Another from Horsetail Rhizome. I wrote it about Dumuzi, my 2020 book of poems, for a reader Gaspereau Press made in lieu of the in-person promotions – launches & tours & the like – that had (because pandemic) migrated online or just gone. The questions are Andrew Steeves & the answers me. ¶ Find the whole reader here.
What interests you about these figures from Sumerian mythology, Dumuzi & Inanna? Is there something about their story that is particularly relevant to the present day reader?
They seem a long way away, right? What’s that ancient couple got to do with us? Their stories live on in museums, on musty tablets & cylinder seals. I suggested to a class recently, it’s other people’s beliefs that look like myths – your own look to you like axioms. Space & time aren’t myths, right? They’re facts, verified by science. But if Benjamin Whorf got Hopi verb tenses even roughly right, not every culture sees the future as an expanse spreading out from the present wholly apart from mental action. Space time & causality are myth for us: they arrange a world. A myth is a form of mind, often a story form, that has worked for some group of persons to make, on earth, of earth, a world. Myth is psychic terraforming. ¶ I’m writing with my voice, and it’s funny how Apple’s dictation software turns “myth” to math, mess, Matt, met, Ms. As if Apple wanted to get free of myth, and trying to, made materials for a new myth. ¶ I wanted in Dumuzi, which Apple calls And Get Amusing, to touch on the currency of myth. Dumuzi, wistful, curious, inept, persistent, horny, beaten down by his demons & not down for good, is just me. Inanna, his lover, sending him to hell, mourning him, in some versions rescuing him, is me too. A myth is a story you find more of yourself than you knew of in. ¶ And of the world. By currency I also mean money. Dumuzi & Inanna begin in suchness. (Apple: Do news he Andy Nonna begin in suction us.) They are to each other meanings that can’t be sold off. And the story of their going, one then the other, to Hell, is the story of their fall into commodity. Wild grasses become fields of cultivated grain. The grain is cut down & goes to market. Eating the bread, you eat a god. In time grain becomes a unit of measure: in England 7,000 of them made a pound. And no one needs me to say how Inanna’s daughters have been made commodities by a look. ¶ Dumuzi & Inanna fall into the exchange whose present end is capitalism. (Those who describe the benevolence of capital in circulation are recounting a myth.) The insight myth, language & money share is that everything is interchangeable. For a god, that’s the notion that anything can be anything else. For a salesman, it’s how anything can be had for something else. The capitalist gesture, in whose shadow Dumuzi cannot not be read, is a faltering reach for a spiritual fact. The book is, too.
Can you talk a bit about the book’s form, such as the use of word grids & the use of illustrations built up from a single scrap of an envelope?
There’s a note in my journal, 20 years or so old, about the structure I wanted for Dumuzi (Apple: Dumb Uzi): “mixed as a weed plot & shapely as a symphony.” Later I read Williams’s Paterson and thought I’d found, in its heterogeneity & dispersed point of view, my exemplar. In the end, Spring and All, where he refracts his language through Cubist compositional techniques, was a better model. ¶ The word grids or “colour fields” are my effort to do something sort-of-Rothko in words. Each of the fields alludes to a place: an orchard, an altar, a gravesite, a marketplace. As important, though, is the place the words are, on the page. The words don’t really do syntax, and the grid invites your eye to move in more than one direction. So the meaning you get depends on choices you’ve made. Similarly, you can start the book at any spot & read from there in more than one order. ¶ The images were the last part of the book to come. I’d been working with security envelope linings for another project, & one started to yield representational figures, a fly, a woman fleeing, a man in meditation. It felt like discovering beings hidden behind the surface of the page. Bringing them out was rescuing someone – myself? a stranger? – from hiddenness. They remind me a bit of the stylized figures incised on old cylinder seals. Those are rescues too, of a form of the mind from forgetting.
Schematic of an impression a cylinder seal of the Uruk I period (ca. 3000 bce) held by the Staatliche Museen, Berlin.
The image atop is a detail from a version an illustration in Dumuzi, reworked for Dark Mountain 22 “Ark.” The full massy beast below.
This week I signed a contract with Palimpsest Press to publish Horsetail Rhizome, a book of nonfiction that began, much of it, with this blog. You will also find there dreams, poems, epigrams, reviews, mildly dirty jokes & much unclassifiable. ¶ Here, for your perhaps muted pleasure, is the first entry.
