The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults

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Part 1 The Necropastoral On Being Posthumous Bug Time Page 2 →

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Strange Meetings in the Necropastoral Owen, Hawkey, Césaire I give the name “necropastoral” to the manifestation of the infectiousness, anxiety, and contagion occultly present in the hygienic borders of the classical pastoral. For all the pastoral’s shoring up of separations, and despite the cordon sanitaire it purports to erect between unhealthy urban strife and wholesome rural peace, we must remember that the premier celebrity resident of Arcadia is Death. It is into the rural that rich urbanites flee with their plague, and into the “urbs” that rat-vessels steer with their cargoes of fleas. The term “necropastoral” remarks the pastoral as a zone of exchange, shading this green theme park with the suspicion that the anthropocene epoch is in fact synonymous with ecological endtimes. Never inert, the necropastoral is defined by its activity, its networking, its paradoxical proliferation, its selfdigestion, its eructations, its necroticness, its hunger, and its hole making, which configures a burgeoning textual tissue defined by holes, a tissue thus as absent as it is present, and therefore not absent, not present—protoplasmic, spectral. It is in this sense that we find the political force of the necropastoral, its ability to stage networks and “strange meetings.” Strange meetings in the necropastoral eat away at the model of literary lineage that depends on separation, hierarchy, before-and-after, on linearity itself; released like a rat-body into all edifices of hegemony, the “strange meeting” will emerge as one of the necropastoral’s occult political modes. Page 4 →

Case Study 1: Wilfred Owen’s Necropastoral As Paul Fussel has so permanently shown, World War I rerendered the “bucolic” meadows and woods of Europe as stinking charnel fields, both literally and literarily. This necropastoral fact winks out from the red kitschy poppy mouths of “Flanders Field,” poppies that would go underground, feed on corpses, and erupt into the feverscape of Plath’s Ariel, reconfigure themselves as chemical rings falling into and from the foliage of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, where their residue would prove sticky both to human skin and to the genetic material of the entire biome. When Yeats complained of Wilfred Owen, “He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar-stick,”1 his words were characteristically prophetic, for this intercontamination of blood, dirt, and spit would, like the sugar-stick or like the chemical agents of modern warfare first experimented with on these Great War battlefields, adhere to everything, sicken the system, stick around. In this sense it was not just Owen’s bad writing, the trashiness of the sugar-stick, but also his ability to contaminate otherwise superior literary taste with the stickiness of his literary production that Yeats so famously deplored and tried to control for by excluding him from the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse. While often dressed in sugar-sweet rhymes, engoldended deathpoet Wilfred Owen’s textual landscapes are rife with the infectious properties and modalities of the corpse. The poems form a continuous, necrotizing battlefield, a skinlike surface, pitted and dubious, capable of inscription and unexpected transmission, full of holes and wounds through which pity can escape like a stench. Draining, bulging, drowning are the defining gestures of this space, in which everything commingles with everything else. In “The Show,” Death’s transportation allows the speaker to gaze upon the whole corpselike scene: “sad land, / weak with sweats of dearth, / Gray, cratered like the moon with hollow woe, / And pitted with great pocks and scabs of plagues.”2 Owen’s speaker describes worms arising from corpses, seeming to animate them but really making and moving through apertures or holes: “smell came up from those foul openings / As Page 5 → out of mouths, or deep wounds deepening.” The poem ends in syntactic and synesthetic confusion. And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan. And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid

Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further, Showed me its feet, the feet of many men, And the fresh-severed head of it, my head. With its many enjambments and the shifting positions of its midline commas, this final sentence is segmented like a worm, and its writhing effect is to perform a miracle of mirroring, in which that which is gazed upon is shown to have the face of the gazer. As in so many Owen poems, gaze itself becomes an agent not of separation but of contact and collapse. The comma that introduces this final phrase enacts a continuity, linking the speaker’s embodiment to that of the worm-ridden corpses he gazes upon. The comma is, in a way, the little flap of tissue that is revealed to be “my head.” In “The Show,” Death and Art and the Poet and War and the Corpse and the Landscape wriggle into one another via the properties of the lyric, its digestionlike enjambment; they go on shitting, eating, decapitating each other like so many worms. The poem hosts a strange meeting in the necropastoral, never reaching an end to its necrotic conversions; its amputations; its eructations; its excrementations; some little bit of worm manages to spasm out of the tissue. Caught in its mouth, a wriggling tail or wriggling head, a bit of phlegm that speaks for the speaker, says “my head, my head.” In one of Owen’s most famous poems, “Strange Meeting,” the speaker escapes from war through a hole eaten in war by war itself: “It seemed that out of the battle I escaped / Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped / Through granites which titanic wars had groined.”3 This double inscription presents a saturation that is also a self-evisceration—war makes an aperture in war. It next produces an unlimited supply of specters, “encumbered sleepers . . . / too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.” Thought and Death, quite distinct abstractions normally, are indistinguishable materials here, acceptable substitutes. Page 6 → The speaker goes on probing, and finally “one” pops up; the material is responsive, becomes a medium. The wraith-speaker now jams the poem, both under- and over-speaks the speaker, speaks of the awful fluid “pity of war / and war distilled,” describing it for twenty-nine lines in a jammed, tangled syntax, which is itself concerned with stoppages and flows: “Now men will go content with what we spoiled. / Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. / They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.” The folly of war, its expenditure, which should elicit a twin expenditure, pity, here boils and flows like pity, and is spilled. The wraith-speaker presents spectral counterfluid. Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, Even with truths that lie too deep for taint. I would have poured my spirit without stint But not through wounds; not on the cess of war. Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were. Here the wraith-speaker tries to distinguish the “cess of war” and “wounds” from symbolic or spectral wounds, holding that “Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were,” but the distinction cannot be so easily made, in part because of the excess of tense specificity, which shores up no particular tense at all: “I would go,” “I would have poured.” Moreover, while the spectral wounds on men’s foreheads would presumably associate them with the crown of thorns, and thus with sacrifice, this also seems to gesture toward the invisible wound of shell shock, making this image vibrate undecidably. The figure cannot resolve. Along with the instability of the tenses, the ambiguity of this image makes the speaker’s rhetorical proposition unclear, an unclear material, a kind of residue of rhetoric rather than rhetoric itself. The oozy murkiness of the poem, recalling the drinking and pouring forth of Keats’s Nightingale ode, finally drains to its most direct claim.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned Page 7 → Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now . . . In this system of saturations, a spectral occupation has come about; the specter-speaker is the speaker, the speaker his addressee, but the spirits continue to pass in and out of each other, “you frowned / Yesterday through me,” while the ambiguous aspect of the “frown” is occultly awarded the fatal force of jabbing and killing. The final invitation to “sleep,” to join in a necropastoral swoon, is itself destabilized by the limited / illimitable ellipses and the quizzical remarking of the final quotation mark. Who “speaks” the unvoiced quotation mark? Is typography here the head of a head of a worm, wriggling out through the corpse surface of the poem, saying my head, my head!? I want to propose that these incomplete, draining, not quite mutual saturations produce distended effects and allow strange elements—punctuation marks, affective grimaces like the “frown”—to temporarily emerge as organizing marks in the murk. Such ephemeral upheavals, such flowing and sinking, commingling, draining, eating, and saturation and submersion, entail the “strange meetings”—entirely apart from conventional protocol, hierarchy, genre, and division—that the necropastoral mounts in both literature and politics. In my reading of Wilfred Owen, I’ve suggested that he constructs a continuous spasming necropastoral mask /masque in the charnel fields/skin of Europe. Indeed, Owen used similar language in a letter to his mother describing No-Man’s-Land as “pock-marked like a body of foulest disease and its odour is the breath of cancer.”4 This necropastoral location stages strange meetings. The dead meet the living or the dead meet the more-or–lessthan-dead, the war eats holes in itself to deliver the speaker through the earth, the speaker and Death moan together, the worms / words move through bodies and continually produce new masticating / speaking heads; thus temporal qualities, “before,” “after,” “during,” and even “event” itself, are also spasmed and distended. The strange meeting might be enfigured as an ampersand, which is a kind of eaten-away Möbius strip, incompletely delivering impossible contacts, inefficiently Page 8 → flooding, dumping, jamming, breaking out, collapsing, gesturing, speeding up, distending, suspending, petering out. The “pity” of war emerges like goo from these pits, but it is also the force that creates its own distended tissues and pitted surfaces. This spasmodic, ampersanding, defective interpenetration, with its sticky goo-, moan-, and pity-effects, is of course a model of politics and temporality that completely denatures liberal models of the body and the state, of points and events, of agency, hierarchy, power, linearity, and historical time. Such is the political coefficient of the necropastoral that it undoes that very emblem of the state’s soundness of body, purity of motive, and fixedness of will—that is, the body of the young, white, male soldier. In his 1923 book Health and Conduct, Captain Arthur J. Brock, the specialist who treated Wilfred Owen for shell shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital, describes the shellshocked soldier as if he is a permanent resident of the necropastoral’s constantly inverting zone. The shell-shock patient is out of Time altogether. If a “chronological,” he is at least not a historical being. Except in so far as future or past may contain some memory or prospect definitely gratifying, or morbidly holding him, he dismisses both. He lives for the moment, on the surface of things. His memory is weak (amnesia), his will is weak (aboulia), he is improvident and devoid of foresight. He is out of Space, too; he shrinks from his immediate surroundings (geophobia), or at most he faces only certain aspects of it; he is a specialist à Outrance.5 This description depicts the shell-shocked solider as “out of Time” and “out of Space,” immersed in a necropastoral zone, constantly moving in the present tense of Art’s ampersand, “on the surface of things.” He is in

transit, in medias res, and is himself a kind of media: though attentive to “only certain aspects” of his surroundings, in conducting these shocks he is a “specialist” to the point of extravagance [Outrance]. The necropastoral is a “surroundings” rather than a place, syntactically multiple, a haptic, active sensory zone, the limit which is Page 9 → beyond the limit. The denizen of the necropastoral is always in motion, walking the Möbius strip, never arriving, always tending to excess, á Outrance.

Case Study 2: Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl In the 2010 volume Ventrakl, contemporary poet Christian Hawkey, himself writing from the no-placeness of the expatriate, jettisons his status as “historical being” in an attempt at collaboration with the Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887–1914). To enter into a zone of convergence with a dead and traumatized poet, who wrote in a language Hawkey himself is only beginning to learn, requires a release of all statuses associated with fluency, stability, mastery and self-mastery, and the reimagining of the poet-translator as staging ground, a site for strange meetings, and a kind of imperfect medium. Hawkey writes in his preface: Voices pass through consciousness, sometimes called upon, other times without request. Often they are recorded and randomly stored voices of the living. . . . Our bodies, our heads, our skulls, the holes in our bodies and skulls are voice chambers, sound chambers, wherein our own voiced selves and the voiced selves of others constantly enter and exit and are changed by our bodies upon extrance, exit. . . . [T]he voice, as Mladen Dolar has suggested, is less a vehicle for “self-presence” than a void, a blank space at the site of intersection.6 In this contradictory zone, the “voice” is a “void,” yet the “void,” like the isle, is full of noises. The translation zone is a place of instability, a medium, a place of passing through, of resonance, of apparitions, of exits, entrances, and, as in Owen’s work, “holes,” of compounding and distorting recording and playback effects. It is a present tense, a place of “constantly.” That this should be imagined as a necropastoral, continuous with Owen’s No-Man’s-Land, “pock-marked like a body of foulest disease,” is confirmed later in the book when Hawkey writes a prose poem ostensibly addressed to Trakl but continually interrupted and shot full Page 10 → of holes by the ventriloquized, italicized, Anglo-Americanized voice of Trakl himself. What persists despite efforts to translate around you, with you, read you, are the singular performances of decay and decomposition, as if intertextuality (meaning moving between texts) is materializing itself as an organic process, de- and re-composing itself, and each image, each instance, a gentle orphan, her sweet body rotting in the bushes—and if we are at any moment living and notliving, dead skin shed, fallen eyelashes, expired cells, thoughts, lost hair, letters, air, gas, how odd our systems of kinship, relatives, remembrance, blood relatives, race, systems that underwrite—great word—nation, nationality, fatherland, or mother tongue, the same problem, I know, let me finish this thought, be my guest, perhaps when I leave this room I should see myself a corpse, a zombie, a limb thudding onto the floor, one soft eyeball rolling out, two, the word two, comma.7 To stage this strange meeting, to converge with Trakl in this decomposing zone, Hawkey has to imagine himself as both a corpse and a zombie, inconsistently killed and reanimated, and, more specifically, as a decomposing author, shedding words and commas. Decomposition, the interpenetration of voice with voice that concludes Owens’s “Strange Meeting” in Stygian slumber, might here be a kind of writing, a dropping of words and punctuation onto the page. As his preface recounts, Hawkey has rejected the conventional practices of contemporary poetry writing, setting aside inspiration, genius, craft, tradition, free verse, and/or an originary voice for a ludicrous array of Oulipian activities, including centos, indexes, lists, homophonic translations, interrogations, interviews, altered photographs, and ventriloquisms, thus creating a book of traces, trances, transcripts, prostheses, and near-misses, all hyperlinked to each other, rather than a collection of independent “poems.” The most forceful, almost vindictive of Hawkey’s writing techniques, as recounted in the preface, invoke trauma and decomposition: the shooting of Trakl’s works with a shotgun, the submersion of the text in a jar of water and larvae. Yet if Hawkey must inflict trauma on the source material, and even on his own authorial image, to Page 11 → arrive at this corpsey necropastoral zone, it is easy to imagine Trakl abiding here. As the

translator Robert Firmage has written of Trakl’s enigmatic status, “That the enigma will abide seems ineluctable, for it is wrought of an intertwining of a life of strangest fascination and a work of febrile darkness, which serve both to obscure and clarify each other.”8 This eternal, dim, helical, Stygian zone, entwined with enigma and riven with bolts of fascination, recalls Brock’s description of the shell-shocked soldier, Owen’s invocations of the charnel fields of Europe, and my own evocation of a necropastoral zone replete with infernal flora and fauna. In keeping with his difficult, unstable life, Trakl’s suicide by cocaine overdose is most immediately attributed to the traumatic aftermath of one of the earliest battles of World War I, the battle of Grodek, after which he was forced, single-handedly and without supplies, to attend a tent of grievously wounded soldiers, some of whom shot themselves to end their agony. Achieving convergence with Trakl, for Hawkey, requires an arrival at Grodek, requires an immersion in Trakl’s final poem, “Grodek.” The final spread in Ventrakl reprints Trakl’s “Grodek” in its entirety alongside an intentionally “faithful” translation of the poem by Hawkey. This is an ultimate double masking by Hawkey: he writes the German poem, “Grodek,” and then writes it again, in English. He also appends his own dateline somewhat hastily to the bottom of this English poem—“Berlin, Germany/January 28, 2008”—as if to immediately break the spell of convergence, reverse out of the necropastoral zone, enter back into history, and mark his own existence off from the Stygian Trakl’s. A businesslike acknowledgments page and colophon follow, yet the author’s photo, which is the final image in the book, shows the him literally wearing Trakl’s mask above his own American-style, white cotton t-shirt. Thus the disentanglement with Trakl’s enigma is truly incomplete. As in Owen’s indistinct indication—“I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned / Yesterday through me”—the faces are permanently doubled. This strange meeting cannot so easily be undone. This final masking bestirs the reader to think back to another convergence continually pointed toward in Hawkey’s book, that of Trakl and his sister, Greta. Photographs are superimposed, annotated, or analyzed together to discover the source of the Page 12 → Page 13 → siblings’ coidentification in life and Death. But, given the final gesture of Hawkey’s work, the masked self-portrait, perhaps we should see this double exposure, this incomplete masking of sister-as-brother, as a figure of Hawkey’s own encoding as Trakl, the vexing, Möbius way he forces Trakl to wear the mask of English even as his own face has been consumed by Trakl’s. Let this photograph, then, stand as our proximate emblem of the extravagantly contradictory potentials of the necropastoral—à Outrance. In this photograph, a face emerges—or does it? Is it a face or a stain? The dark spots propose competing features, which nevertheless cannot completely blot out the face. The face and the stains make an assemblage, a strange meeting here, an excess production that goes further than the portrait photograph “should.” What does face say to stain? Or does stain wear a face mask: my head, my head? The image is an ill production, erraticness itself, material as errata, out of Time and Space but caught up in organic processes: stinking, mottling, rotting, decomposing. Or maybe dead. A spasmodic nonchronology. In their strange meeting, face-and-stain are ill-distributed, defective, a defective ampersand, linking and breaking, blotting out and emitting. Time runs like a fluid in all directions, Time speeding up all over her face.

Case Study 3: Aimé Césaire’sNotebook of a Return to the Native Land Thus far I’ve argued that the charnel fields of the necropastoral, like the charnel fields of Owen’s war poetry, entail a decomposing, mucoid substance that hosts strange meetings: the living and the dead, the not-quite living and the not-quite dead, the wounded, the bleeding, the moan, the worm, Death, the Poet. Chlorine gas and petroleum can meet, eat, shit, interpenetrate, shred and shed, goo, make apertures, struggle with each other, shove their faces in and through each other’s mouths or chest walls, generating more slime, puke, language, and goo, charnel and necrotizing material, i.e., Art, and never arrive at a final configuration. Once the contemporary poet slips out of the carefully delineated and Cartesian axes of historical Time and Page 14 → national Space to enter in this necropastoral, Art’s residue can never be removed. Although the necropastoral is no respecter of hierarchies (except the absolute reign of Art and Death), I wouldn’t describe these strange meetings as egalitarian “exchanges”; instead, these strange meetings occur in a lightless,

mucoid, digestive, altering, mutating, flora-and-fauna-rich field of uncertain conditions that may not ever solidify into “outcomes.” Thus the strange political meetings in the necropastoral not only revise liberal notions of freedom, of the healthy, sound, bordered, well-lit social body of the individual and the healthy, sound, bordered body of the state, but are also a revision of the narrative genre of History; we never know what the “outcome” is, the “outcome” never stops happening, the outcome can only be damage, the outcome sometimes happens backward, has irrational retrospective events, reinserts itself in the field, tears the mucous membrane of the field, the outcome is anachronistic, reedited, happens at different speeds, we can’t link the cause to the effect because we reject the ideological primacy of the “cause” and because we are interested in illicitly generating so very very very very very many unearned and exorbitant effects. The title of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land marks it as a counterfeit; the work was in fact not occasioned by a return to his “native” Martinique but was begun, as myth would have it, in Europe after a visit to Rilke’s castle. For Césaire to literally return to his homeland and write a diary about it might be an unstrange political meeting: the authentic document of an authentic return to the authentic homeland for the purposes of “authentic” political liberation. In this counterfeit realm of Art, however, Césaire’s contact with the Adriatic landscape of Rilke’s vision causes him to be contaminated with vision itself, with sticky, confabulating vision; Art lays its eggs in his eyes, and in this state of possession he conjures a spectral, counterfeit Martinique, enacts a strange meeting, has aesthetic intercourse with the specter of his nativity, a sort of self-incestualization to produce the occult Art-material of the Cahier. Césaire opens and organizes his vision around a difficult-to-translate phrase, “Au bout du petit manon.” I conclude that this phrase is difficult to translate because it has been translated Page 15 → three different ways by one translator, Clayton Eshleman, working with two different cotranslators: “At the end of the wee hours” in 1984, “At the end of daybreak” in 2001, and “At the end of first light” in 2013. Each of these phrases carries its own connotations; I prefer “At the end of daybreak” for the constitutive violence of the “break,” for the paradox of naming an “end” to an interval we understand as lasting an instant. “At the end of daybreak” locates a space within a limit, and thus identifies the limit as not a limit at all but a zone of possibility, à Outrance. The revolutionary present tense is continually arriving in this impossibly repeated phrase. To invoke such a paradoxical temporality not just once but again and again is to suggest not just a birth but a repeated birth, a birth that does not initiate the infant into a stable, temporally linear, culturally naturalized “life” but rather a birth that keeps amplifying itself with repetition, a birth that is the initiation of a life that is more than a mortal life, a life that is (that must or may be) superhistorical, revolutionary, irrational, and pierced with Art. Each time this phrase is repeated it becomes a threshold for a new bolt of Art to enter the fabric of the poem. The untranslatability of this phrase speaks to the fungible, potent, contradictory, mortal/immortal power of the interval Césaire seeks to name, an interval that can only begin again and never conclude. This birth delivers not an infant body but a slough of body parts and bodily fluids, a zone of prostrate mothers and impotent fathers. Césaire’s vision of the Antilles is stagnant and prone: “the hungry Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay.”9 The Antilles is “pitted” just as Owen’s charnel fields and corpses are “pitted,” spewing pity and humiliation and joined clause-to-clause by insinuating commas like the commas that drop from Hawkey’s rotting authorship. This is an alternative nativity, mother material fertilized by corrosion, nativity not into life but into Death, “putrefying force of crepuscular surroundings, surveyed day and night by a cursed venereal sun.”10 The fetal is fetid; stem cell lines of sores, leprosy, degeneracy, “laughable and scrofulous buboes, the forced feedings of very strange microbes,”11 burden the prose lines with their scrofulous lists. This easily denigrated plague ground, a plague ground made Page 16 → of denigration itself (a strange way to meet one’s native land!), is also a political site, however, because it is viscous, heterogeneous, it may be spread and penetrated; its very weakness makes it a site for illicit meeting. Indeed, the repetend, “At the end of daybreak, ” may be reconsidered as a continually re-presented orifice, continually risen to by the poem’s ambivalent thrust. The poem and the Antilles double for each other; the poet calls for both to be riven with ghosts and shot through with visionary materials: “And you ghosts rise blue from alchemy from a forest of hunted beasts of twisted machines of a jujube tree of rotten flesh of a basket of oysters of eyes of a network of straps in the beautiful sisal

of human skin.”12 Here we see that the commas of prostration are quite overshot by phrasal profusion. This turns out to be a strategy for recasting the terms of generation from linear economy to a horizontal fecundity. Flora and fauna of occult potential burgeon in the rotting material of the text: jiculi, balisiers, snakes, conches, etc. The energy of the poem penetrates and repenetrates the rotting native land with ghosts, junk, corpses, skin, denigrating terms, and denigrated materials in order to engender a counternativity, an occult rebirth as ghostly reanimation. In this way the poet incestually forces his own rebirth, not as a liberated man but as a kind of infernal, spectral double, a production of the text: “And behold here I am!”13 This self-sowing in the necropastoral field in turn supersaturates that field, causes it to convulse and refertilize itself with its own shit, to announce its end of daybreak over and over again. This requires the direct pouring into the poem of the supermaterial of vatic invocation. Swellings of night in the four corners of this daybreak convulsions of congealed death tenacious fate screams erect from mute earth the splendor of this blood will it not burst open?14 The vatic, possessed tenor of the Poet’s voice is an attempt to oversaturate the field with Voice, with Art, with force, to make it convulse and burst open and spill blood. In the charnel field of his own voice, he also calls for time itself to split, to self-incesticize, Page 17 → to mutate, pathologize, and double itself. “One must begin somewhere. / Begin what? / The only thing in the world worth beginning: / The End of the world of course.”15 To engender the Beginning is to engender the Ending, and vice versa: Art swallows its own tail, eats itself, shits into its own mouth, causing the political horizon to convulse and shit in the most staggering image of the book. I say right on! The old negritude progressively cadavers itself the horizon breaks, recoils and expands and through the shedding of clouds the flashing of a sign the slave ship cracks everywhere . . . Its belly convulses and resounds . . . The ghastly tapeworm of its cargo gnaws the fetid guts of the strange suckling of the sea!16 The slave ship shits its cargo, the slaves are ghastly tapeworm, and soon the nigger scum is on its feet . . . standing and free17 Lest the hall monitors of the world confuse this effortful, spasming, filthy, necrotic, necropastoral, selfincestualizing shit-as-birth as a somehow conventionally liberal/liberating moment, the poem doesn’t end with this vision; instead:

rise, Dove . . . I follow you who are imprinted on my ancestral white cornea. rise sky licker and the great black hole where a moon ago I wanted to drown it is there I will now fish the malevolent tongue of the night in its motionless veerition!18 In other words, this counterfeit, self-incestual, fetid, shitting, digestive, rebirth image of “nigger scum” ends with an image of Page 18 → rimming; the sky is the great black hole, the dove of liberty licks it, the Poet will fish for food there, eat out the asshole of negritude for the necrotic nutriment of its “motionless veerition.” The implicit white mother’s milk of nativity has been converted to a spectacular black occult fluid, which promises transformation and night vision, like all Hadean foods. It seems fitting that a poem that began with an untranslatable phrase should also end there, on Césaire’s immortal neologism—“immobile verrition.” The note to Eshleman’s most recent translation suggests, “In the French text verrition is a Latinism that Césaire explained to Eshleman and Smith as coined from the verb verri, to sweep, scrape a surface, to scan. Kesteloot, who had also consulted Césaire, claimed the root was vertere, to turn.”19 Faced with such a sweep of alternatives and alterity, Eshleman translates this phrase diversely as “motionless veerition” (1984, 2001) and “still verticity” (2013). (Reading Césaire’s phrase “immobile verrition” as a Surrealist, I see that modifier “immobile” as there not to qualify but in fact amplify the “veer” in “verrition,” a brief compression that makes the “veer” in “verrition” sail out.) But what is the gesture of ending such a poem on a neologism at all, one that “veers” so undecidably? The undecidability of this phrase is also a chronological problem: is this neologism best understood by trying to establish its nativity, by tracing its etymological ancestry, by prioritizing anecdotes, by cerebrally picking apart the degree to which “verrition” turns versus the degree to which it sweeps? Or is it absorbed in and absorptive of its immediate “surroundings,” and does it invite the reader into its black, irrational zone, like the shell-shocked soldier of Brock’s formulation, sensitive to the shocks of etymology but more fascinated with the present and its “veer,” its constant, curving motion? If one could walk forever on the curving Möbius strip of veerition, might one be constantly re-presented with equivocal horizons, with “the end of daybreak”? “Verrition” emerges from the submersion of our Orphic speaker in a necropastoral zone. It is the modality this poem births. It is emergent. It is an emergency. The neologistic phrases translators create to accommodate “verrition” are themselves contaminated by its irrational force. In this final moment of the poem, we catch up with the end of daybreak, but day does not arrive. Instead Page 19 → chronology breaks, night floods as a fluid through the crack in daybreak, the sun is inverted to a superfluid black hole, white cells emit black light, a celestial, rising orientation is yoked to an infernal decline, impossible alterities are joined by enjambment as by a Möbius twist. “Veerition”/verrition is that twist. With this neologism, this hyperfluent, visionary poem does not conclude but exceeds itself extravagantly. It indicates a direction—à Outrance—and names a verb—verrition. This limit has now become a limitless zone, a zone charged with paradox, anachronism, and occult potentiality, decomposition, contagion, and black fecundity. Such a zone—spasming and spectacular, black-lit, floral and florid, rife with eructations and declivities, which hosts strange meetings, denaturalizes hierarchies, produces inversion and translation, sheds Art—I call the necropastoral. Notes 1. William Butler Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, December 26, 1936, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, 113, quoted in Harry Ruche’s hypertext project “Lost Poets of the Great War,” Emory University, http://www.english.emory.edu/LostPoets/Yeats.html. 2. Ironically, “The Show” bears a three-line epigraph from Owen’s eventual detractor, editor Yeats. In this sense, Yeats’s supertext can be seen taking the role of personified Death, floating over and looking down upon the decaying scene. Wilfred Owen, “The Show,” in Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (New York: New Directions, 1964), 50–51. 3. “Strange Meeting” is everywhere on the Internet; to read it in print, see ibid., 35–36. 4. Ibid., 51n.

5. Arthur J. Brock, Health and Conduct (London: Williams and Norgate, 1923), 146, quoted in Meredith Martin, “Therapeutic Measures: The Hydra and Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart War Hospital,” Modernism /modernity 14, no. 1 (January 2007): 35–54. 6. Christian Hawkey, Ventrakl (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), 5. 7. Ibid., 92. 8. Robert Firmage, “Translator’s Preface,” in Georg Trakl, Song of the Departed: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl, trans. Robert Firmage (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2012). 4.Page 20 → 9. Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, ed. and trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 1. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. Ibid., 12. 13. Ibid., 14. 14. Ibid., 17. 15. Ibid., 22. 16. Ibid., 47. 17. Ibid., 48. 18. Ibid., 51. 19. Aimé Césaire, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 66n.

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On Being Posthumous Necropastoral Economies in Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and Yi Sang Double Epigraph/Epitaph: [The Velvet Underground] won’t replace anything, except maybe suicide. —Cher, 19661 Et in Arcadia Ego. —Death

Preface The pastoral, like the occult, has always been a fraud, a counterfeit, an invention, an anachronism. However, as with the occult, and as with Art itself, the fraudulence of the pastoral is in direct proportion to its uncanny powers. A double of the urban, but dressed in artful, nearly ceremental rags and pelts, the pastoral is outside the temporal and geographic sureties of the court, the urbs, the imperium itself, but also, implicitly, adjacent to all of these, entailing an ambiguous degree of access, of cross-contamination. Moreover, the anachronistic state of the pastoral is itself convulsive and self-contaminating, accessing both a Golden Age, a prehistory somehow concurrent with, even adjacent to, the present tense, and a sumptuous and presumptive afterlife, partaking of Elysian geography, weather, and pastimes. A Velvet Underground. Page 22 → Rather than maintaining its didactic or allegorical distance, the membrane separating the pastoral from the urban, the past from the future, the living from the dead, may and must supersaturated, convulsed, and crossed. The crossing of this membrane is anachronism itself. Another name for it is Death, or Media.

Arcadia and Anachronism As a case study for the necropastoral, its occult anachronism, and its media effects, I would first like to examine Jack Smith’s film Normal Love, a pastoral work that is itself an anachronistic material, shot in the summer of 1965 but edited and reedited for the rest of Smith’s life, never solidifying in a final form or even a final title. As late as 1982, Smith refers to this film in a grant application as “EXOTIC LANDLORDISM OF THE WORLD,” “EXOTIC LANDLORDISM,” and “NORMAL FANTASY”; reports that he has been working on the film for twenty years; and notes, “No commercial studio” could do the work he has done editing the film “because they would have no way of knowing when or if it would ever end.”2 The pronoun it is importantly ambiguous here, collapsing both the film and the labor it entails into one endless material. Normal Love itself incorporates the inassimilability of anachronism, a material that will never reach its final state, impossible to enter into the historical record by the conventional means of title and date of completion. The poet Diane di Prima, who participated in the filming, later characterized Smith’s inability to finish the film as a kind of entrancement by the occult force of the film itself: “By the time Jack Smith was in the editing process, he was bedazzled by speed and the glamour of the footage. It literally cast a spell on him from which the artist never emerged to shape or name his work.”3 Di Prima’s diagnosis suggests that Art’s occult power, even over the artist, comes not only from its “glamour” but from its “speed,” its temporal exorbitance, a speed that creates a

paradoxical temporal incongruity with the interminability of the film itself, its inability to reach its terminal state. Simultaneously, the Page 23 → editing “process” becomes a kind of obscure afterlife for the artist, a removal from which Smith “never emerged.” Di Prima’s temporal characterization of the footage’s “speed” is also in contradiction to conditions of pastoral dilation that characterize the shooting of the film itself. In fact, the shooting of Normal Love both fulfills and collapses—that is, convulses—the pastoral paradigm. To make the film, Smith and his band of actors, a collection of underground artists and writers, drag performers, hustlers, and street people, left their downtown, urban milieu for Old Lyme, Connecticut, a pastoral removal if there ever was one, but one that collapsed the conventional aristocratic hierarchies of the pastoral sojourn. This court of low-life artists was assembled not around a patron or a sovereign but around a fellow lowlife artist. On the other hand, these indigent degenerates were converted by contact with media and Art into an underground version of aristocracy for which Smith, not Warhol, coined the term superstar.4 That term, with its reference to supernova, suggests an inflation that cannot endure, extreme and impermanent; the term would also bleed out of the Underground to infect the mass culture, achieving, for some, the fame that, in Warhol’s paradoxically immortal bon mot, carries a fifteen-minute total life-span. Here, then, is the incompatible time frame, the anachronism, of Smith’s Arcadian stratum: the superstars are perishable, yet they are suspended in the permanent toxic medium of Art. Here they continue to perish. The shreds and cerements of time hang off them like so much toxic stage makeup. Brevity and eternity helically entwine to produce not preservation but posthumousity. This paradoxical state is well allegorized in Smith’s prose fantasia, “The Memoirs of Maria Montez; or, Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool,” in which an abject movie crew tries to film a picture around a decomposing leading lady, whose cheek and mouth fall off during the filming. Her cheek falls to the bottom of the pool. And the scaffolding was thick; it provided a thick wall of green darknesses behind which the entire lot strove incessantly to create a film the name and subject of which was forgotten long ago strove as in an endless hopeless dream to attempt to Page 24 → start to try to start this film with no personnel, a leading man dying of old age, a dead leading lady, a decomposing beloved old character actress, no leadership or funds, or coffee money but certain gorgeous color rouged subjective images and a couple of marvelous fantasticated, Etruscated, ruined sets.5 Here is a necropastoral, unfolding in Marvel’s iconic “green shade.” Yet this site is amnesiac, and this greenness is inhabited by shades, by unusually plural “darknesses.” Individual humans are metonymically pluralized into the “entire lot” or made to decompose. In the long clausal murk of this sentence, the magic syllable “but” is like a Möbius twist; the decomposition of the leading lady is hereby converted to yield the “gorgeous color rouged subjective images,” and the litter of her body parts drains to the bottom of the sentence to create the extra syllables in the “fantasticated, Etruscated, ruined sets.” This posthumous activity creates a nonfilm, sublime in its impossible effects: “Rushes of blank film, of sets not on the lot, of empty, ruined, demolished sets. Sets with no people on them. The cameraman weeps. Endlessly long shots of deserted sets of preworld war Monte Carlo ballroom sets empty. Sets that never existed on the shambles lot.”6 The posthumous coordinates of the film shoot produce a film that is at once impossible and ultimate, taking a long view both forward and backward, to a “preworld” that is already a ruin. The fantasia ends with this account of the rushes. There will be no “finished” film, because there can be no film more ultimate than the impossible image of “Sets that never existed on the shambles lot.” Erasure made paradoxically visible through the inverted logic of the ruin. As with the “green darknesses,” here an irrational overproduction is linked to plurals and multiples: “rushes,” “sets,” and “shambles.” The cameraman is positioned in the midst of these “rushes,” suggesting that his weeping is somehow producing the continuous flow, just as Montez’s decomposing cheeks produce images of “gorgeous color rouged subjective images.” Her flesh sheds images, affects, and syllables; his eyes shed rushes. Ironically, the technical term rushes, which refers to the raw workups of a day’s filming produced during the making of a film, also calls up the constitutive anachronism of Smith’s process: a proliferation of rushes, which never amount Page 25 → to a total, a final film. A cluster of speedy, hasty, and triaged rushes, which configure through sheer proliferation a contradictory eternity, a denaturement of time. If “The Memoirs of Maria Montez” represents a necropastoral fantasia, the nonfilm Normal Love is the

embodiment of this dream cinematography. Normal Love, too, consists of nothing but rushes, nothing but “certain gorgeous color rouged subjective images and a couple of marvelous fantasticated, Etruscated ruined sets.” The film is hilariously overpopulated with pinheads, maidens, goblins, satyrs, zombies, genii, vampires, and the like, the pacing as languid as a neoclassical painting, however pierced with slapstick activity. As with all pastoral iconography, the logic is that of tableau rather than event. Smith further exacerbated the dilatory quality of pastoral time in the elaborate preparational processes that went into the shooting. Whole days were spent making up the actors, in direct opposition to the passion for the unadorned beauty of Nature that masks the counterfeit nature of the pastoral, but in line with the Parisian instinct to refer to a luxurious, man-made shopping district as an Elysian Field. Smith’s artificial version of pastoral beauty increases its strangeness, emphasizes its occult glamour, and anachronistically fulfills Baudelaire’s 1863 tract in support of makeup, “so stupidly anathematized by our Arcadian philosophers.” Woman is quite within her rights, indeed she is even accomplishing a kind of duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored. Thus she has to lay all the arts under contribution for the means of lifting herself above Nature, the better to conquer hearts and rivet attention. It matters but little that the artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their affect always irresistible.7 In further violation of Pastoral rules through their excessive fulfillment, Smith’s counterfeiting extended to converting the natural scenery to artifice: “[I]f the cows were the wrong color, he painted them; if the trees were to green, he sprayed them.”8 The processes of making up the artists and making up (that is, counterfeiting) the scenery became inextricable as the grass became Page 26 → littered with hair and glitter.9 Through the counterfeit of pastoral, the figures and the scenery became inextricably collaged, that is, coagulated into a single heterogeneous counterfeit fabric, an artificial membrane. Smith described it as “pink extravagance.”10 Thus the fluid, extravagant, renovating stuff of Art moves across the boundaries of individuals, materials, media, temporalities. As Billy Name said, “Jack oozed his aesthetic,”11 with the word ooze evoking both a sticky, contaminating, semi-fluid substance and its uncannily attenuated, creeping motion. Jack oozes aesthetic as Maria Montez sheds decaying flesh, the cameraman tears. This is how Art is made in the necropastoral. Normal Love convulses the pastoral paradigm by fulfilling it to and beyond its limits, à Outrance, emphasizing its excess and its artifice, its man-made and occultly anachronistic qualities, an anachronism comprising both speed and dilation, remove and infection, in which the boundaries of the film itself dissolve to include process, preparation, and an afterlife of mutation, a spasming afterlife, an unnameability. The film Normal Love itself, to the extent that there may be said to be a “film itself,” is a concatenation of exhilarating, fitful, dilated, and sumptuously, peculiarly pastoral footage, a rush of rushes, indicating pastoral remove in its dramatis personae of fauns, satyrs, mermaids, maidens of various and indistinct genders, all fancifully and semiclassically bedecked in drapes and veils, and also in its confected color scheme of hyperfloral pink and hypervernal green. The exaggeration and febrility of the figures, the colors, and the landscape suggest inflammation, illness, both approaching Death and suspension in a would-be “timeless” plane, a cinematic Elysium into which les incroyables have crossed, along with their Plague. The Plague of Anachronism: A Necropastoral As a second case study for the necropastoral, its occult anachronism and media effects, I would like to present Andy Warhol, necromancer and fraud. Reversing the logic of Smith’s emptied rushes, Warhol made images appear out of nowhere, that is, made images of the subterranean—Underground—come into cultural visibility in media. His time-bending movies, such as the twenty-five-hour **** affected moviegoers variously, rendering Page 27 → them, like Art’s victims in German Expressionist films, entranced, asleep, or somnambulant, denaturing their participation in chronology, that is, in a conventional, mutually compatible social time. In his own account of the single screening of ****, he describes this chronological deformation while scrambling for a temporal vantage of his own.

