I know a lot about you, for example that you can’t stop trying, even though it hurts you very much. Do you know:

• That you pick me up where we left off, that here in the reeds where Pan transformed his first lost “love” into music, that I am bound by blood, that I am blinded, that this book is in a bind.
• That A Crystal Speck of Sand—what came before, beat into disassembled pieces and scattered—divides a—
• That there’s Nothing Else, just this moment of falling—“falling,” indeed, as the implications would have it (??)—and that there is no BOOK strong enough to read me back to my senses, nor vice versa.
• That what remains elusive I am doomed to chase.
• That what I would like to write here is “that there is no geometry to contain what I am full of” but that instead what I am compelled to offer is that I am capable of no such geometry or otherwise, that there are only these scrapings of dust, a broken fingerprint;
• That this mark threatens to break me up into words OH SHUT IT, SHUT YOUR MOUTH ALREADY
• That when I am “sad” that what this feeling is, if I could conceit to describe or “out” what sadness is, oh hell:
• That when I am “sad” that what this feeling is is this: a feeling of my brains being slightly overcooked—dried out, with all the good, fatty juices leaked out, collected in a small cup near the sink. Start over:
• That what sadness is is a concealing of oneself from oneself. That indeed it is a great conceit, a great conceit, to position the self as something that must be DISCOVERED, that it is something by its nature mysterious (from the Greek mysterion, “a secret”—there, that makes it easier, doesn’t it?), that the self must be sought out and reclaimed somehow. That indeed it is a great conceit, that what we are is aslkdfja;w3892 j3tka;, and that’s that OH SHUT IT, SHUT THE BOOK
• That I am a writer of gimmicks and I am indeed a forest of gimmicks, for example this one: THAT by making a show of abusing myself on the page in this way, THAT I somehow escape my douchebaggery as a writer: THAT I somehow make up for the fact (simply by accounting for it) THAT I don’t know anything about what “people” want unless they’re standing in front of me and I can read them. Please dear paper allow me to explain why: because
• This is an exorcism of sorts: to speak what hurts in order to claim power over and finally reclaim it;

• That I just want to punch everything;
• That I miss you very much, your breath (sometimes good sometimes bad) and your wicked sex and the tiny mammalian hairs on my back that I become aware of only inasmuch as you make them stand on end with a certain manner of looking at me which only you possess;

Amen and what have you,

A hooligan.

STARS BURN UP AND WE’RE ALL THE TESTAMENT OF THEIR PRESENCE IN THIS UNIVERSE

[ A S D F ]
[         ]
[         ]

That you TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS and/but/or you ~*forget*?~ me, that I return as a spectator of certain s(h)elves that I’ve been that

I WANT TO BE “_____________”
YOU YOU
YOU   YOU   YOU
YOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU####################################

where does she comb from, this hearth of mine?  ?? ?? ??

Behind the oculars a certain cavern echoes with the proclamations of various overwrought multitudes, the chill, thick air resonating around the inner homunculus-body like an embrace, like a mummification, like hot lips and a flitting tongue around So Many Things that come down to this: not the dignity of a word, but merely a shred of one, the fallout of a word, an utterance, a detritus: “haahr-nnn—,” like when the light pours in and the cave-eyed creatures go blind forever, like when you passage through some terror that nearly but does not finally kill you, and you realize that you’ve made it, and you know that you’re going to be okay now, you’re going to be okay, you’re okay, but not all of you made it. Some shreds of you, the fallout of your forging, was left like sawdust, like metal filings, dispersed around the crucible, anno domini WTF, bad command or filename. In the final estimation—what?

There is always this tension, between the myriad things which one feels—alone, in the sense that these things do not escape the confines of the self—versus the things which [one perceives/hopes that] the Other would enjoy being privy to (never minding the possibility or impossibility of such a gesture).

THAT I TURN around, and you are always there. I am driven to madness attempting to conjure you from my solitude—salmon-red Kia Rio, 20 minutes one way, 394-169-62…

This arc carries, and propels. My words are never beautiful enough.

I just want to pull your hair and paint your body /// with /// myself ///

My love, what happens inside you when we…? That somewhere above, things ECHO BACK & FROTH—this is such a beauty, and a horror…

Like Salome for John, my desire is for your skull to be in my lap, and my desire is to be desired by you who must never have me, and my desire is to be beheaded that I may be with you, and my head rolls, and my head rolls…

Do you know that you are SO MISSED?

