Prose

The Press

iamdan — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:52:50 +0000

The Press iamdan Mon, 03/01/2021 - 01:52

The city of Sao Paulo clogs daily with its refuse, and sits idling for hours with its buses, trucks, and cars. On a sidewalk just west of the bridge where the Rua Brigadeiro Tobias crosses the Rua Alvares a group of young men squat and gather. "Tell us a story, eh, Sebastio. Another story, man. Tell us about Martinho, about Antonio, about the light."

Sebastio sits on an overturned orange crate in a recess where the bridge meets the Banco Holandes. The youth surround him. At 3:00 pm the river of cars and trucks becomes a reservoir, hopelessly damed somewhere downstream. The traffic stands still, a perfect chance for Sebastio to sell his 200 copies of the O Estado. There's even a bomb in the headlines today. The traffic sits. The only movement now the exhaust eddies smoothing over the gum-stuck and well oiled pavement. At his back the stone wall of the bank slowly corrodes. The cars fluke exhaust. Sebastio says fuck. His papers sit on a flatbed upstream somewhere, avoiding him, on purpose it seems, like wise fish.

"A story, man."

"Fuck." At seventeen, Sebastio is already the favorite of the idlers. The loose youth and other Boia Fria daily gather near his crate and hear the stories.

In 1919 Santos hummed with the buzz of the port city during an explosion. It was not unusual to unload the industry of twenty ships a day, all the while sending out the coffee that fueled the violent growth. And each evening as the fish-mist settled with the darkness, the new peasants, street urchins and other Boia Fria would take a heavy comfort in the gold the departing sun splashed over the shapes of the eastern horizon's approaching ships. The ships brought the goods for the inland city of Sao Paulo. Pulleys. Gears. Steel rail. And the so much sought after and talked about turbines, cables and bulbs that would supply the power and bring the new light.

They even called it "The Light." The Sao Paulo Tramway Light and Power Company, the private consortium from Canada, had bid and won the contract to transform Sao Paulo's streets from mud, dung and dust into something from Paris. "When The light comes, Sau Paulo will be translated." The authorites knew that by widening the Avenida Do Estado, and by lighting it with the new electric bulbs, not only would they improve the street, they could tranform the very symbols of poverty that oppressed the city. Never mind the Corticos where five six or eleven families shared a room, the Favelas where, like in the story of the wolf and the pigs, the homes were built

from little more than straw. Never mind that the new roads would not reach the Favelas, or that bridges would not be built if they cost more than a simple road. Never mind the mud, dust and shit, the city and even the people knew that when "The Light" arrived, Sao Paulo would be renewed.

Today in Santos a ship unloads a press. Standing by is Antonio da Silva Prado, a coffee baron from Araras. He's been four days waiting for his press and now he speaks to the Boia Fria and the driver of the useless new truck with the impatience of a missionary. "Come on. Bring it out easy. Don't knock it. Hey!" The dock crane has already dropped a load of pipe and the pallet holds Antonio's breath with it as it sways gently above a waiting flatcar.

He can't help but think of coffee as the press hangs in the blue air. The breeze brings with it the moist scent of the inland flowers on the coffee trees. The trees already in blossom and sending forth the unmistakeable sign of the bumper crop to come. "Finally I'll have power to speak my words," Antonio tells the driver of the new truck, "fuckin Correio Paulistano, that paper tells only lies. It is the Partido's paper." The driver shrugs. Antonio looks at the press still swaying heavily above. "The Fazenda used to have some say. Some power. Now the industry speaks. The Partido pretends to be for Big Coffee, but really they're from outside. Foreigners. Industry." They both sit now on the flatbed of the useless new truck parked by the tracks. "And that road, shit, its useless."

The road to Santos was always no more than a mule trail, but a franchise to rebuild it had been given to the Serra Road Improvement Corporation. So Antonio and the driver had taken the train to Sao Paulo and bought the new truck to come and get the press. Antonio cringed at the feathering metal grate as the driver learned the clutch and gearbox. Then the road. The toll. The first few smooth miles, then the shivering impact with the fist pothole. Then the next. The dust blankets the truck and the cloud traces along the jagged edge of the plateau as the road clings its way down to Santos. Antonio watches the sea through the chalky air outside the window. "I remember my father's stories about the voyage."

He always began with the the paper. He even tried to sound like the paper. "On February tenth 1898," he would say, "I saw an ad in the Diario Milan. This was my chance." He had been married to Angelica a while and I was already born and Martinho felt the weight of the world upon him. There was no room at his family's and no work in Milan. Mother and I were strong, but hungry and Martinho felt

thin. "This is my dream," he told Angelica, "land, work, a new beginning."

Listen: the voyage to Brasilia is one of the most exciting and rewarding experiences since sails were put to sea. As the wind fills the sheets, the dolphins dance around the prow of the ship and shimmer a rainbow up from the depths and through the mist, as if to say follow us to the new land and light given by God. The milk. The honey. In Brasilia, the revolution, the new system of free labor, and the giant coffee industry mean that there is work enough for ten thousand men. The land is so abundant that each man who works for the plantation receives his own farm as well. The soil is so rich that a man can feed his family ten times over. All this and you sail with free passage. So easy.

"Angelica, listen. We can grow our own food. We'll farm, and the work."

"But the passage. How can they send people without money?"

"The planters are patriarchs. They pay the passage and we pay them later as we work."

"But then it's not free, what if there is no work?"

"But there is. When they pay our passage they must have work for us to get back their money." Martinho is aglow. "Imagine, Angelica. We sail together. The voyage is so peaceful and when dark we can feel the light warmth of the stars as if they were night fires in heaven. And the sunsets. The sunsets paint the sky and color the clouds that gather up the horizon purple like the robes of God. Like signs, Angelica. Like signs."

Outside the truck window the sun jewels the sea. Ships on the edge smudge the day with the soot that trails, almost spoken, from their smoke stacks. Antonio blows an old idea through his tightened lips. Rubs his face with his palms. the truck slams against another rut. Antonio turns to the driver, "shit. This road's useless."

So they both sit on the back of the truck and wait as the crane groans its motor and finally begins to lower the pallet toward the waiting flatcar. "But the boat was a steamer. Instead of the dream of the dolphins, Martinho slept with the drive of the piston. The turn of the screw. And leaky too. The rivets beneath the water line seeped constantly and two or more of the passengers would at all times work the mechanical pumps, and another two would busy themselves at the hopeless task of gumming the bolts. On mid-deck, the livestock, sheep, chickens rats and people. Angelica and I spent the days holding onto the three by five foot hatch where we slept at night. Where, for fear of losing the hatch, like nesting birds, we sat for the whole trip, listening to the mechanical Rhunng of the engine room below. We sat because the deck was unclean. A stickiness of piss and rust water that seemed to seep cooly into the skin whenever touched.

One morning Martinho went above to see the much talked over storm. A blackness gathered to the west and the sea flung back and arched its surface into foam which hung dirty like raw cotton. The wind picked up and then the boat began to push its nose through rather than over the waterwalls which lurched to life all around. Soon all below and the rise and fall. The water fills into the belly. Pumps. Pumps. God damnit Pumps. The rise. The fall. Then a frozen moment. A short lived hiss and shudder as the filling water licks into the boiler. The grey safety lights flicker. The scream of the dying boiler. Then darkness. That panic. That scream. Then, again, time and the rise and fall. Morning." Antonio sucks in a last breath of the moist air of Santos. The pallet now safely strapped onto the flatcar, he sends the driver on to Araras and boards the train home with his new press.

