Philadelphia

Your poems are more serious than mine,
My Bloody Valentine, cocoa and Chianti
tea-leaf cosmos becomes a bedtime trope
sleep like scotch shavings and soulfood
lunch trucks, mac + cheese crust pollens.
everything in the plural, s’s abound, hung
with apostrophes and breasted inside jackets

Follow the river south through plummy trees
over the steam vents pop-tents and Poundian
plaques, into the dive bar with the Frenchman
and the only-in-a-clinic-context man, the one
in the horn-rimmed glasses with the story re:
a tombstone, a list of notable Austrians, or
some Schwitters, tinny on Pine and colonial
pizza: “fümms bö wö tää zää uu, pögiff, kwii ee.”

cream coasters, O Kat, a loveletter to a woman
named Viola who collects envelopes in New Jersey
(cheeserinds for soups and grater cuts on thumbnubs)
this is an economy of hangovers, each like sopping
brows and scotchy pillowcases. Seems So Long Ago,
Nancy, so long since we made pointillist sweet-love
on the vineyard gallery walls, love regions jellyfishing
and brain surgery blues. Snows fall in widgets and never
from the sky, prairies flatten the brain into plates, pips

carboncopied typewriter forensics, purple ink and
quince-fruits: once there was a doctor in love with
an addressee, pockety goods gifted in tortoise stamps
and gum-taste, envelopes as key evidence of desire
and traintravel, probiotics revealed as clever labelling
gut bugs proliferate in raw ewe’s milk cheese, curdled
into architectures, cracked with rust. Being here is
Robert Fripp-y, space between the notes, whistle-whistle

Paronymous Attraction

(This essay was written for Critical Animals, a research symposium held during This Is Not Art, Newcastle Australia, October 2009. The title comes from a poem by Aleksandr Skidan. Photograph of fireflies by Akihiro.)

Everything we need is here, nothing is missing. No omission, no repetition. It is rare, it is miraculous, that we may read openly, in a syntax as transparent as the work of mathematics, the coherent semantics of a universe already constructed. Yet nonetheless this is true.
– (Michel Serres)

Events are produced in chaos.
– (Gilles Deleuze)

Susan Howe says, “The selection of particular examples from a large group is always a social act.” This paper is a social act. I am interested in constellations beyond the usefulness of a rhetorical trope. If we can look to the stars and find a goat’s head, we can enact a similarly creative poesis when looking to the material of our experience. I am in Philadelphia, falling into an opposite weather pattern to Newcastle. In the northeast of America, the sky is pale and silvery, like the flanks of herring. Weather gets caught between the Appalachians – a curious ribcage – and the Atlantic. Three nights ago there was a thunderstorm that cracked through the air and woke me from a fever. You will find connections here in my language, you will sketch your own goat’s head.

Marrickville Sunset

In the beginning there was the fall

two or more Lucretian dustmites

ones and zeros, wheatstuffs and yeast

the paint-wrinkle of air across milks

I heard the birdwhistles of late summer,

oiltankers beaded across horizons &

broken into oceanbath projectors. I

heard the Saturday traffic of freeway

sandstones, petrol bowsers lit & drum ‘n’

bassy in Cherrybrook. Sounds like

topology – an easy analogy is a rubber

band – folding over and into each other

as the cityglow murked over to the left.

I had a thousand things for you, mostly

binary, some knotted together or glommed;

others burnt out & sumpy like motoroil,

tobacco lint bedding into potplants. I saw

the cinema of showering neighbours, planes

heading straight for the sexshop buzz of the

church’s cross – cinema for me, for you

Living is a thing we’re doing

The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. Nothing else is different, of that almost any one is can be certain. The time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition and of that perhaps every one can be certain. (Stein, Composition as Explanation)

In July 2008, over slick croissants and pats of butter on Lygon Street, Stein 09 was brainstormed. Two thousand and nine will be a year-long festival of Gertrude Stein. All acts, encounters, products of dumb banalities and intimacies; every word written and word effaced; all the grammars of consciousness and imagination; every plump chook roasted and omelette fried and sock darned and poodle groomed … all perceptive, cognitive and creative events of experience will contribute to a prolonged duration of engaged Steinian thinking-and-writing, writing-and-playing, playing-and-thinking.