Some people stayed through the entire screening, some drifted in and out, some were asleep out in the lobby, some were asleep in their seats, and some were like me, they couldn’t take their eyes off the screen for a single second. The strange thing was, this was the first time I was seeing it all myself—we’d just come straight to the theater with all the reels. I knew we’d never screen it in this long way again, so it was like life, our lives, flashing in front of us—it would just go by once and we’d never see it again. The next day the Cinemathèque began showing a two-hour version of the twenty-five hour movie and that was it—most of the reels went into storage, and from then on we began to think mainly about ideas for feature-length movies that regular theaters would want to show.12 This parable locates Warhol among a range of creatures bewitched by the film, like the deindividuated, pluralized “extras” slumped on the Claes Oldenburg birthday cake in Jack Smith’s Normal Love (of which he, Warhol, was one). He doesn’t use the first person but describes himself as part of “some” who are “like me,” for “they couldn’t take their eyes off the screen for a single second.” The singularity of the artist-as-author is undone by the specter of Art itself; he is now among Art’s enchanted victims, languorous Youths in Arcadia. In describing film as being “like life, our lives, flashing in front of us—it would just go by once and we’d never see it again,” Warhol locates this moment of spectation at the moment of Death—a Death that is, impossibly, survived, rendering the viewer posthumous, supernatural. After all, he, in saying “our lives, flashing in front of us,” he approximates the phrase those who have escaped death routinely use to describe their final visions—“my whole life flashed before my eyes.” Yet when Warhol receives this singular vision granted Page 28 → to individuals in the singular event of near Death, his vision is plural—“our lives, flashing in front of us”—as if even the privacy of this final moment is crowded with multiple versions “like me,” a cohort of ghostly Others. The second paragraph of the quote attests to just what kind of obsolescence and Death is imagined—the obsolescence of an impossible medium, a twenty-five-hour movie cut down in its prime to “a two-hour version,” the long version relegated to storage shelves like ashes in a crypt. Thus, paradoxically, the twenty-five-hour film also takes place in an instant, the instant of the Death of the film-as-medium, and the underground-film-as-genre: “we’d never see it again.” Just as Jack Smith disappeared into a glamour of a continuously mutating film from which he never emerged, Warhol’s loss of his own life is collapsed into the Death of both the medium and the genre it captured. This is another way to interpret the plural of “our lives”—as the life of artist, Art, and art form—in a single, twenty-five-hour instant, a paradoxically eternal and extinguished “rush.” Media, for Warhol, are thus not a vector for permanence but an index of impermanence and a generator of difference, anachronism, and that anachronism par excellence, posthumousness, an Underground state, a necropastoral. This was as true of Warhol’s multiples as it was of his monumental films. Speaking of the inception of the silk-screen process, Warhol marvels: That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple—quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. . . . [W]hen Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face—the first Marilyns.13 The afterlife of media promises only permanent impermanence: “the same image, slightly different each time,” a stuttering Arcadia. This miasmic afterlife of sameness and difference is stimulated by technology, “quick and chancy,” an interference that produces a Mesmeric “thrill” in Warhol. Death also behaves like a quick and chancy Art technology; Monroe “happened to die.” Where silk screening transfers affect as a “thrill” to Warhol, Monroe’s death transfers to Warhol the “idea” to “make screens Page 29 → of her beautiful face—the first Marilyns.” As with the screening of ****, these copies claim a priority, a firstness. They, not the mortal Monroe, are “the first Marilyns,” their priority temporally marked, yet disqualified as “an original” by their plurality.

Andy Warhol, Angel of History Warhol characterizes his participation in Art making as being nearly without agency, possessed by a “thrill” or an “idea,” authored by the twin, chancy technologies of silk screening or Death. “Pop comes from the outside”;14 the

artist, possessed by media, becomes another medium in a fluxing, necrotic, necromantic, anachronistic field of media. “I picked up a new attitude toward the medium from you,” he scripts an interlocutor as saying in Popism: The Warhol Sixties, “not being selective, just letting everything in at once.”15 In Benjamin’s much discussed parable of the Angel of History, the Angel is similarly paralyzed, his face to the past, in which “he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”16 Meanwhile, from Paradise (prehistory?) blows a storm, which besets his wings with “such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” Puzzling over the physics of this image, it’s easy to overlook the fact that the image is doubly ekphrastic, framed by both an epigraph from a poem, Scholem’s “Gross vom Angelus,” and a description of a Klee painting, Angelus Novus. Benjamin’s parable of paralysis and saturation, by both a vision of wreckage and an irresistible flow of violence, is thus itself doubly saturated with media. His Angel of History retroactively overwhelms and saturates the two other Art pieces, just as those artworks impel, permeate, and script Benjamin’s parable. Read this way, the parable seems to spasm with saturating forces; it seems to enfigure mediumicity, saturation, violence, and paralysis. The Angel, itself a medium, a would-be vehicle for God’s agency, is instead evacuated of agency and beset, paralyzed, and saturated with Page 30 → other media, including Art, writing, the medium of violence, and the medium of sight itself. Two Parables Infused with the Parable of the Angel of History 1. Andy Warhol as an Ill Child, in bed with a ventriloquist’s dummy I had three nervous breakdowns when I was a child, spaced a year apart. One when I was eight, one at nine, and one at ten. The attacks—St. Vitus Dance—always started on the first day of summer vacation. I don’t know what this meant. I would spend all summer listening to the radio and lying in bed with my Charlie McCarthy doll and my un-cut-out paper dolls all over the spread and under the pillow. . . . My mother would read to me in her thick Czechoslovakian accent as best she could and I would always say “Thanks, Mom,” after she finished with Dick Tracy, even if I hadn’t understood a word. She’d give me a Hershey Bar every time I finished a page in my coloring book.17 2. Andy Warhol at the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens The thing I most of all remember about the World’s Fair was sitting in a car with the sound coming from speakers behind me. As I sat there hearing the words rush past me from behind, I got the same sensation I always got when I gave an interview—that the words weren’t coming out of me, that they were coming from someplace else, someplace behind me.18 In both of these poems—I mean tableaux—we see Benjamin’s Angel of History reworked around an absolutely unheroic, paralyzed male figure. In the first, the child Warhol is three times possessed by an illness that is itself figured as a kind of possession—Saint Vitus’s dance—which plunges him into a syncope, a removal into timeless, that is, a temporally saturated, seized, anachronistic space, an aperture in temporality that is somehow the same every summer. In this state he is beset, Page 31 → like the Angel of History, with media—the radio, Charlie McCarthy (a celebrity radio ventriloquist’s dummy, itself a paradoxical mash-up of visibility and invisibility, sonority and silence, agency and nonagency, a mise-en-abîmeof media within media), uncut paper dolls (ditto), a mother reading a comic strip (another medium for media), Hershey Bars. Saturated with media to the point of immobility, he is also saturated with proper nouns (Saint Vitus, Charlie McCarthy, Czechoslovakian, Mom, Dick Tracy, Hershey Bar) just as he would become a medium for brands and celebrity in his adult life. Finally, he is saturated with incomprehensibility—he doesn’t understand his illness, he doesn’t understand his mother’s words. Unlike Benjamin’s Angel, his saturation is such that he cannot advance into the future but is possessed by a repeating and durational anachronistic present, a kind of Arcadia as anachronism, glutted with nonadvancing time, with media, and with disease. In the second anecdote, we see a spatiality and a saturation that more closely approximates—that is, both

resembles and departs from—that is, convulses—Benjamin’s Angel. Here Warhol sits facing the World’s Fair, a kind of scaled mockup of the present tense, fitted with the present tense’s kitsch versions of the past and the future. This mocked up heap is before Warhol, while from behind him comes a stream of words, which are “the sound,” pure material, nonsemantic, nonexpressive, issuing not from a person or voice or body but from the car’s body, from its “speakers.” Just as Pop comes from the outside, so words, traditionally associated with interiority, personhood, communication, expression, come from the outside, from media, and rush past one. This is even true in that would-be paradigm of interpersonal access, the interview; even in an interview, one’s own words come from someplace else, like and as Pop. This stream of sound doesn’t propel one into the future, as in Benjamin’s model, but is coming from “behind” one, that is, principally, from “the speakers,” from the outside, from media, from technology, from the present as it edges into future yet floods back to reconnect with the heap of the present, with the World’s Fair. The present wants to become saturated with more of itself. It wants to supersaturate. The Angel Warhol is paralyzed and saturated Page 32 → and situated within the vehicle of the present, within the spasming, mutating, supersaturated, medial, anachronistic body of the present tense. He is the Angel of Anachronism.

The Posthumous Future This is not to say that Warhol had no notion of a future, but it was a future that could not be inscribed in any kind of continuity or “progress.” Instead, famously, the future is a kind of medium: “In the future, everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” That is, a future is not a sequential succession of instants but a medium generating nonidentical versions of itself, present tenses, like Smith’s “rushes,” in which the instant is barely distinguishable from its terminus, a future marked by elapsation, by a series of expiration dates. In August ’62 I started doing silkscreens. The rubber-stamp method I’d been using to repeat images suddenly seemed too homemade; I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly-line effect. . . . With silk screening,] you get the same image, slightly different every time.19 When Warhol says “the same image, slightly different every time,” he imagines a version of time that consists of nonidentical present tenses, made of Art. The present tense is a medium, producing slightly different (counterfeit) copies of itself. Art is a medium for the anachronistic force of the present tense. Art is a wound shedding anachronism. Art is a wound shedding difference. Nonsingularity, nonidentity, multiplication, indexed against money (faces of the dead): Eighty-Two Dollar Bills. 192 One-Dollar Bills. 200 Dollar Bills. 8 Elvises. Thirteen Most Wanted Men. Double Mona Lisa. Four Mona Lisas. Twelve Cadillacs. Two Hundred Campbell’s Soup Cans. One Hundred Cans. Five Coke Bottles. 210 CocaCola Bottles. Double Liz. Ten Lizes. White Car Crash Nineteen Times. Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times. Green Disaster Ten Times. Page 33 → Five Deaths on Red. Five Deaths on Orange. Five Deaths Seventeen Times in Black and White. The Six Marilyns (Marilyn Six Pack). Marilyn Dyptich. Marilyn × 100. Thirty Are Better Than One. Sixteen Jackies. Jackie (The Week That Was)

Yi Sang’s Posthumous Youth Warhol and Smith construct elaborate mixed-media versions of Arcadia that become uncertainly continuous with the present tense, running before and behind conventional chronology to propose an alternate stratum of permanent posthumousity; they render a present tense that is always elapsing and going elsewhere because it is made out of media, materials that want to be overrun and oversaturated with something else. The grass can glitter; the cows wear spray paint; posthumousity precedes Death or may be impossibly synchronized with Youth. This last anachronicity, the synonymity of posthumousness and Youth, goes back to the Romans at least; male babies born after the Death of their fathers were given the name “Postumus,” living always as a kind of ghost as a punishment (or compensation?) for this short-circuiting of time. The glamour of the posthumous was not lost on Warhol: “I started those [pictures of Elizabeth Taylor] a long time ago, when she was so sick and everybody said she was going to die. Now I’m doing them over, putting bright colors on her lips and eyes.”20 The “bright colors on her lips and eyes” are more than just decoration but indicate consecration, the occult glamour of a Death outlived, a living superstar who is immortal because she is posthumous. Literary canons are full of such young, dead superstars, and their work often reflects an uncanny preoccupation with the fluctuations of value: body, language, and money are all leveraged against each other and against the arrival or withdrawal of Death herself. A prominent twentieth-century exemplar of this phenomenon is the Korean Modernist Yi Sang (1910–37). Yi Sang’s life is his afterlife, characterized by the instable formula Page 34 → of brevity and permanence that we have called posthumousity. Like Keats, his life was lived in the incandescent moment of its termination. The scholar and translator Walter J. Kew encapsulates Yi Sang’s typically twentiethcentury term on earth this way: “Born in the year of Japan’s annexation of Korea, Yi Sang was arrested as a futei Senjin (unlawful Korean) during his one sojourn in Tokyo,” dying months later.21 Yi Sang’s crime was an occult one: he encoded numerological puns into a text published in an official Japanese publication, numbers that themselves encoded sexual epithets and terminology, interpreted as being directed at the occupying power.22 In this most infamous of acts, then, Yi Sang was trafficking in the bad money of Art, Art as cash with an unstable relationship with the hoard of meanings, meanings that can be counted on to inflate and deflate, explode and evacuate the body of Art. Yi Sang’s imprisonment and death may be viewed as a payment extracted for Art’s profligacy and exorbitance. Yi Sang’s life can be seen as already posthumous; he was, like Brock’s shell-shocked soldiers, dislocated from both Time and Space, first as a Korean subject of the Japanese Occupation and then as a child who was sent away from his parents and fostered in the home of a childless firstborn uncle according to the patrilineal system.23 Rather than compensating for this double dispossession with heroic fantasies, the antihero Yi Sang sought to move into the Stygian coordinates of his nonexistence, writing of himself as a “vagrant who had slipped into the cracks between centuries with the sole intent of collapsing there.”24 This profligacy, the ravishing exorbitance of such dispossession, is well emblematized in the rushing-ahead, failure-struck, “immobile verrition” of his early poem “Flowering Tree.” Dead center of an open field there is a flowering tree. In the neighborhood not even one That flowering tree with as much ardor as it thought about its thought-about tree opened ardently its blossoms and stood It cannot go to the tree it thinks about Wildly I fled For the sake of one flowering tree I really went that far to make such uncommon mimicry.25 Here translator and scholar Walter K. Lew gamely approximates Yi Sang’s habitual noncompliance with the regulatory pressures Page 35 → of syntax, punctuation, and typography. The image of the tree is presented in statement one, erased with an accountant’s precision in statement two (“not even one”). Yet the there-not-there quality of the tree is already suggested by its location in the center of Death, the “dead center,” that most exact of locations. The missing period after the second statement destabilizes the assertion and speeds us headlong into the next statement, with the wildly thrown pronoun “That,” the eddying of thought (“as it thought about its thoughtabout tree”), which seems to produce the blossoming. Yet “It cannot go to the tree it thinks about.” The tree is ardent and immobile. The speaker appears in the act of trying to erase himself or flee from the poem; he cannot; he is already charged with the tree’s ardency, which continually pushes him “that far” into Art’s mimicry, à Outrance. Yi Sang is claiming for his Art the relationship of cashlike “mimicry” rather than originary value. He

witnesses Art at its “dead center” and carries the contamination of its ardency and bloom outward, in flight, scattering “uncommon” forgeries through the frighteningly unmarked void. The period reasserts itself at the end of the poem, fatalistically, giving the short poem the feel of an epitaph. The always indebted Yi Sang continually practices this convulsive accounting in his work. Frequently, a collapse of time or numerals or punctuation or syntax entails the smashing or collapsing of the body, which delivers the poem not to inertness but into a superfraught state of incipient kineticism, suspension, like Césaire’s “immobile verrition.” In “Poem No. 11” from Crow’s Eye View: The porcelain cup resembles my skull. As I grasped the cup in my hand, from my arm, a new arm like a grafted limb unexpectedly sprouted, grabbed the cup and shattered it against the floor. Since my arm is still holding on for dear life to the porcelain cup, those shattered pieces must be my skull which resembles the porcelain cup. Had I moved my arm before the grafted limb snaked back inside, the blank sheet of paper that holds back the flood would have been torn. But my arm still desperately clings to the porcelain cup.26 In this prose poem, as with Andy Warhol’s use of the word like, resemblance is a powerful agent. Like the hand that grasps the Page 36 → cup, resemblance itself conducts a current; it overperforms; it causes the body to warp and distend, sprout a new limb, shatter the cup. Then resemblance inverts and doubles back again, literalizing the comparison it was meant to hold apart: “those shattered pieces must be my skull.” The skull is shattered, but the eventfulness of the poem will not cease. Instead, the counterfactual and factual are held together in syntax as resemblance runs haywire. The poem is the porcelain cup, held at arm’s length, shattered yet suspended, clinging to the page, which is white like the cracked skull, like the shattered cup. Yet these various substitutes continue to oscillate. Behind the seemingly orderly progression of syntax, “As I,” “Since my,” “Had I,” a quite frightening and illimitable surge of substitutions, oversaturations, and breakings apart is sustained and endured by the poem. Yet the poem does not, finally, die, or arrive at finality. It cannot exit its system. By the last line, the poem is poised to begin again, to endure a new spasm of violence; violence is a current that both shatters and holds “still.” The poem cannot let go of itself or take its hand off the current of its own urgency. It lives out the sentence of posthumous existence, the sticky event of shattering, the shatters that cannot be removed from the system but cause the tissue of poetry to bulge and grow strange around them. False and sick limbs, doll brides, paper tombstones, and other occult deficiencies/surpluses populate Yi Sang’s work; his writing is often a duplicitous entity that plays dead only to reanimate. Poetry is an automaton built like Death, and it performs Death’s dance steps. In “Poem No. 10,” “If, by closing a passage with my palm, I were to die, the butterfly, as if rising from a seat, would fly away. These words must never be allowed to slip out.”27 In this passage, the fate of “words,” as of the “blank page” in “Poem No. 11,” is wrapped up in conditionals, ifclauses, subjunctives; they can be written and unwritten and written backward, like mortality itself, a youth lived permanently, posthumously. Powerfully, Yi Sang’s wife also performs the role of Death, also known as Life; in the erratic, farcelike economy of Yi Sang’s afterlife, she always comes back; she is faithless, yet comes back. This forms the sequence “Paper Tombstone.” Page 37 → When I am in complete despair, thinking that today is the day she may not return, she comes home like an apparition, a face wearing makeup but no expression. When I ask about her day, she tells me everything. Then, not as her husband but as a man, I promptly make an entry into my wife’s diary, a record of what I assume she might do to deceive me.28 Here the speaker’s ledger keeping is slightly out of sync with Death’s arrival and departure. Deception is tagged in the future tense, what she “might do,” although, with the wife’s elaborate makeup and confession, we can also assume it has already happened. The diary, like Césaire’s notebook, occupies a fluctuating relationship with time; if Césaire’s notebook is an attempt to force a rupture with time, the arrival of revolutionary time, Yi Sang’s is the record of the posthumous time Art must endure, and adorn, or fund, its reversible events, its elapsed erasures. In

“Poem No. 1, “Thirteen children are running down a road. / (A dead-end road is acceptable).” In ironic contrast to its apparent account of trapped and frightened children, the poem proceeds as an orderly system of counting and accounting; one by one the children admit they are scared, admit they are not scared, are added, counted, and recounted, all with the flat tonality of a ledger or a game. The final stanza concludes (A through road is acceptable) To say there aren’t thirteen children running down a road is acceptable.29 This is a sharp reversal of the poem’s opening premises. The poem lifts a white mask over its already flattened face, as if a thick piece of white paper were suddenly folded across itself. Having been herded through the dead ends and enjambed lanes of the poem, the children suddenly disappear from its precincts—or, rather, they are disappeared. The passive form of that verb conceals a tide of violence. This whiteness is not oblivion but agential, pulsing, eviscerating violence. The children are not delivered into the oblivion of Death but sentenced to its bureaucratic infinity, the endless accounting that can always be struck out and begun again, reendured, reencountered. Page 38 → A dandy in life, the scenes, sets, and costumes of Yi Sang’s posthumousity are exorbitant and require a scrupulous, irrational accounting, a magic accounting, which in turn has its own occult effects. The link between occultism and the Dandy may be seen in Baudelaire’s prescriptive definition. According to Baudelaire, the Dandy, like the Jesuit, lives perinde ac cadavre, “in the manner of a corpse,” moving both inside and outside of mortal concerns. The Dandy is interested in appearances, but this creates an uncertain occult economy between appearance and that which it conceals; specifically, the Dandy may conceal a biting fox—an evisceration!—under the double disguise of his smile and his cloak. This ambiguous relationship between “appearances” and the uncertain status of the concealed matter underneath extends to his financial affairs: “[T]he dandy does not aspire to wealth as an object in itself; an open bank credit could suit him just as well; he leaves that squalid passion to vulgar mortals.”30 Credit, the illusion, specter, or apparition of wealth, suits him just as well as gold would; credit is a kind of suit, or mask, like a smile or a cloak; it both conceals and provides a link to the uncertain quality of vitality or fatality or pain it stands it for; it traffics in the world like a specter or a corpse. Moreover, it is in connection to “wealth” that Baudelaire articulates the Dandy’s anachronous posthumousity, for if the Dandy wishes to separate himself from the “vulgar,” he also wishes to maintain a separate self from “mortals.” He does this through the magic accounting of clothing, credit, poses, signs. In life as in death, Yi Sang was a committed dandy. He wore only white, operated a series of cafés as uncomfortable as they were glamorous, each of which went under, and was supported by a prostitute wife who often returned to nurse him through his ailments.31 His life, riven by ghost accounting, magic numbers, reversals, the refusal of mortal hospitality in favor of a ghost hospitality, was nearly posthumous until it became exactly posthumous. As Yi Sang’s continuously opening, resembling, reversing, shattering, and suspended poems suggest, there are some lives for which Art’s counterfeit, its occult generation of suddenly deflating or inverting illusions and appearances, is the only possible accounting. Page 39 → Notes 1. This comment can be found at various locations on the Internet. Specifically, see Guy Crucianelli, “The Straightest of Rock Bios: Seeing the Light Inside the Velvet Underground,” Pop Matters, June 7, 2012, http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/159282-seeing-the-light-in-side-the-velvet-underground-by-robjovanovic/. 2. Jack Smith, “Grant Application (September 14, 1982),” in Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith, ed. J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell (New York: High Risk Books, 1997), 145–47.

3. Stephen Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 102. 4. Ibid., 184. 5. Jack Smith, Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith (New York: High Risk Books, 1997), 38. 6. Ibid., 39. 7. Charles Baudelaire, “In Praise of Cosmetics,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 2010), 33–34. 8. Watson, Factory Made, 102. 9. Ibid., 100. 10. Ibid., 101. 11. Ibid., 102. 12. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 317–18. 13. Ibid., 28. 14. Ibid., 61. 15. Ibid., 20. 16. Walter Benjamin, quoted everywhere, including Marxists.org, http://www.marxists.org/reference /archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm. 17. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 21–22. 18. Warhol and Hackett, Popism, 91. 19. Ibid., 22. 20. Andy Warhol, quoted on the Warhol Foundation website, http://www.warhol.org/webcalendar /event.aspx?id=2807. 21. Walter K. Lew, “Portfolio: Yi Sang,” Muae: A Journal of Transcultural Production 1 (April 1995): 71. 22. For this information I am indebted to the poet Don Mee Choi. 23. Myong-Hee Kim, “Introduction,” in Yi Sang, Crow’s Eye View: The Page 40 → Infamy of Lee Sang, Korean Poet, selected and trans. Myong-Hee Kim (Washington, DC: The Word Works, International Editions, 2002). The name Yi Sang is sometimes transliterated as Lee Sang (16–17). 24. Yi Sang, quoted in Lew, “Portfolio,” 78. 25. Ibid., 87. 26. Yi Sang, Crow’s Eye View: The Infamy of Lee Sang, Korean Poet, selected and trans. Myong-Hee Kim (Washington, DC: The Word Works, International Editions, 2002), 39. 27. Ibid., 38. 28. Yi Sang, “Paper Tombstone 1,” in Crow’s Eye View, 70. 29. Yi Sang, “Poem No. 1,” in Crow’s Eye View, 27–28. 30. Charles Baudelaire, “The Dandy,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 2010), 26–30. 31. For this information about Yi Sang’s life I am indebted to the poet Don Mee Choi.

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Bug Time Chitinous Necropastoral Hypertime against the Future Invocation: “I am more powerful than a president. I am a charmed and desperate poet speaking to everyone.” —Alice Notley, Culture of One1 1. A prescient book, prophetic like an ancient Greek oracle who, drugged on her tripod, could only look backward: Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan. Here Brett L. Walker introduces the notion that insects live on different time scales than humans—“high speed evolutionary time,” defined by mutation, selection, evolution. Given that the Japanese “rice hopper,” for example, enjoys a life-span of fifty days and between 2 and 6 generations in a single human year, at least 150 generations of “hoppers” elapse during an average Japanese person’s lifetime.2 “Plus, there are millions more insects than us, which means that mutations—say, a serendipitous (for the insect) genetic resistance to a chemical insecticide or other anthropogenic force—are far more likely to occur.”3 2. What model of literary time is provided by this mutating field time, this bug time, this spasming, chemically induced, methed-up, mutating Death time, this model of proliferant, buggered, buggy, moist, mutating, selecting, chitinous, gooey, bloated, dying time, a time defined by a spasming change of forms, by generational die-offs, by mutation, by poisoning, a dynamic challenge to continuity, and by sheer proliferation of alternatives, rather than linear succession? How would T. S. Eliot’s golden lineup of genius all-stars, constantly reordering itself but Page 42 → still male—and human—and capital—assets—shaped, be affected by this swarm of ravening pissed-off mutant bugs out-futuring them by dying six times a summer, by having no human-shaped future at all? 3. This flexing, Death-defined, mutating anachronistic field-time may be called the necropastoral. The necropastoral does not in fact depend on classically pastoral settings. As any resident of New York will tell you, bugs are perfectly capable of shitting generations of themselves, of shitting explosive non- or multi-linear or mutant-time, in an apartment block. Instead, my term “necropastoral” is a reworking of classical notions of the separation of the rural and the urban, the idyllic and the worldly. Instead, I acknowledge that the most famous celebrity resident of Arcadia is Death; my necropastoral suggests that there is no wall between “nature” and “manmade” but only a membrane, that each element can bore through this membrane to spread its poisons, its Death to the other. 4. Moreover, as with the example of the Japanese hopper, this sped-up enviolenced spasming selecting mutating necropastoral bug time is the shit of historical time itself—a result of anthropogenic influence, industrial poisons, insecticides, land reclamation, etc. 5. Historical time—imperial time—corporate time—each of these linear time scales promotes the illusion of its own soundness, its own linearity, its own stability, its own economy, each of which claims to be always moving forward toward a more profitable, abundant future—in fact these linear, future-oriented time scales shit poison, mutation, anachronism, a flexing and inconstant and wasteful evolutionary time that produces more bodies, more mutations than it needs. Death shits evolution. Evolution is its waste product. 6. I think so-called progressives and innovators need to think carefully about how their ideologies of experimentation, innovation, newness, progress, and improvement remap or offer support to these ideologies of capitalist, corporate, historical, patrilinear time. The true experimenters, it seems to me, are the bugs that fail, that die 6 times a summer, 450 times in a normal human life, that are mutant and nondurable, that are the repositories of anthropogenic forces. Walker notes: Page 43 →

There really are what we can safely call “Japanese insects,” because their evolution has been, at least in part, driven by Japanese politics, society and culture. That is, . . . [the] Japanese have inscribed their history on the bodies—on the very genetic predisposition—of these buzzing beings.4 But I would draw a different conclusion—or make a different proposition—than Walker does. If the Japanese—or any people on earth—have written their history on these chitinous bugbodies, the mutations, the hyperdeath, the evolution and failed evolution of these bodies (since evolution is wasteful and must deal out many more “unfit” than fit models) write an antihistory, a nonhistory of failed adaptation and spectral, miraculous, nonfunctional mutation, something winking and winged, chirping and failing in the dark. What genres are these body-writings? What forms? What motions? What processes? What anachronisms! 7. I would like to make a connection now between the spectacular expenditure, the field of nonlinear waste-time that is bug-life and the economic/aesthetic theories of Georges Bataille. In his “The Notion of Expenditure,” Bataille sets the “principle of loss,” of “unconditional expenditure,” against “the economic principle of balanced accounts,” which is the mask under which so-called proper society runs its shell game, its depredations. Bataille divides society into two parts. The first . . . is represented by the use of the minimum necessary for the conservation of life and the continuation of individuals’ productive activity in a given society. . . . The second part is represented by the so-called unproductive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e. deflected by its genital finality). . . . It is necessary to preserve the word “expenditure” for these unproductive forms.5 In fact, if the latest economic machinations of Wall Street and their like worldwide make anything apparent, it’s that vast expenditures, wastes, and depredations underwrite the so-called economic, rational, linear thinking of rational man, that traders Page 44 → were blindly investing other people’s money in trades they didn’t even understand, that computer programs were crashing economies, that the so-called “continuation of the individuals productive activity” is actually massive expenditure and that the damage and the strafing are of course erratically distributed, written on our bodies as surely as capitalistic and nationalistic prerogatives were written on the bodies of mutating rice hoppers. So what kind of bug-life are we enjoying? What kind of genres are produced by our damaged mitochondria, our hyperdeath cycles? What kind of transcription errors? What kind of mutant forms? 8. With Bataille and bugs as my model, I reject the so-called economy of corporate time, capitalist time, so-called “linear” time, triumphalist time, which is a golden lie anyway, and instead I recognize this tide of shit and waste, I recognize that that is where I live, if I live, on bug time, on bug time; in Indiana, in the necropastoral; I have no interest in myths of posterity, in a secured future, in the supposed future of literature or humans or anything else; the way I’m writing now is disposable; in disposable media and unsturdy genres; but it’s the most important thing in my millisecond life; that’s why I want to wear my grave clothes now, ceremental, distressed, and yes, bugeaten, moths in my hair, Miss Death-in-life, like PJ Harvey in her Mercury clothes, mercury poisoned, one part Miss Havisham, one part Gregor Samsa, with chitinous extensions shoving out from her brain through her cranium, her dura mater (tough mother), her pia mater (little mother), her arachnoid mater (spider mother). Stabat, mater, my black pincers stabbed you in the eye, and now I’ll plant my eggs there, time flowing backward, you carry the eggs again for me. My eyesight has been going for a long time, and now my hearing is going, I wear vinyl in my eyes and poisonous metals and plastic in my ears, I eat men like air, I make no sense, my senses are compounded now like debt. I open up my sweater to the air, I open up my rib cage to bugtime; I always already. All time is past time; you don’t get a choice, you’re being poisoned too, experimented on, you and me and your kids and my twin. I hold metals in my palm that I know are toxic, I hold them in my ear, I talk into them, and so do my kids. And they talk back, my metals. They lace a riddle into my Page 45 → bones, my matter, my brain. They cross my dura mater, my tough mother. They feedback, like a bugged telephone. Like a bug. 10. In the contemporary Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s poem “The Road to Kimp’o Landfill,” the speaker is like a bug with hair for a chitinous exoskeleton, attempting to refuse “the names etched onto my hair that grows daily.” But this waste environment cannot be shed—it is everywhere, around and in the speaker’s body.

Hair fell profusely I kissed in a place where garbage came down like rain I kissed where I vomited all night long Every time I sang vomit flew in I turned the garbage bins upside down in my room and had morning sickness, then had a smoke My poetry books burned Three hundred million babies were born One hundred million of the young and old died6 In this spasming apartment/compartment of profusion and limitation, hair/garbage/chitin comes down like rain, song flies out of the poet’s mouth and vomit flies in, exudation and inundation form the logic of this planet. Poison is always gathered back to the bug-poet herself, what leaves her voice as art-song regathers in her mouth as vomit, in her room as garbage. Her poetry books are destroyed, and a hypergeneration of “babies” is flung outward and collapses back as another hypergeneration of dead. This pattern of outward flinging and collapse continues: “black plastic bags flew higher than a flock of sparrows,” “A busboy at the brightlit lit Motel Rose / threw out a millions of sperm every night.” Finally: From the forest, mosquitoes swarmed And dug into my scrawny caved-in chest. Born in the 20th century, I was on my way to die in the 21st century. 11. The speaker is invested, then animated by her infestation; she goes on bug time, succumbs to the black hair and the names etched there. The speaker is a corpse, with a caved-in, Page 46 → bug-infested chest, but it’s not the end of the story. In her own hypergeneration, she has a future: but not a humanist future. Instead of a vista of progress, the future is a funeral cortege, a black tunnel to die in. 12. Yet the bug time, the corpse time, the necropastoral also makes art: it animates a corpse. It makes the Rose cum. It animates a flock of black plastic bags that can fly higher than sparrows, vomit that flies like Song. The poem’s imagery is meticulously delivered, with none of the dry outlines of “craft”; it exhibits a fetishistic exactitude (which is also exacting), a hard, jewel-like clarity, beautiful and terrible. 13. So Walter Pater reorganizes capitalistic success around decadent brilliance in his famous maxim, “To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” Any suicidal moth would support that as its dusty dressing gown went up in flame. So would Miss Havisham, lighting up like her own hymen-parade, her own white bug-infested wedding slice. 14. As her body, its dress, and veil became united in a flexing, gyrating, necropastoral field, as her decayed flesh arrived at its decadence and fell away, as her matter became reanimated by active, insectoidal life, she would say: 15. Go for bug time. Shit silk.

Notes 1. Alice Notley, Culture of One (New York: Penguin, 2011), 18.

2. Brett L. Walker, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 69. 3. Ibid., 68. 4. Ibid., 70. 5. Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allen Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 118. 6. Kim Hyesoon, “The Road to Kimp’o Landfill,” trans. Don Mee Choi, in Mommy Must be a Fountain of Feathers (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2007), 15.

