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

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.

notes for an essay

Prawns hung like small hooks on the edge of crystal. “Geraniums are an eighties flower,” and “dry-hump” turning up in a poem, then edited out. Macau as the egg-tart capital of the world, a nice in-folding of Chinese and Portuguese imperialisms. When I say composting is not a metaphor I mean it. It is not a metaphor. Yet when Fred says metaphor is a metaphor you ought to believe it is the truth. I am still in agony over whether your couch is the shade of avocado or honeydew. There is always a temptation to say something more abstract, like “mint julep.” “This is a grammatical rule and states a logical impossibility.” There are many things we could do with the book nearest to us – playful or otherwise – but the question of distance and the problem of equidistance means it will never happen. Swimming to edge of the pool, would you crack your nose or not, and if so, does that change physics forever?

in three phases

based on words and blank slots

object had pretty much ceased

‘a punchy line about a vegetable garden.’

never not visual any more than not aesthetic

the part of the piano which holds the

imaginative excursions, wind-swept lovelies

hidden confusions, dialogia. everybody

wants china to fail. critically – good

flour can make good bread, swinging-

and-kissing, chunks of language.

go for your life, my love. Alice safely

sleeps upstairs. nice to see you: Homage

to Ted Berrigan

1095 not out, or, 3 years of love

there are things about you that are almost unbearably
good, like how when you say ‘sphinx’ – to describe the way the cat
rests upright over your arms – you merge a ‘c’ with the ‘sph’
sound so that it is almost germanic, as though you were saying
the word ‘sphincter’ with a textural emphasis – sphincter is indeed
not a casual word – (both words come from sphingein, meaning
‘bound tightly’ – though not, it would seem, from german but from
latin via greek – and this is a very nice connection to discover here)
or – and this is a sensual choice to make – you say the word
‘demon’ with a small thuddy ‘d’ on the end, as though it were
too much a temptation not to  echo the nub of ‘almond’,
itself a nicely finished sound, a plug, a stop, a cork.

uttering

a stocktake of things to say, listed on newly sheafed piles
‘it is my right, my rite, my desire to speak like a goat’
there are few reasons rather than this one to need to use a noun
i’m thinking here of the german language, and childhood.
there are many very impressive ways to groan a point across
like to say, ‘yeah, but… i just… but…’, that last word like a drummy
punctuation, a thing that was always discouraged in language,
putting it on the end like a plug or a soapstone book-end, shaped
like a pelican – one inverted leftwards and one rightwards – and
then falling into someone’s arms and speaking right up into
their throat (as if you were their voice box) and saying very unusual
and untruthful things, like ‘no!’ and ‘i didn’t!’ and ‘i don’t know!’

or a thousand tiny wires, or hairs

i’m remembering a time when i had thought the words
but had never said them aloud – on the subject of these
things that should be said from time to time, or never –
and then it came the time to say it and the words were
a texture i couldn’t understand – like okra or fibreglass –
and you were very quick to laugh at the performance of
me – mouth crawling with hairy grubs – trying to say small
so-and-so things to you

slug courtship

there must have been a time when we would have found it nervous-making to see a pair of slugs wrapped together in copulation (scientific discourse refers to the getting-to-know-you stages as a ‘courtship’, but to me it looks like one slug eating another slug out) and producing what looks like a string of decorative bluebottles. in fact, these slugs hang from the bluebottles (which remind me of plasticy windchimes bought from market stalls and taken down because of atonal, clinky sounds) as they wrap together in slugfuck. here, upside down, they exchage their genetic information and make more slugs. yes, there was a time, the time before these slugs, that we were dry-throated, and we liked to avoid such ideas, because they were bad ideas and we were nervous people. we had never sat down and really talked over the potential benefits of two slugs in ecstasy sharing their codes of differentiation: the way that these things bring together any mating couple as a sign of camaraderie, a nod of knowingness. the way that knowing how slugs love each other brings us closer together, links our desires with the bluebottle strings.