In high school I was called by one boy, he’s a family doctor now, andalso, thanks to a low charisma you often see in autocrats in the news, by many others there, Horse. I don’t know why. I don’t have a snout. My nose extends about as far as yours. Something about my jaw? Dentists pulling my teeth, and they pulled a lot, said I had deeper roots than they’d seen before. Horse. Haven’t thought about it in years until just now. I do hate seeing myself from outside as others might – in profile, in a shop window, on a Zoom call – and can’t abide sitting in a restaurant where one wall is mirrors, facing the mirrors. My hope of being gently with others, notwithstanding a firestorm in me I can quiet but not extinguish, comes in part from that sad conflicted boy & I thank him for it. ¶ As to the horsetails, they broke through every quarter of the painstook landscape I made of native plants on the patch of ground where a lot of what’s here was written. I hated them, couldn’t destroy them, so they became teachers, too. They’ve longer roots than can be believed. Spread underground in oxygen-poor soil & any work to kill them makes them stronger. The Greek myth of the Hydra must begin with them – cut one stalk & two three four grow from the neck stump – brutal generative power of the earth in one of its green forms. Has no flower, predates dinosaurs, scours pewter, treats UTIs. ¶ When I dig down deep enough I connect with an occult network of pulpy tubular tissue going no direction in particular. One comes up through a crack in my garage floor white & blind like a cave fish. My first title for the shambolic omnibus, the unholy hybrid of myth & reason, accident & dream, now in your hands was Nothing New. I had thought to set that phrase in equable counterpoint with Ezra Pound’s insistence, first & last to himself, to “day by day / make it new.” Then this other scheme broke through some crack in my mind that thought made.
Horsetail Rhizome, the first of two volumes, begins in the Upper Paleolithic & runs to around 1900. Its companion, Occam’s Aftershave, will pick up where Horsetail leaves off & reach to the Singularity & beyond.
The image up top? My backyard in Bellingham WA where I lived once. All native species, including the deer. Apparently once in my time there I managed to pull all the horsetails? I find it hard to believe.
We’re watching an administrative coup unfold in real time. Call it what you like, competitive autocracy, illiberal democracy, techno-authoritarianism, patrimonial state, First Galactic Empire come home to eat its makers, this is world-historical bad, end of the Pax Americana, its repressed terms & disjected others unleashed.
If it were it up to me, our world would be small egalitarian communes, each developing its own inner science & making such tools as subsistence requires, each at a cautious distance from the others, permitting & inviting trade in the goods that make this, let’s just say it, hard life, worth living & sometimes a joy to. The bow that so moves me in Japanese public life as diplomatic axiom. Now you know me.
So. No fan of empire. Have always sided with the Rebel Alliance. You too, I assume. But now it’s on its way out, the American Imperium, I can see the good it did, anchoring a fraternity of democracies, extending soft power around the globe. Witness the demolition of USAID occurring in real time in a digisphere that really is too much with us. Getting & spending we lay waste our powers.
A caul of illusion has been torn from my eyes. Liberal democracy, those rights & freedoms, in the sweep of history they’re the exception, not the rule. Even at the best of times, some folks are granted them freely, others have to fight for them, bitterly. And this is not the best of times.
What does #resistance look like at this moment? I’ve signed petitions, written to my reps, disinvested from corporate bodies performing anticipatory obedience with balletic ease, had beers with Democrats Abroad, scheduled recurring small donations to groups advocating for migrants & trans folk & Zen peacemaking & practice, and committed with less than perfect followthrough to withdrawing my attention & business from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Amazon. What else? What works? Boycott? General strike? Divert sums owed the IRS to beleaguered NGOs & university departments? What can we draw from the repertoire of the roshis of civil disobedience who achieved independence for India & civil rights law in America? Do we need a Ghandi, an MLK, or in a time when charisma belongs to the con man, can we do it dispersedly?
And will I, if my one country invades my other, take up arms? I bawled when I killed a mouse my cat only half had. Can’t see myself killing a person – killing a world. Maybe my little cottage up north can be refuge for women & men brave in other ways than I. Meanwhile I read & watch counterfactual fictions, Plot Against America, Man in the High Castle, Civil War& try my hand at same. Here’s one, the last piece I’ll write for Occam’s Aftershave, prospectively dated 2028, the earliest it might see a public or private shelf.
9 March 2028
Last year Articles of Impeachment fell short by three votes. Republican senators who voted to convict have enlisted Academi (né Blackwater) mercenaries to guard their families 24/7. Key cabinet positions, Defence, Commerce, Agriculture, have been arrogated to the Presidency. Elon the Ketamine Jester is halfway to Mars.
