one"?


Except life-forms
Faith and Chance play
In our eyes again
And their false eyes
The truth of Chance
Is beaten to a pulp
By Necessity


This counts (it counts
and counts) this subtraction
counts (and counts)
and counts (hold me for
the time being
time being this eventfulness


The held infant holds us in this event
The infant holds us in this in this
Event the infant held the infant cradled holds us in
This event
Beholden as such--


It holds us and we drop...

Our guns we drop | our guns the infant
Holding us and mute | the start and stutter
We drop our guns | we are not

Crying | in this event we | are not crying in
This event we are | not crying we are
Shedding ourselves | we are shedding we

Are subtracting | our selves from this event
We singletons and cells | and children with
Deeper | eyes we are subtracting | we are

The event of this | subtraction this event
Is a subtraction | for which we are
And we drop | our guns and

We drop our guns...

We will not cry for this
We will not shed a single one


It matters this tear
Like a beam in the eyes confused
With sunshine or another light

Of first things priorities without
Artillery "his argosies"
Before this sudden test like knights become

Benighted invincible and grasped
By percept sky falls from sky
Shells rise and touch their aftermath

In the place we will not be when the walls fall
*Charis* will only be cell will be
Cell and soon and not soon enough


Journalists of ought and not
Hardly save this night
The will is a zipper
At the end of every plan

Civilization is stone cold
Called adrift to global loaves
Incommensurable like all
Truth what won't be spared

Must remain
Like a call on the other line
Of other lives or like tears
Frozen in time.


This movie is instructive
Of revolution because there
Will be no revelation such as
We plan it it's not as they
Say just that the revolution
Will not be televised it
Will be realized only through
That number that is not numerical
The bullet holes and the shrapnel
Like a music missing us
We are humiliated but then
We are also heard

That is I am interested in
The old dyad Faith and Chance
Makes *Charis* or Grace
Is the place we go when
There is no place left
To arrive and only occur
May say our names like
A cry distantly heard
Through a variant like a fated
Infant women men are then
Their own mothers irreproducible
More original than any cast


Red is a flavor
And blue a waste
That smothers sunlight
And converts us rivallingly

White like heat is not
Sighted or cited to
A blankety something
An everything as were

The words we're stuck with
They compose a library here
And not in the sky a system
Of numbers as arbitrary

As anything elsewhere
We care to call this "scattering towards"
What stacks recall us better
Delimiting Infinity in fact.


I want to grasp
That flower too
That is not her
Then ungrasp it

Like it were me
And not her
Who can see
Everything and hear

The crows just beyond
This line the sure
Beams their eyes
Are shined with

Just before they die
In the hunt but don't really
Because as soon
As we're grasped we're not.


For "not" and not "sometimes"
For "sometimes" and not "somewhere"
Some signs for flight for flight
Is a swerve from Void and matters

Clinamen and Fold--lo and behold!

For "yes" and not "on high"
For "here" and not "sweet-hereafter"
For missed targets and not the real
Politics of corrupted belief.

Total Process (Prospectus)

In Robert Smithson's *Collected Writings* under the title, "A Cinematic Atopia," Smithson imagines a project for what I would like to call a "total process" or "autotelos"**. Smithson describes the project as such:

What I would like to do is build a cinema in a cave or an abandoned mine, and film the process of its construction. That film would be the only film shown in the cave. The projection booth would be made out of crude timbers, the screen carved out of a rock wall and painted white, the seats could be boulders. It would be a truly "underground" cinema.... (142)***

In Smithson's project for an "underground cinema," the work of art displays a total process insofar as it begins and ends with itself--spiralling in its own interstices, self-becoming perpetually--or, in Smithson's case at least, until the film breaks-down, the walls cave-in, entropy wins-out. The idea of a "total process" can be located across art works, and fields of production. I read it firstly in Herman Melville's *Moby Dick* where, besides being a late-Shakespearian allegory and reflection of American Imperialist exceptions, the book entails an encylopedic reference to the whaling industry at mid-19th century told by the book's narrator-documentarian--Ishmael--and the dialogue of the book's other characters.

Other cases that may be made for total process include Dziga Vertov's *Man With a Movie Camera*, where the film moves among frames of reality or "windows" (Lev Manovitch) in order to provide degrees of reflection for film reality. Here we have multiple (if not often combinatory) degrees of mediation. The first being the film itself (what the camera-consciousness sees without reflection); the second what is revealed of the film's making (editing, shooting, staging); the third reception (the audience within the film seeing the film); and the fourth reception of reception (us seeing ourselves seeing the audience seeing the film).

In Georges Franju's *Blood of the Beasts* and Stan Brakhage's *The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes* I observe comparable film forms for total process. Franju's film of course involves a recording (with sparse, accompanying voice-over narration) of Parisian slaughterhouses in the 1950's. In the film, the filmmaker shows various moments in the process of slaughter (the initial blows to the head with a pressure gun, desanguiation, dissection, skinning, hanging). Franju's motivations for making the film are not clear to me (Does he wish to sing a common labor practice, of "our daily bread"; best known for his horror film, *Eyes Without a Face*, does he rather wish to produce shock/terror in his audience through recording actual gore?) Perhaps the motivations (and effects) of this film are deliberately ambiguous.