So this ARISTOTLE character discusses the thrust of dramatic fictions as involving, oftentimes, a process of discovering/realizing, and then of processing, some previously unknown data of one’s intimate, historical personage. WELL THEN, that is why love is so DIFFICULT & SUCH: because the “realization”/”remembrance” of oneself is accelerated to the point of being made constant. The Other always knows things about you which you do not, and vice versa. It feels sometimes that the Other knows all the things about you which you do/can not.

For example, why do you love these ugly, stupid fingers, which cannot draw, or play guitar, or sew, etc.? Do you understand that these fingers are hateful to me? That they hurt and burden me? How can you say that you love them—that they bring you some pleasure, and endear you to them?

Your love for me is unintegratable (in that it defies my understanding), and because of this, your love is always a trauma.

And yet these urgent tatters must also be escaped, at threat of death—must be both escaped from, and made/allowed to escape. That is, this stuff, as it exists in us, in relation to ourselves, is a kind of wound, or burden; the relief of an embrace with the other, is the relief of escaping it for a moment (i.e., the relief is not of escaping “oneself,” but just this somethingwhich is in ourselves and which we usually carry alone). Moreover, it is as though this substance has a will of its own and commands us to release it, even against the fact that the task is impossible. In the moment of true encounter with the other, this urgent glow expands to fill us. We are its cage and vessel.

How to explain this by way of example? Notice that this substance occasionally appears to inhabit the body’s parts—both the parts of the other, and of oneself. The substance seems to surface at the skin, or wash out with the voice, to leak, or exude; the flesh gets to needing; patches of the body demand hands, the tongue, etc.. Yet even then, even then— and even in the release toward which these gestures work (orgasm, death, crisis, prophecy)—one opens one’s eyes to find that in the last possible moment, the secret stuff had migrated again. The hunger increased with the eating. The lover, once so close in the heated moment, has already receded and must be captured again.

Love’s many gestures, then, in all their variety, are always simultaneously gestures to, away from, and of this strange, urgent substance. But if, through this self-contradiction, love is futile, in the sense that by its very definition it is unable to be fulfilled or completed, then it is also incapable of stopping itself from attempting to be fulfilled, in spite of itself and all better judgment. And if the urgent need or capacity for exchanging or mediating love represents a kind of wound, as described above, then the goal (or at least animating desire) of love is to be able to carry the other’s wounds, repeating the other’s violence upon one’s own body until the wounds/love of the other have become one’s own. In this sense, love is cruel in how overwhelmingly it pressures us, and how sparsely, weakly, and little it allows this pressure to be released.

Thus love, if it ever exists in the first place, does not—cannot, by definition—end. It just gets to being unbearable sometimes so that we must walk away from it.

You wind around this path, careful not to slip on the wet of the rocks, and find yourself on the island-tip of an arm of soggy land reaching out into the lake. In the distance, the smoke stack of the Black Dog Electrical Plant stretches up into the thick air and disappears there. It all feels like a Tarkovsky film, only there’s no Bach, no poetry narrating the images, no cathartic tensions of fictional wretches–only your own loneliness, your own exploded thoughts, and the cold, the cold, the cold.

This is a space in which things are supposed to suddenly enter and change, but the change never comes. At least not the kind that matters. There’s a noticeably fresh “Fuck Off…” painted onto the concrete of the bridge, and a “vanessa was here (lots of times) 91 – ??” written in scrawling Sharpie, but besides these two things, there’s just the same old garbage, the same clicking of tires crossing the connecting teeth of the bridge overhead, the same dirt, the same angsty thoughts. And you’ve come here alone so very many times. You’ve come back because you’ve yet to find what you’re looking for here: a someone, a person you have known but forgotten, a Lady of the Lake, a Green Man, a blind prophet, a Fisher King.

See, no-one who’s ever come here with you has come here with you the right way; no-one ever fits the space. And it’s not that you fit the space, really–it’s just that you can hardly stand yourself not fitting the space, let alone two people not fitting it. (Why is it that for some people these things are so easy, so in their nature? What voice whispers in their ear, “go there, feel these things, be good?” Where’s your little voice that says these things? Why is it that you’re the inconsolable one, the one who is good in small doses only, the one who gets everything but feels nothing?