From this improvised working bee, ideas about what kind of contemporary Australian poetic might emerge from strategic saturation of neo-Steinian activity were imagined. How might Stein intervene the lineages and chronologies of national poetic narratives? In re-imagining Australian experimentalism in terms of a Steinian poetic, could we somehow mobilise ideas about our own local circumstances that were not tied up with discourses of historical and cultural character? The very fact of our coming together over Stein in a fracas of mid-conference, post-booze, croissant-and-jam skill-share was meaningful. Yet Stein has always done well to elude the logics of her own biography, so her presence in wintry Carlton on this morning was no surprise. She is our contemporary in the sense that her ideas about language and experience, writing and thinking, composition, grammar and time are utterly relevant to our own various praxes. More than that, Stein’s oeuvre is, in so many ways, anticipatory of contemporary preoccupations. She seems to gesture towards key moments of late-twentieth century cultural, critical and philosophical thought.

In a literal sense, this paper is a Stein 09 event, a piece of writing with the project in mind. But more importantly, this paper suggests that the very living and thinking of my being-in-time, my sensing time and living with my own time-sense, as well as the living and thinking of my own sense of a poetics, is a Stein 09 event. To say that this paper is a composition, I must also say that there are other compositions at play, that to compose is to take note, to be aware, to keep moving, to find a way — as Stein would say, to make living a thing that I am doing.

There is a certain sense of playfulness, an admission of silliness in framing these conceptual-creative preoccupations, collective or singular, within a year and naming it a festival. Yes, I admit to being silly about this gestural act. But it is not a silliness that recourses to coolish irony or cynicism. It’s a serious silliness; there are serious concerns at play for me here. Whatever claims I make about the processual or durational events of Stein-induced attentiveness to poetics are claims that actively contribute to my sense of being-in-the-world, claims that demand the ongoing interrogation of my intellectual and creative practices.

fred’s farm

yes this is a field of gunmetal glinting like weather
an entire ecology of dead thistles mapping a drought
barbs pain dull remembering poisons of beestings &
the skull-eye fits perfectly a climbing stick found hill-
side. let’s take a photo here of the air’s texture looking
down into damwater figure out some key property of
atomic nature the push of things against another. let
no one say that sheep can’t really move if encouraged
when it’s a distance issue the soundlessness is affecting
as a cinematic device. this dog resembles more closely a
seal than say a different dog & really the same is else-
where too. owls pocket into roofy line-drawings I’m
imagining that everything is a sketch or a story told
hundreds of times at the dinner table. (months ago
on saying I was interested in oral histories I was made
to feel oversexed and dead-keen on performing fellatio.)
rhubarb is a barometer of the times, heirloom parsleys
grow into mad reunions, tomatoes hang on tho pecked
into pumice. predictably all the wool smells of dinner
farmdogs bray fig trees are irrelevant bowsers like delta

collaborationism

opening out some office-tones hushy-grey
hard/soft metaphors & back-to-ham radios
, thwarting military commands glitching
some new masculine intimacies or love-talks
I’d order less milk for more tea and insist on
‘or’ as a consequential joining word suspending
two things in lateral flow attuning and framed

your code metaphor is very late-nineties
we’re yoking an idea of the body with one of
not-the-body, as if we ever got rid of ourselves
as if we ever felt that the body’s betrayal
was other than us. knitting circles aside newness
clots and curds, nouns set up suggestively as some-
thing more interesting, less servile

meta-sex talk tsk-tsk-ing, the chills / pink frost:
to collaborate is always already evident crumbing
against an Auckland dusk-light. it’s girlfriend in
a coma but without the irony. across the street cats
lope into themselves, into liquid ambers, as though
their limbs were patterning an ominous index
the easy analogy is this – there are bones in a

battlefield, settled into the seams of the soil &
all the conscientious post-bloodshed grasscover
– and the bones tell us a list of things about the
battle or any number of potential battles. brownian
motion (the path of a drunken bird; measured in
units of exquisite likeliness) and ordering peking
duck (quantities jotted on the underside of a napkin)

come to mind. our love, to put it crassly, is indexical.

Objects of experience — P&P post

I wrote a post about my experience with Push and Pull and its relationship to Stein, Whitehead, Olson and object-theory. Read it here.

Billy Pilgrim commits suicide; radicalises time

Photo by Katie Spence

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All the moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.”

Imagine a very small bit of radioactive substance in a Geiger counter. In the course of an hour, a single atom of this radioactive miscellany either will or will not decay. If it does, the counter will detect the ionisation and a mechanism will relay movement so that a hammer smashes a flask of poison. If it doesn’t, no change will be detected and the flask of poison will remain intact.