On the train Antonio watches the tall palm and Brazil trees float by outside the window. He recalls his father's voice. In Santos we were put on a train and taken up the newly opened Noroeste line to work on the coffee Fazenda of Arlindo Piedade. The train grudged up the slope of the Serra do Mar escarpement toward Sao Paulo, then onto the Rio Claro spur, and past the new cotton and cane plantations near Campinas. Martinho saw the Fazendas through the train's smoky glass. The use farms of the colonos in the distance. The long drawn spaces of the drying terraces, the seas of beans in each section raked into rows to witness the sun. The mature coffee trees, round and shaggy, their leaves fuzzing down like shavings of iron gathered on a magnate. "Look Angelica, the farms." Martinho squeezed his eyes toward the window and pressed Angelica's hand. "The coffee. The homes." A thousand palms stood at the edge of the drying terraces in a line five trees thick, shielding the big Fazenda house from the work which built it. The house two-storied. Squat and controlled by a lawn squared around the columned porch which ran the length of the house on all four sides. Martinho said, "this is now part of my dream. That house. See, Angelica how it's spread out and separate. The parts. The House. The tall trees." But the train poked deeper into the new land. More coffee. Coffee. Where were the houses? Some workers. Native brush. Rubber. Palm. Brazil. The train wheezed to a stop a hundred yards past a newly planked building. We step into the slick soil and stare toward the rough vegetable world on both sides of the tracks. Soon a wagon takes us over mud-ruts and through some newly cleared fields dotted with colonos and coffee shoots. Then again to the vegetable wall. Another wagon brings tools unloaded from the train's flatcars. The work begins.

At Araras Antonio met the driver again. They loaded the pallet on the new truck. They bought some cassava from the station, then began the long grind up and through the the fringe plateaus and smooth U-shapes of the Parahyba valley. On the drive to the Fazenda Antonia gathered his eyes on the green that moved outside the window. The coffee trees hung heavy with beans. The Mandioca, sought for its root. Maize. And, of course, the Palm. "It seemed as though my father measured our lives with these Palm trees. Fan Palm. Sega palm. Pigmy. For the first years he cared most for the Fan Palm. For a long time our only joys were the small shoots. Martinho learned that the coffee from his new trees wouldn't be produced for four to six years. To live on the farm they would have to supply the Fazenda with enough coffee each year to meet the terms of their lease, and since the only place one could pick coffee was the Fazenda, this meant that at least five years of his life would be spent in free labor. So we planted between the rows of our coffee shoots. The trees started so far apart that there was room for rice, maize, beans. Here we had room for expectation. The sprout. The growth. Soon we sold food to the cities. My father leased more land. 'Look at those Palms.' He pointed my glance toward the line of Palms along the road one day and said, 'look at those Palms. Already they are tall and stand as a mark for my Fazenda.'

When I was fourteen we went to Santos to deal with the wharehouse. The Commissario who bought our beans was a crook, so we went to Santos. Martinho sold beans to The British Export Commodity Corporation. The new deal would give us the money we needed to really expand. Martinho talked about the new Fazenda house, the coffee machines, more colonos. When we walked the long beaches of Santos, the hills that came down to the ocean ended in an earth wave. The bluff tumbled down to the sand and formed a wall opposite the sea. We listened. The sound over sound. The sweeps of the wave's breathing, returned by the hill's still rock. Ocean. Stone. The breathing sweep. Fhweeaesheough. The waves. The hills. The gathered sands.

In the distance the hills over the shore formed curved eyelines where the escarpement skirted his green thumbs out to meet the water, and said, "nothing more than the assertion of my

receeding coves," then broke over the sea. And the palms above each cove were distinct as faces, not severed, tethered to the ground on trunks too distant and straight to be anything more than imagination." The truck noses its way through a small stream. The driver squeezes his eyes toward the road now dimming in the lengthening shadows of the day's close. They pass the Fazenda of Narciso Lacerdo Franco. Trucks load coffee. Antonio massages his eye area with his thumbpads. "Where's Franco selling beans. Fuckin' Partido. When I finally print O Municipio I'll fight with the truth. I remember when Martinho fought with the Coffee Institute. They said he couldn't be a member. He was foreign. Shit, so were they. They laughed. So he went to Ataliba Tavares, who was the registriero for Araras, and bought the leases for some of Franco's Colons. In the morning, our Grileiro came with his security guards and some Colonos. They picked Franco's beans and sold them for 1500 reis. At the next meeting, when Martinho offered the money they still refused. 'I must try one more thing,' he told the Fazenderas and he pushed the new leases under the eyes of Franco. 'Fucker,' cried Franco, 'you mother fucker.' In Sao Paulo the last lease is valid. The registreiro is very powerful. When Martinho left he still had the 1500 reis, he still had Franco's Colons, and he was the newest member of the Coffee Institute.

When he returned from the Coffee Institute, we walked among the Palms. My father told me how his life had been measured.'See the Fan Palms now. They stand tall, but their beards are shaggy and sometimes torn. But not these here. see the top here.' He shows me the cabbage tip of a Sega Palm that even after five years is little more than a big bulb with delicate fronds. They grow new leaves but once a year. The growth is so fine. See here the brown velvet of the small leaves still wrapped over the tree's fruitful core. And see the fire yellow fruit of the end-bud beneath the velvet, which acts as a sun bursts and powers the plant. And Antonio, these are the new ones we bought from Santos, when we sold the coffee. Now see the old. From the first years they've grown now too high to see the crown. But see how they stand more precise. No shaggy beard, but straight and strong as flags.'" The flags stand tall as Antonio and the driver see them now. They both arch their backs and squat in the dirt beside the truck to ease the bones. "Go get some colonos," Antonio tells the driver, "then start unloading this thing."

In a few days the press is running. It is an old Hoe Type Revolving Machine. Antonio himself locks the type for the first page in the steel frame of the chase and fastens it to the print cylinder. Now with each revolution the type will touch the sheets drawn around the paper cylinder and print the first edition of O Municipio. The headline reads Habeus Corpus. The story reports on the fire last month at the Registrie:

The Correio Paulistano has mistakenly concluded that last month's fire at the Registrie in Araras was set by Martinho da Silva Prado. O Municipio has learned that several foreigners, including the capangas and the grileiro who work for Narciso Lacerdo Franco, were seen running from the Registrie just before the fire. The arsonists may have been connected with the Partido Republicano Paulista, of which Franco is a member, and which has recently been said to have threatened Ataliba Tavares, the Registreiro who was killed in the fire. Based on this new information, O Municipio calls on the Judge of Law to issue a writ of Habeus Corpus immediately, which will bring about the release of the now proven to be innocent Martinho da Silva Prado.

"There. We fight now with words. Fuckin Correio can't print their lies so easily any longer. We'll bring the papers to Araras next week. To the carnival." The carnival at Araras was a yearly event. The highlight was the Fazenda parade. The floats were like a sign of each Fazenda's standing. The pecking order was played out with the colors of the uniforms and the volumne of percussion blasting from each Fazenda's marching bands. For the past month Antonio watched over the Fazenda float. The wagon's spokes were woven with strands of bright paper. Gold, green, yellow. Red. The side boards were a field of green dotted with the delicate paper-like purple folwers of the bouganvilla vines piled in the wagon and flowing over its sides.

In front of the wagon stood Antonio holding the banner: Habeus Corpus. As the float came out from the line of trees that sealed the ends of the Rua Do Bom Jesus, the words seemed to stand alone for a moment. Then the people recognized the headline. The banner seemed to float toward the crowd, as if the words carried forth through the air on their own special power. Habeus Corpus. As the float passed the last in the long row of Palms that lead the road into Araras, the sun blasted over their crowns and seived through the downfolding tissue of the fronds; and the light was so strong and pure behind Antonio and the banner that, though the band jangled in front and the float wheels creeked over the mud-ruts in the road with their bright paper spokes, it seemd as if the idea of Habeus Corpus itself was pouring into the Village. "Finally," breathed Antonio, "finally I feel my voice."