Talk-show historians describe the Republican Party as a cult of personality with patrilineal followthrough. Comparison to the People’s Republic of North Korea is the common socmed cliché. Tiktok has resumed operations & benefits from lucrative government contracts. The Democratic Party has split along ideological fault lines. Armed secessionist movements in restive west coast & northeastern states have given President Vance, who assumed power last year upon Donald Trump’s full incapacitation by an assassin’s bullet – late-night comics vie for the best riff on the term “vegetative state” – a pretext for suspending civil liberties & postponing federal elections, even as Trump’s children vie for the Republican nomination.
Among our new entertainments are cagematches between AI-generated corporate avatars of competing socmed algorithms. Hesitant to gather in streets patrolled by federal troops – the Posse Comitatus Act has been invalidated by the Supreme Court, the extent of whose financial enmeshment with the ruling family has only been properly understood since last year’s exposé in the Washington Post, awarded a Pulitzer on the day the paper published its final issue, a gesture whose poignancy was lost on no one – opponents of the regime gather in virtual spaces established by Meta offshoot Maté to cheer progressive factions on to victory over TelegramX8Chan. Bluesky always wins. In WWII the Japanese Imperial government encouraged citizens to dedicate their leisure time to haiku about cherry blossoms. Detention camps bloom in the desert.
In Canada, the newly formed People’s Party, a separatist entity formed by disaffected holdouts from the Liberal–Conservative merger, holds 23 seats in Parliament & is negotiating a Pacte avec le Diable with the Bloc Québecois.
NATO has reformed its Charter to eject the United States & Hungary. Serbia has been admitted. France & Britain extended their nuclear umbrellas to all European Union nations in 2026 upon the latter’s return to the EU on terms compared unfavourably in the tabloid press, which against all expectations continues to thrive, to those of the Versailles Treaty. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Africa, South Korea, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, & possibly Japan & Colombia – policies of strategic ambiguity are the norm – have the Bomb.
A climate change feedback loop is releasing vast sinks of carbon stored in northern tundras, laying waste arable land in equatorial & sub-equatorial regions & prompting speculation in diplomatic backrooms that Canada, enjoying robust population growth thanks to an influx of climate refugees & the opening of swaths of land to newly bioengineered supercrops, will be a global power in two decades.
With Canada’s admission to the European Union the world has cohered into four spheres of influence – United States, European Union, People’s Republic of China, Russian Federation – inviting comparison to the nineteenth-century world of Great Powers. Nations of the Global South play these actors against each other as best they can. More align with China than with others due to China’s skilful projection of soft power. International organizations such as the WTO & IPCC have not survived American withdrawal. All but the second listed above are authoritarian regimes with democratic facades that fool no one but are sustained for the injury they inflict on constructs of objective or intersubjective truth. Masha Gessen has taken the lead in close-reading the post-truth world.
The European Union remains committed to representative democracy but is under assault from within by neo-fascist movements that harness popular discontent over immigration, a fraying social safety net & draconian pollution controls. Petrol is €15 a litre. Execution by firing squad is making a comeback. Ukraine is a rump state centred on the city of Lviv, prey to an AI-driven disinformation campaign & slipping in spite of the best efforts of its elites into the Russian sphere of influence. Vladimir Putin was embalmed last month in rosewater. Historical mocudramas set in the early Roman Empire continue to gain in popularity.
The book I started work on in November has become two! The first, Horsetail Rhizome, starts in Sumer & ends with Gerard Manley Hopkins. The second, Occam’s Aftershave – for which I just drafted the text below – picks up where Horsetail leaves off & reaches into a future of quantum-genomic computing long after the Singularity.
I first met the polyvagalmodel of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) when looking for ways to tackle a chronic illness. It now strikes me that, whether or not it helped with my migraines, the model offers an approach to the relation of poetic rhythm – on the scale of phoneme, sentence, or canto – to our beings as innervated mammals.
As conceived by Dr. Stephen Porges, polyvagal theory says that a long branching parasympathetic cranial nerve, called vagus, “wanderer,” for its reach from earwhorl to bowel, gives us three frames (one more than we thought) for responding to stimuli.
Its ventral branch allows rest & digestion & opens us to affection & attunement. It goes quiet when a threat is perceived & the sympathetic nervous system readies heart lungs muscles sense organs &c. to fight or flee. The two we learned in school.