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Part 2 Leslie Scalapino CAConrad and Chelsey Minnis Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi Harryette Mullen Hannah Weiner Translation, the Filthiest Medium of All Page 48 →

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Publicity and Obscurity On Leslie Scalapino’s Dahlia’s Iris Publicity and obscurity for contemporary writers are not necessarily exterior to writing itself—that is, such things are but are not only a matter of marketing. Rather, publicity and obscurity are matters of genre and style, revenants and precedents present in the writing itself, captured in the text’s own dubious status as go-between, as medium. This is most certainly evident in Dahlia’s Iris: Secret Autobiography + Fiction, whose subtitle conveys the connection between genre and publicity with the peculiar conjoining of secret and autobiography, and also in the fact that the adjective secret appears to pertain to the more personal writing, autobiography, and not to the more public product, fiction. Secret doubles up the already personal quality of autobiography; secrecy is a surplus quality, a mysterious glyph, from the title right on through the book itself. Dahlia’s Iris, then, has genre trouble, and, resultingly, has publicity trouble. To see why this is so, let’s take two recent counterexamples that do not have publicity trouble. One is David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet; the other is Gary Shteyngart’s Supersad True Love Story. I have not read either of the books. I am merely looking at their publicity. David Mitchell was the subject of a long, praiseful feature in the New York Times Magazine entitled “David Mitchell, the Experimentalist,” in which he finally asserted that art is about people, it’s not about experimentation. . . . It’s the human mud, the glue between us and them, the universal periodic table of the human condition. It transcends.1 Page 50 → Here is an “experimentalist,” no, THE Experimentalist, who helpfully rejects “experimentation,” takes away the grit or surplus that term might propose in terms of style or genre or structure and replaces it with banal, and, importantly, large-scale, Enlightenmentisms. Such comments seek to ensure that the text being hocked here will supply no serious stylistic or generic impediments to its own publicity, providing transcendence rather than friction. Nothing in the surface or structure of the text will create obscurity. Meanwhile, Gary Shteyngart receives a glowing review of his new book by Michiko Kakutani, who notes that, despite the title’s play on generic excess with its “super”: This novel avoids the pretensions and grandiosity of Mr. Shteyngart’s last book, Absurdistan, even as it demonstrates a new emotional bandwidth and ratifies his emergence as one of his generation’s most original and exhilarating writers.2 Here, then, is “originality,” again without experimentation, at least in terms of Kakutani’s review. It avoids “pretension” and “grandiosity,” and it is firmly secured to “emotional bandwidth.” It does not allow pretension or grandiosity to draw it away from the humanistic schematic on which we are all apparently securely slotted, this time construed through the medium/commodity of “bandwidth” rather than the scientistic artifact/commodity of the periodic table. There is something about the genre and style in which both these writers write that allows for transcendence, demonstration, ratification. The books have themselves a constitutive publicness, a publicity, and they are rewarded with publicity. Dahlia’s Iris, on the other hand, has a kind of surplus, and it’s a surplus in the direction of secrecy, inwardness. That is to say, instead of a constitutive publicity, it has a constitutive obscurity.3 The work really cannot be paraphrased, because the paraphraseable part of it, the plot, amounts to (maybe—it’s difficult to disentangle this tissue from those into which it has grown) about 15 percent of the book. This fiction plot might even be called the “public” portion of the book, the part that, the subtitle tells us, is not “secret.” In this fiction, a group of San Francisco detectives investigates a series of murders, including a flayed Page 51 → dot-com industrialist and a string of young nonwhite boys found dead with computer jacks in the backs of their heads. If this plot were a plot, if its establishment, its detection, its solution formed the entire book, the book might have been paraphraseable. It

might have been demonstrable. It might have been transparent. It might have had publicity, and it might have even received publicity. But even this detective plot is defective, infected with obscurity—and only partially because of the style in which Scalapino writes. Scalapino’s habitual anacoluthon becomes the tool for an investigation that continually branches out, modifies and rephrases itself, cannot come to rest. The sentences seem to consciously resist conclusion—they will not draw conclusions—and a conclusion is the one thing a detective plot requires. A passage chosen at random from the “plot” portion of the book shows why this is true: “Flesh after suffering shock to it isn’t linked later. The instant of their separate beings—is feeling itself?”4 In the first sentence, that appendage “later” radically alters the proposition of the sentence, opening an aperture of retrospection on the current plot point from the future. The second sentence raises the question of chronology again, as the dash marks a veer off into speculation, capped with a question mark. Whatever these two sentences do, they don’t “describe” the events happening to characters around them. If they enact anything, it is the wonky fit of the present into the future and vice versa, the renovating power of the “instant” versus the present’s impossible malleability from the perspective of futurity, and the effect of such effects on the coincidence of flesh with flesh, being with being, and flesh with being. “Suffering shock” might entail the “instant” that joins separate entities while also entailing their separateness “later.” Such simultaneous juncture and split is not just related on the page, it is enacted in the syntax, it actually comes to pass—as Scalapino notes in a kind of foreword. Dahlia’s Iris is divided between perceiving and actions in a space—I ‘m trying to bring these together on one space (throughout), where thinking and one’s sensations would be (are) actions there too.5 Page 52 → But even this relatively clear statement harbors surplus and thus obscurity, this time set off in parentheticals that do not represent material to be ignored or excised but rather material that adds material, that modifies and multiplies the simultaneous conjectures of the sentence. It’s not just for stylistic or syntactic reasons, however, that Scalapino notes, “Dahlia’s Iris is a novel with interior streamers streaming off it.”6 This paradoxical statement, proposing that “interior streamers” might stream “off” (and thus are exterior to) a structure, evokes the impossibility of firmly delineating or demonstrating as extricable interiority and exteriority, an impossibility that constitutes the theme and structure of the book. The obscure zone comprising exterior and interior is inhabited most overtly in Scalapino’s repeated “contemplation” of the Tibetan Buddhist “written tradition of Secret Autobiography, which is not the chronological events of one’s life but one’s life seeing. I think the implication of their form is: one’s seeing is the instant of bringing one’s faculties into question.”7 One attempt at summarizing this book, then, would be to say that it inhabits the obscure zone comprising the exterior and interior, considers “where” the perceptual “events” of “secret autobiography” are supposed to take “place,” and delivers something marked as “secret autobiography” on the 215th page. However, though it is given precedence in the subtitle, this nonfictionalized contemplation of “secret autobiography” cannot really organize the rest of the material into its body, as the “plus” sign of the title suggests. The two genres are somehow surplus to each other, yet inextricable. The crime plot doesn’t (exactly) (only) allegorize or exemplify this aesthetic/philosophical thread, but it does seem to occupy some kind of urgent and occasionally overlapping adjacency. Footnotes occupy a similarly active zone. As Scalapino notes: The Footnotes, which are a past, future, present, are part of the main text. My statements of relation are not definitions, but simply motions: statements of relations are motions. LAYERS WERE ADDED TO IT; AND THE INTENTION IS TO SEE CHANGE INTRODUCED INTO THE WHOLE: NOT REPRODUCE MISTAKES WHILE BEING IN IT?8 Page 53 → Thus, footnotes do not maintain their hierarchized position as a substratum of the text. Even Scalapino’s helpful

authorial notes, which I have quoted here, are not given the usual authorial power over the “text”; instead they add motions—events—to the text. A note to her note suggests that they may be read before, during, or after the reading of the book itself. Every part of this text, including its adverbs, its footnotes, its notes and illustrations and phrases, introduces change and may modify the whole. On the structural, stylistic, and generic levels, Dahlia’s Iris resembles Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Body without Organs, helpfully excerpted from Anti-Oedipus in Wikipedia thusly. The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors.9 Dahlia’s Iris is like this but without the egg. Genre itself—defective detective plot, aesthetic/philosophical discourse, authorial notes, religious studies, ekphrasis, comics, film and literary analysis, western autobiography, and “secret autobiography”—permeate and permutate “the whole.” A body such as this, favoring change, “transitions,” and “becomings,” is permeable to everything except analysis, rationality, transparency, ratification, transcendence—permeable to everything except publicity. It might be said to replace rational assessment and accessibility with something else, a complex, globby, dehierarchized, obscure mediumicity. Finally, I would like to note that Dahlia’s Iris, for all its resistance to Enlightenment instruments, was enlightening for me as an artist and writer. It helped me to grasp that writing is Art, that a “novel” is as formally malleable as any other medium, that it need subscribe neither to traditional form nor to experimental formalism, that it is a medium for genre—that the novel is a medium, rather than a genre. Within this medium, a genre or plot may move and itself distend, and become a medium for distorting and distending further conventions that move through Page 54 → it, and so on, and so on. The result is a weird antibody of such peculiar density and such peculiar properties, a dark matter.

Notes 1. Wyatt Mason, “David Mitchell, the Experimentalist,” New York Times Magazine, June 25, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/magazine/27mitchell-t.html?pagewanted=4. 2. Michiko Kakutani, review of Supersad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart, New York Times, July 26, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/books/27book.html?ref=gary_shteyngart. 3. My notion of constitutive obscurity is drawn from Daniel Tiffany’s phenomenal book Infidel Poetics: Nightclubs, Riddles, Substance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 4. Leslie Scalapino, Dahlia’s Iris, Secret Autobiography + Fiction (Tuscaloosa, AL: Fiction Collective 2, 2003), 143. 5. Ibid., 15. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., unpaginated frontmatter. 9. “Body Without Organs.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_without_organs

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Art-trash On CAConrad and Chelsey Minnis

The epigraphs CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. —author’s bio, CAConrad, The Book of Frank This is a cut-down chandelier . . . And it is like coughing at the piano before you start playing a terrible waltz . . . The past should go away but it never does . . . And it is like a swimming pool at the bottom of the stairs . . . —opening page, Chelsey Minnis, Poemland What a trash To annihilate each decade. —Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus”

The argument As these epigraphs so clearly emblematize, Art is asphyxiation; annihilation; anachronism; inebriation; something “cut-down”; something shoplifted; like trash, it makes more of itself; like the past, it should go away but it never does. Like a cough, it doubles up or doubles down on terribleness. It preempts itself by making multiple knockoff versions of itself; it is never Page 56 → sufficient because it is always more than enough. Through perverse excess, Art trashes conventional value, reassigning it to odd and ill-made receptacles, which inevitably can’t hold; the chandelier is cut-down; asphyxiation has a baby; Art leaks and spills Art. Drunk on Art (which is to say, poisoned—) the Artist can’t hold its liquor (which is to say, Art). Not all the vats upon the Rhine / Yield such an alcohol!—ED. Art spends its money on the wrong things. Art spends it all. Art eats breakfast at Tiffany’s: eats the book: like starvelings, the star and starlet suck words rather than speak them with queer pretty prostitute mouths: which is to say, unconvincingly; the ching-chong landlord has buck teeth taped to his teeth. Art speaks in teeth and not words. Art eats conflict, does a violence to violence, wears conflict diamonds in its teetering wig. The starlet eats tulips from beneath the Nazi boots. Moon River. Queer, syrupy tune. Art goes hungry on reverse clock time, Art’s record played backward. The forehead of the exploited child splits, leaking Art. Moon River. Art is snaky like a trickle of blood down a child’s forehead or a Moon River: inside-out peristalsis: it makes something present that makes something else disappear; that is, value; that is, time; something that should go away but doesn’t; sticks around, deformed and denatured and contaminating; dark matter. Artists are the life forms that live in Art’s gut; Art sheds Artists contaminated with Art; Artists are host-beasts that carry Art’s germs through the biosphere, their front legs trotting, their back legs galloping. Shitting Art like dew or conflict diamonds. Inebriate of air am I, / And debauchee of dew, / Reeling, through endless summer days, / From inns of molten blue. Dickinson-Artist, this little tippler, drinks, as they say, to excess. She is never full, because there is a hole in her. But she is saturated, then supersaturated, she reels, she tilts. Time is denatured, that is, made hypernatural for her, summer supersaturated with itself, shits an endless titrate, inns of molten blue, which she also drinks and leaks. (In Poemland, “I’m so drunk I’m seeing toy bats . . .” [50].)

A cut-down chandelier What kind of mother is Art? What kind of child can it make for itself from trash, from shatters? Minnis’s poems form no body, not even a girl body. If you want to be a poem-writer then I don’t know why . . . It hurts like a puff sleeve dress on a child prostitute (15) In the first line, the “then” refuses to mate with the “If” to make a conventional conditional statement. “Then” doesn’t follow from the previous clause so much as reject it, blanks out into not knowing: “I don’t know why” which then (paradoxically) double-blanks itself out with an ellipsis. Like anorexia, it’s as if this thought cannot blank itself out enough and so inevitably underscores itself instead. Or like a cutter, scores itself, that is, scripts itself. So Minnis’s long poem exists in pieces, shreds and banners or snips that seem to poke up out of the skin of the page and want to subside into mystery but somehow only emphasize their long tails (the past should go away but it never does . . .). Every phrase is obsolete by the completion of its utterance, yet can’t leave the system. Unable to evacuate, it becomes a poison to the text (should go away but it never does . . .). Therefore it forms a modality that tends always toward Death. That’s how this four-line sequence ends. Nothing makes it very true . . . Except the promised sincerity of death! (15) Here the withdrawing ellipsis and the flourishing exclamation point have opposite but in both cases self-defeating (that is, self-killing) effects. The ellipsis wants to erase itself but overstates itself; the exclamation mark wants to voice sincerity but is so posed as to voice artifice. Both punctuation marks miss the mark. They overshoot the mark. They are divorced or sprained or autistic to the syntax of the lines, which is nearly autistic to itself, which is to say, inward directed, yet present in the world, unable to remove Page 58 → its symptoms from the world’s stage. A child prostitute’s puff sleeves, which hurt, but hurt what? (“It hurts”), making a parody of presence to mark absence, the location of absence both gestured at and covered up with the exaggeration of something else. There is no selfsame body beneath those puff sleeves, no arms to hurt. Only an “It” and a “likeness,” exploited by Art for its ability to be like something else. Or we could take this line to mean that writing poems is like wearing the painful dress of the child prostitute; out of date, wrong size for what you are pretending to be; exploited by some Other; that Other is Art. It’s worth noting here that the “I” arises in Minnis’s poem in order to mark the site of nonagency; like her exclamation point, which marks where sincerity is not, “I” marks the site where agency, thought, organized, individual consciousness is not. This emblematizes Art’s perverse way with valuation and devaluation. A line reads, “If you are not weak then I will start to feel like I have had enough of you . . .” (2). In this line, a quality (strength) is described by its double negative (not-weak). Minnis exploits her habitual conjectural “If/then,” a weak causality that can barely do its job; the “then” clause doesn’t attend to or follow on the “if” clause so much as reject it, drain away from it. Meanwhile the second clause, “I will start to feel like I have had enough of you,” itself has a seesaw motion of rising and falling, draining and accruing, a future starting out, “I will start to feel,” a past piling up, “enough of you,” and past and future mysteriously linked around the fulcrum of “like,” an inverse (perverse) likeness. “Enough” is indexed to so many drainings and accumulations and conditionals and negatives that it hardly feels like an absolute value or location. Especially as it, too, is now discarded as the sequence continues. But if you are weak . . . Then this is a poem because it squeezes you . . . It is a shimmer like flushing sequins down the toilet . . . (2) Here the first ellipsis suggests not silence as the absence of sound so much as a fullness of wordless gesture that

takes up the whole Page 59 → next line: an inarticulable masturbatory fantasy on the white tiled bathroom floor. The poem returns to reward “you” with a “Then,” which “squeezes you.” “It is a shimmer.” Art must exploit the world in order to articulate itself as a likeness, this time a likeness to “flushing sequins down the toilet.” Sequins instead of money; not something valuable, but something chintzy, decorative; trashing trash; Art’s redundant gesture; saturating the line with itself. Now the little ellipses turn optical, like sequins or a sequence making a spectacle of its trashing itself, flushing itself down the white porcelain toilet of the page, the readerly eye as a receptacle for the image, the hole in the toilet as the receptacle for the sequins, the hole of the page as a receptacle for the words, the world as the receptacle into which Art shits itself. Art says to its receptacle, “This is a chain for you, babe . . . / Babe, it goes around your throat . . .” (8). This is like someone who pawns your minks . . . And it is like a squandered money-gift . . . This is the magic syphilis! . . . There is no need for the truth . . . Like scythes that cut through prom gowns . . . (80) In Minnis’s Poemland, value is always something that empties itself out; the mink is pawned, the money-gift is squandered. Yet that trashing, that expenditure that makes a trinket of everything also makes an ornament of everything. “The magic syphilis! . . .” Art is overmarked, the amorous disease that trashes the body, reworks the decisive gesture as jerk and tremor (exclamation point AND ellipses), decorates the brain with lesion, converts the world to Art. It comes from traffic with prostitutes, and, “Like scythes that cut through prom gowns,” it wants to make another version of itself, a knockoff, a trashy horror-movie version of its would-be grand themes. “Oh, I walk in the red wool corset dress and carry the machete . . .” (98); “Poetry is my fondest stunt . . . like standing on my hands in a dress . . .” (98). Personal Page 60 → experience, even traumatic personal experience, prized materium of the first-person lyric, is here yet one more emblem or trinket of comparison for Art to wear on its chest: “To enchant someone meaninglessly . . . / Is like getting insulted and kissed by your writing instructor . . .” (24). The disturbance of each line break with ellipses or flagrant exclamation points; the excessive blank space between lines as if the lines have been denatured and cannot hold together in the natural body of a continuous thought; the way thought cannot run the circuit of the line breaks but rather keeps interrupting itself and tickishly picking itself back up (“This is like”; “And it is like”), marking itself as likeness and metaphor and never the thing itself—all denatures and dysfunctions both speech and thought, the supposedly distinctively human activities that the lyric is conventionally taken to mime. Minnis’s work suspends the suspension of disbelief in the lyric itself, and thus in speech, and thought, and thus in humanness and the prestige of being human. Everyday I behave as though I am a human being . . . And it hurts me to do it . . . It is egotistically exhausting! This is required to look like a poem . . . and to read like a poem . . . But it’s really just some incomprehensible money . . . (63) As she elsewhere concludes, “This kills the prestige! . . .” (106). When value systems are demolished, when the signature activity of value is to drain, scab, leak elsewhere, and leave behind little track marks of statement, exclamation, ellipsis, the entire denatured landscape cannot amount. Beauty does lie around here, though, like an arm, dislocated, or in pieces, divested of prestige, “like a cut-down chandelier.” Or elsewhere, the line is extrasaturated with beauty, which can’t leave the system, which “should go away but it never does,” it supplies a toxic swimming pool of itself at the bottom of the stairs. “It’s like trying to drink Page 61 → a bottle of

champagne in a roadside bathroom . . . / While holding on to a handle attached to a wall . . .” (38).

CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. What kind of mother is Art? What kind of child can it make for itself from trash, from shatters? CAConrad provides us an allegory for this in the form of his author’s bio. This Artist-son is born from Death, into Death, a very lowdown and ignoble Death (“white trash asphyxiation”), one that isn’t heterosexual (doesn’t involve two parents), doesn’t have a human body, a presence that’s in fact an absence (the absence of oxygen). Born into Death and Absence, the “son” enjoys an inverted version of life, a life with no center, on the margins, “along the highway,” selling trashed cut flowers and shoplifting, activities that continue the logic of exploitation and nonsustenance, but also of an improvised existence. In The Book of Frank, CAConrad recasts this birth; he makes a cast of this birth; he casts a new son from it; like Warhol, he generates counterfeits and multiples; like Warhol, these images start to resemble one another, to enjoy a paradoxical life in and as Art that totally replaces the horizon line of conventional biology, temporality, and experience. Like Poemland, The Book of Frank “trashes” value, but unlike Poemland here a countervalue is allowed to accrue, albeit erratically, from poem to poem in the figure of this continuous, if paradoxical, character. Where Poemland denatures the convention of “continuity” among successive lines on a page, The Book of Frank makes unconventional use of the two-page spread, especially in its first section. On one such spread, on the left side of the page Frank’s mother prefers her miscarriages, jarred in formaldehyde, to her “live” boy. She remarks, “you are too big for a jar my child / you will betray me the rest of your life” (4). On the right side of the page, an alternate version of the relationship is imagined, in which rejection inverts to nutriment, “milk pours from the sky, ” “the countryside is comfortable and burping,” “Frank naps on the lawn / smiling” Page 62 → (5). Art redistributes the dynamics of the “real” relationship in a fantastic landscape; but the inversion also requires that the landscape itself will acquire the qualities of bodily vulnerability that attach to Frank: “with tomorrow’s sun / gutters will / curdle and / sour.” Even Art’s improvised, counterfeit consolations have an expiration date. Art’s counterfeit reality is the space in which Frank improvises an inverted existence; another poem in which the Mother “hollers” at him for pretending to be a bird, concludes: he pecked bugs off the ground the rooster led him behind the hen house (6) The improvised dynamic of Frank’s fantasy life also allows him to participate in an alternate morality, a happy seduction/exploitation at the hands of “the rooster.” The definite article here is important: Frank is the asphyxiation casting these other personages from his own trashy material. The rooster is “the rooster,” the one commanded by Frank to appear and molest him, rather than “a rooster.” In Art’s (and Frank’s) double world, the poles of agency and victimhood are not as clearly separable as they are in the brightly lit nation to which we pledge allegiance each morning in the schoolroom. Just as CAConrad’s own biographical sketch gestures toward a complicity in exploitation, so there is an unstable complicity in these poems between Frank and his parents. The mother, we learn, enjoys cartoonish double vision, a vision that allows her to see “the devil in every room / twirling his asshole / cooking small rodents / masturbating in Father’s E-Z chair” (8). This vision frightens Frank when he assumes it by stealing his mother’s eyes; but this very action allies him with her, allies violence and vision. Frank, after all, has similarly violent or obscene visions; in some poems Art converts violence to a violet, or magically saves a life, but in others, violence and the violence of rebirth in Art continually restates itself. Page 63 →

Mother breaks Frank’s paint brushes forces his head through canvas “FRAME ME!” he shouts “FRAME ME! take the copyright from God! FRAME ME!” (19) Here violence is constitutive; like asphyxiation, here Mother-Art is violence, she gives birth to Art by forcing his head through canvas, forcing him in and through an artistic medium, a medium she is also destroying in this act—that is, trashing. Yet Frank is the son of asphyxiation; Death-giving-as-life-giving; he converts the violence to a violent self-iterating phrase; he asks to be remade as Death’s son, as Art’s son—that is, as Art. “FRAME ME! ” he shouts three times, that magic number. While the Mother and the Son struggle to birth and rebirth Art, the Father is cartoonish in his inability to fix value on his son; he first misreads his son as a cuntless daughter, then becomes confused. Father was confused which was Frank? which the five dollar bill? the pornographer’s smile s t r e t c h e d the room (11) In the perverted stakes of the Book of Frank, even the witchlike Mother can’t fix Frank’s bodily form; nor can the Father fix his economic value. Instead Frank enters into another arrangement; the pornographer’s approval is a welcome, is a source of wealth; acceptance as a sexual commodity stretches the room, makes a roomy place for Frank. At the same time, Frank defines himself in terms of a total abnegation of value, a willing expenditure akin to his identification with miscarriages, which paradoxically produces milk from the sky. Page 64 → “when I die” Frank prayed, “I will never return if I must it will be as abortions it will be as if I had not” (17) Here the declaration that “I will never return” is met with an implicit command to return, just as he returns again

and again to The Book of Frank itself. As his relationship with his mother emblematizes, the relationship with Art is in fact a commandment. The blank space in his utterance counters his own utterance, so he next tries to erase himself by voicing overstatement, a paradoxical multiplication of negation: “it will be as / abortions / it will be as if I had not.” Resourceful under Art and Life’s commandment, Frank improvises a “likeness,” an “as if,” which reinvents him as a negative infinity (“abortions”) even as Art forces him to be reborn and reborn in these poems. As Art’s son, Frank has a nimble relationship with Death, crossing its borders, as he himself is Death. The book is riven with motifs of crows and carrion eaters: “when Father died / Frank was found / straddling him / his crows picking the seven / gold fillings” (31). This recalls Chelsey Minnis’s invocation to Death in Poemland, which is also a willingness to be bodily remade as a dead thing, as Art. I am a vile baby . . . Look, death, I have so much delicious vulture food within my chest cavity . . . (28). In Poemland, as in The Book of Frank, to be Death’s baby is to be Art’s baby; to be Art’s victim, but also its food; the way it comes into the world; to give birth to the Art that gave birth to you; to be a vessel and what comes out of the vessel; to be continually shedding something, Art, even as Art sheds the Artist, makes a son out of impossible noningredients. No value could cohere in a nonsystem like this, a backbreaking, self-digesting, selfgestating, Page 65 → cutting, immolating, imbricating system, certainly not the values of self-authenticity, selfsameness, self-worth, certainly not the value of self-expression, rendered here a complicated ventriloquist’s script of quotations and self-quotations. “I love us with the wig,” Frank said “it makes our voices change you wear the wig and ask my lips to find you in the dark I wear the wig and track you with my tongue the wig uncombed! the wig a fire of curls! ‘the wig completes the head?’ you ask ‘the wig completes the head’ I say” (62) So the Artist born of Artifice, Asphyxiation, Violence, and Death wears Death’s wig and scripts Death’s lines; plays the (false) role of Death; has incestuous sex with Death; trashes the “natural” body, the “natural” family, the “natural” timeline; dwells in paradox; in limitless negativity that does not reverse itself to become a positive; but sons; “one night / the dog / dissolved / with Frank,” . . . “Frank with child / at last!” (116–17); generates artifice and perversion, counterfeit and copies; an ouroboros of exploiters and exploitation that blots out conventional economies of worth and value; a radiant black horizon of expenditure where the voice makes a fake voice of the voice; where multitudinous, queer, perverse, or misanthropic voices fuck up the family romance; “a room full / of lesbian / ventriloquists / threw their voices” (80); anachronism, marginality, deprivation, violence. and pettiness;

but a radiant wig, a wig on fire! It is like being slapped in the face with a stack of dollar bills . . . I like it like glitter drums! (101)

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Another Litter On the Black Arts of Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi

1. Translation Kim Hyesoon is a distinguished and influential Korean Feminist poet and critic. Her critical and pragmatic approaches to Feminism have had a direct impact on the lives of men, women, and especially children in Korea, and her creative work enjoys global reach. Don Mee Choi is a Korean émigré whose family settled in Australia by way of Hong Kong; a poet, multimedia artist, and educator, she is based in Seattle. Moreover, since Choi is Kim’s English-language translator, these poets’ bodies of work themselves form a continuous Möbius strip of transcription, translation, and exchange that is itself in motion, twisting, and trans. Recognizing the inversion and reciprocality of this literary relationship, Kim has said of Choi’s translations, “It is like meeting someone like myself.”1 Kim’s and Choi’s bodies of work are intertwined, in the sense that a Möbius strip is intertwined—intertwined with itself, circuiting impossible arrivals, twists, inversions, and motions of departure that become inextricable with a motion of return. Translation provides a model of writing as an irrationally twisting zone that is always traversing itself, and it is this translating motion that typifies the linked oeuvres of Kim and Choi. Choi refers to this perpetual, contradictory, mirroring, world-splitting motion in her description of translating Kim: “For me, ‘linguistic hospitality’ involves first returning to my childhood home, then departing to my current dwelling in the U.S. It is an act of linguistic return, and hence, a perpetual farewell.”2 Page 67 → It is this double, simultaneous, paradoxical, twisting motion toward and away that defines the Möbius strip of translation. Taking this Möbius strip as our paradigm, the bodies of work of Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi, while not identical in style, form, or content, are arranged in a similarly twinned yet splitting motion. Yet I would argue further that each of these separate bodies of work is additionally constantly being traversed by itself—that is, this work exposes the body of Art as not an intact, stable, bound site but as a zone inflamed by mediumicity, possessed by media, saturated to the breaking point, expelling media from itself, porous, transmissive, fluid, fluxing, spasming, evaporated, mutilated, mutating, pupating, tumoring, splitting open, generating multiples, counterfeits, and bad copies, and above all without a singular site, not selfsame, inconstant. Dispersed, punctured, or adhering haphazardly, everywhere and nowhere, all the time never, the bodies of Art (and these bodies of work) are always trans, generating and occupying impossible sites through an impossible motion, on and as Art’s twisting, wobbling Möbius strip. This diabolical unhinging of self, nation, and even chemical “state” means the transversal motion of the Möbius strip is a political motion, though not one that may be neatly located or prettily labeled “subversion” or even “critique.” Instead, wired to the circuit of Power, Power’s constant synapse and medium, these bodies of Art make visible Power’s ministrations on a spasming, impossible scale, at once infinite and infinitesimal, exposing its fluxes and declivities, its sublimities and degradations, without the cover myths of a bounded, selfsame self, of the body as a fixed and permanent address, or of freedom as the ultimate personal property.

2. A Moving Dot: Kim Hyesoon Kim Hyesoon’s nine volumes of poetry have described a poetics of constant motion, a transitoriness that is impelled by mediumicity, an oversaturation producing dazzling simultaneous eruptions and blackouts. It is in this sense of being overcrowded with contradictory descriptors that her world may be described as Page 68 → “oxymoronic.” In her poetics essay, “In the Oxymoronic World,” she writes: The ether of a poem, the emptiness, the poesy exists inside the movement of language. . . . I’ll call

such wave motion the “moving dot.”

The moving dot can be extinguished in an instant, yet it contains all information, even eternity. Try placing a dot on the undulating waves. The moment I extend my arm, the dot is already gone. The moving dot is infinitely small because it moves, yet at the same time it is infinitely large. Inside the infinite smallness the self becomes infinitely tiny and dies. Inside the infinite largeness the self becomes infinitely huge and dies.3 Kim’s effort to map her poetics itself involves a series of converting and undulating images as she attempts to track this “moving dot” whose motion limns a contradictory, “oxymoronic world.” The first two qualities—ether and emptiness—already set up a paired but opposite, oscillating state; next these opposites are both yoked in a single impossible medium, “poesy,” which is itself “inside” not language but the “movement of language.” In this chain of impossibly simultaneous fluxes, language conducts a motion, and inside this motion is a substance /emptiness, an oxymoronic material, which is poesy. She calls its motion, in turn, “the moving dot.” We have already traveled very far away, yet infinitesimally away, from anything like a stable “definition” of poetry. Instead of memorizing a maxim, we have to track the dot. The mediumicity of this dot, always conducting a “wave motion,” impels it through twisting, Möbius-like space, where infinite extension is coextensive with infinite erasure, and saturation identified with eradication, deletion, or Death. The blackness of Death is thus double, contradictory, and radiant, housing all possibilities, both “the emptiness” and “the ether . . . inside the movement of language.” And Death, rather than marking a conventional narrative finality to one’s life, one’s “destination,” one Page 69 → might say, instead simultaneously exists at both poles, in effect collapsing them into one, and rendering motion between them an impossible oscillation, a moving dot, or poesy. The impossible properties of such dark matter, that is, poesy, make a paradoxical shape Kim Hyesoon has described elsewhere. Don Mee Choi paraphrases Kim’s theories this way. In To Write as a Woman, Kim reveals hell as a “place of death within life . . . the place Paridegi [a banished female shaman-princess] goes to, the place she travels to via death is a feminine space of creation. It is hyŏnbin.” She explains hyŏn as “closed eyes therefore everything is black” and bin as “a signifier of a woman’s reproductive organs—a mouth of a lock, a valley, a mountain spring . . . Inside this dark womb the possibility of all life is held. At that place patriarchy, the male-centered thing breaks, the universality of all things break.”4 In the neologistic concept of hyŏnbin, the blacked-out vision of the closed eyes is fantastically restored by repurposing the reproductive organ of a woman—or rather, a proliferation of analogs of this organ—a mouth of a lock, a valley, a mountain spring”—as organs of impossible, black sight. Implicitly, as these organs of reproduction become eyes, the eye also becomes an organ of penetration and reproduction, as well as orgasm, pain, and ecstasy. In this trompe l’oeil declivity, qualities are distended and redistributed in a kind of black radiance, a negative, impossible possibility. Within this black impasse, this impossibility-scape, that wholeness, “the male-centered thing breaks, the universality of all things break,” but a second, black vision becomes apparent. This constant breaking apart, puncturing, shattering, conversion, leaching, impurity, linked with substitution, and impossible production, is the critical twist in Kim’s Möbius strip; it defines her work as trans. Mommy Must be a Fountain of Feathers, a selection of Kim’s work in Choi’s translations published in 2008, begins with a poem emblematic of this paradoxical motion, this self-traversal—“The Road to Kimp’o Landfill.” The title of this initiatory poem presents the vista of this book as a dumping ground defined by excess consumption, waste, odor, flies, rats, and decomposition, Page 70 → a fetid mediascape of total de- and recomposition. The poem begins with a speaker attempting to reject a mediumicity that is literally pushing through her body as both “hair” and “names”: “Cut my hair short again / I don’t want to pull out / the names etched onto my hair that grows daily.”5 This disavowal and refusal, however, implicitly issue their own negative

image into the poem, that of black hair, either shorn or pulled out, falling to the ground. The body is a medium for hair, the hair is a medium for names, and the speaker is an (unwilling) medium for both; analogously, she is an unwilling medium for the book that follows, a book that is similarly produced by the body, simultaneously waste and writing, hair and names. As this black hair of the poem falls from line 3 to line 4, a black rain begins to fall, black because it is implicitly the hue of plastic garbage bags, and the two images stand in for and constantly supersaturate and emit each other: “As rain fell, garbage bins from the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floor / must have been turned upside down / Hair fell profusely.” The backward listing of the floor numbers creates a spasming, vomiting motion, as rain seems to fall upward and then be “turned upside down.” This foreshadowed image of vomiting is then inverted to its opposite facial motion, kissing: “I kissed where I vomited all night long / Everytime I sang, vomit flew in.” In this oxymoronic world, opposite gestures, to kiss and to vomit, to sing and to vomit, occupy each other’s position and turn each into its opposite: rather than being emitted, “vomit flew in.” By halfway through this poem, the artist-speaker is presented as a strange producer, whose own body is the orifice for Art, but whose bodily fluids and artistic productions leave and return to the body in unpredictable ways, crowding each other, substituting for each other, rendering the song vomit and the vomit song. Traditionally, a poet should enjoy and identify with the emblem of the bird, but here it is “vomit” that flies, and flies back “in,” like a film in reverse that the poet is forced to swallow. In a comparable reversal a few lines later, “Black plastic bags flew higher than a flock of sparrows.” That which should litter the ground is hurled like vomit into the air, that which should fly is crammed with garbage. The saturation returns to the speaker’s body: the body is filled with holes, the holes are Page 71 → filled with “the sound of Mother’s sewing machine,” and as the speaker tears the (female-indicating) breasts from her own body the landscape is (male-ly?) megafertilized with illness: “A forest gave off a foul smell, carried contagious diseases,” and “a million sperm” are thrown out of the “Motel Rose.” In both of these latter images, both the forest and the motel metastasize, become megamedia, burning and throwing out further media of fertilization and/or contagion, which of course double back on and devour the speaker: “mosquitoes swarmed / and dug into my scrawny caved-in chest.” The speaker, who has been walking the forest like Death-in-life, her own speaking a kind of contamination of the poem-space with mediumicity of further contamination, is suddenly herself a declivity, animated by mosquitoes, infested to the point of erasure, “caved in.” Yet, like Lady Lazarus, Kim’s speaker’s work of simultaneously living and dying is not finished. She is always in motion, a moving dot, moving up from and toward her own death: “Born in the 20th century, I was on my way / to die in the 21st century”—on the road, that is, not to a glorious, productive, sanitized future, but to Kimp’o landfill. The poems collected in this book are rife with images of simultaneously imploding and exploding spaces, analogs for the body and for the body of Art, invaded with and expelling matter. In “When the Plug Gets Unplugged,” “you and I begin to rot in the open. . . . Our skin melts, so anyone can look into anyone’s intestines. Toilets also overflow in dreams. Nothing goes down no matter how many times you flush. Even the candles give off a stench.”6 In this vision, a mundane world suddenly becomes omnimediumistic, forced through with “stench,” an unholy vision from which nothing can be erased. Rot and waste are the markers of this environment, and everything in it is collected back into it as rot and waste. The landscape continually saturates and vomits more of itself—making the poem, making Art. In “Seoul, My Oasis,” a continuous collapse of a house into its own space becomes a figure for the way the body of Art is constantly crashing into and saturating the body of Art, revealing Art to be not an object but a medium, a zone of motion, trans: “The houses pile up like stairs and the stairs pile up inside the houses, the houses endlessly flow in.” Thus, the interior is constantly crashed with piling up exteriors, they “pile Page 72 → up” and “endlessly flow in.” The result is that the inside is not a protected place but becomes a stage wherein “The corpses that have just breathed their last are suffocated again by the houses rushing in and expire once again.” On this irrational stage, on which endings and beginnings are pushed down upon each other, everything is “endlessly” and “again.” Yet these collapsing strata also configure an impossible—but, for Kim Hyesoon, characteristic—mediumicity. Bricks pile up daily outside the window and concrete pours into my mouth. The houses move in like the sand of the Sahara that tumbles into an oasis. The houses that build houses inside my nostrils, earlobes, and hair. When the wind blows, the overgrown roofs, the wavering pillars, the pulsating

windows, the antennas that transmit cries, and there is no one in Seoul—only neatly piled up houses.7

Oxymoronically, this inundation of interiority with exteriority has created a world in which there is “no one in”—no one inside at all. Instead every inside is an outside, a surface for building—“the houses . . . build houses inside my nostrils, earlobes, and hair”—and every outside is mediumistic—the pillars waver, the windows pulse, the antennas transmit cries. The last line attempts to put an ironic and chilling calm on this scene, in that the houses are “neatly” piled up, but this phrase only highlights the spasming activity of the poem itself and suggests a vista in which the houses are simultaneously a vista of corpses, overrun with antennae-bearing insects. The only calm is a dead calm.