Then, PBOUPkiow. PBOUPkiow. Two shots. The head in the sun snaps backwards. A hush. A knowledge. Then the body crumbles over the straggled vines and stickers in the front of the wagon. The banner floats down, covers his head and chest, and folds over the edge of the sideboard. Beneath the mess, sweeping out from under the words and the body a stray vine of bouganvilla curves in the bottom of the wagon. The delicacy of its purple paper flowers thickens and sticks in the growing puddle of Antonio's blood.

Sebastio emerges from his tale. The urchins and men gathered around his crate stand and stretch. They seem nourished, returned. The stream of traffic on the Rua now oozes forward. Two men cluck Sebastio on the back then move on. Street sounds. A thin man, maybe seventeen, unfolds his arms from a dirty t-shirt. "Sebastio, you dog. What you doing here? Antonio, Martinho, they tried to fight the system. You just telling stories."

Sebastio shrugs, "What you doing? just listening, man. You don't know shit. Look at this Americano. Now he's listening too." Sebastio jerks his head toward me. The thin man seems unmoved. I fidget my ass on the lathe of my orange crate. Sebastio turns his face full towards me and nods, "what do you think, Americano?"

"It's a powerful story Sebastio."

The thin man spits, says fuck, then turns to leave. The traffic flows now, punctuated only infrequently by the sounds reacting to any hesitation. Whonk. Mheeep. "Come on!" Sebastio watches the thin man walk away. "That dumbshit. Antonio wasn't any hero. He wasn't shit. He didn't fight against the power, he fought for power."

"What do you mean?"

"His own fucking press, man. What did he write? No more Partido. Municipalto control. His father came here to grow man, to escape."

"But he fought for power too."

Sure, he forgot his story, man." Sebastio rubs his palms over the top of his thighs. We are alone now and our talk becomes more of the interview I came for.

Me: What do you mean he lost his story?

Sebastio: The dolphins. Growing the land. The voyage.

Me: But there were no dolphins. The paper was bogus. The voyage was hell.

Sebastio: That's just it, man. The shitstem always spoils the dream. The dream is all. Why do you think these fucks hang around here? The story. The way out.

Me: So what should they have done. Martinho, Antonio? How else could they fight the system?

Sebastio: You can't fight it. But you can. That's what I do. Escape. You resist by denying it. I tell the stories. Martinho pumps the sea from the hold and the blisters in the palms of his hands turn to bone. The water seives through the very pores of the boat and pours through the hatch, buried beneath the sea in swill to his waist, in the darkness with the bilgerat. But while he rolls beneath the ocean I crack the sky and light it with the fingery yellow lines of the words. The Palms. The banner. The light. The cars the trucks, the stink of Sao Paulo far below and paper to my fire. The dream is all. The story. It cannot be controlled."

Me: that's beautiful, Sebastio, that's just right.

The traffic has disappeared. Only a few cars hurry by now. I rise from the orange crate and press my hands into the small of my back. As I turn to leave a flatbed truck screets up to the curb. A boy junks a stack of useless papers at Sebastio's feet.

On the plane home I finish my Vodka and suck on my pen cap a moment. It's a good story. If I make my deadline I'll probably get my first Sunday feature. I replay the story once more, then rewind the tape as we touch down and thrust reverse. It's a good story. Push play. "It cannot be controlled."

Prose

Slow Time

iamdan — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:24:57 +0000

Slow Time iamdan Mon, 03/01/2021 - 01:24

This summer I taught the novel Watchmen , which amazes me with its narrative loops and movements through history. I found myself thinking about our experiences of time. I was also lucky enough to have some spare time to respond to articles and to practice some screen recording. I’ve been capturing performances on the screen and thinking about shifts in composing when inscription plays out in real time. I want to examine a few of the artifacts from one of those experiments.

There are a few ways that you can read this posting, and each has to do with time. If you’re pressed for time, you could just watch the first video below, which clocks in at one minute, six seconds (1:06). You could also read the prose on this page, which, at about 1000 words, would probably require about five minutes. Or you could take in the podcast and three related videos embedded below–for a total of twelve minutes and fifty-one seconds. And there are some hyperlinks: one to an article by Bruno Latour (2,800 words); two screencast videos (9:58) and (9:26); and a podcast (3:01), video (2:57), and portfolio (2300 words) by Tom Macarte. If you really want to explore, give yourself about an hour to work through all of these pieces. I want to argue that each of these possible paths suggests not merely different amounts or kinds of materials, but different modes of reading–and different possibilities for scholarship.

Let’s start with the quickest possible engagement, the video below.

Latour’s “Some Experiments in Art and Politics” discusses the qualities of roundness, flatness, edges, spheres. The piece plays with the shapes we might use to represent knowledge and the world. And the piece layers a larger metaphor over these figures: composing. Latour’s article prompted the video response above, “A Two Text Mashup.”

To make the video I recorded the screen several times, selecting and spotlighting passages of Latour’s article. I then combined the screen recording with a podcast made by Tom Macarte. I only used the first segment of Macarte’s audio file, so if you’re reading to explore the materials collected here, try the full mp3 file .

To better understand the project, it helps to look at the creation timestamps for the videos. At 1:42 PM, I saved the first recording of the mashup. I then spent sixteen minutes experimenting with adding materials–more text and two videos, one primarily meant to provide a second audio track. At 1:58 PM, I saved a version called “Four Text Mashup.” At some point, I decided I preferred the two text version. I then made a works cited video and recorded it atop the two text mashup, saving the finished video at 2:17 PM. Including time spent before starting to record, I devoted about fifty minutes to creating the videos.

The four text mashup (below) in some ways represents a false start in the middle of the process, an abandoned attempt at composing with more layers. I was also recently lucky enough to talk a bit with Jody Shipka, who reminded me that these kinds of castoffs can be some of the most telling artifacts of composing.

One of the texts added to the four text mashup is “Bubble Track,” which appears in a video called “Truing.” In “Truing,” the bubble track plays with no sound, but is deeply wrought within the video and with sounds associated with the other elements in the piece, sounds that return (differently) when the volume of the bubble track is turned back up in the four text mashup.

Reusing the “Bubble Track” video in a different context opens a new way of reading “Truing.” There are flows of meaning across or among the artifacts, boundaries become fluid, bubble-like. Both videos are linked below if you have time to spend with them. (“Truing” is perhaps my favorite performance screencast.)

“Bubble Track for ‘Truing'” (9:58)

“Truing” (9:26)

We might say the bubble track video materializes differently in each piece, helped by the human hand which moves the volume slider and gives the video sound in one instance and not in another. Compositions that reuse materials call for readings that account for these shifts across contexts and temporalities.

And if we zoom back in on the artifact, we encounter different senses of time. The (1:06) video that opens this posting really is a distillation of time and materials. Digital composites, when read, unfold sedimental layers of finished and unfinished composing, as the screencast below shows. If you watch the video, you will find yourself making decisions about commitment and time. There are segments where Macarte has left empty the canvas as he works out the composing of the audio. More than half the video, in fact, features leftover materials that never made it into the posted podcast, throwaway bits that ask a listener (here, a viewer) to wait while meaning subsides and anticipation builds, all represented visually with the playhead as it scrolls over the markers of sound and silence.

And, of course, we can zoom back out again to layers and connections that cross contexts of materials and time. As Macarte points out,

Lots of the loops are from songs that are sampled on the album [by P. J. Harvey]; this relates to my blog posting regarding samples functioning like epigraphs, layering another text, and its meanings and connotations, underneath the present text. To that end, I tried to layer the sampled parts under the readings of the lyrics from those songs (e.g., the first part is a reading from “Let England Shake,” under which I layer the loop from “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” from which “Let England Shake’s” keyboard melody is derived).