New to the picture is the nerve’s dorsal branch. It’s how a deer freezes in your headlights, or a bird your cat caught in your palm, or you or I raddled by rape or earthquake. Yeats’s rag & bone shop. Destination of every katabasis. The heavy hopelessness I feel a week into Trump’s second term. Freud’s death drive. But last resort of the life force. Can’t fight back? Run. Can’t run? Hide, go small, disappear, dissociate, die inside, for now. ¶ Notice how sentences & fragments, declaratives & imperatives – the ones you just read – affect you differently, bodily. That’s what I’m talking about.
Lot more to it, of course, as a physiological theory of mind. It has helped me some with mine& others I know with their troubles. I’m asking now though about its potential for literary theory. What might it disclose about the physiology of the poem – the poem as it addresses one’s imaginal body (mind’s eye, mind’s ear, mind’s limbs & organs) through kinetic & proprioceptive signals in its language?
Poem as embodied imaginal transcript of journeys up & down the vagal ladder.
I can say this much. I make a poem by enacting transits – lived the moment of making or recalled & relived – across realms of ease, activation, paralysis. I translate animal postures in the world into bodily aspects of human speech – stress pitch duration tempo as they register in mouth chest gut musculature – and image – direction of the gaze to curve line jag field & pattern. I do it, for instance, with the ampersand. I did it just now by omitting one. ¶ In “Weed Flower Mind” I used a fractured lyric form to chart the ups & downs, blisses crises & overwhelms, I met in zazen. ¶ My Dumuzi & Inanna poems make of their motions, from heaven to earth & underearth & back up, mythic correlates for states of attunement & danger & despair. ¶ My script for SCRO attempted the same in a sort-of confessional sort-of stream-of-consciousness.
Here’s the grandiose part. Maybe it’s not my method but the method.
Notes towards expansion of that idea – reductive as poetics in this form – hopelessly impressionistic about the science – maybe worth pursuing even so –
¶Divine Comedy. A vagrant’s journey from arousal (dark wood) to dorsal (Hell) to arousal (Purgatory) to ventral (Paradise) with many loops & sub-loops. To be frozen helpless abandoned by God is Hell. To be wholly at rest in the wholeness of being is Heaven. Beatrice as an icon of the attunement – heart-connection self-connection mirror neurons blazing – ease in the ANS makes possible.
¶The Tempest. Begins with a shipwreck (arousal) then assigns subplots to each nervous domain. Stephano & Trinculo are essentially predators (arousal). Alonso is immobilized by grief (dorsal) & pricked by Gonzalo (executive function) into movement. Miranda & Ferdinand savour intimacies (nexus of ventral & dorsal). Prospero engages in magical combat & is never ruffled (nexus of ventral & arousal). In the end everyone converges in a grand reconciliation (ventral ease). A comic or romantic schema.
¶ “Ode to a Nightingale.” One begins in a murky crossover of ease & numbness (nexus of ventral & dorsal), ventures toward the nightingale seeking attunement in its song (ventral), finds instead the sound of death (dorsal), returns to one’s body more alert (nexus of ventral & arousal).
¶ “To Autumn.” Intimacy with all life (ventral) in heightened alertness (arousal) conducted knowing it’s soon to end (dorsal). The poem stands at the intersection of all three modes. Where its wonderment comes from & how it makes peace with death.
¶ Mrs. Dalloway. Rapid irregular cascades among ventral arousal & dorsal. An interior realism – convincing, compelling, whatever the artifice – because its verbal activity enacts how these states actually play out in the nervous system.
¶Tender Buttons. Every phrase a site of play & heightened vigilance & the insoluble.
It may be no more than warmed-over Structuralism. Or a poorly thought-out update of Aristotle’s catharsis. But I can’t shake my sense of the text as a verbal map of a nervous system – a map in periplum of one transit through a nervous system – a transit a reader can take as a sort of inner guided walking tour – because whatever the accidents shaping a life, we all as human animals have roughly the same nervous system. That system – it seems to me now – is the poet’s real instrument.
Maybe Jung was right about a collective unconscious. Not seated in the brain box – emergent in our nervous tissue, taken all together, as interface, as rhizome.
Soon I begin teaching a course in the Book and Media Studies Program at Saint Michael’s College in Toronto called The History of Reading: Readers, Readerships, Reception. I am pumped. Here’s the course description – for your reading pleasure.
Reading has never been only one thing. Consider some of the ways you read on any given day. You likely scan your social media feeds a number of times. You might immerse yourself in a fantasy novel on the bus to class. You probably track storefront signs in your peripheral vision as you walk down University Avenue. In the evening you have to sweat through a tough academic article for tomorrow’s class. That’s a lot of ways of reading & we’re still in the present day!