3. “Say no Lame!” Don Mee Choi Kim Hyesoon’s poems limn an impossible oxymoronic world made of Art, which spasms from death to death through a series of mediumistic inundations and transformations, but it could be read as implicitly allegorizing the fate of the bare individual (and particularly the woman) at the hands of total power, the collapsing, violent, and erratically reerecting regimes of the Page 73 → family, the house, the city, and the nation. In Kim’s work, it is these structures that always collapse, push through, emit, and demand to substitute for the female speaker’s body until it is no longer a body at all but rather a spatial zone defined by such violent possessions. It is simply a further oxymoron that the black radiance resulting from total submission to Art’s mediumicity and the black region of total depredation by Power form a coextensive vista. Don Mee Choi’s writing evokes specific political event and circumstance more directly than Kim Hyesoon’s, and thus her work makes more explicit the ways in which both Art and political Power possess, disorient, saturate, rupture, and thereby make a medium of the would-be subject. Choi unfurls this colonized positionality with her opening gesture, a seven-part homophonic rendition entitled “Manegg.” A homophonic rendition, like the extraordinary renditions of our contemporary traumascape, is an exercise in the perverse positions of total Power—one language forces an extant text in another language to take up its stress positions and speak in the language of the (temporarily) dominant authority. Like Art, extraordinary renditions also depend on a oxymoronically visible obscurity, on productive/nonproductive “black sites.” Yet, with the “translated” sourcetext completely obscured, the homophonic rendition itself becomes a mindless propaganda machine, something like an acoustic speaker broadcasting out the doggerel slogans of its own black regime. In mobilizing the ambiguous tool of homophonic translation, then, Don Mee Choi is making audible the cultural erasure practiced by colonial powers and enforced by their language politics. Say no lame! Say we care. Terror can’t tell and bears a crown in the kitchen, may we? Who cares: cunt can’t battle, key won’t tear. Ugly decay, care for Pa and tell, we lonely. So jail men care, met a lavish man met a landlord. (Eggpisode loiter ha! Advance don’t at all, assuming mellow) Me, countless out to tear. Sane no, lend me. Say I can’t rain, end me.8 Page 74 → If this endless reel does not make “rational” consecutive syntactic sense, nonetheless, taken as a whole, it makes utter sense—it makes the sense of Power, a brute sense based on the logic of possession and command. It delivers

instructions for speech, commands silence, voices rhetorical questions not expecting or tolerating a response; it violently dismisses, and generally enacts the truisms of its own power: “Who cares: cunt can’t battle, key won’t tear.” The effect of this seven-page black rain of black-site utterance is to blot out all responses but a mimic response; what we might conventionally identify as the speaker is reduced to the pathetic objectival pronoun, “me, ” and adhered to the broken, violent phraseology of the commandant voice, ordered to ventriloquize the command for its own erasure: “Say I can’t rain, end me.” The original text, the original language, is completely obliterated here (though identified in epitaphlike notes at the end), and what’s left is a loudspeaker squawking its commands at listeners who are expected not only to decipher its instructions but, more important, to mimic its language. The speaker is one more medium for Power’s language. Mindful of Choi’s own interest in theory, one is reminded of the Deleuze and Guattari maxim, “There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language,” a quote that Choi in fact incorporates into a poem in this volume. Deleuze and Guattari’s imagery is crucial—for it is not only something so abstract as a first language, but, bodily, a “mother tongue,” which Power dominates, obliterates, and substitutes for. In place of the maternal body, the violent body of Power. Thereafter, as in Choi’s homophonic translation, the child speaks in Power’s tongues. Indeed, within Choi’s volume, various male authority figures, such as Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari themselves, thrust their tongues into the acoustic composition, their words saturating and issuing out from the speaking space. In fact, if Kim Hyesoon enfigures poesy as a “moving dot,” I hear Don Mee Choi’s poetry as a continually shifting and variegated acoustic medium registering and mimicking rhetorics and genres but spasming and shuddering in its inability to reconcile their incompatible components into a coherent whole. Thus, poems are heavily annotated, interrupted with italics; they attempt Page 75 → to establish discourses but are interrupted with speech errors. The “Diary of a Return” begins: 8 Aug 2002 I arrived below the 38th parallel. Everyone and every place I know are below the waist of a nation. Before I arrived, empire arrived, that is to say empire is great. I follow its geography. From a distance the waist below looks like any other small rural village of winding alleys and traditional tileroofed houses surrounded by rice paddies, vegetable fields, and mountains. It reminded me of home, that is to say this is my home.9 This sequence of diary entries, labeled as such by the series title, begins firmly enough with a series of numbers: a date and a longitudinal line, itself ladled with history. The third sentence literalizes a visual simile to push the vista of sexual subjugation up from the historical subtext into the literal text of the poem: “below the waist of a nation.” The poem continues, “Before I arrived, empire arrived, that is to say empire is great.” This sentence both describes and literalizes the kind of “power takeover by a dominant language” that Deleuze and Guattari have in mind. Although this land is supposedly the speaker’s “homeland,” her natality is always preempted, paradoxically enough, by the arrival of empire. Moreover, to be preempted by empire is also to perform its propagandistic verbal tics: “empire arrived, that is to say empire is great.” It’s important to note that Choi does not merely write, “empire arrived. Empire is great.” Including the rhetorical filler (“that is to say”) enacts the substitutions that imperial power enforces, one language for another, one logic for another, one statement for another. The same transmission occurs at the end of the stanza: “It reminded me of home, that is to say this is my home.” The fact that the picturesque and therefore generic village has no particular features means it may substitute as “home” for the speaker, even though her displacement from this territory and preemption by empire mean she has no birthplace or home, only something that can be said to be “my home.” As the poem continues, the diary construct is further disrupted by the non-linearity of the dates reported. Something else is Page 76 → “organizing” the diary, apart from an imperial sense of time. In fact there is a thematic here of Korean women’s degradation and death through prostitution or sexual abuse by occupying US soldiers, both during and since the Korean War. The jumbled dates and the sameness of the anecdotes emphasize the tide of violence that presses through the poem, as through women’s bodies, “below the waist” of Korea itself,

and it is this violence, imperial violence, that is in fact the poem’s occupying, organizing force, its disorder more instrumentally ordering than imperial time. For violence is indeed empire’s grammar, the tongue it requires its subjects to learn. 28 Oct 1992 Yun Kŭm-i’s head was smashed with a Coca-Cola bottle. She was found dead, legs spread with the Cola bottle in her vagina and an umbrella up her anus. That is not to say empire does not endorse one planet or Father’s umbrella. On the contrary, it enforces grammaticality within and without before and after Father sprinkles white disinfectant powder on the index finger. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality.10 In this passage, the ravaging violence is identified with “grammaticality”; as the Coca-Cola bottle smashes the woman’s skull and enters into her, so grammaticality is “within and without before and after.” The word grammaticality itself is a foreign object in this poem, like the Coca-Cola bottle, italicized and oddly intact. It smashes but is not smashed. It is inserted by force into any orifice Power can find or make. Like the “arrival” of empire, which preempts the speaker’s own birth, empire’s violence is a grammaticality of utter preemption, as it smashes the skull, occupies orifices, blocks all other thoughts: “No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality.” To be supposed ignorant of grammaticality is to be a no one. To be a one (singular, bounded, stable, intact, countable) is to know grammaticality. This utter violence is empire’s supreme Law, more important than other ways of measuring or ordering, including time, event, birth or death, breaking into and preempting the body itself, rendering “within and without before and after.” Grammaticality, in this handling, is thus not a neutral system, an orderly structure, but Page 77 → rather a force that presses through structure, a violence that preempts any commentary of the speaker’s own. Instead, “That is not to say.” In Choi’s poetry, Power enters and renovates the body with its violence, controlling the body’s emissions, including but not limited to speech. Thus, her poems are rife with blood, sweat, tears, and urination. In the sequence “Diary of the Botanist”: I squat to urinate on a mound of parsley. . . . I sweat. More pine needles to count. Inside the laboratory I wash, rinse, blot dry this year’s shoot cut from pine trees and store it in plastic bags at 4 degrees. Everything must be stored in plastic. One needle per stalk is infected with fungi. I mark the infection with ink. All infections must be marked. In the evenings, kookaburras come looking for diced meat. They laugh at my armpits, my soap-dried hands. They see me sway, sweat, smell my own tongue. Here, there. Here, there. They laugh at my hair. I follow their rusted wings. Tell me where I should urinate.11 In this sequence, the “speaker” is paradoxically without speech; the management of fluid takes the place of speech. She sweats, washes, rinses, blots, marks with ink, smells. Implicitly, every fluid is a bodily fluid and subjected to hygiene: Everything must be stored in plastic. All infections must be marked. The speaker, implicitly an immigrant against the kookaburras’ nativeness, cannot speak; her tongue emits an odor instead of language, she is “diced meat”; their chant “here, there” mocks her placelessness. Urination, by the last sentence, is not a matter of bodily necessity but one more term in the transaction of language, in the grammaticality of Power’s hygiene. Language, by implication, is at best a bodily fluid, another matter the speaker-space exudes. The alienation from the body is further dramatized in the sequence “Instructions from the Inner Room,” in which interiority is not a place of authenticity but an already-colonized space from which grammaticality issues: “Females are silent / Add plenty of detergent / Emerge like a nation / Sing as if you are male.”12 This run of commands makes a narrow column, as opposed to the journalistic prose of Choi’s other pieces. It is as if the speaking space has further constricted, and yet we Page 78 → know, from the title, that the inner room is already occupied. As the space of this poem constricts along with the stanza, the speaker is forced into the space of these inner commandants, and vice versa, and the speaker ventriloquizes their commands. As in Kim Hyesoon’s “Seoul, My Oasis,” here we see domestic space and the sexist power of a gendered cultural order blacking out all alternative spaces, forcing its doxa out of the orifices of the female-gendered speaker. An endnote informs the reader that this sequence takes the form of “poem-songs,” or kyubang kasa, by means of which instructions

regarding “family genealogy, proper conduct, duty and obedience to husband, in-laws, and parents” were passed down hierarchically, from mother to daughter. Written in the vernacular hangŭl script, the only script women were allowed to learn, the poem is both an example of the “black text” women can create inside subjugation and the way in which the violent grammaticality of Power can invade even the blacked-out space to which women are consigned. It is for this reason that the blacked-out space of women’s writing is one of risk and danger, rather than merely an inverted or parenthesized utopia.

4. Another Litter Art is Power; Art is like Power. Art shares Power’s violence and its strategies. The routes and strategies of Art may be taken up by Power, and vice versa; Power may, indeed does, colonize Art’s speaking spaces, causing a overflux, a meltdown, an explosion, a cascading inundation, a mutational tide, more Art, more matter, more force, more Power. Such excessive production should be impossible according to the laws of the conservation of mass and energy; and yet, more Art comes into the world, more Violence, every saturation point can be exceeded, triggering a leak or bleed or the reanimation of corpses: “Ghosts eat food that has gone bad and stagger off as being if tied up and pulled away on someone’s rope.”13 Or Power shoves full the holes and the leak comes out someplace else, as blood or hair, the leak creates a someplace else. It is because of this variegation, spasming, Page 79 → erasure, and accretion that we may refer to Art’s Möbius strip as “broken”—on the one hand, Art conducts strange, irrational, paradoxical motion, and is always trans; on the other hand, it occupies an unstable relationship with Power, Violence, Grammaticality; it may crumble or rupture unexpectedly even if it pops back to life like a cartoon coyote or constricts and secretes itself someplace else. In Kim’s figure, Art generates disposable muses: “Empty-match-box muse. Chocolate-wrap muse. Already-read-newspaper muse. Toshiba-laptop muse. Cooked-rice-container-called-Elephant muse. . . . // My house in which a rice-cooker muse nurtures a maggot muse in my absence / A muse lays a muse, lays, lays again. . . . My house that becomes a heaven of muses when the street sweeper doesn’t come for ten days.” Just as Kim’s muse “lays a muse, lays, lays again,” in Choi’s vision, Art sheds propagating media, generates twins. Twin twin twin zone. Cameraman, run to my twin twin zone. A girl’s exile excels beyond excess. Essence excels exile. Something happens to the wanted girl. Nothing happens to the unwanted girl. The morning news is exciting. Excessive exile exceeds analysis. Psychosis my psychosis. Psychosis her psychosis. Pill her and pill her and file her and exile her and pill her and pill her till axes and boxes and sexes.14 In Power’s grammaticality, everything is doubling and splitting and generating twin twin twin zones beyond excess. So many nouns that they are forced to work as verbs, and those verbs are, naturally, commands: “Psychosis my psychosis. Pill her and pill her.” Plurality becomes an ever-proliferating, overlimit: “till axes and boxes and sexes.” The ever-burgeoning twin zone of Art and Power is the doubleworld these two trans-poets evoke in their growing body of work. On Art’s Möbius strip, in Power’s paradoxical black zone, even holes can multiply, and negativity accrue. This negative productivity, which may be located in the individual bodies of work of these poets, is made still more paradoxically productive when the work of these poets it brought into irrational “twinship” with each other. Thus Kim’s comment, “It is like meeting Page 80 → someone like myself,” marks an uncanny nonidentity that introduces a not-selfsame self, a splitting, a twoness. More expansively, Choi has remarked: As in Kim’s own translation of the blackened realm where two different realities are accessed from the same horizontal plane, the English translation of Kim’s poetry also exists on the same plane as the original poem, but it is made of a different linguistic and cultural mirror. When two such mirrors meet, twoness is forged and become inseparable. My translation is born from the twoness—the chorus of mirrors.15 In other words, translation is a figure that defines each of these individual bodies of work as well as the relationship between them; in translation’s Möbian black-scape, twoness is not identicalness but an “inseparable”

nonidentity, a mise-en-abîmewhere the mirror spills copies and those copies split, drag, and extend into infinity, veering at once toward and away from each other. It is in this regard that these bodies of work are intimately and infinitely and transiently and intransigently trans. The overproliferation of specters created by the chorus of mirrors is itself the paradoxical double of another overproliferation: that of the hole. As Choi has written in an introduction to Kim Hyesoon’s work: During the Korean War (1950–53), about 250,000 pounds of napalm per day were dropped by the United States forces. Countless mountains, hills, rice fields, and houses were turned into holes. Four million perished, leaving more holes. It’s a place that is positively holely. Kim Hyesoon’s hole poem comes from there, and so do I.16 In this description we may hear echoes of Wilfred Owen’s No-Man’s-Land, “pock-marked like a body of foulest disease.” With the paradoxical phrase “positively holey,” Choi’s pun registers the “hole” as a duplicitous site, both surplus and lack, a site of eructation and declivity, a site of emergence and spectacular events as well as annihilation. A blacked-out zone of lawless fecundities. A necropastoral (later she describes Korea as “like the side view of a rabbit. Its severed waist stitched up barbed wire, Page 81 → its scorched belly studded with a million landmines”).17 It is Kim Hyesoon’s and Don Mee Choi’s life work to be possessed by the undead potential of this region, Art’s region, degradation’s region, the region of the map designated by holes, that is, the body, that is to say, the empty-ether, the paradox-scape, the dark matter. As Art punctures and perforates and oversaturates its own topography with its fecund Violence, more and more black Art is produced, more holes, more leak, more piss, more twins. The black motifs proliferate, multiply, suffocate each other and black each other out. As Kim Hyesoon writes of the “Mommy” rat who “blocks the rat hole with her entire body / our ears as well,” It looks as if Mommy is expecting another litter.18 Notes 1. Don Mee Choi, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Kim Hyesoon, Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers, trans. Don Mee Choi (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2008), 11. 2. Ibid. 3. Kim Hyesoon, All the Garbage of the World Unite!, trans. Don Mee Choi (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2012), vii. 4. Choi, “Translator’s Introduction,” 10. 5. Kim Hyesoon, Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers, trans. Don Mee Choi (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2008), 15. 6. Ibid., 32. 7. Ibid., 33. 8. Don Mee Choi, The Morning News Is Exciting (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2010), 3. 9. Ibid., 15. 10. Ibid., 17. 11. Ibid., 19. 12. Ibid., 41. 13. Kim Hyesoon, “When the Plug Gets Unplugged,” in Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers, trans. Don Mee Choi (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2008), 32. 14. Don Mee Choi, “The Morning News Is Exciting,” in The Morning News Is Exciting (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2010), 27. 15. Choi, “Translator’s Introduction,” 11. 16. Don Mee Choi, “Translator’s Note,” in Kim Hyesoon, All the Garbage Page 82 → of the World Unite!, trans. Don Mee Choi (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2012), xiii. 17. Ibid. 18. Kim Hyesoon, “Conservatism of the Rats of Soul,” in Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers, trans. Don Mee Choi (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2008), 17.

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Muse & Drudge & Art’s Ampersand 1. Recording: Don’t mess with me I’m evil / I’m in your sin.1 Recoded: Don’t mess with me, I’m evil, I’m ampersand. Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge is, by any measure, and beyond measure, à Outrance, a paradoxical, nonbinary text, a text that will not settle down into the absolute values of zeros and ones but generates doubling, impossible specters. This phenomenon is present right from its double title, Muse & Drudge, with its nonverbal yet pronounceable, semantic code symbol—the ampersand—a relic of archaic typography and calligraphy, which arises spectrally here amid the binary of terms to knot the antithetical nouns Muse and Drudge into a lumpy, variegated assemblage—the ampersand a kind of broken Möbius strip, a kind of upended, interrupted, distended contiguity. Wikipedia informs us that the typographical appearance of the ampersand is a “ligature” of the Latin word et—it is a tie, a yoke, a bond, it yokes [by violence] together. But a great libidinous surplus exists between the visual brevity of the symbol & and the luxurious surplus of its multisyllabic nomination. Moreover, the term ampersand itself is actually the corruption of the hermaphroditic phrase “and per se and,” compiled of Latin and English elements. The word ampersand is a conflation of the phrase “and per se and” meaning “and [the symbol that] by itself [is] and.”2 Page 84 → Ampersand: And-per-se-and: the symbol that by itself is and. But how can anything be by itself “and”? Can a word made up of a phrase be anything “by itself”? & what is this ligature, this occult quality of “andness,” which needs not yoke anything to be a yoke, which is nothing in itself but “and”? In the nonequivalence of its written and pronounced form, in the ligature status of its typographical symbol, and in the hermaphroditic conundrum of the phrase concealed in its terminology, the &/ampersand begins to be a model of the necropastoral’s Möbius logic, a curving zone of veerition, throwing out noncompatible surpluses, libidinous amplitudes, and irrational declivities, violently special effects.

2. Epigraph: Fatten your animal for sacrifice, poet, but keep your muse slender. Callimachus.3 Muse & Drudge’s epigraph continues the twisting of the ligature; we get a chiasmatic rhetorical structure, with the word Poet as the cross. The “Fatten and Slender,” “Muse and Animal,” sets up a series of binaries as antithetical inversions, but also proposes the word Poet as the ampersand, where the phrases cross, become cinched, synced, linked by the ligature symbol of Möbius but broken violence. Poet, here, is that site of violence, the ligature, the yoke, that which by itself is and: a paradox, an enigmatic site, an impossibility, a possibility. The poet is the glyph, the ampersand, the variable, the zone, the poem, the place where value accrues and empties out, the nonsite, the medium that is not present except as “and,” except as warping effects. The animal is fattened, the muse is starved, the animal is starved to a muse, the muse finds herself on the knife point of sacrifice, and the poet is the glyph, the poem, where those syncing, cinching ligatures of violent exchange are activated. Page 85 →

3. Report: sepia bronze mahogany / say froggy jump salty / jelly in a vise / buttered up broke ice4

I want to propose that the Poem, not just Muse & Drudge but any poem, and not just any poem but Art itself, is the occult ampersand, that which is in itself and, and per se and, pure medium, a place where binaries meet and reverse places, mingle statuses, incompletely saturate and split, more Möbius strip than equal sign, enfiguring a constant draining and accruing of material across its libidinous band, its slippery starved and gorged interior throat /exterior flank. Art’s ampersand is a kind of accelerated and distended present/tense, the violence of yoking together that cannot mask over a splitting, a nonidentity; this occult activity is both suspended from linear historical time and heterogeneously distributes it, linking, syncing, breaking, splitting. This coefficient of anachronism creates a constantly mutating contiguity in place of absolute order, value, stability, precedence. For example, in his spectrally permanent 1783 comments on Abraham Cowley, Samuel Johnson proposes that because Cowley’s views are so narrow, he has made a ligature with “temporary prejudices” rather than “tracing intellectual pleasure to its natural sources in the mind of man”; it is this interface with the temporary that results the variegation of value surrounding his work, “at one time too much praised and neglected in another.”5 In Johnson’s characterization, Cowley’s stock shifts like Mullen’s “jelly in a vise,” the vise being its intersection with the temporary, which is to say, Art’s cross, its swerving chiasmus, its and, its ligature, its permanent and dubious present tense. In this diagnosis of Cowley’s vulnerable relationship with time, we are reminded of Brock’s formulation of the shell-shocked soldier, pathologically absorbed in his “surroundings” in the vexed and vexing present tense, neglecting the hygiene of historicity, no universalist but a specialist à Outrance. In place of the durable, rational, classically conceived male body, a haptic, quivering jelly. Page 86 →

4. Resound: Handful of gimme / myself when I am real / how would you know / if you’ve never tasted6 Johnson’s iconic comments on the metaphysical poets, by contrast, are shot through with the sureties of one who feels he has a firm grip on the historical record. With an Enlightenment confidence in biological divisions, he refers to the metaphysical poets as a “race of writers” doomed to exclusion from the historical record, a race that “will without great wrong lose their right to the name of poets.” This is because they are unnatural, faddish, perverse, occult, petty, and violent: “Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.” If the metaphysicals are defective specimens, the risk exists that their profligacy is contagious. Thus Johnson must warn that the metaphysical offerings are shoddy and overpriced, a debauched economy of surpluses and lacks not regulated by the invisible hand of the market but whipped up by a kind of “discordia concors”; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased. Rising up from Johnson’s pronouncements is the specter of the metaphysical work as a spasming zone, a hazardous ligature across which variegations of value run, expanding, eclipsing, a shrug or swerve between the big and the little, the minute and the general. This habitual veerition is reflected what Johnson calls their “hyperbole; their amplification had no limit” and in their “combinations of confused magnificence,” the term magnificence here also calling up resonances of a fraudulently inflated or “magnified” scale. Amid such profligacy, the reader Page 87 → experiences anxiety establishing value and worth: whether the ride was too dear, the thought too much or not enough. For spending, expenditures, and exorbitance are absorbed or drain out of that ampersand as the status of the metaphysical poet and his thought engorges and empties out, mounting intensities of occult resemblances and yoking together the heterogeneous with fluxing, ampersanding, perverse violence. Johnson’s attempt to grapple with the status of the metaphysical leads him to propose the metaphysical text as a

site of per- and in-versions, twisting ligatures, yokes & violences, and occult force, intensities, syncs, and shunts where status and value might suddenly flip and drain or surprise the reader by reaccruing. In the face of his inability to determine value or resist spending, the reader finds himself unable to imagine the writing of the text, and thus the poet himself becomes a duplicitous cipher. The poet is and is not a poet; the poet is both a diabolical wonder-worker and a nothing; an agency and an absence; an eructation and a declivity; one who can be supposed and no one. Thus the reader’s stymied efforts to stabilize value produce a spectral double on the other side of Art’s ampersand, in the unknowably yet perverse quantity of industry that produced the metaphysical thought. That is, Johnson’s dummy-reader “wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.” In Johnson’s iconic treatment, the text becomes a glyph, an ampersand, a squashed chiasmus linking Poet to reader, a broken and not entirely continuous ligature that admits coefficients of value and waste, perversity, occultness and violence, quandariness, a discordia concors, which far from establishing resemblance trades on labor, expenditure, and misrecognition. This ligature, this ampersand, is the insignia of Art’s violence, and of violence itself.

5. Or, as Muse & Drudge unreels, my last nerve’s lucid music sure chewed up the juicy fruit you must don’t like my peaches Page 88 → there’s some left on my tree ... clipped bird eclipsed moon soon no memory of you no drive or desire survives you flutter invisible still7 These opening passages demonstrate the fluxing nonpattern of sound and syntax that breaks and reforms units of sense, nonsense, immersion, and distance in variegated, unstable ways, proposing occult contiguities and coercions, an ampersanding of sound that splits apart to erase itself or hint at a persistence. In the first quatrain, “my last nerve’s lucid music / sure chewed up the juicy fruit / you must don’t like my peaches / there’s some left on my tree.” Here the specter of the stanza itself suggests both contiguity and fragmentation, something that splits and joins into couplets, but couplets that do not join to each other except through the occult resemblance of their sound/tonal pattern rather than their sense. In the first couplet, the nerve produces elevated, lucid music, something produced without organs, absolute music, something like Keats’s unheard melodies, perhaps; yet this is a production of one’s last nerve, the final gesture before total expenditure of anger, breakage, breakdown. In the second line, the lucid music turns antic and embodied, perhaps it “chewed up the juicy fruit,” made the jaw work and the mouth water, and dived quickly from high to low, “lucid music” to a chewing gum. Value here is accruing and dispersing, dipping in status from lucid music to jawboning, even as it becomes more material, oozes from bodiless music to juice. The next two lines rewrite the saucy blues imprecation “If you don’t want my peaches / don’t shake my tree” as an almost economic consideration, the lucid music and the juicy fruit’s logic of accrual now reversed across the chiasmus of the couplets into a retrospection and a counting up of excess that is also a kind of rejection of value: a waste. This stanza makes a ligature, an ampersand in which the “my” speaker contemplates devaluement and excess, but also in which the juice (juissance) is stored back up in the tree to begin

the lucid release of music again. Page 89 → The remaining stanzas on the page continually conduct these lawless appearing and disappearing acts, these spasming double impositions of zero and one, an unstable overpermeation of the instant with possibilities, a visible/invisible toggling: “you flutter invisible still.” call me pessimistic but I fall for sour pickles sweets for the heat awrr reet peteet patootie8 This passage, beginning “call me pessimistic,” begins in the conversational tone, but again this lucid music in the apparent mouth of a speaker converts to juice, sour pickles, a watering mouth, which waters in response to something else being put in the mouth, the mouth not as the site of self-expression but as a join, the site of “and per se and,” the lawless substance, the spit that becomes lascivious and then irrationally eructative: “sweets for the heat / aw reet sweet patootie.” The next two quatrains flip back and forth almost psychizophrenically. shadows acrossed her face distanced by the medium riffing through it too poor to pay attention sepia bronze mahogany say froggy jump salty jelly in a vise buttered up broke ice9 The “shadows” stanza’s diction is essayistic, descriptive, a critique, enacting the distance from the medium it describes, but also making “her” face a medium for projection of obscure, occult resemblances, shadows. The “medium” here, which should ligature, instead splits, casting out the “her” from its immediacy, its in medias res; she, too, is on the wrong side of value’s ampersand, unhooked from the medium, “too poor to pay attention.” This reversal of fortune recalls the disappearances, eclipses, drainages, and reversals that riffle across the previous passages Page 90 → I’ve read, sending a temporary speaker counting the peaches on her own tree, creating a countertide to the buoyance of language. Yet here we see that same buoyance surge through the ampersandic medium again, proposing its own gooey gluey medium from which there can be no distance for accounting and phrases are built on a “discordia concors,” a variety of textures that becomes its own glue: “jelly in a vise / buttered up broke ice.” I’d like to point out for a moment what my readings are and are not doing. I am not reading the figures continuously, trying to align the “I,” “me,” “you,” “my,” “her” into speakers and personae. As a reader I see these as heterogeneous syntactic elements caught up in the ligaturing, ampersanding movement of the poems, power sources that volt the syntax into certain brief shapes, a line, two lines, four lines long, rather than as continuous lyric figures from stanza to stanza or even, necessarily, from line to line. For all the readings I presented above, I could probably also present denatured readings that consider even smaller units, even slenderer continuities. I also don’t read the stanzas as continuous with each other, as rhetorically, scenically, or tonally developing each other, but as a kind of superheterogeneous medium through which heterogeneous elements surface, submerge, reknot, and break in the violent activity of the text, producing more juice, blubber violence. Sound to me has a duplicitous, occult function in these poems, splitting syntax and powering through with a syntax of its own as in

“awreet sweet patootie” or creating an illusion of continuity and occult resemblance that calls into question how instable and fluxing the would-be absolute poles of sense and nonsense as adjudicated against sound really are. In fact, as I’ve contended, I think the impossible, chiasmatic “and per se and” of the poem discredits permanent status, enacts the split and join, the ligature where statuses degrade and reinvest each other. In this way the poem becomes the questioning ground of the status of both reader and writer, an occult crucible in which all forms of presence become spectral, conjured by the ampersand, as easily envisioned as eclipsed. In fact, by putting “and” on the outside of the mirror phrase “and per se and,” the ampersand also proposes an eternal series of links that could conjoin with this site of occult, Page 91 → perverse violence and absolute fusion that is the “and per se and” of Art.

6. elaborate trash / disparaged rags. if I had my rage / I’d tear the blueprint up chained thus together / voice held me hostage / divided our separate ways / with a knife against my throat black dream you came / sleep chilled stuttering spirit / drunk on apple ripple / still in my dark unmarked grave10 How does Mullen speak of the occult, apersandic quality of her own work, its violent yoking, its ligature, its broken Möbius strip, and how might this be read back against our macrocosmic sense of the work as a medium yoking writer to reader? In thinking about literacy itself, Mullen has proposed that texts work with a kind of ampersanding function, linking writers and readers in an unstable feedback loop. I’ve called up the specter of Johnson because I want to argue that Mullen’s work further exacerbates the distension of the linear schematic of writer-text-reader, which, per Johnson, becomes deranged by the metaphysical, in that the reader of the metaphysical poet is literally unable to imagine the writing process, unable to imagine the violent labor through which the text was birthed. But such absences or lacunae are filled with blubbery violence, activated by Art’s occult ampersand, always draining and filling, splitting, straining, fissuring, fusing, and reconstituting, often in, through, and around a body that is a kind of polyp-body for the text within the text, Art within Art, a supersaturating surplus of fruit within music, booze within thrill—“the last nerve’s lucid music / sure chewed up the juicy fruit,” and “you’ve had my thrills / a reefer a tub of gin.”11 This kind of draining, collecting, filling, splitting, twinning, making of damaged, degraded, or variegated copies that happens through the speakers and bodies of the text is itself a kind Page 92 → of imprint of the collective speakers Mullen associates with Muse & Drudge; in a 2000 interview she told Cal Bedient, “The making of the voice in this poem is the recycling of tradition. So these things are not independent of each other. One feeds the other. Any time I’ is used in this poem, it’s practically always quotation; it comes from a blues song, or it comes from a line of Sappho; it comes from—wherever it comes from. The ‘I’ in the poem is almost always someone other than myself, and often it’s an anonymous ‘I,’ a generic ‘I,’ a traditional ‘I,’ the ‘I’ of the blues.” To further exacerbate the derangement of value performed by the Art’s ampersand, Mullen reconfigures text as a rank collection pool, which fracks you up with its erratic draining and filling, erratic doubling up and pooling. When I read the words of African Americans who were slaves, I feel at once my continuity and discontinuity with the past, which I imagine is similar to that of the unborn reader who might encounter my work in some possible future. There is another kind of experience I sometimes have when reading the words of authors who never imagined that someone like me might be included in the potential audience for their work, as when I read in Circlot’s Dictionary of Symbols that a “Negro” symbolizes the beast in the human. When I read words never meant for me, or anyone like me—words that exclude me, or anyone like me, as a possible reader—then I feel simultaneously my exclusion and my inclusion as a literate black woman, the unimagined reader of the text.12 Analogous to the unimaginable labor of Johnson’s unimaginable metaphysical poet, who nevertheless perversely executes diabolical, spasming, text effects, an unimagined reader is a kind of specter, produced, occultly, by a text

that cannot imagine her and yet calls her into being by an ampersanding assemblage of continuities and discontinuities, a vertiginous pulsing cluster of exclusions and inclusions. The blubbering aspect of Muse & Drudge, its ampersanding violent, gibbering, gibbeting, ligatured production, might be seen as the signature of this violent yoking pulsation and withdrawal: “it’s rank it cranks you up / crash you’re fracked you suck / shucks you’re wack you be / all you cracked up to be.”13 In this passage, political force is Page 93 → massively depersonalized as “it.” The damaging extractive industrial practice of “fracking” is implicitly linked to the damaging impact of “crack” and “crank,” as well as to the punitive regime of the War on Drugs, with its spectral personages of the Crack Whore and Welfare Queen. These onomatopoetic noun-verbs—“crank,” “crash,” “frack,” “suck,” “cracked”—all packing an assonantly and rhythmically synchronized beating, all falling on the “you.” Yet “you” is a notoriously fungible pronoun in poetry. It can refer to a singular or plural addressee, a specific person or a generalized yet informal and thus familiar “one.” “You” can even mask an “I,” a way for a speaker to refer to itself. Of course, in Mullen’s hands we have no way to stabilizing these surplus quantities of “you.” Instead, “you” is like the jelly in the vise of these damaging verbs. This shattering discontinuity, this cracked-out violence and fracking, can damage but does not cancel the “you.” “You” cannot escape this stanza. “You” keeps reappearing to register the damage. Elsewhere this spasming of sound has the opposite effect, creating a medium for staging spectacular conversion from negative to positive, a site where a shimmering, pulsating spectral presence may be configured, in Don Mee Choi’s phrase, as “positively holey,” as when “breaks wet thigh high stepper / bodacious butt shakes / rebellious riddem / older than black pepper.”14 It seems critical that this quatrain begins with no pronominal human subject, but in medias res, with a noun-verb, “breaks.” “High stepper” seems to supply a noun by force of idiom, but by line 2 no verb is supplied, only another statement, “bodacious butt shakes.” Now we must reread and wonder if “high stepper” is masked possessive—if the “high stepper’s / bodacious butt shakes.” The next line delivers us to “rebellious riddem / older than black pepper.” This answering couplet seems to me to be the correct and redemptive way to read this quatrain. Read all out of order, the quatrain supplies a “rebellious riddem,” a riddem that is itself embodied here thorough all the syllables and body parts it touches, a jellylike, resourceful flexing that is marked as political, “rebellious.” In place of the dumbstruck reader of metaphysical verse imagined by Johnson, who considers the ride not worth the carriage, who cannot fathom through what perverseness of energy a text was composed, and who thus considers the reading Page 94 → experience too “dearly bought,” an unworthy expenditure or a drain, an excess and a waste, Mullen reverses the current and imagines an ever-swelling body of unimagined, spectral readers and speakers and nonspeakers and nonhuman nonspeakers, a “riddem” rather than a singular voice, spasming fat and slender, waxing and waning, yoked together across the ampersand of the text. She has said, “I think of writing as a process that is synthetic rather than organic, artificial rather than natural, human rather than divine. My inclination is to pursue what is minor, marginal, idiosyncratic, trivial, debased or aberrant in the language that I speak or write. . . . One reason I have avoided a singular style or voice for my poetry is the possibility of including a diverse audience of readers attracted to different poems and different aspects of the work. I try to leave room for unknown readers whom I can only imagine.”15 Unlike in Johnson’s model, in which the unity of the natural mind is ultimate and heterogeneity fracks up value, it is the fracking in Muse & Drudge that yokes by violence a diffused, nonsingular chorus of spectral speakers, assonances and riddems, and a cluster of variegated potential readers each yoked by violence to different intensities of the text, simultaneously and heterogeneously assembled with Art’s “and per se and,” Art’s ligature, Art’s broken Möbius strip, Art’s distended Ampersand. Notes 1. Harryette Mullen, Muse & Drudge, collected in Recylopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2006), 99. 2. “Ampersand,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand. 3. Epigraph in Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 97. 4. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 102. 5. All Samuel Johnson quotes are derived from the webpage of the Abraham Cowley Text and Image Archive at the University of Virginia, http://cowley.lib.virginia.edu/small/johnsoncowley.htm. 6. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 101.