A keyboard melody in one song evokes a second song which is then layered over a sample from a video of the first song. To read the piece, one must explore and find information elsewhere, here in a video where Macarte explains, “I can use my beatmaking skills to make an argument” and in reflections about his work. And I’m not just asking us to immerse ourselves in these materials to prove some academic point. I like spending time with them, getting lost in their connections and layers of meaning. In some ways, this is just accumulating, spending time with materials, and taking pictures with the screen. It’s a process that recasts our experiences with reading (and with time). It’s personal, self-referential, pleasurable. Surely that couldn’t qualify as scholarship. Could it?

Originally posted at Digital Rhetoric Collaborative

Prose

Time to Move On

iamdan — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:12:09 +0000

Time to Move On iamdan Mon, 03/01/2021 - 01:12

Computers and Writing Conference, 2007

I’m going to ask you to hold two memories in your thoughts. The first is a soft swaying song. It’s a memory from way back in the past. Use a metaphor if it helps. But don’t try sloughing off memory layers as you might with an onion or with garlic skins. The smell is not that piercing, not that compressed. Smell instead some baby powder. Oatmeal. Fresh clothes. Cradle whatever memory you have of a small child, pre-speech, breathing, curled in cotton blanket and smelling of soap and scrubbed skin. Now, layer over the song. A lullaby. Something hummed to soothe a troubled child. A floating melody woven into the long hours of the night. Stop now and take your time. Find the song and call it into memory.

Now finish the memory. A figure stands in soft light near a bedside. A father or mother, holding the child, hearing the music. The smells and the sounds take shape in reflection, but the memory becomes fixed when bundled into the arms of the figure.

You can hold this memory as long as you like.

The second memory is a straw memory from eight years ago. It pits those who want some baby powder sprinkled over their scholarship against those who want to fix their words with rigor. It starts with Wendy Bishop asking where to stand, wondering if there is a place to do her “mixing, not to elevate genres but to intermingle them, not to venerate the poetic or belletristic but to point out that each brings us to our senses, though in different modes and tones” (17). Bishop herself gives us the image for part of this memory, the figure of the writer-teacher and teacher-writer who wants to find “a deeper understanding of the connections between thought, words, and life.” But the figure must be placed in a field. Again, a metaphor might help.

When driving country roads in spring I’ve sometimes smelt through the car window the scent of scallions. Looking over, I see the growth in the fields has been cut and I know that the wafting smell comes from wild onions mixing with the new-mown grass.

But imagine that on the opposite side of the road we find a field peopled with men and women carrying signs. On the signs are painted words. Intellectual. Power. Theory. Construction. Composition. And pouring in are more and more people, each “[bringing] to the field an intellectual rigor and sophistication that bodes well for the future of rhetoric and composition as an intellectual discipline” (Olson, np). But the people are trampling the flowers and wild onions. The grass is worn bare, and their feet even kick up small puffs of dust.

Now let’s complete the second memory. We drive past and scan the rearview mirror. A figure steps from the field of wild onions just as another steps into the road from the field of signs. They walk toward each other arms extended. Our car is moving forward. We steal one last glance in the mirror to see the figures approach each other; then, at the last minute, they turn away.

So we have two memories. The cradled child sung to sleep and the two figures from composition’s past approaching, and then turning away form each other. Now we have to bring the memories together.

Let’s start by combining some of what we know about language and music. Daniel Levitin tells us,

In order to be moved by music (physically and emotionally) it helps a great deal to have a readily predictable beat. Composers accomplish this by subdividing the beat in different ways, and accenting some notes differently than others . . . When we talk about a great groove in music . . . we’re talking about the way in which these beat divisions create a strong momentum. Groove is that quality that moves the song forward, the musical equivalent to a book that you can’t put down. (166)

Peter Elbow in his recent essay finds a similar pull in written language, a pull Elbow aligns with the “itch and scratch” of musical prose. But for Elbow, this pull does more than create an engaging groove. The pull takes us into an experiential world with a psychic payoff based on pleasure. Citing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Chick-sent-me-high), he points to “the concept of flow [to describe] the experience of complete absorption in a task where time passes almost without awareness” (640). It’s the same awareness Greg Ulmer discovers in electracy, the sting of recognition that brings with it a sense of something more, an experiential magic that occurs “when you are being productive (at anything) and enter into the state of “flow” (298).

But such pronouncements only take us so far. Or, rather, they take us too far. Like right-clicking the magnifying tool on an image editor, our conceptions expand from words and sounds into spiritual charges felt ineffably in creational flows. We zoom out and away from the tangible surfaces of writing with every mouseup.

So let’s go back down to the compositional surface. Left click. Zoom in. Magnification 300. Even zoomed in, there’s energy flowing through words and sounds. Elbow asks us to be “open to experiencing a different kind of organization . . . an energy-based organization derived from the kinds of time-binding qualities [found] in music” (631). Forget outlines, Elbow tells us; “they promote a visual ‘perspective’ on organization—they try for the bird’s eye view rather than the ant’s eye view” (634). Zoom in instead to the sounds of the words and their “energy-based organization” which flows just as “melodies, melodic motifs, and rhythmic motifs” (635) flow through music.

Elbow deliberately pulls apart the spatial and temporal to highlight what he sees as “the visual bias in our understanding of organization” (651), a bias that Elbow believes

leads to problems. The most obvious is simply the neglect of other dimensions . . . Hearing--the modality that works in time--reaches an older, deeper, and more instinctual part of the brain than sight. Rhythm and movement reach inside us. Eyes tell us about the surface of things, but sound tells us about the insides of things. (651-2)

Elbow turns toward music and the sounds of words so that we might “experience the inherent temporal and even aural dimension of any text” (656).

Knowing now that language can be musical, we might want to wheel the car around and head back to the scene of composition’s memory, to our field full of agents and signs on the one side and the freshly mown flowers and grass on the other. Let’s pull over and talk with the figures on either side of the road. We find Wendy Bishop standing among the stalks of cut grass. “What are you thinking about, Wendy?”

“Expressivism.”

“What’s that?”

“Good question. It’s hard to say. We don’t get to hear much from expressivists these days.”

“I thought expressivism was all about feelings. You know personal writing. Not really much use in school, though.”

“No. That’s a caricature. No doubt expressivism is about a person writing, a voice. But it’s not personal in that touchy-feely way. A lot of scholars have missed the point. They pretend

that "expressivists keep students in a state of naiveté, don't prepare them for the languages of the academy, abandon them to the forces of politics and culture. . . ." (648). (11)

“Okay, so expressivism isn’t necessarily naive. But what is it about?”

“It’s really about finding “a place to write from, [it’s about] a writer’s identity; as a teacher I need to ask students to question the self they are constructing in their physical texts and in the actual classroom” (22).

“I think I get the point. I’m going to cross the road and see if I can recognize any of these ideas on all those signs.”

We say our goodbyes, look both ways, and then head across the road and step into the crowd carrying signs, looking around for words that echo Wendy’s. There’s one, a fellow carrying a big poster with words painted in bright red—Liberatory Pedagogy. “Hey there. What’s on your sign?”

“Paint.”

“I know it’s paint. What does it say?”

“Can’t you read? It says liberatory pedagogy.”

“I guess I mean, what does it mean?”

“Well I can’t tell you that. You have to figure it out for yourself. Otherwise it wouldn’t be liberatory. See?”

“Oh. Maybe you could give me an example so I can get a better feel for it.”

“Well, I don’t really have any examples. But I can tell you ‘the pedagogical scene is often one in which power is used and abused, where students suffer in the name of being "taught," where well-intentioned teachers can reinscribe sexism and racism.’”

“Hey, that sounds a lot like the message I got on the other side of the road, something about students questioning their constructed self and the classroom. Good to know, you’re both on the same page.”