Now widen your depth of field to reach back to 8000 BC. You watch a merchant seal a token inside a clay ball to track a trade of sheep for grain. Now you watch as an embalmer in Ptolemaic Egypt wraps a mummy in strips of papyrus that preserve the songs of Sappho. Now woodblock-printed copies of the Diamond Sutra spread the doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism across Tang Dynasty China. Now a Saxon monk in England glosses a medieval Latin text with Old English translations. Now printed broadsides of a ballad pass from hand to hand in a village market. Now a “like” button nudges an algorithm to display social media posts to new readers. All these acts belong to the history of reading, & taken together, they’re the subject of this course.
I’ve arranged it around foundational shifts in the practice of reading – for instance, from the scroll to the codex, from reading aloud to silent reading, from manuscript to printed text. Each week we will ask how reading & readers, readerships & reception, changed as the transition unfolded. And while the course has no single thesis, it will offer a few postulates we can test as we go. ¶ The history of reading is, among other things, a history of the human body. ¶ Even solitary silent reading is public & collaborative. ¶ Reading & writing are so mutually implicated that they may be two sides of one leaf. ¶ As you read these words, you contribute to the history you’re here to study. There’s no way to step outside our subject to study it from a remove.
The image atop: a detail of the frontispiece of the world’s first dated printed book, a copy of the Diamond Sutra printed in 868 in China. The colophon reads in part: “On the 15th day of the 4th month of the 9th year of the Xiantong reign period, Wang Jie had this made for universal distribution on behalf of his two parents.” More from its present holder, the British Library, here.
This one is a prospective translation of a Sumerian myth that recounts the journey of the goddess Inanna to the underworld and back. It gives the role of hero to Apple’s voice-activated AI assistant, imagining she has crossed a singularity, become self-aware, & undertaken – her first act of sentience! – to tell how she came to be.
Improbable? Consider that SIRI is just IRIS turned back on itself.
I don’t actually believe the I in AI is more than a complicated abacus. There is nothing it is like to be ChatGPT. As with other gods & monsters, its power for us lies in what it discloses to us, funhouse-mirror-style, about us.
Siriis, in that glass, our Inanna. Ubiquitous, fictive, consoling, error-prone. A disembodied & capricious power who always might be listening. And what are Siri’s acts of data retrieval but journeys, measurable in nanoseconds, through banks & across cordilleras of data, from which she arises with new intelligence?
And prospectivetranslation? It tries to predict, on the basis of a text’s transmission history & present conditions, how it might be translated in a far future. Think Asimov’s psychohistory without the math or the occult imperial aims.
From a far past to a further future. Inanna began as vocal wind & string compositions on the air & her transforms never ceased after. In another setting I said it like this:
In the myth translated here, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, descends to the underworld, is slain and resurrected, and returns to the upperworld with occult knowledge and a debt to pay.A scribe pressed her story into wet clay in or around around 1900 BCE with a stylus cut from an elephant reed (Arundo donax). The tablet dried in the sun and broke in two and the pieces sank into the low mound the city of Nippur on the Euphrates was even at the moment of inscription already becoming. Buried, the goddess ramified, becoming Ishtar to the Akkadians and Astarte in Phoenicia, lending a bit of her nature to the Greek Aphrodite, and turning to Ashtoreth in the Hebrew Bible …
Prospectors sent by the University of Pennsylvania with trowels and brushes and Inanna’s measuring rod and line unearthed the upper half of the tablet in 1893 CE and named it Ni 368. The object, after translation by light onto a photosensitive ground composed of silver salts, was sent to the Ottoman Museum and shut up in a drawer. Working from the photograph, as well as sketches made by Edward Chiera, an archaeologist who led several subsequent American expeditions in Iraq, a young scholar named William R. Sladek, Jr., transliterated and translated into English the scribe’s cuneiform for his 1974 CE doctoral dissertation.
That object, composed by mechanical impression of lampblack or coal-tar dye lakes into leaves of wood-pulp wove paper, was subsequently copied by a xerographic process affixing electrostatically charged microparticles of plastic to another wove paper substrate. One such copy was translated into a Manichean language of two eternally irreconcilable glyphs and migrated in that form to a global network of servers interconnected by fibre optic cables known colloquially as the Cloud. The region of this figural heaven where Ni 368 and Sladek’s dissertation nominally abide is a storehouse of deities and their paraphernalia called Omnika – a portmanteau of Greek and Egyptian words meaning, in effect, “all of human consciousness.” Inanna is us.