7. Ibid., 99. 8. Ibid., 102.Page 95 → 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 101. 11. Ibid., 99. 12. Harryette Mullen, “Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and Including the Excluded,” boundary 2 26, no. 1 (1999): 199. 13. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 122. 14. Ibid., 106. 15. Mullen, “Imagining the Unimagined Reader,” 203.

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Disabled Texts and the Threat of Hannah Weiner 1. In our “Manifesto of the Disabled Text,” published in the winter 2008 issue of Catherine Taylor’s /nor, Johannes Göransson and I argued in favor of disabled texts, texts that reject the “compulsory able-bodiedness” of contemporary text culture.1 Our primary examples of disabled texts were translations. Translations, as disabled texts, pose the same challenges to the conventional norm as disabled bodies do. They deviate from monolingual textual expectations, and are thus deviant. They threaten to blur, and thus undermine, organizing binaries of social/textual/literary life (such as those defining dominant conceptions of gender/genre and racial/national/linguistic identity). “Compulsory ablebodiedness” requires that translated texts function as docile bodies that reinforce dominant cultural norms of genred, raced, and classed bodily/textual function and appearance.2 We also argued in favor of publishing practices that promote the threat of disabled texts to work their dismantling energies on language, image, and text culture, and beyond. 2. Just as the disabled body disrupts societal norms and repressive stabilities, the disabled text has a disabling (disarming!) effect on hierarchies of reading and scholarship, inviting the reader, scholar, even the translator to move into a space where there may be no mastery, where fluency itself is a proximate and contingent affair. This effect is perfectly evident at literary translation conferences, where one may hear translator after translator bemoaning the “untranslatability” of works to which he or Page 97 → she has dedicated a lifetime of creative engagement. Poets from Frost to Pound have made a fulcrum of such petulance, and yet in Pound’s case we can see how much textual effulgence was to be gained by making a practice of aberrant and errorful translation. 3. The profitably disabling practice of translation may even lead translators to doubt the prioritized fact of their own birth—if one does not have mastery over a language, may one be said to be a “native speaker”? And if one is not a native speaker of any language, what kind of speaker is one? 4. Perhaps a nonspeaker? A silent speaker? A clairvoyant? 5. The spirits are telephoned. Who invented it? DADA. (“Dada Excites Everything,” 1921)3 6. Hannah Weiner presents us with a model of clairvoyance as bricolage. Clairvoyance brings to mind most readily the Surrealists, who brought clairvoyance to mind to bring things to mind (Do you want to hear the great voice of the oracle?—“Surrealist Game,” 1942),4 but I’m thinking more of the Dadaists (The poem will resemble you—“Dada Manifesto of Feeble & Bitter Love,” ca. 1921).5 Weiner (1928–97) was a New York clothing designer and performance poet whose work explored text, collaboration, codes, and signals; she underwent an “‘at home’ experience” in 1970 in which she began to see text on various surfaces in her vicinity. These texts amounted to real-time calligrammes appearing on people’s foreheads, on her own body and clothing, on the walls of her living space (most calligrammatically, trailing the pull cord on a light). This extraordinary experience has been interpreted by others as the effect of mental illness, a bad trip, or general New Age susceptibility, but Weiner interpreted these textual apparitions as the inception of a decades-long spiritual tutelage by “silent teachers.” Moreover, she developed an almost sculptural textual art form, which she called “clair style,” to record and render these addresses. Despite the disembodied astral dimension of the spirit teachers, Weiner’s clair style was very concrete and pragmatic, manipulating the capacities of her new electronic typewriter to create the distinctive typography/tectonics of her clairvoyant journals and other texts, a resolutely visual poetry she nonetheless described as representing “voices.” Page 98 → I bought a new electric typewriter in January 74 and said quite clearly, perhaps aloud, to the words (I talked to them as if they were separate from me, as indeed the part of my mind they come from is not

known to me) I have this new typewriter and can only type lower case, capitals, or underlines (somehow I forgot, ignored, or couldn’t cope with in the speed I was seeing things, a fourth voice, underlined capitals) so you will have to settle yourself into three different prints. Thereafter I typed the large printed words I saw in CAPITALS the words that appeared on the typewriter or the paper I was typing on in underlines (italics) and wrote the part of the journal that was unseen, my own words in regular upper and lower case.6

7. TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words which make up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order they left the bag. The poem will resemble you. And there you are—an infinitely original poet of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.7 8. In her “conscientious” “copying” of the words that appeared around her, Weiner remakes mysticism as a species of Dadaist bricolage, a “clair style” deriving from a mostly exterior cache of possible words rather than mimetic of an interior locus of experience. In an interview for Charles Bernstein’s LineBreak in 1995, Weiner insists: Charles, I bought a typewriter. And I looked at the words all over the place and said, you have three choices: caps, italics, and regular type. And that settled it. That’s all. The words settled down to three voices.8 Page 99 → Page 100 → In this account, the “regular type” associated with Weiner’s “own voice” is just one more set of words. This voice does not derive from a privileged interior district but may simply be found “all over the place,” akin to Tzara’s deliberately exteriorized sourcing of words. 9. In nearly all her published books from the inception of “clair style” on, Weiner included an opening note, which insisted on her clairvoyance. I SEE words on my forehead IN THE AIR on other people on the typewriter on the page

These appear in the text in CAPITALS

or italics9 BEST SEE WORS I SEE WORS BE

ST

I

S E E

W O R D S10

A S S E E N I W O R D S11 CLAIR STYLE ALL WORDS SEEN OR HEARD YER BETTER SAY YOU SEE ASTRAL”12 In these cases, Weiner’s foreword becomes a kind of concrete glyph the reader must pass through as an initiation into the “clair-style” works within. The reader learns to read this glyph first, and can thereafter perceive the spatial logic of what follows. 10. The Angel Hair edition of Clairvoyant Journals features as a cover image the photograph of a grinning Weiner with the words “I SEE WORDS” written across her forehead. In this photograph, Weiner herself is a concrete poem. The text that follows does not re-create, as some would have it, her experience of clairvoyance (i.e., some arguable interiority reconstructed on the page) but resembles and is continuous with her exteriority, itself covered and in contact with language.13 Page 101 → 11. The text resembles Weiner but is not exclusive to her. Any three voices may voice it (and do, most extraordinarily, in three versions that may be listened to at PennSound).14 The text recognizes no difference or priority between, say, appearing on Weiner’s forehead or being cited by her on a page, since the phrases “STOP TH SENTENC”15 and “I DONST FINISH THIS PAGE,”16 which appear to refer to the pages on which they are found in the Clairvoyant Journals, were first read by Weiner on her own head. This doubleness is inherent in a favorite trope of the clair-style writings, apostrophe, which, yes, suggests the kind of acute, high-flown, vatic address typical of conventional mysticism, but is also textual and homely, suggesting the opening of a letter or the exterior of an envelope. 12. By way of comparison: my schizophrenic painter uncle Timothy McSweeney (yes, that Timothy McSweeney) wrote all over the outside of envelopes and mailed them to lots of folks selected to receive them by occult or at least arcane logic. One recipient was Dave Eggers’s mother. My uncle was forwarding addresses, or, rather, forwarding address itself. Oddly, the result of this graphomania was that his own written name detached from the site of his person and attached to Eggers’s obscure publishing venture. 13. The poem didn’t just resemble Timothy McSweeney; it discarded him. It re-placed itself, and replaced him. 14. Even more pertinent, in the case of Weiner and her typewriter and the astral entities she referred to as “silent teachers,” apostrophe suggests that high-off-the-line punctuation mark that truncates words, pulls them together, precisely annotates vernacular imprecision, and signals possession. The apostrophe as a mark thus allegorizes “clair style” as a process, a signal, and a mark of (psychic) possession. It is in these typographical senses that apostrophizing could be another name for Weiner’s species of bricolage. 15. The critic A. S. Bessa has proposed the category of bricoleur as a possible critical location for the categoryfrustrating Öyvind Fahlström, a Scandinavian Brazilian poet and fabricator who made Art in a range of forms across his career, from concrete poems and manifestos to films, happenings, parades, and room-sized gameenvironments. Bessa contextualizes Fahlström Page 102 → within a century of Brazilian Art that swung between the two poles Lévi-Strauss proposed in The Savage Mind: the engineer and the bricoleur.

16. The difference between the engineer and the bricoleur, as Lévi-Strauss proposes and Bessa paraphrases, is that the engineer works “by means of concepts,” the bricoleur “by means of signs.”17 This already would seem to describe Hannah Weiner, whose “silent teaching,” as she eventually deemed her clairvoyance, took the form exclusively of “signs,” words themselves rather than some species of paraphrased or paraphraseable revelation. 17. Lévi-Strauss further declaims that the bricoleur makes his structures from whatever is to hand; material isn’t conceived of in regard to a certain project but “is a contingent result of all the occasions there have been to enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.”18 This calls up Hannah Weiner, closed in her apartment, building her clair-style writings like a textual version of Schwitters’s merzbau; the available material keeps denoting the type of project that may be undertaken. 18. Moreover, Lévi-Strauss seems to be writing (clairvoyantly?) of Weiner’s preclairvoyant Code Poems, based on the (nautical) International Code of Signals, performed with lights and flags in Central Park and published as a book in ‘68, when he further holds that: Both the scientist and “bricoleur” might therefore be said to be constantly on the lookout for messages. Those which the “bricoleur” collects are, however, ones which have in some sense been transmitted in advance—like the commercial codes which are summaries of the past experience of the trade and so allow any new experience to be met economically, provided that it belongs to the same class as an earlier one.19 Working within a preestablished code of signals had appeal for Weiner, even before the advent of “silent teaching, ” and prefigures her departure from conventional models of mysticism—she prioritizes silent teaching (the code itself) rather than silent Page 103 → teachings. This tendency is evident in the preclairvoyant “Fashion Show Poetry Event Essay,” in which she presents “fashion language” as a kind of code and makes idiosyncratic use of the word style, which will later resurface in the neologistic appellation clair style. We use the phrase “write the style” rather than the more usual “write in the style” because the latter indicates that one is using a style to serve a certain content, but here we are writing a certain style using a certain content as a pretext to write this style.20 In this passage, writing is style—a system of signs, not of signifieds. This orientation further places Weiner in the category of bricoleur, one who is distinguished in working “by means of signs.” 19. In The Fast and other texts, Weiner makes remarkably acute tallies of the material things she buys, eats, and has to be rid of, an accruing list that provides a physical allegory to her continual categorizing and logging of the language presented to her so materially and so imperatively. Weiner and her texts were both bound in their own discourse, unable (or declining) to bring in new variables or contexts. Derrida suggests when he writes of bricolage: The only weakness of bricolage—but, seen as a weakness is it not irremediable?—is a total inability to justify itself in its own discourse. The already-there-ness of instruments and of concepts cannot be undone or reinvented. In that sense, the passage from desire to discourse always loses itself in bricolage, it builds its castles with debris.21 This disparaging or deprivileging of bricolage is already present in Lévi-Strauss’s depiction: “[I]n our own time the term “bricoleur” is still used to refer to someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared with those of a craftsman.”22 The bricoleur is not a craftsman. Nor is she an artist, for an artist is supposed to be halfway between the bricoleur and the engineer; an artist who made all her Art in the category of “bricolage” Page 104 → would, by definition, be making ill-made, unjustifiable, irremediably weak, non-able-bodied Art. 20. Disabled Art. 21. Of Fahlström-the-bricoleur, Bessa writes:

How does Fahlström’s bricolage “justify itself in its own discourse”? To be able to address this question one needs to leave aside any expectation of closure and, as in “A Writing Lesson,” simply follow his discourse and surrender to the disjointedness of his text.23 Here Bessa describes the way in which a disabled and irremediably weak text in turn requires a disabled reading practice that jettisons expectation of a stable, closed textual form. This is the type of disabled practice required by Weiner’s text. Time and again Weiner deliberately resists attempts by well-meaning friends and critics to normalize her experience or separate her aesthetics from her clairvoyance (often in order to assign her political bona fides). When, in the LineBreak program, Bernstein invites Weiner to identify her filiations with Feminism, she answers with an exasperated nonsequitur: the taglike description of her “clair style” process quoted in section 8 above. When he asks her how she evaluates books by other authors, she answers that she judges books by their authors’ auras. Finally, when he suggests that all writers “see words,” she refuses to allow her clairvoyance to be normalized on a spectrum of conventional authorship.24 22. “Clair style” has no recourse, no inner resources, no justification except its own discourse, and yet this discourse is unjustifiable, not “convincing” even to Weiner’s compassionate, patient, and loyal friend Bernstein, who in his eulogy for Weiner both distances himself from “her more heterodox beliefs” and tries once again to recuperate her as a conventional author, even as he acknowledges the instrumental place of her clairvoyance in her life. In any case, Hannah Weiner’s work is not a product of her illness but an heroic triumph in the face of it. Her personal courage in refusing to succumb to what often must have been unbearable fear induced by her illness, her persistence Page 105 → in writing in spite of her disabilities, is one of the legacies of her work. And if her schizophrenia gave her insight into language, into human consciousness, into the nature of how everyday life can be presented rather than represented in writing—well, we all have to start from where we are. While Hannah’s last few years weren’t easy, she continued to produce amazing writing, pushing her own poetry and the possibilities for poetry into new zones of perception. What else are poets for?25 Bernstein thus proposes a version of Weiner as part of “we poets,” as a craftswoman first, diligent “in the face of” mental illness. But it is precisely some “what else,” something that cannot even be mentioned here except as part of an already-foreclosed rhetorical question, that Weiner’s work amounts to. We may fashion at least one hypothetical answer out of the debris of her own discourse: Q. What else are poets for? A. Silent teaching. 23. Bernstein’s compassionate insistence that Weiner wrote “in spite of her disabilities,” that Weiner’s work is “not a product of her illness” but a “triumph in the face of it,” seems like special pleading. Weiner’s work is her clairvoyance. Her aesthetic process is indistinguishable from the fact that she “sees words,” a fact she insists on graphically both on the page and in the frontmatter of every published “clair-style” work. She is not a conventional artistic hero; she does not survive the crisis of her Art or her life with her subjecthood intact but lives for twenty-five years after the inception of her clairvoyance without arriving at the closure we associate with epiphany.26 Her bricolage, to work with Derrida’s terms, bears an irremediable weakness, as compared to conventional, closed, well-crafted, able-bodied texts. It is for just this reason that her texts disable conventional reading practices and categories, even extremely avant-garde categories and extremely radical political stances. When Bernstein asks the question “What else are poets for?,” the fluent, able reader recognizes this as a rhetorical question that expects no answer; the implied answer is “nothing.” But if we can allow ourselves to be disarmed and disabled by Hannah Weiner and approach this open-ended body of work as a disabled text, we might just find Page 106 → the rhetoricalness of Bernstein’s query itself disabled—his remark “What else are poets for?” remarked as an open question.

Notes 1. The term compulsory able-bodiedness was coined by Robert McRuer in the essay “Compulsory AbleBodiedness and Queer-Disabled Existence,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon L.

Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thompson (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002). McRuer’s term is itself an adaptation of the queer studies notion of “compulsory heterosexuality” developed in the essay of that title by Adrienne Rich (“Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4 [1980]). McRuer’s use of this term signals not only an indebtedness to but also an alliance with the feminist and queer studies paradigms, and our adoption of his term to speak of translations and other disabled texts is also meant to suggest both a borrowing of his rubric and an alliance with his program. 2. Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney, “Manifesto of the Disabled Text,” /nor 3 (Spring 2008): 94–98. 3. “Dada Excites Everything,” trans. Lucy R. Lippard, reprinted in Manifesto, a Century of Isms, ed. Mary Anne Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 290. 4. “Surrealist Game,” trans. Mary Anne Caws, reprinted in Surrealist Painters and Poets, an Anthology, ed. Mary Anne Caws (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 461. 5. “Dada Manifesto on Feeble & Bitter Love,” trans. Barbara Wright, reprinted in Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, vol. 1: From Fin-desiècle to Negritude, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 302. 6. Hannah Weiner, “Mostly about the Sentence,” reprinted in Hannah Weiner’s Open House (Chicago: Kenning Editions, 2007), 127. 7. “Dada Manifesto on Feeble & Bitter Love,” 302. 8. Hannah Weiner, interview for Charles Bernstein’s LineBreak, 1995, accessed at PennSound, http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/LINEbreak.html. 9. Hannah Weiner, Clairvoyant Journals (Lenox, MA: Angel Hair, 1978). 10. Hannah Weiner, Little Books/Indians (New York: Roof Books, 1980).Page 107 → 11. Hannah Weiner, Sixteen (Windsor, VT: Awede Press, 1983). 12. Hannah Weiner, silent teachers remembered sequel (New York: Tender Buttons, 1994). 13. For an interesting comparison, consider this image against the 1920 photo of a smirking Francis Picabia with the words “Viva Papa” grafittoed across his forehead and chin, reprinted in George Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 338. 14. See PennSound, http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Weiner.html. 15. April 17 p 2, entry in Weiner, Clairvoyant Journals, unpaginated. 16. Monday, May 11, entry in Weiner, Clairvoyant Journals. 17. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 20, quoted in the manuscript of the introduction to the book by Antonio Sergio Bessa, Öyvind Fahlström: The Art of Writing (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008). 18. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 17. 19. Ibid., 20. 20. Hannah Weiner, “Fashion Show Poetry Event Essay,” in Hannah Weiner’s Open House (Chicago: Kenning Editions, 2007), 58. 21. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 139, quoted in Bessa, Öyvind Fahlström. 22. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1973), 16–17. 23. See Bessa’s introduction to Öyvind Fahlström. 24. This last instance was pointed out in the “Beginning with the End” section of Maria Damon’s Hannah Weiner Beside Herself: Clairvoyance after Shock; or, the Nice Jewish Girl Who Knew Too Much, Faux Press, http://www.fauxpress.com/t8/damon/p3.htm. 25. Bernstein’s eulogy was first published in Poetry Project Newsletter in 1997 and is available online at Jacket Magazine, http://jacketmagazine.com/12/wein-bern.html. 26. For this disability-studies critique of epiphany, I am indebted to Robert McRuer, “As Good as It Gets: Queer Theory and Critical Disability,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9, no. 1–2 (2003): 79–105.

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Translation, the Slavish Mold, the Filthiest Medium Alive With Special Reference to Matthew Barney, Andy Warhol, and Divine 1. What regime does a work of Art appeal to? Does the work of Art appeal to a sensory, generic, or interpretive regime? Is that appeal “abject”? “slavish”? 2. Let us take translation as an example of a work of Art. For translation works on extant materials and transforms them—conforms them—into new, sculptural, legible shapes. And rhetorics of etiquette and behavior—rhetoric itself—the terms of the appeal—are constantly being applied, in a disciplinary manner, to the medium of translation. 3. [I want to be clear that I am using the term medium in two different ways here—one, medium like paint, photograph, marble, steel, the stuff of Art, the material of Art. The substance. And the other, the transfer of Art from one form to another, the delivery system, the conveyance, the technology. Translation also fits both definitions of mediumicity. It’s both a medium (the material of Art) and a medium (that technology through which Art passes and is delivered). Both a thing, a substance, a material, and a conveyance, a way that one material is converted to another form, one substance de-, re-, and con-formed to a new legibility. It already has impossible properties, impossible doubleness, self-saturation, impossible borders. This impossibility issues in a third resonance of the word medium: that of occult, spiritualist receptivity to ambiguous presences. The downtown text and performance artist Hannah Weiner (1928–97) embodies all three dimensions of translation’s mediumicity. In 1970 Page 109 → Hannah Weiner was contacted by astral figures, “silent teachers” who communicated to her through visual texts only she could see. Weiner spent decades developing a multimedia textual practice for “translating” these texts to media perceptible to other humans. In her (occult) mediumship, Weiner became a medium (technology of conveyance) for bringing the teachings of her unseen spiritual masters into a multimedia form. Weiner’s body of work is a substantiation of translation’s demanding, occult regime.] 6. To continue: Reading contemporary reviews of translation, one concludes that translation must decide what its appeal will be, and that it has two options—masterful or slavish. See, for example, Kathryn Harrison on Lydia Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary: “Faithful to the style of the original, but not to the point of slavishness, Davis’s effort is transparent—the reader never senses her presence. For “Madam Bovary,” hers is the level of mastery required” [New York Times Book Review, October 3, 2010.] Page 110 → 7. This level of mastery, then, is self-mastery. Also known as scrupulousity, good behavior, also known as taste. Because the best taste is that which cannot be noticed. It cannot be detected. It is merely—exactly—what is “required.” Not a slavish display of slavishness, Topsy, we’re too civilized for that, that would be a caricature of power relations. 8. Instead, of slavishness, Harrison (and practically everyone else) calls for something more modern, more acceptable to modern tastes: a well-trained servant’s invisibility, “transparentness,” tastefulness, a knowing what is required. The guests at the dinner party should never sense the translator’s “presence.” Or, more commonly, a faithfulness. A faithful retainer. A faithful servant. But, nay, never a slave, fie! 9. To conform to this regime of transparency is, paradoxically enough, mastery. 10. The metaphor of translation is used almost compulsively to describe multimedia Art, an Art that’s “translated” from medium to medium. And translation in multimedia Art is not transparent—it is the thing itself, the something that moves from shape to shape, from medium to medium, from phase to phase. It has texture, it has weight, it has properties, it causes problems. So can we conclude (transitively) that a quality of not-quite-slavishness-but-

transparentness-i.e.-exactly-what-is-requiredness is also translated as the regime to which multimedia Art will appeal and thus conform? Or can we turn this metaphor around and see multimedia Art as proposing an alternate regime for translation—one of palpability? Of visibility? Of materiality? Of mediumicity? Of saturation? Of problems? Of slavish, lurking, presence? 11. People get weird about Madame Matthew Barney Bovary. I get weird about Madame Matthew Bovary Barney. Mr. Mustard Ovary. On the one hand, he fits the mold of that most annoying of Art-cultural products, the white, male, rich, success-right-out-of-BFA-school Art star. The young white quarterback of Art. The inheritor of the Old Masters. 12. In fact, some commentators have said Barney not only exemplified this mold, he MADE this mold, and then cast himself from it. From central casting. That is such an annoying mold! Page 111 → Not only does he fit this mold, but he was once in fact a model. Some commentators suggest he is the model of this mold. 13. Yet something there is that doesn’t love a mold, or that loves it too well, that smooshes it, splooges it, that overcomes it, that moves over and around itself, that is borderless, that oozes and spreads when the mold is split away. That makes the mold subside. That something is mold. 14. As Matthew Barney said of a giant petroleum-based jelly he made for his feature-length film Drawing Restraint 9, You’re going to see a crust starting to form pretty quickly. The interior of the casting is still soft so that the, uh, it pushes the uh, it pushes through the crust and slides. It starts to shear and slide away. It starts behaving a little bit like a glacier. It drives the rest of the story. The behavior of this, of this casting drives the rest of the story. 15. Moldy-lowly-slavish. Grovelly. Crusting, pushing, shifting, sliding through itself. Shearing away. I am the Duchess of Malfi still! JonBenet decomposing, wrapped up in a carpet sample in the basement. Something skanky. Chelsey Minnis. Something that huffs itself, form evaporating, changing, molding, its willing to be servile (S & M) and thus without mastery, yet it persists, it has its own overweening rhetorical force (S & M), its properties. This is the Art, the slavish force of translation, that spreads and smears through the many media of Matthew Barney’s work, covers his own body in frozen or melting shapes, his own face in plastic prosthetic devices. In Drawing Restraint 9, while up on the deck of a Japanese whaler the multiton mold crusts, slides, goes semisolid, then flows away from the mold; similarly Barney’s prosthetic flesh is cut away with flensing knives in the tanker of viscous fluid, an oily liquid that preserves what bleeds and pearlesces from his flesh. Even as Barney would erect rationales, epistemological scaffoldings to control or support it, to reerect the mold that would contain the mold, the mold slips out, down, revoltingly, down the throat of Art. Of its own devices. 16. And the throat of Art revolts. Regurgitates more mold. 17. A slave revolt! 18. Speaking of Cremaster 3, which includes a barroom interior: “Of course in the film, the original [bar] was made of walnut. Page 112 → In the exhibition, it’s been consumed by the Vaseline aspect of it. In that sense, it’s been consumed by the sculptural language which relies liberally on the family of plastics used in prosthetics” (Barney’s production manager, Matthew D. Ryle, in “Matthew Barney: The Body as Matrix,” 19). In this telling quote, the Vaseline material, which forces its way through the various elaborate structures of Barney’s films, which surfaces in his Art (his surfaces), is shown to be a driving force in the translation of Cremaster 3 from phase to phase. In this quote, an iconic set from the film, a walnut bar, has been “consumed” by the Vaseline as Barney’s team creates the exhibition “phase” of the film. 20. Even the metaphor of the “phase,” to speak of the different stages of his work, reveals that Art is here material—translating itself from form to form. The substance of Barney’s Art is “translated” from costume, mask, set, and prop to video to film, it rematerializes as photograph and as installation, and then is translated to a new visual and material substance, the thick, glossy-yet-grimy, wordless books.

21. The pressure that Barney’s materials exert, in their slavish, lowly, yet forceful urge to change forms, is total, is intense. Its constant lowly pressure erodes the vertical hierarchies of traditional Art, or narrative, or film. As Nancy Spector notes, the Chrysler Building can become the main character in a film while Barney himself “can become a sculptural presence in the movie” rather than a humanist protagonist. This Art star is translated to a site where material elements congeal, coalesce, slick, propel, and/or are ripped away, through which materials push to find new forms. There is no natural body in Barney’s work, because the body is always revealing itself to be prosthetic, a set for evisceration or dismemberment, a sculpture, a tool, a medium for media. And this supersaturated mediumicity often reveals itself as a wounding of the body, an opening, a ripping away. 22. Let’s revisit Barney’s description of the “mold” in Drawing Restraint 9. You’re going to see a crust starting to form pretty quickly. The interior of the casting is still soft so that the, uh, it pushes the, uh, it pushes through the crust and slides. It starts to shear Page 113 → and slide away. It starts behaving a little bit like a glacier. It drives the rest of the story. The behavior of this, of this casting drives the rest of the story. 23. In this quote, we not only see the paradoxical regime of the slavish translation, as opposed to the conventional regime of mastery to which translation is usually made to appeal, but we even see a certain moldiness, an unformedness, that pushes through his own syntax and arrives as raw material: “so that the, uh, it pushes the, uh, it pushes through the crust and slides.” That the materiality of this translation might be paradoxically also language, that is, saturated with the qualities of both materiality AND language, is reflected in Barney’s later comment, “I wanted the mold to metaphorically be a whale but at the same time wanted it to have all the visual language of a mold.” In this sense it is a mold, a multiton heap of semisolid petroleum product, that pushes through all the signifying regimes of the artwork. It is itself translation, pushing a regime of translation through every possible phase. 24. Barney is given to allegory; his metacomments on his work, his “commentary tracks,” are always saturated with references to the archetypal, allegorical, genealogical structures that give his works their origin, their analytical frames and contexts: the stages of genital development in the wound, the stages of Masonic hierarchy, the topography of Idaho, etc. But against all this rigorous self-definition, restraint, and self-development is the counterforce of the mold, of translation itself as material, process, and form, pushing against and through the Art star’s own body, causing him to make plastic replicas of himself, to go masked and be ripped apart. The somatic imperative is reflected in Barney’s description of the site-specific aspect of his projects: “My own language becomes a guest in this host body and passes to the other side.” Like a parasite, “his own language,” his mastery, becomes shit, a shitty slave, and is shitted out of the host organism of Art. 25. This notion that multimedia “translation” involves a saturation of one body by another and ultimately consists of the degradation of all constitutive borders is confirmed in theorist Karen Beckmann’s reading of Andy Warhol’s film Empire. Page 114 → Yet this new painting cannot simply contain film: rather, as film enters into the space of the still image, it imbues the idea of the painting with film’s temporal dimension, recognizable in spite of the image’s stillness through the visible disintegration of a moving strip of film. . . . These acts of translation throw the mediums’ limits radically into question, disorienting our sense of where if anywhere the borders of film, painting, sculpture, and literature might lie. [Karen Beckman, “Film Falls Apart: ‘Crash,’ Semen, and Pop,” Grey Room 12 (Summer 2003): 104.] In this quote, “acts of translation” are matters of one medium entering another’s space, of one body saturating another, of disintegration, a disorientation of borders. As with a Kara Walker silhouette, a Möbius strip, or a great libidinous band (film), this new continuousness, this total contact, is impossible yet slavishness makes it; it gums up our ability to really know where anything starts and stops. It’s a temporal send-up, a parody. It touches and slicks everything, breaks everything down, makes a medium shit its own Art star out. The oversaturated,

signifying body of the slave becomes paradoxically continuous with the form of the master. No mastery now. Variations in power and position are fleeting, temporal, and can be as easily inverted again in the next wounding (Walker’s cut). Infectious slavishness. Isn’t that what we worried about the whole time? That a masterpiece could be infected by slavishness? Isn’t a nice, transparent, appropriate servant more acceptable after all? 26. Too late. Translation is here, in all its cringing lowly moldiness. For this new regime for translation, this slavish one, for this parasitic, contaminatory, all-powerful slavishness as a counterrhetoric to the regime of mastery, I occultly ventriloquize the celluloid voice of the Divine, as she herself apostrophizes Boise, Idaho, location of the stadium scenes of Cremaster 2. Divine: Boise, Idaho, get ready. You are about to receive some migrants of a very special nature. You are about to receive into your community the filthiest people alive!” [Pink Flamingos] 27. Translation: the migrant of a very special nature. The filthiest medium alive.