Let’s pause this memory. I’ve got to get back in the car and get moving. I’m on my way to work. We’ll drive into town, find a parking place, head across campus, and into the English building. Walk with me into my classroom. I have to collect some playlist assignments. We wrote stories using arrangements of songs and excerpts of lyrics. Let’s ask Adam what he thought about composing a playlist.

This was probably my favorite assignment so far in this class. It was great for me because I love music and I always think about things like the composition of CD’s and the hidden messages of songs . . . It was an especially intense experience for me because the story I told was autobiographical and had a lot of personal meaning to me.

Wow. That sounds great. Let’s ask Danielle what she thought.

This playlist tells the story of a young girl named Monica who struggles with obstacles in life. This topic was inspired by close friends of mine and even a little from my own life. My mother grew up as a single mother and raised my older brother and [me] on her own. Relating the story was easy for me because I felt like I was telling the story of my own mother and friend.

Nice. Seems like Adam felt a sense of identity and Danielle was able to reflect on social concerns. Let’s head out to the roadside again and report back. We’ll think while we drive. Let’s use our zoom tool again, too. Left click and explore what makes the assignment go. Discussing the connection between music and pleasure, Levitin reports that music activates areas of the brain “involved in arousal, pleasure, and the . . . production of dopamine.” He also tells us that, “music appears to mimic some of the features of language and to convey some of the same emotions that vocal communication does . . . but far more than language, music taps into primitive brain structures involved with motivation, reward, and emotion” (191).

So, there’s more to music than meets the ear—it brings pleasure, goes way back in brain time, and (educators take note) is linked to motivation and rewards. And, language shares a good deal of these qualities. But we need to zoom in one more time. Music is also physical. Again, Levitin reports

that in every society of which we’re aware, music and dance are inseparable . . . [I]t has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized. The embodied nature of music, the indivisibility of movement and sound . . . characterizes music across cultures and across times. (255)

It’s good that we’re almost back to the roadside now, because we’re also back to memory number one. It’s the movement that ties the physical knot between what we hear intellectually and emotionally and our memory of the child and the song. Come on. Picture the darkened room again. The mother or father picks up the child, inhales, and eases into the lullaby. Can we even pretend they don’t start to move gently back and forth as s/he starts to hum? No.

Let’s tell Wendy. “Hey Wendy. Remember when you said that ‘mixing brings us to our senses . . . in different modes and tones?’ We just found out that music does this physically. The toe-tapping syndrome. We can’t hear without moving.”

“Yes. That’s really the answer to your question. That’s the self-actualization of expressivism. That’s why we talk so much of the voice or the emotions. They’re the instruments of sound and movement.”

“Thanks, Wendy. We’ve got to cross the road and tell the others.”

So, we turn, ready to explain what expressivism means and how its related to new media like music, but looking across the road we see the fellow with the Liberatory Pedagogy sign in deep conversation with someone carrying a sign saying Agency. We start to cross the road, but then notice something strange about the two figures as they talk. They seem to be rocking back and forth. It’s subtle, they’re not dancing, but no doubt there’s something going on. Now I don’t think there is any need to interrupt. I think I see them starting to sway.

Works Cited

Bishop, Wendy. “Places to Stand: The Reflective Writer-Teacher-Writer in Composition.” College Composition and Communication. 51.1 (Sep. 1999), 9-31.

Elbow, Peter. “The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization in Composition.” College Composition and Communication. 57.4 (June 2006), 620-66.

Olson, Gary. “The Death of Composition as an Intellectual Discipline.” 16 May 2007 < http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3986/is_200010/ai_n8912218>.

Levitin, Daniel J. This is Your Brain On Music : The Science of a Human Obsession. East Rutherford, NJ: Penguin Group, 2006.

Sherman, Adam. Web Interview7 Dec. 2006.

Ulmer, Greg. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. New York: Longman, 2003.

Veal, Danielle. Web Interview. 7 Dec. 2006.

Prose

Reverberating Twangs

iamdan — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 03:47:27 +0000

Reverberating Twangs iamdan Sat, 02/27/2021 - 04:47

Ruminating on the Self in "The Man With The Blue Guitar"

Say blue guitar; twang it out, blue guitar, blue guitar...The [u] phoneme of blue is placed in the back of the throat, a rounded mouth is required to form the vowel (oooh), which is held a bit longer than normal, because of the voiced consonant [g] of guitar--blue guitar; the extension of the oooh into the g makes the velar stop of the [g] phoneme more abrupt--blue guitar; a twang echoed by the added tension needed to produce the sharper, more forward, and flattened mouthed [i] of the tighter first syllable of guitar; the final, round again and returned to the back of the throat, (ah) of guitar recalls the beginning of the phrase. The blue soothes, the stopped [g] gets plucked, before the tightened [i] spits its note in front of the falling phrase's final echo. Blue guitar, blue guitar, I'm hearing things the way they are.

But wait. This is a poem. This is not things as they are. The Blue Guitar is about the difference between things in the poem and things as they are: it "cannot bring a world quite round,"patch it as it might. The poem announces in its opening the dynamic between a metaphysical world as it is and a poetic world as it is heard to be. The problem is that the poetic world which is heard will always be once removed from the metaphysical world, a patch. And so much is at stake. To know things as they are is to know the self, what the poem calls "man [sic] number one." And if the tune misses the metaphysical, it will only be valid on a level once removed from reality and the self; it will not be the self, merely "the serenade / Of a man that plays a blue guitar." The poem begins with need and doubt; "play you must," the poet is told. However, to play the blue guitar is to apparently miss the metaphysical, to distance the self from the real.

The doubt seeps in, but it's a sneaky kind of doubt. Listen:

Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang it from a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings. . . .

The passage speaks of a hope, of what it would be like to capture the essence of the metaphysical in the playing of the guitar. It's sneaky, though, because, while the passage acts as if it's speaking of an impossibility, poetically it is capturing the essence brilliantly.The imaging of thoughts as "wings spread wide" works subtly with the poetic material, the stuff of the blue guitar, to do what the lines say they want to do. Wings spread wide, contains two sets of wings, the w's beginning both wings and wide present wings to the sight in a visual metaphor that nails the thought firmly in place for the eye. More subtle, is the enunciation of the phrase that the poem requires; spread wide introduces the listener/reader to an idea, the semantic thought of spreading. Immediately, the thought is revealed in the poem's sonics with the enunciation of the word wide. The word partakes of the unique spreading of sound that the [ay] diphthong requires. To say the i in wide, one must begin in the back of the vocal tract with the [a] phoneme and gradually slide the sound to the high front region of the tract for the palatal glide [y]. The diphthong spreads sound inside the mouth, so that "spread wide" in the poem indeed spreads the thought out loud.

The passage performs a similar erasure with the doubt regarding capturing the essence of the metaphysical self. In fact, the passage turns the essence back on itself, when it tries "To strike his living hi and ho, / To tick it, tock it, turn it true." To strike his living initially might suggest the expressed desire to convey the essence, to mark it, perhaps. However, the lines take on interesting connotations when considered with the remainder of the couplet: "To tick it, tock it, turn it true." The series of iambs conveys a sense of repetition. However, the final line of the couplet highlights this repetition with the insertion of the commas between tick it, and tock it. The commas create a brief spondee or pause in the reading of the line and place extra stress on both tick and tock. Piled onto the regularity of the line, then, is the clicking emphasis on tick and tock. "To tick it, tock it, turn it true" strikes with the very clock of finitude that defines metaphysical existence. The dagger and the brain upon the board take on a new negative connotation, and the strumming of the blue guitar, in addition to demonstrating the efficacy of its once removed playing of things as they are, demonstrates the finitude and limits of the metaphysical self and the world from which it is removed.

It is no coincidence that the poem follows this demonstration with a recognition of the validity of things as they are on the blue guitar, and the possibility of discovering a self in this realm of the once removed:

Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place

Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them, on the blue guitar,

Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;

For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when

The thinking of god is smoky dew.