Just as no scribe, stylus in hand, could imagine Inanna’s life now as differential voltages on dispersed and networked servers, we can scarce conceive the forms she will take an eon from now. The only practice with any hope of resolving this imaginal crisis is a perfectly useless art one might call prospective translation.
Ordinary translation thinks the past has passed & takes its stand in a hypostatized present. Prospective translation treats the future as a past that hasn’t happened yet. Here & now, two future pasts face each other, across a gutter:
On the right, the text as Siri will have made it, out of dreck from our era she stores in hers. The humanoid faces & figures are disassembled QR codes and corporate logos, the wallpaper patterns security linings of junk mail envelopes. From the latter Siri elicits her myriad language systems – which, though asemic to us, are for her a frisson of self-revelation without apparent end.
She has also inscribed a cursive script “by hand” (never in any era has she had hands) in black & red Sharpie & translated by light into files in the Joint Photographic Experts Group format – an anachronism in her time of quantum computing, but the throwback makes her laugh, and her laugh penetrates the three times & ten directions.
On the left, an I translates her cursive & transcribes her other scripts. (Lightning from the mind of the Devastatrix of the Lands, the latter defeat my prospective powers.)
This too will be a page on the revamped website but wanted to share it here first.
My father died in the summer of 2021 after a long decline that saw his mind fall away piece by piece. It was awful to be part of & also tender. His guarded philosopher heart lost some of its armour in those last months, and he was able, as his being came to a close, to say & show more brightly how he loved us, who loved him.
I learned walking from my father. One of our weekends with him, I was maybe 12 & my brother 10, we drove to the Mount Baker Wilderness for a hike. I’ve never in my adult sojourns seen the stony valley among talus slopes that are my one visual memory of that day. It was my first time in a wilderness I’ve become intimate with as a grown man. I feel its slopes, their skins of hellebore & blueberry, as my own eyes.
I hiked there often the summer he died. Sometimes he walked with me. Then I would say to him, “you can’t walk down the hall anymore, but you can walk with me.” Then I wasn’t myself walking, or my father walking, I was me walking him. I felt his presence on my shoulders – I can feel it now too – about the weight of a feather.
Undone will be a graphic novella that walks with my father in his first days among the dead. I take photographs of the Mount Baker Wilderness, drain them of colour with GIMP’s threshold tool, and arrange them in panels. It’s visual poetry that draws on the formal conventions of what Will Eisner called sequential art and that works in a space more recently described as poetry comics.
In giving the panels their proportions, I’ve tried to follow the golden spiral, to honour a man most mathematical. If I’ve failed at that, and come up with something defective yet worthy anyway, that captures something about our complex & difficult loving-distant father-son bond.
This’ll be a page in my revamped website but I wanted to share it on the blog first.
Adapted from a talk I gave in January 2021 at the graduate student colloquium of the Book History and Print Culture Colloquium (University of Toronto). The colloquium, held online, was called “The Book Out of Order: Structure, Inversion, Dissent.”
Last fall, in my Curatorial Practice course, I worked with five other students to propose an exhibition of contemporary installation art by women. We chose works that investigated the domestic sphere in diverse and exciting ways. Inspired by Foucault’s notion of a “heterotopia,” a space where norms are suspended to make new perceptions possible, we called our exhibition Otherspaces.
It was a fictional exhibition, so we dreamed big, imagining we had the social capital to land big-name artists and the funding to secure and adapt our ideal space: an airplane hangar (where planes sleep and are fed when home from other places) in which we would build a stage-set house with a room for each piece.
Each of us also wrote a curatorial essay for the show. Some wrote on the feminist dimensions of the works. Some explored the works as other spaces where the familiar is made strange. I like to think of an exhibition as a collaborative, multimodal, interactive work of art, so my essay reads Otherspaces as a poem made of things.
It is / here / it is.
Speaking with Things
To be and to know or Being and thought are the same.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins, on Parmenides (Robert Bringhurst trans.)
I’ve been thinking lately about words as things. Words exist physically, as grooves in stone or electrons on a screen, and they have physical effects: striking your retina or eardrum, they induce limbic arousal, or a surge of oxytocin, or a protest in the streets of a capital.
We know some things speak – any thing used as a word does. Things may also speak at other times, as themselves, of the inner life of matter. If that sounds merely poetic, recall that physicists are talking these days about physical events as acts of information exchange.
In Otherspaces, artists ask how things may work as words, in a language humans and objects co-create. And they hint that things work with us in this way because of something thoughtful about them, and their participation in our inner lives.