Perhaps this is unfair; you do, after all, appreciate the things you have. An omelette of smoked salmon, brie and asparagus is a good breakfast; the laptop you’re typing on is another luxury worth celebrating. But where, still, is your tiny voice? Where is your someone who makes the spaces possible? Where is your poetry narrating the images? And why no graffiti?

Oh, spend a few, sparse hours between work shifts running through Lebanon Hills and snapping photos. Two thoughts converge along the path.

1. The juxtaposition of youth and age is a common enough trope; “what is it like to be in the last years of one’s life, bla bla?” It’s a common image with a common response, one of quaint sadness; the implications are kept at a distance: they are old but we are not–and yet even that’s a common enough conclusion. It’s too easy. I wonder, then, instead, about middle age, and to me it almost seems scarier, crueler. I wonder, what must it be like to be middle-aged and to know that certain possibilities have been precluded, but that there is yet so much time to fill? That is, what must it be like to know that the moments in which one could have become/accomplished/experienced some certain thing have passed irretrievably, and that now, there are so many more days ahead? Surely, the experience of life is contiguous, largely unbroken, etc., but if one is ever to stop and survey one’s place along the timeline, then to look out over middle age is surely the most terrifying prospect to me. I suppose the experience of growing older is in large part the experience of watching the foreclosure of more and more possibilities from your life, until one day you realize that no, you won’t make it to the party, that she will never fall in love with you, that your book will never be published, that you’re too old to learn how to dance that dance, that the garden will never produce vegetables as delicious as they were that first year, that there is still no cure for cancer, that there is still no cure for loneliness, that there is nothing left to do now but fall asleep, etc.. And socially transgressive/taboo though it may be to mention such things, I find myself unable to resist bringing them up, because they are mine, too, (or will be in due time, however many years ahead,) and I am utterly terrified of this.
2. When looking at images of landscapes (especially of the Romantic variety), and to a lesser extent of distant cities, there’s this feeling I get of sublimity (in the sense of otherworldly terror, sudden sparking of the thoughts, etc.). And much has been written on the sublime, but what I’ve thought recently is that [at least some of] this exhilarating feeling produced by it (whatever its underlying mechanism or meaning) has something to do with the possibilities suggested by landscapes, that is, this feeling that comes from seeing in the image some version of oneself that one would have to become in order to arrive at such a landscape. In yet other words, I feel that one feels electrified because one imagines who (else) one would have to become in order to occupy such a body as is suggested by the eye of the camera; the possibility of landscapes, travel photography, skylines, etc., is the possibility of becoming other than one is as an observer. The “pleasure of the image” (after the “pleasure of the text” of Barthes), then, is the pleasure of becoming the body of the camera-eye. (Kino-pravda?) In this latter insight, I am reminded of an essay, “Divided We Stand: An Outline of Scandinavian Situationism,” which discusses “the idealized wish to be someone other than who we are becoming to be” (vis-à-vis what the Situationist’s called the “society of the Spectacle”, most famously in a certain of my favorite films) on the one hand, and on the other, “another historiography [which] can exist.” Taken together, I think these two things correlate to the feelings of possibility given by images of landscapes on the one hand, and on the other, some other more “actual” experience of landscapes. (I should point out that this word, “actual”, is problematic, since there are ways of experiencing “actual” landscapes as though they were photos (as, e.g., in the case of tourism).) In this former case of experiencing images (or landscapes as though they were images), there’s this kind of “oh if only I could become appropriate to this place,” and the feeling of possibility present in the image is a fantasy-possibility. This “other historiography,” then–the one contained in actual landscapes (“actually experienced”)–instead produces first a sublime/terrible “yes, this is actually happening–the storm stirs, and I will be wet, the bugs are real, I am cold, etc.,” and second, a feeling that follows this accomplishment, namely, “given this, what next?”