The poetic, the realm of the blue guitar, has been posited as a more permanent realm, "beyond the compass of change," and we may discover there for "ourselves" a more permanent self.

However, the self and permanence we may discover there will still be a self found in art, a self , however brilliant and prevailing in a moment, still expressed with the fleeting presence of smoky dew. The presence is fleeting here, I suppose, because, while it has placed itself in opposition to a finite and untenable metaphysical self and reality, it nevertheless is based on opposition. The artistic self still must address the duality between itself and the metaphysical self. The poem expresses this clearly with its description of the poetic self in opposition to the metaphysical/real world:

It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

When shall I come to say of the sun,
It is a sea; it shares nothing;

.............

And shall I then stand in the sun, as now

I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,

Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand

Remote and call it merciful?

If it is the sun that shares our works, then the poetic self, which now stands in the moon, is somehow invalid, because it is remote, isolated. Further, if we take the sun as a traditional symbol of metaphysics, then the question becomes , when will this poetic self be validated by a (social?) shift in what is seen as permanent, immaculate, and good? The distance between the poetic self and the metaphysical remains; the poetic self is alone, the man [sic] in the moon; "the strings are cold on the blue guitar." Further, without social validation, the poetic or artistic self not only stands alone, it too grows cold and dies:

Is this picture of Picasso's, this "hoard
Of destructions," a picture of ourselves,

Now an image of society?
Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,

Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,
Without seeing the harvest or the moon?

Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead. . . .

The paradox of the poetic self is that its very brilliance and sense of permanence separates it from the finite metaphysical world and other social selves which might validate it. It sits, detached from reality, transcending reality, yet unable to shore that transcendence.

In a sense, then, the realm of the blue guitar, too, succumbs to finitude. Is "the blue guitar a mould," and was the poetic realm and self merely a dream? For a moment it seems so, but the playing of the blue guitar, and the self and realm it reveals are later sensorially elaborated:

A dream no longer a dream, a thing,
Of things as they are, as the blue guitar

After long strumming on certain nights
Gives the touch of the sense, not of the hand,

But the very senses as they touch
The wind-gloss. Or as daylight comes,

Like light in a mirroring of cliffs,
Rising upward from a sea of ex.

Wow! The permanence and existence of the realm of the blue guitar are not exactly revealed in its strumming; rather they become real, things beyond the physical, the hand, in the touch of the sense; the sensations involved in listening to or strumming the instrument are such that a world, a self, even can rise up from the finitude of the metaphysical and the transience of duality, like light and cliffs rising upward from the sea of ex. Thus,

. . . .the blue guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar. (136)

The realm of the once removed where the blue guitar composes the senses is again validated. The sensory validation allows the poetic self to become "like a native in this [poetic] world / And [to] think in it as a native thinks"(146). The thoughts of the metaphysical self and the world of things as they are once again are transcended. The sensory realization, the "unspotted imbecile revery," offers the poetic self contentment and a viable realm in which to play:

Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move

And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar. (147)

The inhalation mentioned in the passage marks it as a realm and self offered through sensory revery. Later, the poetic self contrasts a metaphysical reality with the poetic in the same terms:

. . . .Morning is not sun,
It is this posture of the nerves,

As if a blunted player clutched
The nuances of the blue guitar.

It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of the blue guitar.

The passage combines the elements of sensory self, "the posture of the nerves," with those of rapture, and those of song; rhapsody captures both the revery of the poetic self and the song that inspires it. The final result is again the validation of the realm of the blue guitar, for the song has now become the "rapture of things as they are." The metaphysical world has become the world where the employer and employee contend, and beyond this is where the self will be finally discovered:

. . . .Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.

So, the beginning transcendence of the metaphysical world and self by the poetic self strummed out in the realm of the blue guitar, which was socially inadequate has been replaced by one which is sensorially validated. But one might question the adequacy of this second transcendence and discovery of self as well. Even if the sensory nature of the second poetic self is what makes it possible for social validation, one might ask how much the sensations can be trusted. At some level there is still distance between the poetic self and the metaphysical self and between the sensory poetic self and her metaphysical self. There's still an old philosophical nut to crack here. One might say that both versions of the poetic self are simply supplements offered in response to the dissolution and absence inherent in the original metaphysical self. I'm thinking of Jacques Derrida, of course, who states that "the superabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is . . . the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented."¹ Mapping the supplementary superabundance of the signifier over the discussion of Stevens here would place the superabundance in the realm of the blue guitar; it might even account for the sensory revery that leads to the eventually more valid poetic self. The same map, however, would have to place the persistent lack and finitude driving the superabundance over the metaphysical world of things as they are in the poem. Once again we're made to realize that the poetic self is a self once removed from an inadequate metaphysical self. The more rigid thinking of Derrida, however, forces us to admit that this poetic self, operating in a realm of freeplay based on an initial lack, too, lacks the stability and therefore viability that a metaphysical self (if one were possible) would contain.

After establishing that the realm of the blue guitar, the signifier, is one of freeplay, and even that "freeplay must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence" (242), Derrida outlines two responses to this knowledge:

The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who....has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation. . . . (242)

It might be possible to see the initial poetic self in The Blue Guitar as responding in the first manner; seeking the assurance of the metaphysical, yet living a life of exile, the man [sic] in the moon alone. The second sensory poetic self, then could be seen as responding in the second mode, with what Derrida calls, the Nietzschean affirmation; content with the sensory reverie heard in the strumming of the blue guitar, the second poetic self, though empirically invalid, is in a sense, or several, self-sufficient; rapt in its reverberating realm, the poetic self thinks, and says, and makes things as they are. For Derrida, the second response, the affirmation "determines the non-center otherwise than as the loss of center And it plays the game without security. For there is a sure-freeplay: that which is limited to the substitution of given and existing, present pieces" (242). The second response to freeplay, paradoxically, is a "sure-freeplay," taking as given the substitute nature of its realm. The Blue Guitar may take the reassurance of this realm even further, taking as a given its own substitute nature, and further taking its given substitute nature as its subject matter, and from this making a world. The end result is a realm and a world that each and where each of us may hopefully discover ourselves. It is a realm where,

Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and

To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is

An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.

But are these separate? is it
An absence for the poem, which acquires

Its true appearances there, sun's green,
Cloud's red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?

From these it takes. Perhaps it gives,
In the universal intercourse.

The passage speaks of a self awareness of its own once removed nature, from which its very nature issues and to which it must return; the section also notes that this is a realm removed from metaphysical presence, a realm where there is an "absence in reality," which nevertheless is not an absence in the realm of the once removed blue guitar, "which acquires / Its true appearances there." Note the freeplay involved in the depiction of the "true appearances" of the realm of the blue guitar: "sun's green," and "Cloud's red" make little sense in the metaphysical world, yet in the world of the blue guitar they provide the sense that creates the final knowledge of reality; note the freely played out descriptions of the realm are once again reinforced with sensation and lead to eventual new, call it blue, knowledge: "earth feeling, sky that thinks." It seems as though the realm of the blue guitar, for all its absence, is sure enough in its freeplay to present a world, and by implication a self.