Imagine that the radioactive miscellany, the Geiger counter and the poison are all securely arranged in a box with a cat. At the end of the hour, the cat will either be dead or alive, depending on whether an atom has decayed and a flask has shattered.

According to the early 20th Century Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, a system only transforms from a superposition of states, simultaneously one and the other, to a single state, either one or the other, when the act of observation takes place. So according to the interpretation, before the lid of the box is removed, the cat is both alive and dead. Imagine a cat smeared across parallel planes of dead and not-dead; trapped in some vibration until our gaze pulls it into stasis. After the lid comes off, you will look inside and the cat is either alive or dead. Your engagement returns smeared cat back to stable cat.

Now imagine that you have a gun to your head. The gun is rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. When the trigger is pulled, the particle is measured. If the particle spins in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire. If it is spinning anticlockwise, the gun will not fire.

You sit in a chair and pull the trigger. The gun does not fire. You continue to pull the trigger for eternity and the gun never fires. You continue to live. If you travel back in time to the beginning of the experiment, you pull the trigger and the gun discharges. You are dead. In the first case you lived and in the second you died. Every time you pull the trigger the world splits and the two possibilities occur side-by-side. Every time you pull the trigger, the chance of surviving decreases by half but never reaches a non-zero number. There will always be a small subset of unlikely worlds in which you survive. A conscious ability to observe your own creaturely sensation – in other words, to feel your own pleasure – may have ceased in the first gunfire, but you have achieved a state of quantum immortality by committing quantum suicide.

These two thought experiments, the cat and the gun, are variants of the same paradox. Schrödinger’s Cat interrogates a popular interpretation of quantum activity that runs the risk of separating experienced reality from hypothetical mechanics. The quantum suicide paradox explores the potential non-conscious selves existing across infinite universes. In the sense that dead-undead states in the second experiment are versions of the observant self, this quantum suicide model imagines Schrödinger’s paradox from the perspective of the cat.

Both experiments radicalise the time of death. We might say that we are constantly moving towards the event of our death and therefore we are always in an intimate relation with being dead. Yet this idea supposes that we are travelling on a timeline with some anticipated horizon as a limit. The rim of our experience is death and time is tugging us along. A dead-alive paradox in this idea is a fantasy. In the two thought experiments, alive and dead are two textural qualities in a complex field of potentials.

In Slaughterhouse 5, Billy Pilgrim is able to experience events in his life – including his birth and his death – simultaneously and non-linearly. I’ll avoid the use of the phrase ‘time-travel’ here (though it is used in the novel) for two reasons. Firstly, when Billy moves through different temporal zones, his material body stays in the present, albeit in a kind of dumb, anaesthetic state. It is his consciousness and his memory of experience that moves. Secondly, the words ‘time-travel’ imply that any radical temporal movements occur on a stable x-axis, as Vonnegut writes, like beads on a string. To anchor Billy in the present and imagine that his extratemporal experiences are simply back-and-forth deviations to hallucinogenic other-times mean that we are stuck in a simple, unimaginative geometry.

If we must represent Billy’s time-experience spatially, let’s imagine it as fractal, or vortical, the texture of toffee as it cools from syrup to brittle. Constant difference and unending self-sameness. To map it would be to map a bowl of porridge. All experience is remembered, all memories are constant, all time is in flux, all chaos is sensual, all moments are stretched across spastic durations. If you want to talk about a centre of a now-time, the real Billy Pilgrim in the centre of his living, you have to first find the centre of a milkshake, a wormhole, a clusterbomb in the split-seconds after detonation. Find the centre of a melody, a toothache, a pile of shavings from a wood-carving.

Critics of Slaughterhouse 5 have said that Billy Pilgrim reveals a deeply cynical and nihilistic fatalism in Vonnegut. Billy is seen as a pin-up for every passive non-feeler who has let himself be dragged through the pathological hostilities of modern trauma; the histories of war and holocaust, the banalities of family, the stupid failures of lives and love. Yet what these criticisms assume is that Billy’s experience of loose time, his conscious, sensate, simultaneous memories, represents a passive or disengaged surrender. It assumes that Billy somehow gives up what is known as ‘free will’ in order to move across the textures of time. And yet this idea of ‘free will’ protected by Vonnegut critics falls down at the slightest nudge. Billy Pilgrim was sent to Germany as an eighteen-year-old small-towner, spirited out to the wintry dregs of an inconceivable war. This was the experience of Vonnegut, and the very fact of his service shatters whatever triumphant myths there are about the absolute free will of the individual, carving out his own fate against any odds.