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Part Three Eye Wound Media Page 116 →

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Eye Wound Media for Chris Andrews whose translations of Bolaño’s short works slit open my eye

Part the First: The Evil Eye as Medium 1. I was looking at the cover of Prigov’s Fifty Drops of Blood in the Ugly Duckling edition; the cover features an eye-shaped cutout through which splashes of red blood may be seen strewing what looks like the exposed tissue of the page beneath. 2. The eye wound. Drops of blood (Art) drop from the eye. But also: the violently opened eye insignias the opened media. The front cover of the book has been sliced open to let the Art flow. Open the book, open the eye, dissect the eye, follow the eye’s discharge: the Art. 3. The most epochal eye wound since Oedipus’s: the opening image of Un Chien Andalou. Here the cut eye works two ways: the woman’s sliced-open eye collapses, spilling fluid, which fluid is the matter to follow, the stuff of the film. And the watcher’s eye is of course initiated at that moment, vitiated, cut open. The wound of initiation (hymen). The viewer’s vision is changed. 5. In his milestone essay “Becoming-Media: Galileo’s Telescope,” theorist Joseph Vogl makes Galileo’s telescope the object lesson for his meditation on “becoming-media” and notes: This experimentalization of seeing relates to the fact the eye and its natural vision are now merely parts of a single optical case among many others. The telescope does not enlarge any more than the eye makes smaller, and the telescopic view is no less natural than the eye’s vision is artificial. Galileo’s telescope Page 118 → Page 119 → thus erases the coordinates of natural vision, natural view, and the natural eye.1 6. In this quote we see that the new media does an injury to the eye’s status. It wounds the eye. But this necessary wounding becomes an aperture through which a new continuum can be established, a continuum that includes both the new technology and the formerly naturalized sensory apparatus. The new assemblage, renovating BOTH the technology (the telescope), AND the bodily organ (the eye) is the “becoming-media.” 7. And it requires an eye wound. That’s the aperture through which this forced birth may occur. 8. To slit the eye so that vision may be exploded is to involve the eye in a huger project, one that disorients epistemological hierarchies. To wound the eye is to pluck it from its niche at the top of the humanist hierarchy (seat of vision, insight, understanding, rationality) and reinsert it in a horizontal position of occult and limitless contact. As Homi Bhabha holds in “Interrogating Identity” in The Location of Culture: The evil eye, which is nothing in itself, exists in its lethal traces or effects as a form of iteration that arrests time—death/chaos—and initiates a space of intercutting that articulates politics/psyche, sexuality/race. It does this in a relation that is differential and strategic rather than originary, ambivalent rather than accumulative, doubling rather than dialectical.2 9. This “evil eye” is evil because it has rejected its perch as the king of the senses and “initiates a space of intercutting”—as good a gloss on the function of the eye wound at the opening of Un Chien Andalou as any. For indeed, to view that film for the first time is to be initiated into just such an “space of intercutting,” of bold and gratuitous montage that exists in the slash mark, the mark of violence that, in the Surrealist project, links “politics” to “psyche,” “sexuality” to “race.” The slash mark of montage also fulfills all the first terms in Bhaba’s sequence: it establishes a voltaic differential, marks a literal ambivalence (the join that sunders), and doubles—envisions an

“or” that is really a kind of impossible “and.” Page 120 →

Part the Second: The (Story of the) Evil Eye 1. The ultimate appearance of this evil, wounded eye, which releases its fetid liquors (Art) and “initiates a space of intercutting” (Art) may be found in Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, nearly contemporaneous with Un Chien Andalou. Bataille’s is a novel that fulfills the Sadean command to say and show everything, by the standards of his own time and ours today. There’s a kind of circuslike, ludicrous precision in the way the elaborate sexual stunts are physically composed in this novel. “That was a period when Simone developed a mania for breaking eggs with her ass,” begins an early chapter. “She would do a headstand on an armchair in the parlor, her back against the chair’s back, her legs towards me, while I jerked off in order to come in her face.”3 Yet the book maintains a quivering, supersaturated lacuna when it comes to its ultimate image, that of the titular eye, cut from the socket of a dead priest, run through the buttocks of the ingenious Simone, and finally inserted into her vagina. This insertion performs a material montage, and, like the workings of an evil eye, doubles up the imagery, proposes an impossible “and” (the cunt-eye). The narrator describes it thusly: Now I stood up, and, while Simone lay on her side, I drew her thighs apart, and found myself facing something I imagine I had been waiting for in the same way that a guillotine waits for a neck to slice. I even felt as if my eyes were bulging from my head, erectile with horror: in Simone’s hairy vagina, I saw the wan blue eye of Marcelle, gazing at me through tears of urine. Streaks of come in the streaming hair helped give that dreamy vision a disastrous sadness. I held the thighs open while Simone was convulsed by the urinary spasm, and the burning urine streamed out from under the eye down to the thighs below.4 2. This passage is remarkable for myriad reasons, for every reason. Here is the image the book has been jerkily yet persistently pressing toward with its whole might, with its runic, repetitive images of eggs, eyes, balls, pissing, its pornographic episodes, lovingly diagrammed in prose, but the compulsively frank Page 121 → speaker, for once, can’t name or describe what’s before him: instead, he found himself “facing something.” Rhetorics of slicing and eyeing pick up right away; presented with this ultimate eye, the speaker’s urge is to figure himself as a “guillotine wait[ing] for a neck to slice”—to open the eye, to open (himself up to) its evil. To perceive this eye, then, is to slice it, and, of course, to be sliced by it; the initating pressure of the image causes a sexual response in his own eyes; they go “erectile,” proffer themselves for the aforementioned guillotine. The next sentence also does not name or describe the eye; it merely talks around it, gives its location, “in Simone’s hairy vagina,” and then a substitute image of “the wan blue eye of Marcelle” (a figure previously seduced in the book), and then attention is turned away from the cunt-eye and toward urine, to a hyperbolic apposition,” dreamy vision,” “a disastrous sadness.” Finally the eye appears at the very end of the passage, but one could almost miss it in the flood of urine imagery that pours over, around, and from it, the tear-urine, substance of disastrous sadness. The fluid production of this eye, like the blood on Prigov’s cover, is by now more important than the eye itself. The minute three-letter word reads like a bare placeholder compared to the flood tide of imageries, fluids, and comparisons that have literally poured all around it. 3. What’s most shocking about Bataille’s treatment of this ultimate image of the eye looking out of the cunt is that, despite looking right at it, he doesn’t look at it at all. Instead what he sees is an absence, a hole, a lacuna, from which violent metaphor, dreamy fantasy, and “tears of urine,” “burning urine” issue. What is important about this image of the eye, toward which the whole book has pressed, is not its actual visual properties, its iconic wholeness, its archetypal freight, or even its appearance, which the passage barely describes and hardly names. It’s that it issues. It issues fantasy, violence, waste. It issues Art. The ellipsis that ends the passage underscores this absence, the lacuna, the eye overrun by its issue. Or it might mimetically evoke that dripping issue itself with its dot, dot, dot. 4. The eye made a medium is no longer an instrument of sensory reception or perception, or apprehension, still

less the site of insight; it is “evil” in that it is dubious—there and not there—a Page 122 → hole from which things issue, a doubling up of the cuntiness of the cunt. It tears, it cries, but it cries urine, it cries cum. It makes a slicing artist of the viewer. It initiates a space of intercutting that implicates the viewing eye, slices it, makes it come. 5. To return to Bhabha’s formulation of the evil eye: it barely exists. It is “nothing in itself.” It is “nothing in itself, ” but the space of “intercutting” it initiates splices together multisaturated everythings—Death/chaos, politics /psyche, sex/race. It’s an impossible assemblage, the nothing that’s more than everything. Vogl arrives at this same impossible description for media itself: “No such thing as a medium exists in any permanent sense,” and yet the assemblage that is “becoming-media” “denaturalizes the senses” and “can be understood as world creating organs,” and, like the disappearing-eye in Bataille’s passage, they are “defined by the anesthetic space they produce”—that is, their own disappearance from the detectable frame. 6. Bataille’s speaker views an assemblage of eye and cunt and wants to join the assemblage as the guillotine that slices the eye, and/or/also as two more eyes ready to be sliced, erect (aroused) on their “stalks.” He longs to occupy more than one subject position; indeed, he longs to occupy more than one object position, to be part of the becoming-eye, with its violence and foul issuings, the evil assemblage of Art. He wants and/or, the impossibility performed by the slash mark of the evil eye. 7. The implications of this becoming-eye, becoming-media, becoming-wound as a model for Art’s assemblage are massive because the cut-eye, the wound-eye, and the cunt-eye completely denaturalize humanist orders of knowledge and self-knowledge, rhetorics of wholeness and perception, sanity and sanitation, and replace them with a regime of uncertainty, doubleness, the objectification of the self, and its subsumption into the assemblage of Art. That’s the “evil” of the evil eye, its essential unwholesomeness. Its unwholeness. There is also a kind of unholy multiplication at work here; Bataille’s narrator wants to be a guillotine, he wants to be two eyes erect on their stalks. He wants to be more than one thing, so he can be nothing. Through Art’s evil eye, this is possible. And/or is possible; the slash mark makes it possible; “both” is hosted by an impossible “nothing.” Page 123 →

Part the Third: The Evil Eye as Amulet 1. In Bataille’s ultimate image of the eye in the cunt, the eye does not regard the viewer. It does not judge, perceive, or even reflect the viewer. Instead, in its injury and mediumicity, it overwhelms him with (and is itself overwhelmed by) a flood of fantasies and incomplete substitutions (Marcelle’s eye for the priest’s eye, tears for urine). Like the slash marks in Bhabha’s quote about the evil eye, this evil eye performs impossible unions and sunderings—it “ors” and “boths.” Such an impossible eye—an evil eye, not transparent but material, opaque, issuing not insight but substance, Art—is an important (and gratuitous) motif in Roberto Bolaño’s corpus, an absolute (and contrived, fictive) site, the site of Art’s im/possible issue. 2. The eye appears throughout Bolaño—in Amulet, it arises in a runaway simile introduced to describe a nighttime walk down the Avenida Guerrero in Mexico City. Here’s that simile in Chris Andrews’s headlong, addictive English. Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.5 3. It is typical of the evil eye’s duplicity (and Bolaño’s habits of syntactic construction) that this crucial image is introduced in such a pleasantly gratuitous manner, as part of a simile meant to “simply” describe a street at night. Such a runaway simile exceeds the job of description or even comparison; digressive, gratuitous, unnecessary, flagrant; evil; in other words, Art. The passage begins simply enough, with the syntactical setup of the simile—“Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue.” This sentence merely rewrites the old cliché of a deserted street, neighborhood, or nightspot being “dead.” But Bolaño will raise this dead

metaphor from the dead. The “more” cautions us that something not entirely precise will follow, not as precise a description as the pinpoint geographic and temporal Page 124 → specificity of the subject of the simile: “Guerrero, at that time of night.” Instead, Bolaño, employing another syntactic habit, right away begins introducing his magic “ors,” which pile on forking paths while pretending to remove them: “not a cemetery in 1974, or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666.” The syntactic armature of “not” and “or” cannot serve to erase these dates proffered for the reading eye; instead, like Bhaba’s evil eye, this syntax “opens up a space of intercutting” in which all these options are made present at once. A kind of vertigo ensues as we skip back and forth from 1974 to 1968 to 1975 and then leap, finally, to 2666, opening a huge aperture on a future so distant as to be far out of proportion of the small adjustments of a few years in either direction. This setup establishes a wobbling in the place of precision and, finally, with the sci-fi date of 2666, an outlandishness, a “gratuitous leap.” 4. This leap then delivers us to the meat of the simile itself—“a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child.” Here our cemetery is adorned with a throwaway adjective—“forgotten”—which will be picked up as important as the sentence continues. And here again, Bolaño’s ludicrous specificity of location, “under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child,” actually amounts to a radical doubleness. The reader is not meant to choose “a corpse” OR “an unborn child” but, rather, to read a radical “and” in the place with “or,” a radical, instable, and incomplete “and” in which each successive image is saturated with the image before it. In other words, rather than establishing a binary, in which one term would obviate the other, Bolaño’s “ors” establish an impossible saturation of one alternative by another—“and” and “or” at once—and/or. So now the reader is to imagine “unborn child” saturated with “corpse,” an impossible gambit the paradoxical physical and temporal dimensions of which are constitutive of the impossible, evil dimension we have entered with this simile. Working backward, we may also apply this reading to the list of dates. These dates are to be read not as alternatives to each other, but as saturating each other—2666 is saturated with ’75, ’74, ’68, and it is only because of this saturation that it can perform its oversaturated, supersaturated, supernatural role. 5. Finally, the simile is concluded: “bathed in the dispassionate Page 125 → fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.” This clause would seem to modify “cemetery,” but its most immediate possible antecedent is “unborn child”—as if the “unborn child” were “bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye.” This sets up an impossible double exposure—the impossible and/or—the unborn child is actually the same as the cemetery under its own eyelid—both are “bathed in the dispassionate fluids.” And the fluids are the key here: the fluids—tears and/or amnion—are saturated with “one particular thing, ” having forgotten everything else. That thing, like the “something” in Bataille, is unnamed here, unnameable, perhaps: it is the fluid itself. It issues itself. It issues a thousand reprints on the cellular level. This fluid is total, concentrated, potent, impotent, dead, unborn, nonviable, vitiating, Evil, Art. 6. The Evil Eye: a site Art flows to (in violence) and from which (through violence) it flows. 7. A location (an image) Bolaño returns to again and again in his body of work. This image, as rendered in Amulet, is a potential one, locked far in the future, a permanently unborn child, a corpse dreaming after-the-fact. But the potential is there in that unreleased fluid, and the image itself will open up in an epidemic of murder, which upends the cemetery, shakes out the dead, issues the flood tide of Art that is the coursing and digressive 2666. Indeed, the title 2666 identifies this image from Amulet as its matrix, proposing a flexing impossibility of scale—a huge, multiapertured book opening out of a brief passage in a slim work like Amulet, an impossible trick, like a cemetery, a historical gyre, like a corpse inside an unborn infant inside an eye inside its own eye inside the year 2666. 8. In lieu of an umphalos, or a womb/eye. Art that flows from a locked womb, a dead eye. 9. Et in Amnion Ego.

Part the Fourth: Mauricio (“The Eye”) Silva 1. Where does Art come from and where is it going? In Bolaño, as I have shown, the answer is the eye—the evil

eye, evil Page 126 → because it gushes and innundates, evil because its aperture is violence, evil because what it produces does not conform to the usual prerogatives of prose—description, comparison, illustration, precision, insight, analysis. Instead, Art’s evil eye generates its own something, dark matter, polymorphous, superfluous fluid. Art. The evil eye in Amulet is copied over in a dispersed multiplicity of tears or apertures from which prophecies and visions flow in that novel, contact with which prompts the heroine, Auxilio, to issue visionary, prophetic texts. Auxilio’s contact with the eye/womb, the flow of images like the flow of amniotic fluid, transforms this non-Mexican, nonmother, nonpoet into the “Mother of Mexican Poetry.”6 2. In the short story “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva,” collected in English in Last Evenings on Earth, Bolaño contracts his ocular/occult model further. Here the titular character is himself The Eye. He is himself Art. It is from The Eye that Art flows and returns to flow again, through an aperture of violence. 3. This story is crucial for our understanding of Art’s Evil Eye because it’s not only Art that goes away from and flows back to The Eye but also violence. Indeed, the spurt of Art and the spurt of violence are the same, as Fifty Drops of Blood (each drop a poem in the “absorbent medium” of Prigov’s volume) tells us, and as the image of the cut eye that issues from Un Chien Andalou long ago emblematized. This coextension of Art and Violence is evident in the story’s opening passage: “Mauricio Silva, also known as ‘The Eye,’ always tried to avoid violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but violence, real violence, is unavoidable.”7 The narrator also contends, grandly, “The case of The Eye is paradigmatic and exemplary.” The hyperbole of this statement puts a queer pressure on its “and” (“paradigmatic” and “exemplary”?); “and” seems to signal, through Bolaño’s conscrution, the difference between like things rather than confirming an identity. There must be some difference between “paradigmatic” and “exemplary” if they both must be specified. The reader is left to wonder what minute wobble is being proposed here, if The Eye’s case may be two unlike things at once. Such is the magic power by which Bolaño’s syntax turns “ors” into “ands” and “ands” into “ors.” 4. In fact, The Eye’s case is paradigmatic/exemplary of two Page 127 → unlike things that nonetheless occupy the same place: Art and Violence. That The Eye is paradigmatic of violence the opening sentence and all that follows confirm. That The Eye’s case is paradigmatic of Art is established when we learn he is a photographer; he works for a newspaper and takes family photographs when visiting the narrator’s mother. As a photographer, then, The Eye creates multiples, dispersal, multiplicity; although he is a photojournalist and a portraitist, two uses of photography that are conventionally seen as faithfully recording reality, readers of Distant Star know that what the artist’s eye captures may be not reality but artifice, a mutable, nonfixed artifice in which a murderer’s victims seem to be disintegrating, to be dispersing into the air. 5. More bluntly, The Eye issues Art in that his contact with the narrator prompts the story; indeed, he is literally the source of the story-within-the-story. It is only by means of physical contact with The Eye that this story is elicited and resumed. 6. If The Eye is firmly identified with both Violence and Art, The Eye’s identity as The Eye is rooted not just in his role as a photographer but in his physical composition. I sat down next to him and we talked for awhile. He seemed translucent. That was the impression I had. The Eye seemed to be made of some vitreous material. His face and the glass of white coffee in front of him seemed to be exchanging signals: two incomprehensible phenomena whose paths had just crossed at that point in the vast universe, making valiant but probably vain attempts to find a common language.8 Here we do not have a simple comparison of The Eye to an eye. Instead he is an eye, as his nickname suggests. He is made of “some vitreous material.” But what passes through him is not just light; instead, “signals” pass between him and something else that is like him, translucent and vitreous—“the glass of white coffee before him.” Being an eye, or The Eye, is not about insight, vision, precision, perception, or any of the qualities normally associated with the eye. Instead, The Eye’s “evenness” is a matter of material, a gluey material that congeals in various forms, a material that is also a medium, which issues and receives “signals.” Page 128 →

7. As in Un Chien Andalou, importantly, this Eye is also a moon. The narrator meets him in nocturnal settings; he moves through and into shadows; and, when remembering The Eye, the narrator describes his visage and his gaze as exhibiting the moon’s spectral distance and vagrancy: “There was a certain way of expressing opinions, as if from a distance, sadly but gently, that I went on associating with The Eye, and even when his face had disappeared or receded in the shadows, that essence lingered in my memory: a way of moving, an almost abstract entity in which there was no place for calm.”9 When the narrator meets The Eye again in Berlin, The Eye functions as a kind of moon in a nocturnal scene: “His gaze was fixed on the paved path winding across the square . . . [and] for a few moments, nothing seemed to exist for him except the tops of the tall German trees, and, above them, the fragments of sky and silently boiling clouds.”10 8. The assemblage of moon/eye in The Eye is critical because, in Un Chien Andalou it is through violence that these images are yoked together, and it is from this wounded assemblage that art, or Art, will spill. The saturation of The Eye with moonlike qualities reinforces his materialism—The Eye is made of a material that, like moonlight, will spill, foreshadowing the violence that will gather and accrue to him like so much material. Most literally, of course, the story of The Eye starts from and returns to his lunar image—he relates it to the narrator in the middle of the same Berlin square he’s described as, lunarly, crossing and crossing again. (Such a lunar image, ironically, also appears in Amulet: “Then I saw the still moon reflected, in a tile, a single tile, as if it were waiting for me. . . . Then the moon changed tiles.”11 9. Paradoxically, while his “paradigmatic” violent story flows from and accrues around The Eye, The Eye is struck with the same emblematic amnesia that strikes the “eye” in the simile from Amulet discussed above. Just as the eye in Amulet “tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else,” so The Eye forgets many details related to his tale, as the narrator relates. I regret to say that here I interrupted to point out that as well as having forgotten the name of the deity, he couldn’t remember the name of the city or of any of the people in his Page 129 → story. The Eye looked at me and smiled. I’ve tried to forget, he said.12 Of course, as we’ve learned from Amulet, the effort to forget something only increases the concentrated power of that something itself—makes a fluid of it, a fluid of “something” poised to spill from and deluge The Eye. As the narrator reports, The Eye’s is a story “that he was compelled, by history or destiny or chance, to tell me.” Here again Bolaño’s magic “ors,” which are really and/ors, suggest that The Eye was “compelled” by history saturated with destiny saturated by chance. These supersaturated pressures force the story (of violence) by violence from The Eye. 10. The story The Eye relates involves a journey to an Indian brothel where he rescues one little boy who is a eunuch and another who is to be castrated in a ritual the next morning. When the castrated boy is brought before him, The Eye breaks his narration and says to the narrator: Do you understand what I’m saying? Sort of, I said. We fell silent again. When I was finally able to speak I said, No, I have no idea. Neither do I, said The Eye. No one can have any idea. Not the victim. Not the people who did it to him. Not the people who watched. Only a photo . . . You took a photo of him? I asked. A shiver seemed to run down The Eye’s spine. I got out my camera, he said, and I took a photo of him. I knew I was damning myself for all eternity, but I did it.13 In this passage a breach is established, comparable to that which occurs in the Bataille passage, when the narrator looks and can only see an inarticulable “something.” In Bolaño’s passage, the humans can have “no idea”; neither The Eye’s consciousness nor any human consciousness can “know” the occult content of this moment. Instead, “Only a photo . . .” But only a photo of what? What does the ellipsis conceal? The ellipsis underscores that what is being described here is an ellipsis. A lacunae. Something that cannot come into an “idea” or be “known.” As such it is evil, it is Art. It is Art’s materiality (only a photo). It is evil Page 130 → because it is materiality, outside and beyond such categories of mind and consciousness, let alone ethics and morality. Additionally, this photo is not

“seen” by the story. Like Bataille’s cunt-eye, it is not describable. It is no longer a visual artifact. At this point not just insight but sight itself has been completely wiped out of The Eye; we cannot see the photo taken here. 10. This proves to be a crucible moment for The Eye, a moment in which he participates in evil: “I knew I was damning myself for all eternity, but I did it.” Thus he becomes a medium for Art’s mindless materialism, a truly evil Eye. A “shudder” that runs down “The Eye’s spine,” a paradoxical phrase that puts stress on Bolaño’s hybrid syntax; now when we see the phrase “The Eye” we also see an eye. The image of a spine inside an eye recalls the fetus curled in its own eye, bathed in its own tears, in the Amulet image. 11. Having taken the photo, the evil Eye begins to spill. In the next paragraph, he begins to sob. As the narrator notes,” Once or twice I heard The Eye sob beside me, but I didn’t want to look at him.” The narrator does not want to look at the Evil Eye—to become contaminated by the Art that is leaking from The Eye, his story leaking out with his sobs. At the same time, though, the narrator is susceptible. Everywhere his own gaze falls he sees a version of the Eye/moon in miniature: “I saw the headlights of a car driving down one side of the square. Through the foliage I saw a light come on in a window.”14 12. It is in his supersaturated status as Eye/Moon that The Eye comes in to his occult power, weeping the unnatural tears that will begin to fuel the crisis in his tale. Returning to his narration, he holds, “I was crying, or thought I was, said The Eye, or maybe that’s what the prostitute thought, poor kid, but none of it was true.” In this sentence, neither tears nor narration can find a stable perspective or point of view to which to attach—each clause contradicts and relocates the previous one, while shoring up an omnidirectional sense of disorientation. We are within the globe of the eye. The Eye continues, “I tried to keep a smile on my face (although it wasn’t my face anymore, I could feel it drifting away from me like a leaf on the wind).”15 In this image, disintegration continues; The Eye’s face isn’t his face, he feels it “drifting away . . . like a leaf on the wind.” To “drift” conjures Page 131 → a nocturnal, lunar image like the clouds that cut the Eye/Moon in the opening sequence of Un Chien Andalou. 13. Yet what’s revealed when this face/leaf drifts away, when the face is removed? 14. A something. 15. A violence. 16. Pure moonlight without the moon’s terrain of craters. 17. Art. 18. Then the Eye was transformed into something else, although the expression he used was not “something else” but “mother.” Mother, he said and sighed. At last. Mother. What happened next is all too familiar: the violence that will not let us be. . . . All I know for certain is that there was violence and soon he was out of there, leaving the streets of that district behind . . .16 In this pivotal passage, The Eye is transformed into Art’s “something else,” the “something” seen by the speaker in the climactic scene of Bataille’s Story of the Eye. He also becomes a “Mother,” like Auxilio in Amulet, transformed by contact with Art’s superfluity. But also like Auxilio, like Bataille’s Eye, like the Eye/Moon in Chien, The Eye is here awash in, deluged by, an issue of violence, another “something,” which the tale’s main narrator cannot specify as a specific plot event, or even an active construction: “All I know for certain is that there was violence.” Violence is the spasm coextensive with the crisis of transformation for The Eye. 19. From here, as the narrator relates, “The rest is more an itinerary than a story or a plot.”17 After his rescued sons have die an epidemic, The Eye runs his plot backwards, returning to the town from which he had fled with

the boys: “He was somewhat surprised to discover that it was not nearly as far away as he had thought: his flight had followed a spiral path, and the return journey was relatively short.”18 He then prepares to return to Europe. 20. But, in the book’s true climax, The Eye collapses, like the eye in Chien, entirely in fluid, entirely in tears. Page 132 → He wept for his dead children and all the other castrated boys, for his own lost youth, for those who were young no longer and those who died young, for those who fought for Salvador Allende and those who were too scared to fight. Unable to stop crying, he called his French friend. . . . And his friend said . . . What’s that sound? Are you crying? And the Eye said, Yes, he couldn’t stop crying, he didn’t know what was happening to him, he had been crying for hours. His French friend told him to calm down. At this The Eye, still crying, laughed, said he would do that and hung up. But he went on crying, on and on.19 As a conclusion to this story, a surfeit of tears. Like a stigmata and its inexhaustible supply of blood, The Eye’s tears are a self-renewing, an inexhaustible fluid, a liquid that runs from Art’s wounded eye; in place of insight, vision, perception, The Eye issues a something, a substance, a material, a mother-material, Art, that goes “on and on.” The gushing of fluid that ends this story recalls the cut eye that opened Un Chien Andalou, which itself opened up the “space of intercutting” of the film’s eye-initiating montage. Here, Bolaño insists, what leaks from The Eye, will go on and on. And this matter is not just sadness or grief in material form, though it is also that; it is Art itself, because The Eye, in this story, is Art, the place where the story comes from, to whom it returns, and where it issues again in a fluid, relentless tide, a tide resembling Bolaño’s own relentless, generous, digressive, ticmarked, motif-driven, concentrated, populated, elegiac tide of writing in every length and genre.

Part the Fifth: Interlude Bolaño on silence, writing, Death, and fluids: There is a third literary silence—one doesn’t seek it—of the shade which one is sure was there under the threshold and which has never been made tangible. . . . The kind of silence that isn’t sought out is the silence of . . . I do not dare call it destiny . . . a manifestation of impotence. The silence of death is the worst kind of silence . . . the silence of death cuts the Page 133 → edge off what could have been and never will be, that which we will never know. We’ll never know if Buchner would have been bigger than Goethe. I think so, but we’ll never know. We’ll never know what he might have written at age thirty. And that extends across the whole planet like a stain, an atrocious illness that in one way or another puts our habits in check, our most ingrained certainties.20 In this passage, silence is associated with absence, the absent literary work of a figure who died young. By analogy, it also represents the generation of Latin Americans wiped out by violence that Bolaño continually elegizes in his work. But absence, here, is not really absent—it’s “like a stain, an atrocious illness that in one way or another puts our habits in check, our most ingrained certainties.” That is to say, the silence of lost generations is converted in Bolaño’s thinking into a stainlike, vitiating presence. That is, Bolaño’s body of work. That is, Art. Silence/absence made material. The Disappeared, the ghost made tangible. Art’s stain (stigma). Art’s self-generating wound (stigmata). Art’s fluids. Art’s atrocious (communicable) illness.

Part the Sixth: Prefiguration of the Evil Eye 1. The short story “Prefiguration of Lalo Cura” begins with an iniatory image that revises the opening image of Un Chien Andalou.

It’s hard to believe, but I was born in a neighborhood called Los Empalados: The Impaled. The name glows like the moon. The name opens a way through the dream with its horn and a man follows that path. A quaking path. Invariably harsh. The path that leads into or out of hell. That’s what it all comes down to. Getting closer to hell or further away.21 In this image, the name is compared to the moon, and the moon is impaled or intercut by its name, like the full moon sliced by clouds and spliced (intercut) with the sliced eye in Un Chien Andalou. And this wounded moon “opens a way through a dream,” “a path”; it is thus a medium, a place of transmission. The way Page 134 → itself is a “quaking path,” “invariably harsh.” It is itself violence. This assemblage of images stands in for and is saturated by a more conventional natal account: that of passage, through violence, through the cunt, after the breaking of the amniotic fluid. 2. As a rewrite of Chien, the eye itself is the missing term in this assemblage of images. But as the opening passage continues to open, a fetal visuality arises. “I’ve opened my eyes in the dark. Once I opened them by slow degrees in total darkness and all I saw or imagined was that name: Los Empalados, shining like the star of destiny. I’ll tell you everything, naturally.” Here, barely a few sentences into his story, the speaker loops and repeats himself, starts the story over with the name, Los Empalados, opens his eyes in the total darkness of the womb, reconfigures his natal scene, the sound of the name, which is also somehow a visual image. This amplitude, the “shining” that issues from this impaled/moon/star of a name enfigures the issuing of the story itself: “I’ll tell you everything, naturally.” 3. As if to signal that his story should be read in assemblage with Story of the Eye, the speaker next attests that his father was a “renegade priest” who “kept slipping away into the sacrificial words until he vanished, gone without a trace.” This image of disappearance repeats and inverts the idea of a name, or “sacred words,” as both an aperture and a medium of transmission, a site that can be crossed into. Indeed, it is the fact that they are media that makes these words “sacred,” that is, that makes them an aperture onto someplace else. 4. The narrator soon reveals that his mother was one of the “stars of the Olimpo Movie Production Company,” a pornography studio run by a German, but since he has identified her as a “star,” a heavenly body, we must now worry that she will be impaled, a medium, a site of transmission that something will issue from and through her and run off somewhere else. But then we realize that this has already come to pass, and that the speaker, Lalo Cura, his name itself the verbal trace of the absent priest, is that which has issued from this star. 5. The particular kind of porn the narrator’s mother stars in is “lacto-porn . . . aimed at men who believe or make believe that women lactate during pregnancy.” The fluid issue (of milk) inherent in this genre is multiplied by the success of the publishing Page 135 → house, which sends “copies” out, especially to Europe. When the narrator, at nineteen, views an example of this lacto-porn, made when his mother was pregnant with him, he relates: The Force is with me, I thought, the first time I saw that movie, at the age of nineteen, crying my eyes out, grinding my teeth, pinching the sides of my head, the Force is with me. All dreams are real. I wanted to believe that when those cocks had gone as far into my mother as they could, they came up against my eyes. I often dreamed about that: my sealed, translucent eyes swimming in the black soup of life. Life? No: the dealing that imitates life. My squinting eye, like the snake hypnotizing the little bird. You get the picture: a kid’s silly celluloid fantasies. All fake.22 In this image Bolaño mobilizes the assemblage of cunt/eye evinced by Bataille, but here from the opposite direction. The speaker’s is the translucent eye in the cunt; what he sees is “the black soup” of “the dealing that imitates life,” “silly celluloid fantasies.” The speaker envisions himself already inside the assemblage of Art, under siege by fantasies, exchanges, the evil unwholesomeness of Art, “the dealing that imitates life.” But, of course, the speaker doesn’t actually see these things through this eye; instead he sees his fetal self in a dream seeing these things. The image itself is mediated by, that is, made of, that is, saturated by, fantasy, and also by the medium of movies: “You get the picture. . . . All fake.” This connection between media and fantasy, of the self as the media-consumer of even his own dreams, is underscored by the fact that the same language is used to describe his relationship with this dreamt image as is used to describe the porn buyers, who “believed or wanted to

believe.” Belief and/or desire for belief draws all these consumers into the orbit of Art’s evil eye. 6. The story moves into a faithful description of a series of pornographic scenarios that recalls the diagrammatic exactitude of Bataille; however, the most critical revisiting of Bataille’s eye-in-the-cunt, that lacuna that issues, that full but empty structure, Bhabha’s saturated “nothing,” appears in an image at once sonic and visual: the sound recording of a hurricane played for the child Lalo by the porn producer, Bittrich. Page 136 → Now you’re going to hear the hurricane from inside, he said. At first I couldn’t hear anything. I think I was expecting a god-almighty, ear-splitting racket, so I was disappointed when all I could hear was a kind of intermittent whirling. An intermittent ripping. Like a propeller made of meat. Then I heard voices; it wasn’t the hurricane of course, but the pilots of the plane flying in its eye. Hard voices talking in Spanish and English. Bittrich was smiling as he listened. Then I heard the hurricane again and this time I really heard it. Emptiness. A vertical bridge and emptiness, emptiness, emptiness. I’ll never forget that smile on Bittrich’s face. It was as if he was weeping. Is that all? I asked. . . . That’s all, said Bittrich, fascinated by the silently turning reels.23 In this extended image, the hurricane is (conventionally) an eye, but also the womb-eye, a womb because it is “made of meat”; just as the narrator imagines himself seeing within the womb, now he will “hear the hurricane from inside.” At the same time, it is an evil Eye, a wall of destruction that marks off a nothing. It issues a nothing that is a something on the other side of language, “a vertical bridge and emptiness, emptiness, emptiness.” That vertical bridge is akin to the path described in the opening passage, quaking, invariably harsh, an emptiness saturated with the terrible force of a hurricane. The womb-eye of the Hurricane is a relentless, resourceful, circular shape; it hurls destruction; its signatures are reeling and weeping. The final image of the “silently turning reels” not only reinforces the eyelike shape of the hurricane but also the fact that this passage has recounted a recording of the sound of a hurricane—a copy of a copy that still fascinates, Art’s ability to copy and disperse itself. 7. The impaled eye of Los Empalados, the evil eye of the hurricane, the evil eye of the producer Bittrich, who, smiling and/or weeping, churns out limitless images and copies of images for consumers who “believed or wanted to believe,” all saturate the image of Pajarito Gomez, “an emblematic figure in the pornography of the 1980s.” We know from “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva” that to be “emblematic” in Bolaño is to emblematize both Art and Violence, that is, to be wounded, to be torn open or apart. Indeed, Pajarito Gomez is a piece of Art, “A great actor wasted by life, our life, yours and mine, my friend.” But Pajarito Page 137 → emblematizes Art’s evil eye more particularly: “Pajarito Gomez, who could generate an inner vibration that planted his image in the viewer’s eyes.” A kind of violence, an “inner vibration,” fuses exterior and interior and creates an aperture through which his image moves and may be “planted in the viewer’s eyes.” Indeed, “Pajarito had this continuous vibration, and, watching him, sooner or later, depending on your powers of resistance, you’d be suddenly transfixed by the energy emanating from that scrap of a man.” “Pajarito Gomez gave off prostatic fluid!,” the narrator declares. 8. Pajarito’s “vibration” marks him out for superhuman status; he is the only actor in the company to survive the AIDS, drugs, and violence of the ’90s. He is the opposite of “useless grandeur: handsome young men without shame, marked out for sacrifice, fated to disappear in the immensity of chaos.” Like Bolaño’s work, Pajarito Gomez does not disappear. His vibration transfixes (impales), copies itself, plants itself like a seed (semen) in the eye of the viewer—converts the viewer’s eye—makes it a womb-eye. 9. A grown-up Lalo Cura tracks Pajarito Gomez down. I reminded him of the old Pregnant Fantasies days. We both smiled. I saw your prick, it was transparent like a worm; my eyes were open, you know, watching your glass eye. Pajarito nodded, then sniffed. You always were a clever kid, he said, before you were born too, I guess with your eyes open already, why not. I saw you, that’s what matters, I said. You were pink for a start in there, then you turned transparent and you got one hell of a shock, Pajarito. Back then you weren’t afraid, you

moved so fast only little creatures and fetuses could see you moving. Only cockroaches, nits, lice, and fetuses. Pajarito was looking at the floor. I heard him whisper: Et cetera, et cetera.24

10. In this fascinating passage, fantasy is layered upon layer; the narrator’s fantasized vision in the womb, built from the “all fake” celluloid imagery of the porn itself, convulses to create actual vision, as if the evil eye of Pajarito Gomez, whose vibration moves across media, has been transferred to the fetal Cura: “my eyes were open, you know, watching your glass eye.” Pajarito’s Page 138 → “prick” is here describe in imagery recalling the café scene in “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva,” in which The Eye is translucent, vitreous, and eyelike, recapitulating a glass of white coffee; here Gomez’s “prick” is glass, transparent, and bearing an “eye.” Yet, if Lalo Cura’s fetal vision is a mirror image of Pajarito Gomez’s evil eye, the final phrase suggests that Gomez as the source of Art is still somehow scripting Lalo Cura, completing what should be Cura’s line: “Et cetera, et cetera” 11. Perception is important to this exchange as it has not been in other instances of the evil eye in Bolaño, but perception has material effects—it is a medium of contagion. Those who perceive Gomez’s not quite visual “vibration” are transfixed but also transformed by it, as Cura is. The womb becomes a place of spectral vision. 12. Immediately after this exchange Pajarito begins to cry. And says “Et cetera et cetera” again, an incantation that names both nothing and everything. Cura, who claims to be barely able to detect Gomez’s vibration anymore, responds with an outpouring of his own, a tide of compulsive language, alternatives, impossible and/ors in response to Gomez’s tears. I haven’t come to rub you out, I said to him in the end. Back then, when I was young, I had trouble using the word kill. I never killed: I took people out, blew them away, put them to sleep, I topped, stiffed, or wasted them, sent them to meet their maker, made them bite the dust, I iced them, snuffed them, did them in. I smoked people.25 This remarkable tide of language is coincident with a remarkable tide of violence; it showcases words’ ability to continually transform and euphemize and copy themselves over, to go occult and translucent, but, most important, to replicate themselves, to go “on and on” through channels of fluid/fluent syntax. Each of these phrases provides an alternative that is the same-as-but-different-from “killing”—each saturates and explodes the statement “I never killed” with florid, fluent counterfactuals, which rush all around that kernel of a statement, open an aperture in the text and let artifice, evil, flow out its side. 13. Cura’s listing, his compulsive alternative making, his compulsive Page 139 → artificing, marks him as one more evil eye, the seed of Gomez’s vibration, planted in his fetal eye in the womb. His use of language is evil; it conceals, obfuscates, and introduces new material that makes the text less concise and transparent. Once he begins leaking/listing language like this he can’t stop. He lists people (“Connie, Monica, Doris, Bittrich, Pajarito, Sanson Fernandez”), he spits out phrases one after another in a digressive and divergent account of a dream: “shouting unintelligible words in his ear, something about a buried treasure. Or about an underground city. Or about a dead person wrapped in papers proof against putrefaction and the passage of time.”26 These and/ors saturate each other, amount to a whole alternative adventure novel. But the final image recalls the image in Amulet. The fetus/corpse /eye is not here bathed in amnesiac single-mindedness but in “papers”—wrapped in literature, made limitless by Art, preserved like a bomb with a cemetery (Death) under its eyelid. 14. Once impaled, once sliced open, the narrator’s Evil Eye will not close. He is vulnerable (woundable) to Art and cannot stop shedding it. In the story’s final passage, the narrator looks on a doubled image: the visage of Pajarito Gomez, there in the room with him, and of another porn actor in the video playing on the TV set. There was no one like you in Los Empalados, I said. Ignacio Lopez Tarso and Pajarito Gomez looked at me: stone-like patience. The pair of them gone crazily dumb. Their eyes full of humanity and fear and fetuses lost in the immensity of memory. Fetuses and other tiny wide-eyed creatures. For a moment, my friends, I felt that the whole apartment was starting to vibrate. Then I stood up very carefully and left.27

Just as The Eye weeps “on and on” at the end of “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva,” thus emblematizing Art’s limitlessness, its inexhaustible supply of material, here Art is a material that flows and accrues from eye to eye. Lalo Cura figuratively genuflects before Pajarito Gomez; “There was no one like you in Los Empalados,” he says, whereupon, contradictorily, Gomez doubles, produces a likeness; two faces look back at Cura, their eyes saturated with Page 140 → multiplied images: “Their eyes full of humanity and fear and fetuses lost in the immensity of memory.” Whereas Cura noted that Gomez’s vibrations had seemed much diminished in his old age, once this act of incredible multiplication is performed, suddenly he “felt that the whole apartment was starting to vibrate.” Now Cura is again, as when a child, inside the womb/eye, hearing the hurricane from the inside. Just as Violence, Art’s signature gesture, provides an aperture through which Mauricio “The Eye” Silva could escape with his children, so this Violence, this vibration, Art’s protoplasmic fluid, will force Cura out of the apartment, and out of the story.