But further down the path, I find these disparate thoughts combining. I find myself wondering, what must happen to those who feel their sense of agency diminished–as by age, for but one example–when viewing these sublime landscapes I’m talking about, landscapes which in this particular conception of them are essentially objects of possibility and promise? (What, that is, of the poor, broken, sick, lost? The unimaginative? The [otherwise] enslaved?) In my own middle age, for example, will I look at certain landscapes and feel sadness, instead of possibility? If one’s position in life precludes certain possibilities, that is, does one feel sadness instead of joy? I can only guess yes, even if the mechanism remains mysterious. And I suspect that this dynamic is what drives one increasingly from one kind of possibility (historiography) into another; as agency decreases, one’s need for fantasy increases. Or is that too cruel a thing to think? Representing as it is the convergence of these two thoughts above, anyway, my interest is not so much in posing difficult but obvious paradoxes than in investigating the so-much-less-than-obvious instances in which the expected response of hope and possibility, etc. (as, e.g., in landscape paintings) are somehow intercepted, as it were, by an unknown condition of one’s life, a condition which one is specifically unable to become aware of yet which bitters everything that is sweet. Using myself as an example, why is it that certain moments in films, certain movements of a hand, certain smells of food burning, etc., make me feel so sad? What thing in myself is being quietly referenced in the background of my thoughts to make me whimper like that? What experiences have I yet to cure my heart of?

I know there are these things in me because, even now, I recognize in my own habits an awful lot of this former practice (the settling for phantom possibilities) in a certain practice of information accumulation endemic to what I’ve elsewhere called “database culture” (a culture which I broadly consider to include filesharing, iTunes & YouTube cultures), namely, the thrill of gathering ever more (audio)books, music, documentaries & films, etc.–this practice of seeking that “like in the photographs” sense of promise by acquiring ever more obscure, specific, technical, etc. knowledge objects. To my credit, I guess, it’s a habit I’ve been reexamining lately; I see it as an engagement with the same feeling one gets when going shopping with a few dollars in one’s pocket: every thing becomes a window into another way of being, into an other, better version of yourself. That is, I suspect the pleasure of shopping (consumer of the culture industry) to be of the same species as the pleasure of hoarding books and other knowledge objects (consumer of the knowledge industry? academia? the internet vis-a-vis the collecting and organizing principles of Empire under global capital? hmm…), at least when this latter pleasure (of books) is never “actualized” and instead remains at the level of “oh wouldn’t it be nice” possibility.

Echoing, at any rate, the SI essay again, I find that “another historiography [must] exist;” lately, I’ve found it happening in me again at Lebanon, running frantically through the woods, feeling the Old Magic stirring again in my blood, pissing in the bushes, identifying that special kind of rest that comes from a bed of prairie grass, etc. And afterward, reviewing the photos I took, finding them magical, realizing that they were indeed my photos, that I had been the body of that camera-eye–that the camera-eye was my eye, that when people look at these photos it is my body which they are becoming… And that’s something “actual.” Isn’t it?

For me, there is no other channel back into this self (or selves) than to read what I’ve written–that which has come uniquely from me into the world, as from nowhere. For my words are a kind of processing of the world, certainly–the language is borrowed, for example (as borrowed as my matter)–but, importantly, they come into being as though from somewhere outside of the world, somewhere in myself. And these thoughts like so much dust are all the evidence I have of–all the testament that exists to–who and what I’ve really been all this time.

I approach this dust wanting in my heart to be told who I was, what I am, how I am to continue; but though I go begging at these former selves for answers, I abide nothing less than exacting, tedious scrutiny. I endeavor to approach myself as a scientist does their specimen: fastidious, detached, methodical, impatient–and yet all of these things (if I am to be honest to myself about it) in a kind of Marie Curie or Isaac Newton way: possessed, obsessive, radical, deeply wearied.

This process of self-recovery therefore continues endlessly: no matter the isotopes gathered, there is no way to bring my husband back to life; no matter the maths invented and secrets of nature discovered, the Philosopher’s Stone does not come; no matter, that is, the extent of my research, this vision of myself (a thing I’ve lost) is always disassembling again into inassimilable parts, like smoke into the wind, at the remembrance of some small, forgotten thing or at some unsuspecting insight.

But why this vagueness? Why must the search be endless? Because once at the threshold of being caught, the image darts away? Yes, because the image is quick–there is that. But, moreover–or, more accurately, instead–what about the possibility that this vagueness in my conception of myself comes from a vagueness of my very self itself? That is, what if this image of myself is smoky, not because I am unable to look clearly (as through a glass darkly), but because the thing (myself) is itself smoke-made to begin with?

It is one thing to understand that the texts I leave behind are not (just) signs, but seals–to be read, to point, and to suggest, but never to be opened completely, to be made to reveal. It is one thing, indeed, to understand that I, Myself, am/is hid somewhere, guarded. But it is another thing to realize that this I, Myself, am/is not solid enough to be discoverable in the first place; is more a process than a product; is at the constant risk of shifting direction entirely with the wind.