There remains one difficulty, however, with the blue guitar's freely played self. While the blue guitar may indeed be an instrument able to create a world and self, Derrida notes that the Nietzschean affirmation also "surrenders itself to genetic indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace" (242). At first, this might merely suggest that the strummed out self lacks any final certitude, but Derrida ends his essay with a passage that makes the seminal adventure seem much more ominous. Contrasting the two different reactions to freeplay, Derrida states:

I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing [between the two]--in the first place because here we are in a region (let's say, provisionally, a region of historicity) where the category of choice seems particularly trivial; and in the second, because we must first try to conceive of the common ground, and the differance of this irreducible difference. Here there is a sort of question, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing today the conception, the formation, the gestation, the labor. I employ these words, I admit with a glance toward the business of child-bearing--but also with a glance toward those who, in a company from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity. (242-243)

The passage complicates the seminal adventure of the trace, I think, in two ways. On one level, the birth of the monster may be the result of the unknowable that must reside in freeplay; the genetic indetermination that the strummed out self, by virtue of its substitute nature, surrenders itself to. But the passage also speaks of an attempt to "conceive" of the difference between the two reactions to freeplay, and by implication between the metaphysical world and the substitute realm of the blue guitar. It is interesting, then, that Derrida includes himself in turning away from this emerging and potentially monstrous conception. If any assurance found in sure-freeplay is genetically indeterminate, then the tune played out on the blue guitar may only be a siren song. However, if even conceiving of the difference between this genetic indeterminacy and a sought for metaphysical determinacy is itself indeterminate, and possibly threatening, then the only sure solution and certain solace for the self is to erase the difference between the two realms; to make the self heard in the song of the blue guitar not merely a substitute for the world as such, but rather an equal to or an integral part of the self as such. So the poet says,

. . . .Where
do I begin and end? And where,

As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares

Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.

The passage ends in assurance, and might prompt us to say that the blue guitar is positing a substitute self that knows itself well enough to avoid the genetic indeterminacy that corrupts Derrida's sure-freeplay. But this would not do justice to the final assurance of The Blue Guitar. The final level of knowledge for the poem answers Derrida's question. It states in two different directions that the knowledge of the substitute self must nevertheless be self-knowledge. It is impossible to conceive of a substitute self without an original self to do the conceiving, or, conversely, it is impossible for a substitute self to conceive of itself without creating a conception which is in fact itself, and a self. In either case there remains an interchange between the metaphysical and the substitute levels. The final knowledge of the passage is assured, but this is an assurance resting not just in some exact coincidence between the substitute self and a metaphysical self, or in the sure-freeplay of the substitute self itself; the final assurance and a final conception of self comes from the sure-freeplay the blue guitar allows between the two, the substitute and the metaphysical self. The interchange between the two is the difference that Derrida conceives to be monstrous. The player of the blue guitar, however, takes this difference and makes a final self from it.

That I may reduce the monster to
Myself, and then may be myself

In face of the monster, be more than part
Of it, more than the monstrous player of

One of its monstrous lutes, not be
Alone, but reduce the monster and be,

Two things, the two together as one,
And play of the monster and of myself,

Or better not of myself at all,
But of that as its intelligence. . . .

To be a self in face of the monster is to take Derrida's knowledge and play with it. Just as denial of self affirms self, facing the monster reduces it. To know a self in the face of the monster is to take Derrida's knowledge and play of it. And so the final reverberation of the blue guitar, then, is heard beyond the distinctions which seem at first to mute its strings:

Dichtung und Wahrheit, all
Confusion solved, as in a refrain

One keeps on playing year by year,
Concerning the nature of things as they are.

The two realms remain, but the final self has little to do exclusively with the original or substitute world of things as they are; The shearsman plays on concerning the two, and rests assured in the knowledge that it is from their very difference that the monster shall be reduced, and that the final song of the self will emerge.

Notes

1. Jaques Derrida, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, in Contemporary Literary Criticism, eds. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schliefer (New York: Longman, 1989).

Prose

The Bus Stops Beyond Language

iamdan — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 22:07:17 +0000

The Bus Stops Beyond Language iamdan Fri, 02/26/2021 - 23:07

busstops

The Bus Stops Beyond Language

A man believes in words. Always writing some letter or another and usually to some old teacher, school principal or appropriate other authority figure. He woke and thought of letters he'd like to write. The letters would expose (more or less) the reader's own world made from words. He decided to use obscenity. Words have power, he thought.

"Dear sir," he began. "Words have power." He paused then demonstrated with some choice four-letter examples. He'd have to deliver the letters in person, though. For it would be like the fascination with not so much the naked body, but the naked reaction, when interrupting a shower, or a shit.

This came to him on the crapper. Why call it a toilet? Why indeed. A word gets its meaning from the mind that uses it. It's all mirrors and smoke, he thought. The bird-chirp, the bicycle, the sun and the moon are ideal illusions, nothing more than simple words.

In this way he mixed his concrete. "Fluid," he thought. The world is wet." And he ironed the idea. "My thoughts are like fish," he decided. But do they smell like fish? Are they slippery? "No. I simply mean that they swim around."

And so they did. In whimsical patterns. Splashy patches of plasmodium color, unfathomable like the shadowy undersides of autumnal clouds, the dark forms commingling beneath the sheath blue and dubious purple shades of the stony roof of his mind. Suddenly a FLASH. Apocalypse, as if the idea itself were opiate enough to extract his succulentest essence. Hhyeeeoop. His body, like so much dry skin...flaked away. "the world is nothing more than words," he said.

Two hours later he was hit by a bus.

A man steps onto a bus. A recalcitrant bus: refusing to stop at certain signs, stalling and breaking down, always already late. The bus rumbles and bumps, jarring a spherical spot in the back of the man’s mind. He rubs the spot like an Indian worry stone.

In his palm the stone feels the world. He strokes his thumb over the polished face of the pebble; the stone lets him into its bigger picture. Pools of smooth liquid bubble forth on the surface. He dives in. "I'm splash-dancing in the primordial soup," he cries. The creational big-bang just rang in my eardrum, an echo so full of the juices of the universe. "Like a sponge, I soak the juices up." I'm wringing them out now:

A fat bird expresses my smallest thought, a thin one
does the same. Disturbed, they both fly away, but soon
return, unconcerned. Me too. A duck quacks. Me too.
Prisms spectrum across my field of inner-vision. Red,
yellow, green--all red, fade to black--begin soundtrack:
duck quack duck quack, alack alack alack.

But the bus runs on time, adumbrating along, and shuddering toward a stop. The burden of finitude sweeps over him. Like relief from a room he feels an emptying, a dark portending. The bus hisses: an evil symbol he recalls and contrasts to a dream he once had of shedding his skin.

In the dream the sun dissolved the clouds overhead, not unlike the cells of skin magnified beyond the billionth power, until each cell is a world isolated and whole in its connection to the multiple layers and innumerable other cosms that make up our physical shells. I step inside the exploded view: The sky enfolds me, surrounds me, lifts me to its arms and kisses me. Like a child's bright eyes I dilate in the sky.

And the motion of the wheels begins to soothe; signals a memory. The hallway of the Roma-Nizza express train is put to well use. Solemn thinkers think, perched on the foot-square chairs that fold out from the walls. My light comes from behind too small curtains trying to hide a heated compartment; all the compartments are full, half the aisle seats are out, and the lucky ones are just standing, looking out. A near-full moon is only rarely covered by misty Italian clouds and the ground is mostly fog with trees sticking out. Rooftops and houses swim in the mix.

bright fire dragon's eyes appear in the sky above our train, warning flying creatures of the track's high tension wires; the silver white crackles splashing across the black sky above, telling voltage and danger. A city approaches, a stop, maybe a compartment for me. No. It's too good a movie outside. Movement. no woman no cry, Bob Marley hums into my ears. Rocking. Moving. Here little darlin' don't shed no tears. No woman no cry.

The compartment behind me has gone dim; only a pink knowledge from behind the curtain. Orange cherries glow from cigarettes in the hall. Motion. Outside the window, the movie begins again as we rock and sing along the silver European rails.

A village. An old village right on the water. A small cove dotted with cottages and splashed with wet light. The silver moon. The silver ocean and dories on the sand.