The Tralfamadorians tell Billy that the Earth is the only place in the universe that practices the myth of free will, which relies on the same simple geometry of a straight line. Each moment is a bead on a string and at each moment our experience of time is the experience of choice. Every choice contributes to our sense of final becoming, a catalogue of what we chose and avoided, what we achieved and what we failed to overcome. If all time is all time, as it is to Billy, it is not how we compose our lives in each moment; it is how we negotiate the total sum of all moments. In this sense, an idea of ‘free will’ might become more an idea of attentive encounter with the entirely non-Euclidean shape of experience. The first atomic swerve that produced the smallest something, the slight swoon or dip into another, the intimacy of touch and closeness, the activity of collision.

At every sentence of Slaughterhouse 5, Billy Pilgrim is alive and dead, at war and in his marital bed, on Tralfamadore and in Ilium, New York, a cat and not-a-cat. Every potential Billy lives out each wonderful desire and failure. So it goes.

The essay as

An essay of mine (based on a conference paper given at The Art of the Real in Newcastle, May 2008) has been published here at TEXT.

Corncob malfunction: Chaplin as clown, parasite, static

Teddie Adorno and Charlie Chaplin meet at a party in Malibu in the mid-1940s. Standing next to each other, they are parodies of themselves. Both in auto-exile, neither belongs to the hologrammatic fantasy of California. They are each always other.

Adorno is introduced to an actor, recently returned from war, whose missing hand has been replaced with an iron claw. As soon as the actor turns away, Chaplin, standing centre stage, mimics Adorno’s split-second expression of abject shock, that one frame in a moving image that contains the recoiling and guilt of recoiling, compensating and guilt of compensating, as the claw is sighted and the handshake ritual glitches. Chaplin captures the expression—barely a glint—and apes it. It is both an exact resemblance and a gross exaggeration, copy and caricature.

Years later, Adorno remembers this encounter in celebration of Chaplin’s 75th birthday: “All the laughter he brings about is so near to cruelty;” says Adorno, “solely in such proximity to cruelty does it find its legitimation and its element of the salvational.” Such cautious reverence is significant. Elsewhere, Adorno superimposes laughter and cruelty as a key moment of ‘culture industry’:  “[A] laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its members are monads, all dedicated to the pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everything else. Their harmony is a caricature of solidarity.”

What separates Chaplin, and perhaps what earns him this reverence, is his unknowableness, his elusive playfulness, his suggestiveness. He is not merely a producer of cultural capital, in the sense that he is not an actor or filmmaker by way of trade or profession. He is an incessant performer. His off-screen performativity is his social mode, and each banal act of clowning, each momentary update, complicates a sense of his ‘true’ self, so that the very notion of a true self might finally collapse. Chaplin is Chaplin is Chaplin. He is beyond schizophrenia and towards compulsive multiplication.

In Modern Times, Chaplin’s frequently sampled other, the Tramp, negotiates the pathological shittiness of Depression-era capitalism. The factories, when still running, are Fordist panopticons. Some workers are revolting, others are having nervous breakdowns, the majority are ground to automatons. Beautiful waif-girls are stealing bread and bananas. Cops are herding riff-raff. Gaols bloom with Commies and misfits. The rich waft past like rakish ghosts. Chaplin’s Tramp moves through the scenes as an odd composite: despite his earnest Protestant work ethic and his infallible ‘goodness,’ he is exceptionally naughty and is constantly being carted away by police. He corrupts the micromanaged body-economics of the factory assembly line by failing to cope with the repetition of bolt-wrenching. When the system corrupts Chaplin begins to dance, a truly non-profitable economy of movement for the productive industrial capitalist.

It is too simple to say that in Modern Times the Tramp performs a perfect allegory for the human spirit under threat from modernity. Indeed, it is too simple to say ‘human spirit,’ and it is certainly too simple to say that capitalism operates outside the human in order that it might threaten some organic essence. It is certainly a seductive temptation, to pit the Tramp against the superstructure and to hope that the human prevails and the machine is corrupted sufficiently. Yet it might be more interesting to imagine the Tramp—rather than exemplifying the human or standing-in for a human whole—as a composite or hybrid that operates on a plane beyond representation. In other words, Chaplin as performer becomes the Tramp as a series of cinematic images, not singular but many. His body is a collection of film grains, and the composition of the Tramp as a celluloid object has three resonances. Firstly, the material of his body as it changes through space, that is, his mime and slapstick, shape and form. Secondly, its reproduction in light. Thirdly, the relationship between the body’s movement, its cinematic image and technological processes that produces it. The Tramp is as human as the camera lens that images him, orders his composition in frames. His ego is no longer a psychological or even emotional continuum.