But moments are those spaces of time in which everything that will happen, comes to happen, no? A moment contains the transformation of a playful glance into a seductive one (or else lechery); of hot tea tickling the tongue, to singing it; of the orgasm, flash-transmuting the universe into pleasure, to unbearable terrors; of the ringing phone, with they on the other end, saying everything you want them to, to someone else entirely, who wants to know if you’d like to purchase X Y Z…?

No, moments do not know human time. They are unpredictable, sometimes leisurely, sometimes hurried, always silent, always unsympathetic. So, here you are, putting something down for just a moment, but who knows how long this particular moment will be? Can you probe its will?

Oh, things have a way of returning, certainly. If a thing is something modest, like a scrap of paper, it may recede into those tiny cracks of shadow that wait, hungrily, between boxes, and books, and (paradoxically) other scraps of paper—but eventually, when you have to move the box, or stacks, you’ll confront the pieces again. Else, if the thing is more insistent, like a peel that calls the flies in, or maybe a phone that eventually (one would hope) receives a call, then maybe the thing escapes obscurity sooner. Or maybe you’re not at the mercy of the object; perhaps you’ll get lucky this time and remember where you put it, or, as it more often happens to be, you’ll get lucky and find where it ended up.

But maybe something else entirely will happen; maybe you could never pick it up properly in the first place, with your hands free, even, lifting with the legs (not with the back) and all that. Or else maybe it’s just too heavy. And this thing, this heavy thing: you don’t intend to pick it up again. Maybe you can’t.

What about those things, that don’t ever fade, but that you can never again lift? Like bodies mummifying in the dry sand (or else pickling in a bog, or freezing in ice, etc.), disappearing from view for a time (a moment), but returning again, haunting your museum?

What bodies haunt your museum?

String Quartet No. 15 in A minor (“Heiliger Dankgesang”), Op. 132:  III. Molto Adagio; Andante (“Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart”, “Holy Song of Thanksgiving by a Convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode”)

>>But oh the truth of it is, this is all just to tide me over. What I want is BLOOD. I have eight rambling drafts of posts to finish, some of which have been sitting in queue since August of last year I AM NOT KIDDING THIS IS RLY HARD YOU GUYS. The post I currently need to finish, and from which I am taking a break in order to play around with this post (oh,

[what I want to write here  is "the clandestine blog post in the night, is a cruel mistress, but at last, she is my mistress,” or something to that misogynist effect, the thought having coagulated out of a vague recollection of the quote “such and such is… a cruel mistress,” HOWEVER >>>> I googled “is a cruel mistress” (the quotes are important), and found that there are many cruel mistresses in this world. Following are 136 CRUEL MISTRESSES, as catalogued by the Google (and sorted by me in alphabetical order because I am secretly a great pedant):

1. addiction
2. age
3. alcohol
4. alphabet, the
5. art
6. AskMe
7. Astroglide
8. audience of participators, benefactors and critics, the
9. bad timing
10. ballet
11. bayou, the
12. beauty
13. bitterness
14. Black Christian Media
15. blame
16. blogging
17. body, the
18. bowling
19. Burger King, The
20. Caltech
21. Capitalism
22. carrie
23. cash box, the
24. cinema
25. clock, the
26. coffee
27. crochet
28. data
29. daylight
30. democratic politics
31. denial
32. desire
33. destiny
34. Dewey Decimal System, the
35. Difficulty Curve, the
36. double dutch jump
37. evolution
38. fame
39. fantasy baseball
40. fashion
41. fate
42. Fortuna
43. future, the
44. FxCop
45. gaia
46. gardening
47. gas
48. geodata
49. gravity
50. greed
51. Green Fairy, The
52. hard break, the
53. heroin
54. hipness
55. history
56. Hollywood
57. hope
58. IIS
59. inertia
60. inflation
61. insomnia
62. internet fame
63. internet, the
64. irony
65. jazz guitar
66. jealousy
67. Jet-lag
68. karma
69. Kitchen Muse, The
70. L.A.
71. Lady Luck
72. lake effect wind
73. law, the
74. life
75. lightning
76. literature
77. love
78. “Loveline”
79. market, the
80. math
81. Michigan
82. MIDI
83. mind, the
84. mirror, the
85. Monohydrazine-veined typecasting
86. Mother Nature
87. motorcycling
88. mountain, the
89. musuem, the
90. nature
91. NCAA tournament, the
92. new construction
93. nostalgia
94. OCD
95. perception
96. Photoshop
97. porcelain goddess in his bathroom, the
98. pornography
99. procrastination
100. puberty
101. public admiration
102. RAID 5
103. reality
104. reality TV
105. recession
106. regression
107. relevance
108. revenge
109. RNG
110. road, the
111. rock and roll
112. running
113. S3
114. science
115. sea, the
116. search for the newest trends in popular music, the
117. she
118. silliness
119. sketch comedy
120. sleep
121. slow business
122. soccer
123. social media
124. South Beach Diet, The
125. Southern Ocean, the
126. spandex
127. Spears’ gene
128. sport
129. theatre, the
130. time
131. universe, the
132. Vista
133. vodka
134. white widow, the
135. Wichita restaurant market, the
136. Zeitgeist, the