Then a bump. A short-lived lift, before a jarring retreat to the seat. And again the shell of the bus contains the man, reticent within its luke medium confines. The bus stops. And goes, running on time but behind schedule, inconvenient, equivocal, hitting every pothole (like a day). Resigned, he decides "there are no days but these," and indeed there aren't.

This thought sparks inspiration. He takes solace in the moment, temporally bolstered by the bolt of human finitude. Ouch. And insignificance. Bummer. A Cartesian moment of insight arrives. "If thoughts lead to dissolution, ought we not to follow?"

His body liquifacts, flows in deep pools of phenomenal wax; protean he swims within the puddles of his melted shell; promethean he leaves the scene. The bus transports him further, "succumb to the short-lived tyranny of the everyday," he cries. The little damage done by time releases me in its very grasp.

And now I try to hold onto the things bigger than words. A corn- eating-cartoon-typewriter-contemplating-moon beam streams into the room behind the eyes--the soul's main hole out of which we look and judge a little upon a little sliver of scene; we pile the ideas with indifferent structures, until full of musty relics the attic, the brain, searches for some loving demon's mercy killing breath from beyond. It's gone.

But outside the window again, a scene: a forest grotto green to the depths and measured out in beats like the magnitude of water bounding down the distant rocks in an endless orchestration of plops and streams, and falling through crevice, the sunshine dapple and glory bounce along with my thoughts. How do I describe it? Babbling.

Until the moment of departure approaches. The bus slows and horizons stretch like telepathic elastic, expanding and ripping into neon spasms, arcs of interstellar plasm, osmosing and apotheosing upward like amoeba, colored with thoughts of union, expansion. Hhyeeeoop.

The center expands from the core of the being. Centric waves of infinite power ripple away from the body, toward infinity. A euphoric sheen purples the lens of the perception. The bus rolls toward its final stop; the world shimmies; the door opens; transcendence grows viscous outside and in. He hesitates, before knowing we must step off.

The bus is language.

iamdan

Prose

Three Days Dead

iamdan — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 17:53:19 +0000

Three Days Dead iamdan Sun, 01/31/2021 - 18:53

This is a repost of a playlist composition I want to share with some classes. I'm posting here an audio mix of the playlist and the textual mix below. Prompted by the phrase "was dead three days," the story is about missing time.

Three Days Dead

" One Tree Hill " U2 ( lyrics )
The story begins today, steeped in references to our shared memories. The black center of The Heart of Darkness and the songs of folk found in Jara’s music trick us into thinking these are only our struggles. But the tale leans back, archetypal, toward the symbolic scene.

" Babylon " David Gray ( lyrics )
Three days bind the story. Its deeper movement starts with anticipation.
An eager descent softened by hope:

Friday night I'm going nowhere / All the lights are changing green to red

A blessed mistake.

Only wish that you were here

You know I'm seeing it so clear
I've been afraid

To tell you how I really feel

Admit to some of those bad mistakes I've made

The long passage back.

Turning back for home

You know I'm feeling so alone

I can't believe

Climbing on the stair

I turn around to see you smiling there

In front of me

" Sympathy For The Devil " The Rolling Stones ( lyrics ; Salon piece )
This big picture plays out in close up, the curtains rich burgundy, velvet and deep as blood. Not fabric, but membrane screen image flickering as grey light comes up from the back of a stage. The lit grey screen contracts into a tight circle and swings off stage to the woman, wracked. The light swings back, center stage. The dead.

So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
(woo woo)
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste, um yeah
(woo woo, woo woo)

The dead shimmer as the man extends his arms and gathers them, shapelike, collecting them like clouds dissipating in summer sun. He breathes deep. Looks off stage. The light dilates, brightens, and swings with his gaze, highlighting the woman. Her face is framed at the bottom by fingers, steepled over lips. Eyes closed with thought. Brow set, wrinkled. He looks to the light. Turns.

" In The Garden " Van Morrison ( lyrics )

The streets are always wet with rain
After a summer shower when I saw you standin'
In the garden in the garden wet with rain

You wiped the teardrops from your eye in sorrow
As we watched the petals fall down to the ground
And as I sat beside you I felt the
Great sadness that day in the garden

His fingers curl over the back of her hand. Nerves race up his side and fire up his face. He radiates. She breathes, opens her eyes. He’s fixed. She too.

And as it touched your cheeks so lightly
Born again you were and blushed and we touched each other lightly
And we felt the presence of the Christ

And I turned to you and I said
No Guru, no method, no teacher
Just you and I and nature
And the father in the garden

The man awakens. He stretches, expectant. Remembering the garden. Sunday. Ascendance. The morning light warms the side of his face. Questions. The circle of light surrounding him on the empty stage expands and all around him the dead. He squints toward the sky. The morning sun makes no sense. Three days and still he sits among bankers, butchers, mothers, fathers, sisters, sons, the lost souls of the darkened world. Sunday’s past and something’s wrong: “They call it stormy Monday but Tuesday’s just as bad.”

" Stormy Monday " Eva Cassidy ( lyrics )

" Black " Pearl Jam ( lyrics )
The sadness smacks personal and profound. Lured by pain and beauty to betray the world, he feels now the loss and fingers at his own soul like a sore, remembering. That joining. That giving, that, allowed just an instant, instantly changed forever.

And now my bitter hands shake beneath the clouds
of what was everything?
Oh, the pictures have all been washed in black--
tattooed everything.

" Pacing the Cage " Bruce Cockburn ( lyrics )
Reflection comes much later and brings with it nothing more than the slow turn of the proverbial screw. The unjust judge and the pearl of great price. He wanders the timescapes of the past, stepping into this very present. The rusted ships, scuttled on distant shores and waiting to turn to scrap. The lights of cities, biting and empty in their brilliance. The thrum of the engine soundtracked beneath the song of the lark. He wonders aloud, how is it that you’re just now “finding yourself in a place that you've willingly waltzed into. Suddenly, you realize it's not such a good place to be, and it's hard to find your way out, hard to know where the next step is supposed to go.”

" All Along The Watchtower " Bob Dylan ( lyrics )
Swiveling days compile their despondencies and urgent little victories. An adoption in Armenia. Plundering in Mertz. A library in Egypt. A Caldera vaporizes a village. A man has a dream. Resigned, he turns toward each event, draping shawls over corpse and cold soul alike. Lowering and lifting to the timeless rhythm of the rise and fall. More, he finally cries. I now need nothing more.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

" Across The Universe " The Beatles ( lyrics )
The sound of horse’s hooves rises from the edge of the stage in clops like gentle rain. The ebbing and flowing circle of light that baths the man swells to full brightness and the two riders join the scene—the woman and the father, smiling. Musical feet fill the gaps as the horses stop, and with each beat figures step on the stage. Teachers. Farmers. Runners. Writers. Young and old, they step forward like members of a choir and mouth the sounds that change the world.

Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world.
Nothing's gonna change my world.
Nothing's gonna change my world.

" With or Without You " (live) U2 ( lyrics )
As the crowd gathers on stage, another sound swells from behind. A whistle. Clap. Clap. Whistle. Clap. Looking out he sees more souls pouring in from doorways and climbing down from the rafters. The days, he understands, have nothing to do with the scattered sequences of noon and night. The days instead have played out over these millennia in each ragged cough and lover’s cry. Three days dead, he understands he’s not alone and he “give[s himself] away”

My hands are tied
My body bruised, she's got me with
Nothing to win and
Nothing left to lose

And you give yourself away
And you give yourself away
And you give
And you give
And you give yourself away

She takes his hand. The sound turns smoky and swirls over the scene. It surrounds the man and the woman and slowly lifts them, as if on filaments of thought, invisible and rising skyward.

We'll shine like stars in the silver light
We'll shine like stars in the Christmas night
One heart. One home. One love.

Prose

Poetry

Portfolio information

Genre -- Playlist

Materials -- mixed