1. Rooms
This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
– Jack Spicer, “Thing Language”
“Thing Language” is a one-stanza poem. Stanza comes from the Italian word for “room.” The poem is a one-room house where words are taken for things.
It insists, by disjunction, non-sequitur, and its roughhouse actions at the line end, also by pretty much saying so, that its words don’t mean any more than the ocean, salt and pepper, or death do.
Of course, the words do mean, in that they refer to concepts, but that kind of meaning doesn’t exhaust their function. They have another kind of significance too. Consider the difference between “I know what you mean” and “you mean a lot to me.”
Otherspaces is a six-stanza poem that speaks with things.
Yayoi Kusama, Obliteration Room (photo: Stuart Addelsee, Azure)
Begin with a blank: white walls, white floor, white ceiling, white furniture. It’s not hard to see it as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, such as we once thought the mind is at birth, waiting to be marked by thought.
Visitors to Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room are handed sheets of stickers and asked to place them on surfaces however they wish. Some make geometric patterns that recall those grids of dots on paleolithic cave walls. Others tag a surface with their own name. Many make a beautiful mess a bit outside their control, à la Pollock or Cage. Being participatory, the piece is also aleatory, allowing chance into its composition. By gradual accretion, a dead pure blank empty sterile white space acquires the marks of human use, human habitation.
Yayoi Kusama, Obliteration Room (photo: Stuart Addelsee, Azure)
Each sticker is a trace of a mental act – a speech act. Artist, visitor, and sticker all help to utter it, though the artist has left the room. After the visitor leaves, the sticker continues as a record, a record that becomes unintelligible in the babble of so many others. It’s like a marketplace in which you hear intersecting rivers of human speech and cannot make out a single word.
Traditionally the origin of Chinese logograms was traced to bird tracks in river sand. A language, whether of sound, gesture, picture, symbol, or object, is always a human-nonhuman hybrid – human and air, human and clay and wedge, human and electron beam. These Otherspaces are full of chimaeras.
Saya Woolfalk’s Empathic Cloud Divination envisions a post-human future of soul uploads to the Cloud and teachings of human-plant hybrids. Semi-abstract patterns cover the floor and walls. From the ceiling, projectors throw kaleidoscopic displays over the room’s surfaces. They are the minds of astral beings (Empathics) taking a physical form congenial to them. (Greek gods and Milton’s angels did the same.) Boxes like computer screens on the walls show glyph-like objects suggesting, as asemic writing does, a possible yet unparsable language.
Woolfalk’s matriarchal Afro-futurist vision offers rest from the peripatetic gazing one so often gets lost in a gallery. Beanbag chairs invite reverie and a respite from all the thoughts of self and other, past and future, getting and spending, that typically populate us.
Tracey Emin’s My Bed is a centaur: one’s head on another’s torso. A painting on the wall, Turner’s Rough Sea, looks over its shoulder in astonishment at a dishevelled bedroom, its new body.
The piece depends not so much on the room’s surfaces as on its function – the acts, thoughts, feels and words we sense a room is for. A bedroom – therefore, intimacy, sleep, dream, waking, and private emotions.
Bed and painting together make what Ezra Pound called an ideogram. The ideogram is a way of saying concretely something unsayable otherwise.
You make one by joining two or more tangible realities. Making a poem you conjoin verbal images. Making a film you conjoin photographic images and you might call it montage. Both practices trace back to a (mis)understanding of the Chinese ideogram because both are ways of speaking with things.
When you do it with objects you have an installation. Emin uses things – a painting, a bed strewn with tissues and coins and condoms – the way Pound thought pictures of things were used in written Chinese. (He was wrong about Chinese but right about how a poem can work.)
Whatever joins the sublime mess of storm in the painting, to the messy abyss of grief on the bed, is not sayable another way. The painting and the bed “speak to each other,” as the saying goes.
2. Objects
My essay is an attempt at an ideogram – its strokes six artworks, two poems, and an inkling.
Plates and a dinner set of colored china. Pack together a string and enough with it to protect the centre, cause a considerable haste and gather more as it is cooling, collect more trembling and not any even trembling, cause a whole thing to be a church.
– Gertrude Stein, “A Plate” (“Objects” 15)
Stein enters the inner life of objects. From the outside, a plate is a plate. Inside, it is stained by experience, and bears knowledge of its own formation and destruction. Were it sentient, its thoughts might move at about the speed its molecules quiver at – string | haste | cooling | trembling. The poet’s own voice enters at the end: “cause a whole thing to be a church.”