everything, everything…), to be an exhausting explanation of why I write my blog. How lame. Truth is, I want to be a serious philosopher, but I’m afraid I’d never be taken seriously; at times, for example right now, I want more than anything to tear myself into confetti. I listened to Vivaldi for about seven hours and it’s stuck in me like a knife, an icicle knife, the kind you hear about in logic puzzles. Here is the puzzle: if I could just get warm for once, if I could just be with you, if I could just swallow sunbeams, well then maybe it would all melt, and the wound of this music—this wound that is pure music; the wound of the-world-as-cruel-mistress; the exquisite, exquisite pain that feels like mountains shaking into dust, and the apotheosis of movie stars in every movie ever, and warfare as an aesthetic project called Shock and Awe, and me, drowning my face in tears against your chest, with the endless Glass string quartets and Vivaldi trio sonatas for 2 violins and basso continuo no.s 1-10; perhaps all of this, this interdimensional cosmic wound that calls out to be cut and cut and cut, which makes my stomach roll over like a scared old dog and my fingers twitch against the keyboard for release, if the cosmic holy psychic icicle knife composed of pure music should ever melt in me, and the notes stop, and the skin sew back together, etc., would I even want that? How would they ever find the culprit? Is that what I want—that they, the police and search engines, never see my destroyer, whom I love with all of my feeble ability? Am I not now responsible for this wound—as a testament of my power to survive, and of my great terror, and most of all, of the power of my destroyer, to whom I owe everything?

Alas, this paradox—she listens to way better bands than I do, and she won’t talk to me because I don’t have a car, plus I have strep throat and smell of chicken soup and honey. I feel doomed to heal, but not ever completely. That would just be too much.

The 29 poems of Gulf are an eclectic mix of styles and language that is at turns formal and experimental, ecstatic and vulgar, swift and dense. Sometimes, they are all of these things at once.

There they were – open slowly your shoulder blades! [from "Baal, or the Technicolor Polo Shirt"]

This experimental aspect of the poetry — an effect of using software to process/produce/mediate the poems — is what originally drew me to Stephens. My own writing is heavily influenced by software as both a tool for writing and as a subject for critical inquiry, and I was hoping to learn more about the field.

As it turns out, in order to understand what it would mean to read computer poetry from a static/printed book (rather than through an interactive medium, as I’d assume), I found it necessary (/irresistible) to explore something of the nature, history and current discussion surrounding computer poetry. I did this alongside my reading of Gulf and learned a lot in the process. Read the results of this excursion in the follow-up companion post, “Computer Poetry: ‘Language as Gameplay’” (to be posted soon).

Surveying Gulf

When I read a book, I usually study the table of contents, read the foreword/intro pieces and the first chapter/poem or two, then get impatient. I jump to the end and read the last line (no matter what), then flip backwards toward the front, stopping where I like. (If it’s a dead-tree book, I ruffle the pages and smell the paper. Deeply. Numerous times. Try this if you haven’t.) When I’m satisfied that my search algorithm has covered most of the book, I then start at page 1 again and run page by page, just to be sure. This is how I started reading Gulf.