Eye Wound Media—Part the Last “Each time the encounter with identity occurs at the point at which something exceeds the frame of the image, it eludes the eye, evacuates the self as site of identity and autonomy and—most important—leaves a resistant trace, a stain of the subject, a sign of resistance. We are no longer confronted with an ontological problem of being but with the discursive strategy of the moment of interrogation, a moment in which the demand for identification becomes, primarily, a response to other questions of signification and desire, culture, and politics” (Homi Bhabha, “Interrogating Identity,” The Location of Culture, 71). 1. What I have shown in this essay is that Art’s evil eye is evil because it is never performs perception, never establishes the stable depth of field that, Bhabha elsewhere shows, allows the self to construct a mirroring interior depth, thus shoring up the self. Instead, Art’s evil eye is an aperture through which something, material, Art flows, contaminating, replicating, supersaturating the scene it would otherwise be merely observing. When Bolaño’s various authorial stand-ins, his narrators, come into contiguity with a figure who is an aperture for Art—with, say, Mauricio “The Eye” Silva or Pajarito Gomez—Art spills from these evil eyes and through its vibration deflates the apparent autonomy of the listener and renders him instead a kind of hole, and everything/nothing through which Art may flow. Page 141 → Thus the many Arturito Belenos and Roberto Bolaño’s that inhabit Bolaño’s story are reduced, minimal, themselves lacking and, paradoxically, occurring inside the stories they are in fact authoring. As Auxilio Locature notes in Amulet: I could say I knew Arturito Belano when he was a shy seventeen-year-old who wrote plays and poems and couldn’t hold his liquor, but in a sense it would be superfluous and I was taught (they taught me with a lash and with a rod of iron) to spurn all superfluities and tell a straightforward story.28 In this passage, Arturito Belano, the author’s stand-in, can’t hold his liquor, and also can’t hold in his Art—he produces poems and plays. One kind of incontinence, with the overproduction of bodily fluids it implies (urine, vomit, blood) is the same as the other. Both are conjured in the use of the term “superfluous,” with its implication of both fluidity and superproduction—an overflow—and set in opposition to a “straightforward story”—something that must be beaten into the body through discipline. In such a passage Bolaño associates Art with superfluity, and the Artist with the superfluid production of Art. Something else that is superfluous is the doubling up of authority here—the author’s stand-in is not the narrator, and the narrator speaks of someone who is not the author. The Great Chain of Being normally authorized by Art is thus already undone by vibration. 2. At the same time, Bhabha’s quote reminds us that the nonvisual role of Art’s evil eye—as that which produces material, supersaturation, superfluity—amounts to an evacuation of the interior depth normally associated with consciousness, and particularly the consciousness of the artist or author. Thus collapsed, the artist or author is knocked from his vertical position of hierarchy above or behind the artwork and instead is rendered radically continuous with it. This accounts for the debased position of Bolaño’s speakers amid a chain of other speakers and relaters and narrators. That is, the collapsibility of the evil eye, emblematized in the opening frames of Un Chien Andalou, accounts for another key narrative habit of Bolaño’s: that of the ludicrous and collapsing frame story. For example, Chris Andrews’s translation of the story “William Burns” begins: Page 142 →

William Burns, from Ventura, California, told this story to my friend Pancho Monge, a policeman in Santa Teresa, Sonora, who passed it on to me. According to Monge, the North American was a laidback guy who never lost his cool, a description that seems to be at odds with the following account of the events. In Burns’s own words:29 And he makes no further mention of Burns before concluding, less than ten pages later: And the end of the story, as Pancho Monge tells it, is that six months later William Burns was killed by unidentified assailants.30 3. This frame story amounts to an evacuation of the position of the narrator—who appears only as the “my” in “my friend Pancho Monge” and the “me” at the end of the sentence. “Me,” then, is not consciousness, selfhood, backstory, authority or depth; it is merely that place to which Art comes, and from which it flows. Meanwhile the duplicity of Art is such that an account presented as “Burns’s own words” can employ the “I” for most of the rest of the story; it might be his words, but it is not his voice, as he is being ventriloquized by the narrator. At the same time, the “I” is not that of the narrator, who is here speaking with Burns’s words. Instead, it’s Art’s I. Its eye. 4. At the same time, the flimsiness of the frame story, the ease with which it may be broken through, allowing the story of William Burns to issue, emblematizes the gratuitousness, and the resourcefulness, of Art. 5. This gratuitous collapse of frames may be seen across most of Bolaño’s prose works, which combine a deliberately contrived frame story with an overwhelmingly gratuitous tide of prose—that is, prose that seems to self-generate, that cannot be held in check by its frame story. (The fact that Bolaño stipulated that his lengthy posthumous novel 2666 be published as five separate novels to earn more money suggests that he felt his own frame stories to be somewhat disposable.) The disproportionality of such structures renders his prose works a kind of Dis-, a kind of ravening, unraveling under/world of personages, emblems, syllabi, Page 143 → cast-off traces in which his own likeness repeats and repeats but never swims to the top. The detective work of both Savage Detectives and 2666 could be characterized as a purposefully failed attempt to retrieve the frame story from the miasma of the ever burgeoning work. 6. Yet, charmingly, Bolaño’s work also comprises the opposite: the entire novel Nazi Literature in the Americas is a book that contains only framing devices, the dates and birthplaces of the authors, the conditions of their narrations and receptions, their Deaths or disappearances, leaving out the main stories altogether. These most evil of authors deliver the most evil and empty of eyes. The flow of Nazi Literature in the Americas, frame stories without a story to frame, exerts the evil eye’s uncanny presence and forces a hole in the would-be integrity of that text that drains into another work, the inside-out novel Distant Star. 7. Distant Star may be called an inside-out novel because here it is not clear which is the frame story, which the material framed. It begins with a paragraph italicizing the source of this story from the final chapter of Nazi Literature in the Americas, and, dividing and subdividing this flimsy frame, introducing an extra first-person speaker who is not the same as the speaker of the novel that follows, an extra Arturo B. who may or may not be the speaker of the novel that follows, who doubly may or may not be a stand-in for the Author, or even an extra antagonist, Lieutenant Ramirez Hoffman of the Chilean Air Force, a third pseudonym (or heteronym?) for the poet /pilot Ruiz-Tagle/Wieder tracked through Distant Star. In addition to this pileup of protagonists, speakers, and antagonists, this preface mimes the habitual transfer and re-visioning of stories with which Bolaño’s frame stories are typically preoccupied—the narrator is relating a story “heard from a fellow Chilean, Arturo B. . . . He was not satisfied with my version . . . [and] we composed the present novel.”31 From the occult, italicized, separate space of this prefatory paragraph, Art keeps issuing counterfeits, and/ors that are not identical to each other but form a wobbling assemblage with the Art that pours forth from this aperture. 8. A provincial tale of a provincial poetry workshop takes up the novel’s opening sixteen pages until, this time, a frame story seems to collapse in on the main story: “A few days later the Page 144 → army seized power and the government collapsed.”32 The rest of the novel consists of chasing an absence, a nothing-that-is-everything, a student poet, Ruiz-Tagle, as he continues to morph through names (Carlos Wieder, a name that itself splits to spill

etymological and thematic material; Jules Defoe), media (newspaper accounts, photographs, television broadcasts, literary journals, hearsay), and counterfeits, Art he makes and Art made about him. To follow this material is to follow an absence that is a presence, an “evil eye, which is nothing in itself, [yet] exists in its lethal traces or effects as a form of iteration that arrests time—Death/chaos—and initiates a space of intercutting that articulates politics/pyche, sexuality/race.” To track Wieder is to try to track the evil eye in the act of shedding or shitting Art. 9. To become a savage detective, to try to trace Art back to its source, is to generate more and more reams and reels of unfathomable Art. 10. And this figure’s passage, his motion, his gesture, is identical to his Violence. Violence is the track or trace Art makes. 11. Thus Distant Star, which seems to track the always moving moon/eye of Carlos Wieder through the Art he sheds and casts, finds its centerpiece, the eye of its Hurricane, in the Art show Wieder erects for his fellow officers. “As to the nature of the photos, . . . [he] would only say that it was visual poetry—experimental, quintessential, art for art’s sake.”33 He undertakes a preliminary display of visual poetry in the sky; those gathered below the clouds “were bewildered, but they knew that Wieder was writing something,”34 and the reader of the novel reads that massive “something” with a feeling of dread; for that inarticulatable “Something” is always Art, Art’s absolute material, Death and/or a name. Thus what Wieder is actually writing in the sky above the clouds is a series of saturations: Death is friendship; Death is Chile; Death is love; Death is growth; Death is my heart; Take my Heart; Carlos Wieder. The italics here enact the saturation with Art just as the italicized frame story did; the Artist’s signature here does not signify the end of Art but its ultimate arrival from which tides of further Art may flow. 12. When that Art becomes visible, it is paradoxically in a tight, compressed space, a bedroom apartment at a cocktail party in Santiago. This is set up, unusually, as an absolute point Page 145 → by Bolaño (“The following account of the photographic exhibition in the flat is, however, accurate”); the Art show is shown to emerge from all the counterfeits and collapsing frames that have generated and amounted to the text so far. Yet the account of the exhibit comes after a buildup; we see party guests’ reaction to the Art (anger, vomiting) before we see the Art itself; this is like being in the wall of the Hurricane before we arrive at its inside, its eye. And what we find there truly is “art for art’s sake.” It decorates, it tells a “story (literal or allegorical),” and it moves somehow out of its frame, just as Bhabha predicted: “In general (according to Muñoz Cano) the photos were of poor quality, although they made an extremely vivid impression on all who saw them.”35 Indeed, it is not so much Art’s image as its effect that is here perceptible—the “vivid impression.” At the same time, those photos that are actually described point elsewhere, at times literally: “A photo of a young blonde woman who seemed to be dissolving into the air. A photo of a severed finger, thrown onto a floor of porous, grey cement.”36 Even here at Art’s epicenter, Art points elsewhere; exists as a vibration not an image: radiates out. Moreover, as Bolaño describes it, this Art radiates into “hubbub,” synesthetically, into noise and activity, a ringing telephone. The hurricane from the inside. “The edge of the abyss.”37 What’s indelible, instead, is the trace Art leaves. Muñoz Cano never saw Wieder again. But that last image was indelible: the big living room a mess; bottles, plates and overflowing ashtrays, a group of pale, exhausted men, and Carlos Wieder at the window, showing no sign of fatigue, with a glass of whisky in his perfectly steady hand, contemplating the dark cityscape.38 13. Muñoz Cano may never again see Wieder, but others try to track him. The literary critic Ibacache attempted to describe the literary tastes of Carlos Wieder but “broke off abruptly, as if stepping into a void.”39 Bolaño’s own Nazi Literature in the Americas, which supposedly provides the frame for Distant Star, appears within it, as “Bibiano O’Ryan’s The Warlocks Return . . . a highly readable survey of fascist literary movements in South America from 1972 to 1989 (stylistically, it owes something to Page 146 → the detective novels Bibiano and I used to devour.” In this work, “Bibiano’s account of Wieder and his poetics is faltering, as if the presence of the aviator-poet had disturbed and disoriented him . . . [and] when faced with Wieder, he becomes tense, accumulates adjectives ineptly and indulges in scatology, as if he were trying not to blink, not to let his subject (Carlos Wieder

the pilot, Ruiz-Tagle the audodidact) disappear over the horizon. But everyone blinks in the end, even writers, especially writers and, as always, Wieder vanishes.”40 14. As with the iconic opening frame of Un Chien Andalou, the eye collapses; only when it cannot be perceived can Art flow from it. As in Bataille’s Story of the Eye, the Eye cannot be seen; it is a Something; but it is the nothing-something from which Art issues. 15. A fellow officer of Wieder’s relates that “Carlitos Wieder looked down on the world as if he were on top of a Volcano; . . . he believed that Nature intervenes actively in history, shaping it, buffeting our lives, although in our pitiful ignorance we usually attribute these blows to bad luck or destiny.”41 For Nature, read Art. 16. The maid who witnessed Wieder’s first murder eventually surfaces to testify, yet “Her account of events was swept up in a cyclical, epic poem. . . . When she spoke of Wieder, she seemed to be talking about several different people: an invader, a lover, a demon. . . . Remembering the black night of the crime, she said she had heard the music of the Spanish . . . : ‘Rage, sir, sheer futile rage.’”42 17. Nothing, and everything. Violence and Art. In the novel’s final movement the narrator is enlisted by a detective to trace Wieder through a variety of media, from literary journals to porn films in which Wieder was the cameraman, one “R.J. English,” his trace a variety of texts, murders, and aliases. When the speaker finally does track Wieder down to a café where both men are reading, he says, “I could see myself almost joined to him, like a vile Siamese twin, looking over his shoulder at the book he had opened.” Wieder and the speaker are not looking at each other; instead their lines of sight are aligned; the speaker looks out from Art’s evil eye, and the result is a multiplication of eyes. Page 147 → I felt that Wieder’s lifeless eyes were scrutinizing me, while the letters on the pages I was turning (perhaps too quickly) were no longer beetles but eyes, the eyes of Bruno Schulz, opening and closing, over and over, eyes pale as the sky, shining like the surface of the sea, opening, blinking again and again, in the midst of total darkness. No, not total, in the midst of a milky darkness, like the inside of a storm cloud.43 In this image we find a capsule version of the imagery that will bloom to form “Prefiguration of Lalo Cura”—Art’s self-replication and its multiplication of apertures, its location as the inside of the storm, the hurricane from within, the cunt-eye, the beetle eye, the lifeless eye, the evil eye. 18. At this same instant Wieder sheds all resemblance: “He didn’t look like a poet. He didn’t look as if he had been an officer in the Chilean Air Fore. He didn’t look like a man who had flown to Antarctica to write a poem in the sky. Not at all.” And yet Wieder is the site of Art’s issue, its violence. When he meets his violent end, it’s absent from the story, his Death circle around in tautological exchanges: “I asked him what it had been like. Like these things always are, he said.” Later: Nothing like this has ever happened to me, I confessed. That’s not true, said Romero very gently. Worse things have happened to us, think about it. You could be right, I admitted, but this has really been a dreadful business. Dreadful, repeated Romero, as if he were savoring the word. Then he laughed quietly, grinning like a rabbit and said, Well, what else could it have been? I wasn’t in a laughing mood but I laughed all the same.44 Each exchange is like a go-round, words repeating and turning around on themselves, words being “savored” for their taste in the mouth, statements recycled as rhetorical questions, and finally rendered in the pure noise of laughter, which generates laughter in response. Around the kernel of Wieder’s unspeakable Death, Art’s ultimate Violence, its collapse, Violence against itself, Art not for its own sake but against its own sake, with this Something as its empty yet electrified center, the vortex is already in motion, the meat-hurricane turning, Page 148 → initiating a space of intercutting, issuing material from its evil, rendering Eye.

Notes 1. Joseph Vogl, “Becoming-Media: Galileo’s Telescope,” Grey Room 20 (Fall 2007): 17. 2. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), 79. 3. Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights, 1987), 10–11. 4. Ibid., 84 (ellipses Bataille’s). 5. Roberto Bolaño, Amulet, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2006), 86. 6. Ibid., 1. 7. Roberto Bolaño, “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva,” in Last Evenings on Earth, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2007), 106. 8. Ibid., 108. 9. Ibid., 109. 10. Ibid., 111. 11. Bolaño, Amulet, 168. 12. Bolaño, “Mauricio (“The Eye”) Silva,” 114. 13. Ibid., 115. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 116. 16. Ibid., 117. For more about this story and queer motherhood, see Lucas de Lima’s post “The Violent Eye of Queer Motherhood,” Montevidayo (blog), October 7, 2010, http://www.montevidayo.com/the-violenteye-of-queer-motherhood/. 17. Bolaño, “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva,” 117, 119–20. 18. Ibid., 119–20. 19. Ibid., 120. 20. Roberto Bolaño, “Positions Are Positions and Sex Is Sex: Interview by Eliseo Álvarez,” trans. Sybil Perez, in Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2009), 91 (first published in Turia [Barcelona], June 2005). 21. Roberto Bolaño, “Prefiguration of Lalo Cura,” in The Return, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2010), 99. 22. Ibid., 102–3. 23. Ibid., 106–7. 24. Ibid., 113–14.Page 149 → 25. Ibid., 114–15. 26. Ibid., 115. 27. Ibid., 115–16. 28. Bolaño, Amulet, 1–2. 29. Roberto Bolaño, “William Burns,” in The Return, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2010), 25. 30. Ibid., 34. 31. Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2004), 1. 32. Ibid., 16. 33. Ibid., 78. 34. Ibid., 82. 35. Ibid., 88. 36. Ibid., 89. 37. Ibid., 90. 38. Ibid., 92–93. 39. Ibid., 106. 40. Ibid., 108–9. 41. Ibid., 110. 42. Ibid., 111. 43. Ibid., 145.

44. Ibid., 149.Page 150 →

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Part Four The Future of Poetry Page 152 →

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The “Future” of “Poetry” 1. Becoming a mother made me a goth. Becoming a mother, and nearly dying in the process, and wondering for ten months if the body inside me is alive or dead, and, concomitantly, if I would also kill myself if I learned it was dead, then holding it and realizing what a very minor and insubstantial gate a six-pound infant is onto some kind of Hades—well, it rendered life on earth a kind of Hades. A kind of vista on Death. Now I have a vision of the present tense in which every moment has its opening on Death, has its interface with Death. In fact the present tense might be an interface with Death. 2. The future of poetry is the present, and it has already arrived. The present tense rejects the future. It generates, but it generates excess without the ordering structures of lineage. It subsumes and consumes pasts into its present, erasing their priority. It’s self-defeating; its rejection of survival into a future may be infanticidal. Without a concern with past or future it necessarily negates many of the values that come with the western literary tradition, including stability, well craftedness, elegance, restraint, timelessness, humanism. It is concerned with the media through which it moves, flimsy concerns and flimsy conceits, superficiality, errata and (likely) ephemera, flexibility, instability, unevenness, but it also partakes of a nonproductive productivity typified by bombast, excess, and overproduction. This Art often involves failure and “bad fits”—the “bad fit” of one genre into another, the bad fit of one media into another. Its modality is violence, frequently a self-violence against the text itself, so that text is something that explodes, exhausts, breaks down, flounces around, eats and/or shits itself, is difficult to study or call a text at all. 3. Goth, noir, fantasy, speculative fiction in which the premise Page 154 → is as flimsy as a video game, video culture in which the video world is like a Death world, is usually a space of Death and has its literal interface thereon, its own glowing portal, virtuality in all its forms. Awesome and terrible books of poetry, like the nearly unreadably excellent Alma, or the Dead Women. Art forms that are already dead. Occult Art. The ludicrous, the unjustifiable, the Death dealing. The films of Kenneth Anger in their recent DVD release form, piled up, fragmentary, and degrading into commentary whose only accounting is either (a) gossip, of which disparaged modality see Dodie Bellamy; and (b) an accounting of failure (often fallacious or at least suspect, such as the account of the making of Invocation of My Demon Brother, which expands to include the Manson murders, etc.). 4. Ryan Trecartin’s video Art without an aerial view. In Trecartin’s I/Be Area, which you can watch on YouTube, his characters, Wendy and Pasta, look like decaying cheerleaders, like Laura Palmer had she stood up in the plastic to direct Twin Peaks. They snap back and forth: Life reproductions on top of shit/always in the moment/ always/always/always/right now/so cool /never in the past/ we show you your life/but better/thread edit/thread edit/ because we know right now/and we know how to make contemporary/right now.1 This sounds like an ars poetica, rendered, as it were, poetically—less so when snarled from a tiny glowing box by two crayon-hued, violent, aggressively bewigged heroines cavorting with actual preteens until spectra and specter of simulacrum, copies of copies, become snaky, contaminatory, dirty, and contemporary. 5. The present tense, rejecting posterity and Art’s endurance, insists on the artifice of creation and proposes children not as units of the future but as vulnerable portals between Death and life. Children are Death in life, their numeration and nomination the place where text happens. In his late Fragmentations, the cuntphobic Artaud renders himself an ultramother, without lineage—“Out of the cunt without the mother I shall make an obscure, total, obtuse and absolute soul.”2 Artaud’s vision is of daughters whose bodies are a portal on violence and Death—a Page 155 → portal that makes the body present and becomes a kind if infinite catalog, life and Death’s interdeterminate coextension. I saw the meningeal syphilis of my daughter Catherine’s legs, and the 2 hideous potatoes of her swollen kneecaps, I saw the onions of her toes blistered like her sex organ. . . . I saw it burst from her

skull like Annie of the “Holy” Throat, and I saw the intestinal crown of thorns of her blood flowing from her on nonmenstrual days.

And I saw the notched knife of my other daughter Neneka who I felt moving in the opium of the earth, and there were also Yvonne, Catherine, Cecile, Annie, and Anna with Neneka.3 6. A similar efflorescence of dead women and girls, an inverted and death-leaning and unnatural fecundity, makes up the decomposing and reforming body of Notley’s Alma, or the Dead Women—even the math of that title exposes its flexing crowdedness, Death’s revolving door, the fitful instability of multiplicity and individuality, a resulting instability in the syntax, and the twin conditions of scarcity and a useless excess this doubling creates. Alma is turning over again groaning in her stupor saying i am the unknown and all these you’s. i say i know you too are i and i am no superficially, for i’m whatever superficially, sad because of my body to age so i am let’s see Myra? too many names. well there are millions more of dead women not just the few you are hey nonny. i damned well can’t remember Nonny, though i remember Gracie, Marcellina, Irene, and others. I have shot up, in effect, and Alma’s tone is the boss tone here she is god.4 7. Hiromi Ito has been called the “poet of childbirth” in Japan, which is ironic given that her most iconic poem is titled for infanticide and themed with both infanticide and abortion. Her daughter’s name is Kanoko, and this poem is “Killing Kanoko” (also the title of the Action Books volume now available, Ito’s first English-language edition). In the title poem: Page 156 → Without melancholy, without guilt I want to get rid of Kanoko in Tokyo Congratulations Congratulations on your destruction Congratulations on your destruction Teruko-chan Congratulations on your abortion Mihoko-chan Congratulations on your abortion Kumiko-san Congratulations on your abortion Congratulations on killing Tomo-kun Mari-san How about getting rid of Nonoho-chan? Mayumi-san

Was the fetus a boy or a girl? Riko-chan It’s about time to get rid of Kōta-kun Let’s all get rid of them together All of the daughters All of the sons5 In this passage, the “begat-” logic of linear generations is reworked, as “generations” are obliterated by abortion and infanticide; instead of patronymics, given names and pet names overpopulate the text, so the effect is multiplication rather than subtraction, and we are left with an ecstatic simultaneous omnigeneration of killers and ghosts. Death of the child is the same as generation of the child, is the site and the incitement, what each line does with its address, as each name appears in the text and is neither removed from it, nor made productive. 8. Poetry’s present tense rejects the future in favor of an inflorating and decaying omnipresence, festive and overblown as a funeral garland, flimsy and odiforous, generating excess without the orderliness of generations. It rejects genre. It rejects “a” language. Rejects form for formlessness. It doesn’t exist in one state but is always making corrupt copies of itself. “Too many books are being written, too many books are being published by ‘inconsequential’ presses, there’s no way to know what to read anymore, people are publishing too young, it’s immature, it’s Page 157 → unmemorable, the Internet is run amok with bad writing and half-formed opinions, there’s no way to get a comprehensive picture.” Exactly. You just have to wade through the plague ground of the present, give up and lie down in it, as the flood-waters rise from the reversed drains, sewage-riven, bearing tissue and garbage, the present tense resembles you in all its spumey and spectacolor 3-D.

Notes 1. Author’s transcription. 2. Antonin Artaud, Watch Fiends and Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period, ed. and trans. Clayton Eshleman with Bernard Bador (Boston: Exact Change, 1995), 67. 3. Ibid., 74. 4. Alice Notley, Alma, or the Dead Women (New York: Granary Books, 2006), 17. 5. Hiromi Ito, Killing Kanoko, trans. Jeffrey Angles (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2009), 38–39.

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Expenditure Or, why I’m going to die trying 1. My nonrealist writing is exhausting. It exhausts the sentences. It has no good measure. It starts out formal (interested in genre) but it distends form and makes it sag. 2. When Bataille analyzes society, he divides it into two parts: the productive part and then “the second part, represented by so-called unproductive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity . . .—all these represent the activities which, at least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves.”1 3. Ladies and gentlemen, we live in primitive circumstances. There are wars of attrition going on all over this planet that have no end in sight, wars that, regardless of their recent dates of inception, seem immemorial. In place of “immemorial,” let’s try “expiration date.” It’s time for the showstopper that brings down the house. 4. Bataille says “the term poetry . . . can be considered synonymous with expenditure; it in fact signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss. Its meaning is therefore closer to that of sacrifice.”2 By sacrifice he means a loss unto extinction; sacrifice produces sacred objects. Furthermore, “in particular, the success of Christianity must be explained by . . . the Son of God’s ignominious crucifixion, which carries human dread to a representation of loss and limitless degradation.”3 5. Or, put another way, there’s no success like failure. 6. Some have said that Roberto Bolaño’s work, with its many missing, absent, or disappeared artists, thematizes the failure of Page 159 → Art to intervene in and alter history, to prevent coups, to make anything happen, but I think his formlessness and archival quality makes a history on Art’s terms. In the final passage of Amulet, dead bodies extend all the way to the South Pole and back, a parody of a utopian vision that would stretch further; the dead bodies in the fourth part of 2666 dishevel the narrative and even the ability of the genre—here noir—to assemble itself. The bodies amount to just carnage and dread of more carnage. Boring, boring dread. 7. I often talk of my work in terms of form, but what the form frames is something else that gapes away from it—in the final form of my sci-fi novel Flet the protagonist becomes an archaeopteryx rotting in the desert, and that’s how the entire second half of the plot is “resolved,” or, decomposed in a decomposing artwork that involutes and becomes darkly and toxically capacious. Like the women of Juárez, it can die and die and die. 8. The figure of an accounting is obviously central to the model of expenditure versus capitalism built up in Bataille, and it’s a nice fit with what we’re here to discuss today: story making. The making of an account. The accounting. Should the accounts be measured? Should the balance hold? I think they should take the form to destruction and beyond. Mine will be poorly made, willful, deathleaning. Spend, spend, spend. This does not mean it will be drab, minimal, but maximal, desiccated, well dressed for Death. I like archaic things that have already failed or are not destined to survive, failure to thrive, shrift instead of thrift, a shrivening, a mourning, the lack of sturdiness that pertains to minor genres, the eructations they engender instead of children. As Baudelaire writes of the Dandy: Whether these men are nicknamed exquisites, incroyables, beaux, lions or dandies, they all spring from the same womb; they all partake of the same characteristic quality of opposition and revolt. . . . Dandyism appears above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet allpowerful, and aristocracy is just beginning to totter and fall. In the disorder of these times, certain men who are socially, politically, and financially ill at ease, but are all rich in a native energy, may conceive of the idea of establishing a new kind of aristocracy, Page 160 → all the more difficult to shatter as it will be based on the most precious, the most enduring faculties, and on the divine gifts

which work and money are unable to bestow.4

—and he goes on to give as examples the Dandyism of the “savage” tribes of North America. 9. Indeed, northwestern North American tribes, with their model of potlatch, provide Bataille with his extensive model of expenditure. Whereas the displaced Lakota provide me with the model of the Ghost Dance. The materialization of irrational expenditure of the Ghost Dance caused such panic in the would-be sensible army that they had to put an end to it. They who did not believe in spirits or ghosts found the spectacle of this expenditure so frightening that they reacted irrationally and completed the Indians’ acts of expenditure by sacrificing them, and making them sacred. 10. And they all spread from the same womb, the same womb or entrails, and their high fashion, their cloaks and adorned, bullet-proof ghost shirts, cover over it until it can’t. Which brings us to the topic of camp. And particularly to the figure of Judy Garland, once the girl next door who always seemed to be singing from beyond the grave, as if her flesh would really melt from her voice at any minute, her body weight and its untidy expenditures the matter of constant biographizing. In the wholesome Summer Stock, the film with which the whole notion of “putting on a show in the barn” reaches its apotheosis, Garland-the-farm-girl stops the show by shedding her overalls and performing a sexy, terrifying, Weimar-inspired cabaret number in only a man’s jacket, stockings, and hat. She sings: Forget your troubles, come on get happy We’re going to chase all your cares away. Shout alleluia come on get happy, We’re headed for the Judgment Day. This ghoulish hymn to Death-in-life is all the more ghoulish for its context—like revolution, it stops the show by maxing it out. Like revolutionary violence, it stops the clock. Death and life touch there. In “real life,” Judy fled the set for an eight-week Dexedrine Page 161 → purge midway through the production. She literally stopped the show and remade it in her own artificial image. Moreover, her incarnation of Weimar sensibilities opens an aperture from the awe-shucks American setting onto an earlier and patently ghoulish time. Death-in-life applies not just to the lyrics of the song, which in their manic inability to arrive at the promised land suspend the “we” in a feverish, plagued in betweenness—but in its aesthetic ventriloquism of the Weimar period, the decadence that was the recto of the Holocaust’s verso. 11. Or put another way: The whole world is coming, A nation is coming, a nation is coming, The eagle has brought the message to the tribe. The Father says so, the Father says so. Over the whole earth they are coming, The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming, The crow has brought the message to the tribe, The Father says so, the Father says so5

This verse, danced with aforementioned consecrated, bullet-proof ghost shirts, was not enough to prevent the massacre at Wounded Knee. 12. The millenarian view of the Lakota reveals a culture in extreme crisis, improvising an aperture through which both Death and life may pass, in this case the dead back to life. In one Lakota account: They danced without rest, on and on. . . . Occasionally someone thoroughly exhausted and dizzy fell unconscious into the center and lay there “dead.” . . . After a while, many lay about in that condition. They were now “dead” and seeing their dear ones. . . . The visions . . . ended the same way, like a chorus describing a great encampment of all the Lakotas who had ever died, where . . . there was no sorrow but only joy, where relatives thronged out with happy laughter. . . . The people went on and on and could not stop, day or night, hoping . . . to get a vision of their own dead. . . . And so I suppose the authorities did think they were crazy—but they were not. They were only terribly unhappy.6 Page 162 → Like any occult text, the apocalyptic text of the Ghost Dance can be read backward AND forward: the vision enables the followers to transcend categories of life and Death. Life and liberation may be found through illimitable contact with Death. From this perspective, the special garments required of the Ghost Dance were not only designed to repel bullets but were a means to dress up for this special occasion, like Judy’s Weimar drag, like the Dandy’s deliberately nonutilitarian garb. Here’s a white woman’s account of the ghost shirts in 1890. The ghost shirt for the men was made of the same material—shirts and leggings painted in red. Some of the leggings were painted in stripes running up and down, others running around. The shirt was painted blue around the neck, and the whole garment was fantastically sprinkled with figures of birds, bows and arrows, sun, moon, and stars, and everything they saw in nature. Down the outside of the sleeve were rows of feathers tied by the quill ends and left to fly in the breeze, and also a row around the neck and up and down the outside of the leggings. I noticed that a number had stuffed birds, squirrel heads, etc., tied in their long hair. The faces of all were painted red with a black half-moon on the forehead or on one cheek.7 13. Ironically that illimitable potential textualized by the ghost shirt and the Ghost Dance was correctly appraised by the US Army, although the Lakota had no intention of funneling this potential into violence. The army’s murderous response to Lakota “craziness” was excused as an attempt to quell the Ghost Dance before it brought harm to whites and Native Americans alike, irrational fear expended in an effort to restore a balance, balanced books, a rational accounting.8 In the Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee massacre, irrationality and expenditure seemed to infect both sides, though the loss, as always with expenditure, was asymmetrical. 14. Which is all to say: I may be writing a maximal, dandified, camp, ill-gendered, millenarian text, for the sentences run on past health to Death, a region in which the most blasphemous rituals take place, and they require an undue attention to style, flair, garments, gestures rather than actions and plot, descriptions Page 163 → only of things that never were, an uncanny, transporting voice not tied to any body, around which flesh accrues and decomposes, a text that does not choose life but might acquire it alongside Death.

Notes 1. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 14 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 118. 2. Ibid., 120. 3. Ibid., 119. 4. See Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” trans. Jonathan Mayne, excerpted in Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood with Jason Gaiger (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 500. 5. For this translation of a Lakota Ghost Dance song, see Bowling Green State University,

http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/acs/1890s/woundedknee/WKghost.html. 6. For this account of a Lakota Ghost Dance, see Bowling Green State University, http://www.bgsu.edu /departments/acs/1890s/woundedknee/eyewit.html. 7. For Mrs. Z. A. Parker’s account of an 1890 Ghost Dance, see Public Broadcasting Service, http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/eight/gddescrp.htm. 8. For government fears of the “crazed” Ghost Dancers justifying a violent response, see Agent James McLaughlin’s 1891 letter at Public Broadcasting Service, http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources /archives/eight/sbarrest.htm.

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The Mask of Art It is too bad for the wood which finds itself a violin. —A. R. 1. The 2011 removal of the four-minute David Wojnarowicz video A Fire in My Belly from the Smithsonian in response to a protest by the Catholic League and the threat of defunding by Representative John Boehner made me return to all things Wojnarowicz, and particularly the photo series Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978–79. This series features forty-four black-and-white photographs of a male figure dressed in the garb of the young hustler—white tee-shirt, jeans—situated in down-and-out urban locales—leaning in the shallow shelter of various ragged storefronts, shooting up in a ratty apartment, riding the subway, frozen before a deserted and desolate Coney Island, urinating, masturbating—all the while wearing a white paper Mask featuring the iconic photograph of Rimbaud—moon pale face, schoolboy’s coxcomb. This is gorgeous work—visually sprained and saturated, engorged with allusion and contradiction, swollen with a time period that surges up and around the somehow gritty and ethereal images captured by Wojnarowicz’s (stolen) camera, with the heavy decades of time since they were taken, with the burdensome loss of whole generations to AIDS, and with the grievously damaged generations right now combusting all over the globe. An unsigned note at the back of the edition contends, “for photography, even more than the other plastic arts, accumulates years the way a violin does. Its material hardens as its tone becomes richer and more resonant.”1 Yet, if these photographs are a violin, they are not objects but an instrument. If they are responsive Page 165 → to something, animated by something, it’s not (only) the (ocular) touch of the viewer but something else, something both subterranean and plain as the Mask on the young man’s face, which is, after all, not plain at all. Which is, after all, both entirely legible and entirely obscuring. The Mask of Art. 2. Where Is Art Going and Where Has It Been? When I gaze on the icon of the Mask in these photographs, I see something stubbornly two-dimensional, something cut out, something unyielding, something that repeats, something that cannot be absorbed into the sumptuous depth and shadowy, smeary inclinations of the tableaux. In the first photo, of the young man outside a peep show, the whiteness of the Mask pierces the scene; Page 166 → brighter than even the neon around it, it proposes a punctum (Barthes), an affective wound from which Art drains not away from the photo but outward in the form of light. This dazzling effect persists across the photos, breaking the picture plane with its strange outward motion, its excessive dimensionality which is actually a product of its lack of dimensionality, the fact that it is 2-D and lacks the sumptuous variance of the scene around it. In one photo, the Mask and the hustler’s hands both seem to project outward in potent, ghostly whiteness. In another, the young man faces (Masks?) the camera from the middle of a diner swirling with motion; motion accumulates in streaks and smears, and in this gelid environment light itself is solidified, tactile. The whiteness of the Mask puts it in communication with the whiteness of sugar, cream, a ketchup label, but among these commodities the Mask is still the whitest thing, seems composed from the streaks and smears that mark where light hits the surfaces of glass and linoleum. Some photos do feature a brighter element than the Mask, such as a bright circular clock in a subway station, which suddenly brings out the Mask’s vulnerability, darkening the regions of blackness on the Mask itself. The Mask is whiter than a tee-shirt, but not as white as a cigarette. In some photos, the man twists his body in an attempt to reconcile the angle of the face as portrayed in the (photographic) Mask with the angles of his own head on his neck; this attempt at naturalization arrives at contortion rather than naturalism. Somehow the photographs in which the Mask is not the most prominent element of the composition are the saddest, as in the photo in which the figure stands against a mural of a palm tree and the Puerto Rican flag; in a reverse trompe l’oeil effect, the Mask erases the dimensionality of the poser’s head and looks like one more element drawn on the wall. The poser is rendered headless; he has a three-dimensional body up to his neck, and then our gaze cuts through him to the wall.