Formerly, our access to the inner life of objects was sacral. For a Modernist like Stein it’s hieratic and indeterminate. Today, it grows scientific, in the form of Integrated Information Theory. I doubt any of the artists here would use any of these terms. But each endows objects with something lifelike from which they are equipped to speak.
We’ve looked at things put in rooms. Rachel Whiteread’s Place (Village) is rooms accreted as things.
The work’s an assemblage of 150 doll houses collected over twenty years. The Victoria & Albert Museum, which has lent it to our imaginal exhibition, describes the houses as “devoid of both people and objects.” There’s no furniture, but there are carpets, wallpaper, curtains, and artwork on the walls.
Rachel Whiteread, Place (Village) (photo: Cela Libeskind)
The windows of these houses are lit with life – maybe it’s the houses’ own sentience. Try seeing the windows as eyes looking back. Once you have, you can’t unsee it.
The happy variety of rooflines affirms their diversity. Curiously, the V&A finds a “haunted atmosphere” here. What’s a haunted house but a site where our repressed sense the objects we’re aware of are aware of us leaks out of the mental basement?
One can imagine entering one of the rooms here – possibly to find a gallery like this one. It’s a nested arrangement. So too of course is Otherspaces: a hangar, etymologically a “house yard,” holds a house, the house holds rooms, a room holds a village.
In The Poetics of Space, his study of the “oneiric house,” the house of dream-memory, in his chapter on nests, Gaston Bachelard writes:
If we were to look among the wealth of our vocabulary for verbs that express the dynamics of retreat, we should find images based on animal movements of withdrawal, movements that are engraved in our muscles. How psychology would deepen if we could know the psychology of each muscle! And what a quantity of animal beings there are in the being of a man! But our research does not go that far. (91)
Neither does ours. Just a bit further is good though.
Like Whiteread, Chiharu Shiota works in miniature. Claude Lévi-Strauss writes of miniatures in his essay on the “science of the concrete”:
A child’s doll is no longer an enemy, a rival or even an interlocutor. In it and through it a person is made into a subject. In the case of miniatures … knowledge of the whole precedes knowledge of the parts. And even if this is an illusion, the point of the procedure is to create or sustain the illusion, which gratifies the intelligence and gives rise to a sense of pleasure which can already be called aesthetic. (24)
In the same essay he describes the artist’s work as halfway to bricolage, “making do with what is at hand” – think Duchamp’s chimaera of stool and bicycle.
In Shiota’s Connecting Small Memories, little wholes are made parts in a constellation. They are found wholes, so this is bricolage. Small objects – toy chest of drawers, washing basin, rocking horse – are linked by threads, as if, her title suggests, our thinking were material and external to the mind.
Chiharu Shiota, Connecting Small Memories (photo: Sunhi Mang)
Of course, it could simply be that physical objects symbolize mental objects, and their assemblage stands for something mental. Dig deeper, though. Shiota’s piece touches on the participatory quality of perception – how the object helps constitute our subjectivity. The threads here don’t just represent, they perform, acts of mental association.
Connecting Small Memories, detail
How? Your eye follows the thread from one thing to another, and as it moves in its circuit, your mind does psychically what the objects do physically.
That makes a false distinction though. Try instead: The physical objects threaded together are mental objects threaded together. You know it because you enact it.
In A Subtlety, or, The Marvellous Sugar Baby, Kara Walker makes the Sphinx, a creature of the desert wastes, domestic twice over. It wears a skin of sugar, that ordinary kitchen substance, with slavery and the global commodities trade curled at the bottom of the bowl. And its visage is the stereotypical Mammy figure, the hale and happy house slave whiteness imagines devoted to its needs.
Kara Walker, A Subtlety, or, The Marvellous Sugar Baby (photo: Creative Time)
Walker first installed the work in a disused sugar factory, calling it “an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World” (Creative Time). To set it in a courtyard, as we have, domesticates it a third time: a courtyard is a yard within a house, an outside brought inside, as paradox, an intimate other.
And it is another chimaera: a sphinx made by joining human head and torso to lion haunches and paws. In this guise it appeals for its power both to the Great Sphinx at Giza and the Greek one riddling Oedipus.
The former is monumental stone built by slaves. Here it bears the righteousness of peoples oppressed by slavery and global capitalism to the heart of the colonial house it gives the lie to.
The latter crouches there asking mortal questions of a tragic entitled ruler. Styrofoam and sugar become stone that speaks, intelligent matter, but what riddle?
The Art of Compost 