Similarly, in Stan Brakahge's early 70's *The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes* (meaning *autopsy* in Latin), Brakhage records a human autopsy from start to finish. Where Franju's film is restrained in its camera movement, and uses dissolves and time-lapse cinematography to convey the transformation of the "beasts," Brakhage's film tends towards "real" or "lived" time--with edits only for breaks in the autopsy procedure. What has always struck me watching this film, and even showing it once to students, is how important Brakhage's use of "hand-held" is to lend his "Document period" reality and credence.**** That Brakhage trembles before his subject (and so also his camera) conveys a truth less of "the birth of the clinic" (Foucault), than of the individual envisioning-soul bearing witness to death in its purest immanence.


Another figure who I have considered for this project is Matthew Barney, whose works have fascinated me since I first saw *Cremaster 2* in 2000. Seeing *Drawing Restraint* this past fall (and thinking of Melville) I was reminded how much Barney is exemplary of total process in his use of "molds," his athletic procedures, as well as in the large-scale underakings of his works since *C2* (I can only imagine rental fees and/or legal permissions for use of the Chrysler Building and a Japanese whaling liner).

Whereas Melville or Franju seem put into the service of factuality, documentary and history (despite Franju's somewhat aestheticized narrative, and the deep mythological-allegorical underpinnings of Melville's text), Barney's work differs as a mytho-historicization of Capitalist postmodernity (the Guinness logo of *C3* occupying the same narrative space as CGI ogres and dwarves; Gary Gilmore & Houdini emblamatizing myths of Manifest Destiny & American antinomianism). In *DR* I am less interested by the fact that Barney is "Orientalizing" (a charge many have made against the film), than that he reveals the ultimate cultural mobility of his project. Whereas Barney's most substantial films preceding *DR* (*C2* and *C3*) draw upon American icons, motifs and locations to bear-out Barney's foremost problem of creative process and (self-)becoming, in *DR* these problems are graphed onto Japanese culture. *C2*, *C3* and *DR* are all appropriative & mythologizing, only the latter seems more awkward in this appropriation, less "appropriate" (...I think here of the tea ceremony, as well as the parade that inagurates the voyage of the whaling vessel).

Talking to Kevin Killian recently, he mentioned that Barney refers to his Vaseline molds as "self-lubricating". I had not heard this term before, but it confirmed what I already suspected about Barney: that he is *the* artist of total process/autotelos in our era insofar as his works begin and end with themselves, "self-lubriate," self-transform (think of Bjork and Barney chopping off their limbs at the conclusion of *DR*). The works are meta-historical in this respect. That is, unlike Franju, Melville or Vertov, Barney's works do not refer to a historicity beyond themselves, their processes. Though they employ figures from a popular cultural lanscape (Mailer et al), such figures remain iconic and mytholigically enactive. Yet history may interrupt meta-history in *CR3* and *DR* where I for one can not view the Chrysler building without thinking of the men and women who contributed to its making, and its prominence in the NYC skyline; nor can I can think of any whaling vessel nowadays without immediately imagining it being tracked by Greenpeace and other environmental agencies.

Whereas it has become fashionable in recent years to think of historical structures as containing a primordial element both constitutive and disrruptive of its subjects (e.g.: "The Real" or "traumatic kernel" of Zizek and other Lacanians), perhaps we should also be thinking about historicity as something that interrupts the primordial, mythological, meta-historical, interior and imaginal. In Barney, factuality interrupts a form for mythology and pseudo-ontology. However inadvertent, History is the angel that rushes in to save meta-history from itself. Facts depose mythopoetic enclosures, if only briefly.




*a prospectus for Stacy Szymaszek's reincarnated *Gam*.
**thanks to Eliza Newman-Saul for drawing attention to this term.
***from The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson.
****see the 2002 Chicago Review special issue on Brakhage for elaboration of Brakhage's term "Document".

Sleepy with Gregg Biglieri (@ St. Mark's)

Gregg Biglieri is one of my favorite poets & reading with Evelyn Reilly at the Poetry Project tonight...

22 Gregg Biglieri & Evelyn Reilly
Monday, 8:00 pm
Gregg Biglieri is the author of five chapbooks: Profession, Roma, Los Books, Reading Keats to Sleep and I Heart My Zeppelin. He currently lives in Buffalo, where he is finishing a dissertation on Louis Zukofsky's Bottom: On Shakespeare in the English Department at Temple University. Evelyn Reilly’s first book, Hiatus, was published in 2004. A chapbook, Fervent Remnants of Reflective Surfaces, is just out. Reilly co-curates the winter segment of the Segue Reading Series. She is currently pondering the relation of ecology and poetry, and is editing ((eco (lang) (uage ( reader)), a collection of essays on the subject, with Brenda Iijima.