The Mask blocks realism. It blocks authenticity. It makes the poser a poseur, showing us a false face. It blocks intimacy, or, at least, conventional intimacy; in one photograph, it is oriented impassively out of the frame while someone goes down on the young man. It invites us to be intimate with Art, with impassivity. It threatens to go flat, and then it does go flat. Then it goes Page 167 → animated, but animated by the swoon of a junkie with a needle in his arm; it seems to swoon; this is a vector it will participate in, simulated Death; but is it simulated, or does Death enter here, animate the Mask of Art as Poe foresaw that it would? In this junkie photo, the Mask is maximally white. In scene after scene, interrupting the play of light, the Mask of Art hoards light, sheds it fitfully, shares it jealously. It reminds us that the illusion of depth in the present photograph is in fact an illusion by constantly indexing another photograph, by substituting two-dimensionality for the supposedly expressive features of the human face. But this is vertigo: this has happened many times over, already; the photo substituting for Rimbaud’s face, supplanting it, replicated, disseminated, reproduced, cut out, pierced, an object, yet, in these photographs, an object that is mostly flat, that proposes a surface within a surface, that refuses its third dimension. The Mask of Art repeats uncannily; the Mask of Arthur is replayed here like a still frame constantly repeated, another movie running in the center of this movie, and showing always the same image. It is sometimes pulled down but never pulled off. That is, it never reveals a face behind itself. In one photo it is pulled into an assemblage with Art, an anatomical drawing and a piece of graffiti (Beuys’s “The Silence of Marcel Duchamp Is Overrated”); then it is surfeited with Art, overrun. This is its preferred dimensionality. Then, peeking out of a ruined wall, it makes the ruin Art. It poses for its own crime scene shot on a tiled floor, which sends its black and white into the blunt range of a newspaper photo; it lies bodiless on asphalt as if chipped from the body of the poser, the victim of iconoclasm. Yet it does not seem less animated for lacking a body. It seems just as undigested. It seems responsible for the blackness around it. It has staged even this final photograph to suit its ends. The Ends of the Mask of Art. 3. What is a Mask, and what does it mean to wear the Mask of Art? The most potent insight into the Mask must be postcolonial theory’s realization that the Mask has nothing behind it; as Homi Bhabha writes in regard to Fanon and Césaire, “Mimicry Page 168 → conceals no presence or identity behind its mask.” Bhabha continues, “[T]he menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority.”2 As he further specifies, this threat “comes from the prodigious and strategic production of conflictual, fantastic, discriminatory ‘identity effects’ in the play of a power that is elusive because it hides no essence, no ‘itself.’”3 That is, the Mask does not conceal an authenticity but insists on a doubleness, a nonidentity in the circulation of signs. Looked at another way, if power requires mimicry, a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite,4 and realism as a photographic genre is a compulsory mimicry of the regime of the “real,” the Mask of Art widens this aperture, amplifies the “not quite,” creates a chaotic antirealm that claims the city for Art. The city is stamped with Art. It is wounded, punctured by Art. It is posed and punctured with a junkie’s needle. It swoons. It takes the Drug of Art. It wears the Mask of Art. But the Mask of Art is not an entirely triumphant one; it participates intermittently in the scenes, at times untouched and at times subsumed. Its position is precarious. Bhabha contends that mimicry “is uttered inter dicta: a discourse at the crossroads of what is known and permissible and that which though known must be kept concealed; a discourse uttered between the lines and as such both against the rules and within them.”5 This accounts for the fluctuating status of the Mask of Art. At times it insists on the falsehood of photography above all other qualities, blatantly disrupting the picture plane by insisting on its own planar qualities, disrupting the genre’s ocular rules of compositional coherence; at others, it partly capitulates, that is, plays the role of head or face, is stained and shadowed, is made to express the tonal prerogatives of the scene. But the capitulation is only partial, because the diminution of the Mask’s mastery over the scene signals the rise of the scene’s own potent and material, that is, magical, effects. The scene itself appears to work on the Mask of Art as its material. The scene itself is no longer a piece of reality that happens to be recorded on film, but is itself now Art, infected with and performing Art’s diabolical ministrations. 4. The impossible title of the series, Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978–79, signals that the work is a kind of occult reanimation Page 169 → (and relocation) of the nineteenth-century figure. But occult reanimations are also the province of fraud, artifice, technology, and media. The series could be seen as the ultimate Spirit Photograph,

contact with the Afterlife as a matter of Artifice, the medium presenting holy wounds, apertures on the spectral fraudulence of Ghosts. But is it the Ghost that is the fraud, or the contact? In Rimbaud’s notorious letter of May 15, 1871, he insists that the Poet “make himself a seer” via the “long, gigantic, and rational derangement of all the senses.”6 The disordering of the senses opens up an aperture between the Poet and the extant world into and through which Art may course. The deranged senses are like a gigantic, outrageous membrane, in contact with Art, infested with it. This adjusted notion of mediumicity is similarly conjured in the famous passage “For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. This is obvious to me: I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it and listen to it: I draw a stroke of the bow: the symphony makes a stir in the depths, or comes on to the stage in a leap.”7 In this passage, the spatial distancing opens up an uncertain depth in the place of selfsameness, of identity. This sense of distance and separation from the “I” is an affirmation, first, of its objecthood, and, next, its mediumicity; the Other/Self might be comparable to the brass in the trumpet, waking not into identity with itself but into distancing, transformation, into mediumicity. That’s what’s conjured by the term seer—not merely “sight,” but mediumicity. This radical derangement and disordering may be analogously read back against Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978–79. Here the Mask of Art is the Brass in the Trumpet, taking a turn out of time, disordering temporal order, waking into the scene as Art, puncturing the scene with Art, occupying uncertain depths. But Art’s productions may not be easily controlled or located, for its depth is uncertain; what appears to “begin in the depths” might in fact be “coming on to the stage,” participating in an illusion of depth or violating the proscenium with its “leap,” erupting, making pustules, making contact, bursting through. Similarly, the Mask of Art cannot occupy one position permanently; in circulation, it cannot ensure its hold on all the white light, white heat. It might outshine neon, or it might be capsized with shadow, upstaged by a cigarette. It might be the source of Page 170 → everything or a husk, a nothing. Such reversible fortunes Rimbaud envisioned for the seer/poet, who must make himself an aperture, a medium, increase this visionary distance à Outrance: “He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnameable things.”8 This is Art’s motion, its dislocation, its inconstancy, wherein an icon can become an aperture, can become animated or animate or contaminate its surroundings, can run into or drain out of the scene, can drain through itself, collapse. It is this infernal motion that converts the scene to Art.

Notes 1. Unpaginated, unsigned editorial note in David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978–79 (New Haven, CT: PPP Editions, 2004). 2. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Men,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, [1994] 2010), 126. 3. Ibid., 128–29. 4. Ibid., 122. 5. Ibid., 128. 6. Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 305. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 307.

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On Influence 1. I want to begin by suggesting my discomfort with the conventions of discussing literary influence. I want to suggest that influence need not come from literary forebears, elders, teachers, or even people. For me this notion of influence, regardless of the gender of the participants, is too close to patrilineage, which bothers me for three reasons: its method of conserving property and wealth, ownership of originality; its copying over of heterosexist, male-dominated bloodlines and the reproductive futurism that goes with it; and its commitment to linear notions of temporality—that what comes before causes what comes after, that the dead precede and may be sharply delineated from the living, and that the most important thing is to move forward in time. I find all these structures suffocating and confining. I think we’re all conceptually limited by the unexamined assumptions about temporality, property, gender, sexuality, wealth, and inheritance implicit in discussions of literary influence, regardless of the gender of the writers under discussion. 2. It seems to me that a discussion of literary influence would benefit from an effort to think outside these structures and strictures. I’m for thinking of influence in terms of the dead metaphors of flow, flux, fluidity, and fluctuation, saturation, and suppuration inherent in the term influence itself, influence as total inundation with Art, inundation with a fluctuating, oscillating, unbearable, sublime, inconsistent, and forceful fluid. 3. That such a discussion should require the reanimation of a dead metaphor—the fluid or flow in “influence”—is noncoincidental, to my mind, for to think this way about Art is to think about it as something undead, uncanny, something that does not progress, does not move toward a cleaner, better-lighted future, does not conserve, is not healthy or community oriented, Page 172 → does not preserve a stable, reasonably priced image of the artist for the future or secure an inheritance, but pursues its own interests, pierces, ravages, remakes the artist and repurposes him or her as a kind of host-body to counterfeit more viral Art in its own image, Art that possesses the Artist, forces him or her to swell, mutate, to rupture and leak fluids, to leak more Art into the world. To my mind, that is the thrilling, debilitating force of Art, its influence. 4. Global warming, melting icecaps, blacked-out species, literary landscapes such as the snows of Kilimanjaro disappearing, a twentieth-century reference rendered as remote as Ozymandias; the twentieth century turned cryptic occult anachronistic rising in strange places reanimated; dressed in the flesh the grave-cave ate; Ozymandias’s legacy survives, diminished but undead, as Art-rot; in place of patrilineage, mutation, decomposition; beware, beware; one literary life lived nine times like Lady Lazarus or Woolf’s Orlando in body after body or a life lived in two time signatures like Dorian Gray; both embalmed and desiccated; persisting; contaminating: Art’s unnatural acts. 5. The American underground filmmaker Jack Smith of Flaming Creatures begins his career with an unnatural negative nostalgia surrounding Maria Montez; finds a young Puerto Rican drag queen and rechristens him Mario Montez; casts Mario Montez, the beautiful fake, the counterfeit, in his movies as a medium for undead, occult, desiccating glamour; confects the terms Superstar, later stolen for Andy Warhol’s decadent fifteen-minute famers; flames out; confects performances in his apartment of such slowness that they confound and mesmerize the audience; finally, dying of AIDS, in penury, he lies back in his charity hospital bed and just “reclines,” a ravaged body in drag as Maria Montez, dying, in Art’s drag, as Death, because, as he told a friend, “nobody can recline like Maria Montez.” In place of patrilineage, a cyclicality, an expenditure, a trashing and a doubling up, Maria Montez: Art’s radiant Nobody. 6. Debilitated by Art. Shredded by Art. Shedding Art. Imitating Art. Beware, beware. Decline, decline. That’s all or one-half of the Sublime. Moving away from measurable profit and from time. Or, to choose another model of influence from our contemporary environmental dystopia, influence as poison, a Page 173 → contamination of the water table with mutagenic elements, as at Fukushima, Japan, or off the American Gulf Coast, a spill, a leak a killoff, a spawning cycle, the many clones of Abu Ghraib, the many hooded men, total inundation by bad instincts and reproduction via digital media itself, Wikileaks burned onto a Lady Gaga CD, every portrait is Art’s self-

portrait, Art-shit, Art-trash, wear the hooded mask of Art, sleep in the sleeper cell of Art, naked, Bradley Manning, sleeping under the mountain naked, in the neon light, because he is a risk to himself, having spilled the knowns and the known unknowns across the Wikisphere in sufferable, insufferable leaks. 7. So I’m talking of Art’s influence, Art itself, inhuman, non-humanist, which flows toxically through media, through images, yes, through the works of specific artists, that engenders clones, contamination, and anachronism, has retroactive and special effects, unearned effects, trick effects, trick lighting, trick shots. Hosts ghost conversations. Repeats itself (beware, beware). Doppelgangs-up-upon. Possesses & rots, evanesces. Prised away from the neat rhetoric of forebears, receptions, imitation, inheritance, inherited traits, we release the lawlessness, infectiousness, jouissance of Art’s influence, the making and remaking it perpetrates, which includes the Artist him- or herself. I find it so liberating to be free of linear time, of linear literary genres, of forward thinking, of progress, founders, and heirs, and instead enter into a variegated zone of alteration, mutation, change, generation, replication, which draws little distinction among me, my body, my laptop, my output, my outfit, my input. Output is just a chance for me to counterfeit or imitate or amplify my input, albeit with dolled-up, mutagenic effects. My laptop is full of toxic chemicals disassembled by hand by children in China, wherein it will have mutagenic effects on their gametes. My iPhone is radiating my carpals, tumoring my brain; my typing makes my hands shake, and my reading makes me stutter like I never did before I became a writer. The birds sing in Greek to Virginia Woolf, they sing to the Brazilian Swede Öyvind Fahlström in Birdo, they sing through musical instruments in the concentration camp and at the apocalypse in the Quartet for the End of Time, I speak in tongues, someday I’ll read you Poe’s “The Raven” translated into Birdo. Page 174 → 8. In the classroom, I use a term for this mutagenic zone: stealing a phrase from the Swedish poet Aase Berg, I call it the deformation zone. Translation is the ultimate manifestation of Art’s deformation zone, for entering yourself into Art’s mutagenic properties, for being entered and altered and destroyed, if necessary, by Art’s prerogatives. Translation is anachronistic; it happens in real time and across time; it happens backward; it changes he who takes and he who gives; no boundaries can stand up to this inundation; everything is rendered a membrane by translation. Translation is bio-identical to Art’s influence, spreads and eats and leaks more texts, more Art. It makes too many versions, breeds new hybrid languages, and obscures the priority of what we used to call the “original.” Translation’s deformation zone then becomes the model for Art making itself—a zone where new, strange forms and voices and images are animated that would not have existed if the students had not entered themselves into Art’s deformation zone—its transformation zone—its translation zone—its trauma zone—its zero-sum play out of order—with total commitment—total vulnerability—to take the drug of Art. To paraphrase Norwich’s own China Mieville on Art’s mutagenic properties, we’re monsters, we’re in it for the fucking monsters. Or to read from the monstrous, infectious, microscopic, syllable-by-syllable, vibribrating deformation zone of Aase Berg’s Transfer Fat, here in the double deformation zone of Johannes Göransson’s English translation: Hare Rag The hare conductor stringed attracts the opposite tone the string vibribrates dimensions that will crook the instrument Hearing has a strungtime tugs faster than the string beats

harpy births child conducts child over fields of the as-of-yet unprepared.1 Page 175 → 9. In this brief poem, itself, in Swedish, a deformed translation by Berg of English texts of string theory, syllables stutter, deform, repeat, and form new, monstrous words. No patrilineage here; Art is the Harpy, the fucking shemonster, the shirt-hurling, altar-befouling hybrid who, impregnated by hearing, by broken, corrupted, crooked vibribrations, births a “child” and “conducts” it over a malleable protean region, a deformation zone, “fields / of the as-of-yet unprepared.” Maybe she will drop the seed, or shit, or child, impregnate the field with this mutant offspring, half monster and half sound; maybe she will form a further hybrid with the “child,” reject separation, and the monstrous double body will keep flying forever through the clanging landscape. Further vibribrations. Violence, conductivity, flight, monstrous birth, new ineffable vistas that are themselves in a kind of symbiosis with Art. What Art conducts: itself: Art: its potential: its fecundity: its contaminatoriness; in and of itself: its viral mediumicity: its monstrosity; its sound; its vibribration; its stutter; its contagion; flightlike or fluid; its inhuman Influence.

Note 1. Aase Berg, Remainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg, trans. Johannes Göransson (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2005), 53.

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Loser Occult Outside the campus bookstore a few weeks ago, I glimpsed a white minivan with a green bumper sticker reading “I miss Ronald Reagan” in a big goopy white Snoopy toothpaste font. Good grief, Charlie Brown! The woman driving this minivan stood in dumpy befuddlement facing first the bookstore, and then a security booth on the edge of the parking lot. She rotated back and forth in confusion in the morning smog like a fucked-up sunflower, like she couldn’t decide whether to go buy another bumper sticker in the campus bookstore or go commit suicide by cop. Her performance of utter stupor drove home the lunatic force of the bumper sticker. Next to that salubrious slogan with the magic nomen, its spell-like alliteration, was an image of the old goat himself, one-half of his face lost in mystic shadow, the visible half glowering in ghostly white outline against the green, as if having caricature-able jowls and hairline were some kind of evidence of permanent cultural relevance. He is not dead. He’s only sleeping under the mountain, his spirit shall walk among us and fuck everything up again, etc. The dead are present, in the present tense. Subterranean, homesick. Impelled by nostalgia and perversity. It’s (undead) morning in America! BP is drilling off Alaska through an artificial island they built themselves. Voilà, pretend onshore drilling! Jenny Holzer is selling $75 “Protect Me from What I Want” sneakers through Keds! Comeon, it’s benefiting the Whitney Museum! “Somehow, I can’t see Jackson Pollock agreeing to this,” says a museum rep. I would never have agreed to this! says undead Jackson Pollock through a mouthful of brain matter, a tree growing through his face. Loser occult is a rejection of any concept of literature still Page 177 → trying to worship at that old altar of patrilineage, of literary inheritance. Do even poets, the most marginalized, penniless, and emasculated of cultural producers, have to work day and night in the salt mine of that old sexist and property-obsessed hierarchy? Yet we, more than almost anyone, are supposed to celebrate an exclusive, narrow, and harrowing traditionalism. We’re supposed to be its guardians, after all, like those old ladies sweeping the streets in Soviet Russia with twig brooms, as photographed for Newsweek magazine. This generation did this, that generation did that, this old man was the forebear, this young man is the inheritor. The loser occult knocks that edifice down, hangs out in the rubble huffing, hallucinating, gossiping, making out, wasting time, confecting new and obscene humanoid and nonhumanoid forms. Loser occult envisions a kind of leveled, ambivalent, invisible perpetuity without precedence or antecedence, not based on permanence but on decay, infloration, contamination. It rejects youth, youthful promise, power, vigor, resonance, and shared experience but allows for the possibility of weird mutation, arbitrary reanimation, coincidence, corrosion, drag, and psychic twinship. I, Miss Ronald Reagan: I have to live in squalor, (chewing noises) all day long playing hide and seek with odors. I want to be uncommercial film personified. That’s the . . . oh wait . . . have to live in squalor all day long playing hide and seek with odors . . . no kidding folks. They love dead queers here. (music) (Jack Smith, “What’s So Underground about Marshmallows?”). According to the dead New York Times, gay men are starting Facebook pages for their friends lost during the opening years of the AIDS epidemic. Friend the dead. Facebook occult. Like those friendly undead Facebookers, I’m speaking ahistorically here, thanks! What I like about the Golden Dawn is its embarrassing persistence, its nonrelevance, its adjacency, its outrageousness, its stupidness, its code names, its beards, props, and costumes. What I do not love is its supposedly disavowed sexism (just ask Nemo¸ aka Miss Georgie Hyde-Lees; go ahead, get out the Ouija board and ask her!), its obsession with hierarchy, its cherished elitism. I reject it! Although finally I welcome it into my society of rejects, into my condo unit on a hill in Indiana, my underwater condo unit, where I will microwave organic Page 178 → popcorn in my toxic microwave, whose rays are dangerous only to the pregnant, infants, and those with eyes, where I will reign forever, 25 percent of American homes are now underwater, it’s a rehearsal for the destruction of Atlantis.

Rejection of literary paternalism, its entire model of precedence and succession, is a rejection of literary time—the time of literature and the time in literature, as I, Miss Ronald Reagan Georgie Hyde-Lee Gertrude Stein Jack Smith puts it. The rejection of the time of literature is what I’ve discussed above—no forebears, no lineage, no inheritors, no master-slave files, just a present-tension, a heap of erratic and corrupting nows dressed in different sorts of clothes: I, Miss Ronald Reagan: Here’s a list of other likely vampires: murderers’ victims, the battlefield dead, the drowned, stroke victims, the first person to fall in an epidemic, heretics, wizards, alcoholics, grumpy people, women with questionable reputations, people who talk to themselves, and redheads (Michael Sims, “All the Dead Are Vampires,” Chronicle.com, http://chronicle.com/article/All-the-Dead-Are-Vampires/65829). Right on! I want to hear from all those guys! It’s not difficult to interact with the dead. Everyone who is dead is available. Every dead letter, every dead art form, every dead Kennedy, every dead idea. Lamarckian evolution, maybe. Stretch your neck to eat from the dead tree and have a heap of babies dead and long-necked, like you, I, Miss Giraffe Ronald Michael Jack Gertrude Stein Sims Reagan! And Technology exists to reach them! The deader the better! Betamax! Spirit telephones! Early generation iPods! Thaumotrope! Ear trumpet! Review the Ringu movies for ideas in this department. Work the cultural junkyard, dreaded undead unheralded ungarlanded girdled giraffe bricoleur! Of course, since everyone acknowledges that reading is dead, writing is dead, and especially poetry is dead, you already have the perfect dead/undead occult technology right in your weak little hands. Kurt Cobain is completely available, people. Yes, I know, technically he could be construed as a cultural winner or victor, and thus outside the model of the loser occult, but his rhetoric of weakness and gayness, his inability to look directly at a camera, the inner disorder of his body, his chronic ailments, and the replication Page 179 → of his corroded and corruptible image, including the thousands of kids all over the world alone in their bedrooms singing maudlin versions of his songs into the cameras on their laptops, counteracts that. Let one thousand dead Kurt Cobains bloom, ten thousand corrupt, bootlegged, and shitty cover versions! Let them march forth in Vans, on blown knees and bullet-smarting crania, shitting errorful code like parasites! What music will you make now, undead Kurt Cobains? To hear that music, isn’t that fucking enough? I, Miss Ronald Reagan: Enough, or Too Much! Now, after you’ve gone so far as to exorcise literary patrilineage, literary inheritance, and all its works and arts and forms, warping the time in literature is practically done for you. I, Miss Ronald Reagan: The theater generally hypnotizes; it pulls one into a dream that imitates a place in which the spectator would like to be. . . . The theater of Smith . . . avoided that through building into performance various “confounding” devices—in Smith’s case that great slowness informed by a feeling that “everything was going wrong,” which made it hard for the audience to remember what was happening (Richard Foreman on Jack Smith). A confounding, a dismay, everything going wrong, a practice of amnesia and dementia, the audience forgetting what is happening before them, fascination, as Foreman points out elsewhere, replacing interpretation as a literary mode. The time in literature cannot stand up against this onslaught of bad practices. Things fall apart. A kind of horrific stasis takes over, a decomposing undead present tense. Once time breaks down, genre breaks down. I, Miss Ronald Reagan: The dust settled. O finally! Maria Montez was propped up beside the pool which reflected her ravishing beauty. A chunk fell off her face showing the grey under her rouge. How can we get to it? We must retrieve it or else scrape off all her flesh and start over. Best to fish the chunk out of the pool and pat it back into shape. It’ll show as a blotch on her cheek but we can shoot around that. Somebody will have to go out there with a pole (Jack Smith, Memoirs of Maria Montez; or, Wait for Me At the Bottom of the Pool).1

I, Miss Ronald Reagan: Early that morning I could see that the Page 180 → day would be an ordeal. The Cretins were most excitable and openly masturbated, overstimulating the pinheads. Today they would put on their shepard and shepardess costumes and run across the fields with their sand pails to milk the cows. I rode shotgun on them in my floor length black leather jacket and needle-heeled opera hip boots made of wildebeest leather with the tufted tops (Jack Smith, Normal Love).2 What is this? A synopsis? A shooting script? A diary entry? A film journal? What is its relationship to the film Normal Love, also known as Normal Fantasy and Exotic Landlordism of the World? Which is the “main” text, which are the supplementary texts, what is the secondary text, which are the iterations of the text? Where is the body of the text? The borders of the text fray away, more text accumulates like gossip, degraded text, rejected text. Everything frays and multiflorates, Jack Smith wants to cut up and deform the only print of Flaming Creatures, Jonas Mekas won’t let him, and thus earns himself a peacock’s fan of mutating epithets: Uncle Jonas, Uncle Roachcrust, Uncle Fishook, the Landlord, the Lobster. Smith undulates, too, as Sinbad Glick, the Penguin, a maternal type, “the only normal man in Baghdad.”3 Corrupt and multiplying copies. To write in a form that can’t be sold, even as Art, that can’t fill out a grant sheet, that can’t write letters, that can’t check off a genre box, that can’t apply itself, to raise from the dead a defunct or disparaged genre, to raise readers for your work from the dead, to raise from the dead your collaborators, to raise from the dead your medium, to stage your zeroness on the zero stage of the grave, to perform for protozoa, tiddlywinks, pasties, and pumpkins, leftovers and rejects, to be derelict, to be derelict to be derelict I, Miss Ronald Reagan: This is “success” in “life.”

Notes 1. Jack Smith, Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2008). 37. 2. Ibid., 51. 3. Ibid., 154.

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Arga warga On the Doubled Ambience of Violence & Art 1. I was recently reading the riddley, apocalyptic novel-song Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. This tale, one slowly gathers as one limps or lips along with our enriddled, walking protagonist, is set in a new Iron Age thousands of years after a nuclear holocaust has leveled Britain. The tale is narrated in a squirrelly Medieval argot pierced erratically with jargon of the late twentieth century, and it can only be followed by ear. As a result one’s ocular imagination is at a delay to one’s sonic sense—the book seems to happen out of sync with itself, in the dark, opening up an aperture within itself that is continuous with the aperture Violence has caused in civilization within that narrative. And Violence fills that black aperture, flexes out of it, converts itself to all materials, pours out of all materials, becomes an ambience, in this case a sonic ambience. Follerree Folleroo on your track Oo hoo hoo Yoop yaroo Folleree Folleroo follering you If they catch you in the darga Arga warga1 This bit of doggerel, sung by a chorus of children at the edge of the action, is in fact doggerel in its truest sense, describing the mythical dogs “Folleree” and “Folleroo.” In this song, syntax collapses at two points: the split sonic phrases in the second line seem to embody the two dogs themselves, breaking into and leaping on ahead of the song’s sense. The final line works differently. This onomatopoeia of a gurgling, violent Death speaks Page 182 → for itself. It enacts a Violence, a groaning thrown flailing or roaring into the air on the jaws of that w, Violence vomiting itself, a Violence that reaches back anachronistically and rips the k off the end of “dark” in the previous line, remarking it with its own anguish as “darga.” 2. In our present moment, Violence is ambient, from our strafing economic nonsystem to our corporateenvironmental poisonings to the uneven ways catastrophe is visited upon bodies across the globe. In Hoban’s novel, Violence and Art are simultaneous to each other, shove into the same spaces, split open, devour each other and pour each other out, the near twins, Folleree and Folleroo. The climactic Art moment in the song is also the climax of the Violence: Arga warga. Art has the same distribution channels as Violence. It moves like Violence. Like the Big Bang, an enviolencing that rivens the whole universe, it is prior to, after, always working, never completed, an open wound out of sync with itself and with rational models of progress and time. Art is not a part of the Enlightenment. A something and a nothing at once, a declivity that violently spasms and splits forth more antic dark matter into the universe. In this way Art is continuous with and bio-identical to the physical Violence rivening bodies and the planet, a Violence that is also paradoxically making assemblages and voids, links and holes. Art floods with Violence and Violence floods Art. Thus there can be no question of admitting Violence into our Artwork or representing Violence in Artwork. Violence isn’t represented in Art. It is Art. Arga warga. 3. “The distinguishing feature of the immediate present is what is called the crisis. In addition to its political determinations and its visible and material manifestations, which are plain to see, the crisis must be understood as the persistence of a central excess, a form of opaque violence and degree of terror that flow from a particular failure: that of the postcolonial subject to exercise freely such possibilities as he or she has, to give him/herself and the environment in which he/she lives a form of reason that would make everyday existence readable, if not give it actual meaning.” Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony.2 Page 183 →

I take Achille Mbembe’s comments to be applicable to all of us living in the permanent crisis of the corporate postcolony. On top of the specificities of our economic and political catastrophes, we can identify a “central excess, a form of opaque violence” that makes life illegible, unreadable. That is, the central excess and opaque Violence that define our times have textual and aesthetic effects; they unwrite the Enlightenment text of reason and legibility and meaning with their dark matter; they performs the speech act of themselves, run its program forward and backward, say “Arga warga.” 4. Therefore I do not recognize a border between Art’s Violence and life’s, for Violence is a dark matter, morphing, rotten, propulsive, decaying, and continuous, if never identical to itself, and these properties obtain as Violence moves inside Art. But at the same time, Art’s Violence does not merely replicate life’s Violence. After all, Art is a medium, and it needs media, and these media alter and denature Violence in the same way that Violence denatures and alters the bodies it comes into, both assailant and victim, linking them in an ampersand, a ligature, a rotten eroded Möbius strip, a bursting membrane that overpromotes, eroded by its own supersaturation. Art may in fact intensify life’s Violence, derange it, convert it, make it newly anachronistically present again and again. 5. In Terrorist Assemblages, theorist Jasbir Puar writes of the suicide bomber: Temporal narratives of progression are upturned as death and becoming fuse into one: as one’s body dies, one’s body becomes the mask, the weapon, the suicide bomber. Not only does the ballistic body come into being without the aid of visual cues marking its transformation, it also “carries with it the bodies of others.” Its own penetrative energy sends shards of metal and torn flesh spinning off into the ether. . . . These bodies, being in the midst of becoming, blur the insides and the outsides, infecting transformation through sensation, echoing knowledge via reverberation and vibration. The echo is queer temporality—in the relay of affective information between and amid beings, the sequence of reflection, repetition, resound and return (but with a difference, as in mimicry)—and brings forth waves of the future breaking into the present.”3 Page 184 → In Puar’s figure, the suicide bomber is simultaneously possessed by Violence and by Art, by artifice, by sound effects and warpings, reflections, resounds and vibrations; it is simultaneously an assemblage and a splitting apart. Just as the phrase “arga warga” may be read backward to the same effect, and yet cannot be unsaid, only said twice, only multiplied, I would also reverse the last statement of Puar’s, because if the suicide bomber shatters the present with shards of the future, it also breaks shards of the present into the future. It refuses to let the future arrive in one piece without anachronistic ruptures and breakages continually, simultaneously driving it into the past, into “the darga,” even as it rips forward into the arga warga. 6. The work of Swedish poet Aase Berg is a good example of these dark matters, these radioactive assemblages of pastness and futurity, decay and arrival, declension and propulsion, void and productivity, the suicide bombers of Art and the Art of suicide bombers. Her brief poem “Smelt” from the volume Transfer Fat seems to be a colloquy between interdecaying corpses. Smelt Carry my smelt across hard lakes carry my way of pouring runny body Your shell’s meat darkness4

As the poem opens, the “smelt” seems to be both onomatopoetic of a decaying body and something like olfactorypoetic—the smell of the “smelt” is what carries, and, redundantly, supersaturatedly, what must be carried through a landscape where decay leads not to diminution but contagion. Against the landscape of “hard lakes,” the “way of pouring runny body” must be “carried,” as a disease is carried. It must be copied, replicated, implicated, spread; it must convert and take over till the host is burst; then it must be copied elsewhere. The addressee is a medium for a “pouring runny body,” a body that is not a vessel of the self but of pure infectiousness, decay, mediumicity. After the stanza break, we arrive at an arresting phrase: “Your shell’s meat darkness.” It Page 185 → is unclear whether this bit of disjecta membra from the poem is the speaker describing the addressee, or looking back at herself from across the hard lake of the chiasmus, or if the addressee is speaking back to the speaker, or if, perhaps, the speaker has been successfully carried into the addressee’s “meat darkness,” if communion (which is devourment) is happening here within the darga, if the poem is snuffed out in darga, “meat darkness.” In fact all these possibilities seem suspended and interpenetrated in the onomatopoetic universe of the smelt, an ambient Violence in which all bodies both contain and cannot contain every other body, since each body is a darga, a dark matter, a dismembering, disintegrating, reassembling pouring runny. The sequence of poems in Transfer Fat is remarked with similarly impossible-possible impregnations and enviolencings. In “Myling,” named for the haunting spirit of miscarried babies: The babymeat mushroom’s sweetsour paleness Fluffwhite and porous babymeat paleness It is the fatwhite agaric It is the shadow in the forest of cosmic Sascha The laughing flinch-hare 5 Here laughter and “flinching” are part of the same impossibly simultaneous motion—the Violence of flinching renames the child as a beast to be preyed upon, a “hare,” something to be hunted, something unequal to a human or beastly stalker. This threat of consumption and dismemberment is present from the first two lines, a series of compound words, assemblages that show their seams, that threaten to split the baby apart in the poem’s mashing, mangling maw: “babymeat mushroom sweetsour,” “fluffwhite babymeat paleness.” But if the baby is torn apart, then what? What dark matter will this split body yield? As the title tells us, with its reference to that Myling, that haunting baby spirit, what the slain baby yields will be malignancy, the very malignancy anachronistically present in this poem itself. Indeed, the title tells us this violent event has already occurred, is already casting out malignant traces of itself like a little Big Bang, the little boy dropped from an airplane onto Hiroshima, Page 186 → which made media of so many genomes and carved its malignant legacy on so many little boys. So Violence in this poem has occurred, is foreshadowed, is shadowed, is flinched at, finally just approached, as the poem concludes; Violence is ambient, everywhere, but inconstant; it happens erratically, happens in anything but linear, patrilinear, national time; it rips the poem to shreds and is also the condition of its assemblage; it improvises from refuse of language an explosive, compound device, a molecule always ready to split again. For, as another installment of the poem reads: Hearing has a strungtime tugs faster than the string beats harpy births child conducts child over fields of the as-of-yet unprepared6

As notes played at different frequencies produce a dark matter, a spectral, violent beating, so the radical anachronicity, the different speeds of our universe’s enviolencing, the inequality ravaging our planet, the speediness of its degradation and decline, produce a mashed-up winged monster child who is suspended over posthumousity, ready to drop into its foreclosure, its Death, its Big Bang, its expansion, its replication, its infinity, that little boy. 7. We live, if we live, in the darga, in the strungtime, in ambient Violence, in radical anachronism, enviolenced and slipping, beating, issuing dark matter, out of sync with itself. Art acts like Violence, and Art is Violence. Violence distributes itself along Art’s distribution channels, and vice versa; they enter by the same holes and cast the same wreckage as a black production and make further holes in that and cast out more wreckage. Nothing can be undone, but everything can be done again (with a difference, like mimicry). The Artist cannot remove him- or herself from the economy of Violence. Vulnerability to Art is Vulnerability to Violence; that’s what Vulnerability means: the ability to be wounded, to bear the mark of the wound, to suffer malignancy, and to issue malignant substances; to be infected, made a breeding ground; the shell’s meat darkness; to make Page 187 → new copies; little boy; Myling; to pour runny body. Whether the Artist throws bricks in the street, launches a cyberattack, wears a suicide vest, goes on hunger strike, or performs violent acts on the page, airwaves, Internet, or stage, all these acts are mediumistic, supersaturate their mediums with Art and Violence, cause each medium to split and yield the way the Artist’s own body splits and yields, open a paradoxically productive void that is propulsive, moves, coerces, changes, collapses, obliterates itself, splits its own atom, starts new universes moving in a pattern of distinctive destruction (darga), makes new assemblages and shards itself simultaneously into the future and the past. Dark matter woofs and wags its tail, forward and backward, but never unsays itself. Art says its Violence again and again: Arga warga.

Notes 1. Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 16. 2. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, trans. A. M. Berrett, Janet Roitman, Murray Last, and Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 143. 3. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 217–18. 4. Aase Berg, Remainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg, trans. Johannes Göransson (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2005), 41. 5. Ibid., 49. 6. Ibid., 53.Page 188 →