Walter Benjamin was excited by the implications of the cinematic body in respect to contemporary audiences (that is, contemporary in the 1930s), proposing a model of ‘innervation,’ with Chaplin as a key example. Innervation here refers to the affective flow of the on-screen body’s movement-images to the perceiving audience, so that the experience of perception simulates (and stimulates) the sensation of ‘being alongside,’ attuned with, the movement capabilities of the new cinematic technologies. So the engagement with the filmed body excites a kind of electrodynamic response in the nervous system of the perceiving body. Sensations of dissonance, acceleration, cuts and swerves.  “In its jerky and technologically mediated movements,” says Nieland, “Chaplin’s Tramp promised, as it modeled, a kind of being best suited to modernity’s public world: distracted and forgetful, dislocated and improvisational, aimless and instantaneous, at home in modernity’s mechanical world of things.” Benjamin, continues Nieland, goes even further, suggesting that Chaplin’s “anarchic personality exploded bourgeois models of personality; its “negative expressionism” set him drifting from the demands of bourgeois sociality – moral propriety, consistency of character, domestication.”

Yet there is now another danger: in setting up a loose analogue between human and machine, we approach another simple model, in which the human is not imagined in opposition to the machine, but in terms of self-similarity or psychological identification.

So, while still playing with a notion of self-sameness but complicating it, here is another idea: the parasite. In French, ‘parasite’ has three meanings. Two are shared in English, that is, the parasite as biological organism and the parasite as a relationship of social dependence. The third meaning in French is what we call, in English, static. So the parasite, as Serres suggests, might refer to any productive interference in a transmission. The parasite-as-interference model suggests any meaning transfer that is complicated, deviated, changed or added to by interloping static. In this sense, the parasite is neither wholly guest nor host, and in fact, the guest/host dialectic has no distinction in French, where both subjects of a parasitic relation are known by the same word, hôte. Rather, the parasite is the creative, corruptive, potential-filled agent of change, differentiation, agitation. The parasite doesn’t destroy the system it interferes with, but nudges it, plays with it, improvises its structural organisations. When we watch Modern Times we can imagine that Chaplin’s Tramp parasitically engages with industrial capitalism while industrial capitalism parasitically engages with the Tramp. The interference is two-way or many-ways. Subject/object structures collapse. “What is essential,” says Serres, “is neither the image nor the deep meaning, neither the representation nor its hall of mirrored reflections, but the system of relations.”

In this model, the difference produces the thing. Chaplin’s Tramp is a play of differences: if we can say that the Tramp is a character, then the character is known as a complex of minimum differences. Each movement of the body, facial expression and deviation from what is expected, framed in long and short shots, allow Chaplin’s Tramp to interfere as a mode of existence. The humour of Chaplin is in the resonances of differences and sameness, the ability to play on what is banal and fantastic, expected and unexpected, closeness and distance, intimacy and alienation. This is clowning, among other things. We laugh because play of difference is key to experience: fluctuation, attraction and repulsion, atomic collision, the pleasures of opposition, synaethesia, hyphens, the burlesque. Each making the other. Interference might have political mobility if we imagine the parasite as an organised cell of activism. Interference might imply a radical approach to clock time, where clock time operates at the unit of onward production. In this sense, interference might be anti-progress, where progress is accumulation of systemised time-units in an economy of productivity. As a parasitic relation, the Tramp works these differences. The sensation of the world and of being in the world. Tea gurgling in the gut, twisted hankie up the nostril of the boss, coffee poured through the cavity of a roast chook.

It feels appropriate to end with another snippet of Adorno’s strange and lovely birthday dedication. The reverie of comparison here is almost incomprehensible – Adorno moves from synaethesia to total eccentricity, and yet in a movement that feels entirely appropriate, fucking with the smoothness of metaphor. He writes:

The one who comes walking is Chaplin, who brushes against the world like a slow meteor even where he seems to be at rest; the imaginary landscape that he brings along is the meteors’ aura, which gathers here in the quiet noise of the village into transparent peace, while he strolls on with the cane and that so become him.