(It is nothing like revolution, it is more like de-
volution.) (Rabbits in the patch dying
from artificially induced suffocation for law and limp
order.) (Shore leave or compromise, all
the same in the hyperbolic star of an
infant with nipple needs.) (They keep the borg
tape-mouthed, wrists cuffed in the
closet.) [from "N Epic"]

The poems range in form and length from single-stanza poems, to a short (1-page) acrostic, to a 15-page conceptual poem, to the 32-page title-poem. Given the set of concerns that frame the book, and taking into consideration UbuWeb’s mention that it “first appeared in the form of a huge mass of stapled photocopies,” I suspected that the overall structure/layout was arbitrary. (I think, too, of Manovich’s notion that the new media art object is essentially “an interface to a database.” A book, as a collection of texts, is just one possible “view” of a larger database of texts.)

That said, it’s clear that the structure of the poems themselves is quite the opposite; knowing that Gulf was written programmatically leads to a number of questions.

For example, what is the relationship between the “input,” or original, text source, and the final product? Does a full reading of the poetry necessitate a reading (or a familiarity, for that matter) with the original text? Some of the poems confess their original text while others keep their sources concealed. The poem “Stops and Rebels,” for example, is a scramble of a translated poem by Tennyson. The footnotes from “Didactic Poem” read, “Robert Creeley, from ‘Seven,’ in Pieces; Ron Padgett, from Great Balls of Fire; Susan Howe, from Pythagorean Silence; John Ashbery, from ‘37 Haiku,’ in A Wave.” Most others list nothing.

And what about the role of the code as a kind of source (or even author)? That is, where the text breaks down and fails to make sense — where it feels like noise — is this Stefans’s “fault, or the softwares? Conversely, wherever it does read clearly, is “actually Stefans speaking,” or is it coincidence on the part of the software? True random numbers do not exist in computers; even when they are random, they are random in a precise way. In this way, even where there is no visible order to the text, it can be assumed that this very disorderliness — by merit of the fact that it was produced by software — is methodical, intentional, and possibly even consciously shaped.

Of course, we can never know any of this for sure; Stefans didn’t include his source code.

With open-source software and web media (like this very post), we can see the relationship between the output and the code; we can reify the relationship between the work and its source, tracing its decision-making processes. With new media art like Stefans’s computer poetry, though, this is not the case; the “output” we’re given is first mediated by the artist (the “attractor” function that Stefans describes in his “Language as Gameplay” lecture), who stands between us and the machine.

In fixed texts like Gulf, we are disallowed (or at least discouraged) from making a distinction between the voice of the author and the voice of the computer. The computer and the poet speak with the other’s voice.

Parsing “Slipstream”

My favorite poem (and a good example of what the poetry is capable of, then) is “Slipstream”; I love it for its mad, incoherent ecstasy and its urgent, sprawling, 15-page form. Reading it is like having your brain subjected to a buffer overflow attack by bizarre, lascivious hacker-angels. (Uh, yeah.) Here are the first five lines:

Bucked Strange They Sex Complexity & Slowly Somatically Typically Relax “This Dream Is
Spurious” One Conjures To Commit In Middling Fit Doubled Cumulus Topples Overhead
Feet Brink On The Nervousness A Colon Splits Irredentist Utopian Brakes Sprach Breach
Iridescent Peon Thus Hegelian Circumspection O Torched Polygon Blandishments Of
Sympathy Regalia Of Arms & Slowly Somatically Typically In The False Wood Duration’s

There’s too much to process! I freak out! And yet short passages of meaning do emerge, here and there. Sparse, vivid images flash by. We keep intently focused on every word. (Stefans talks openly about using suggestive words and images to make sure that users/readers never lose interest.)

And longer passages in “Slipstream” open into more-or-less coherent-looking sentences like this one, offering hope:

Vestigial Tyrannical Myrmidons Concatenate Fruitfully.

Or this one:

How I Matriculated Among Certain Of Your Exquisite Exits.

And then, er, well these also end up being nonsensical (and/or sexual), and the futile, irresistible scanning continues. The “stream” being “slipped” is clearly a stream of consciousness. Meaning ruptured somewhere upstream, and is now unclear of its ability (or even desire) to return to a state of signification. The result is a kind of drunk, lucid buzz, or maybe hangover, in which violence, transgression, anatomy, digital bits, lust, and critiques of self, capitalism and society all intermingle. It’s a powerful drink.

This dynamic persists in other poems which appear more “conventionally” written (i.e., exclusively organic), but it is here in “Slipstream” that the uniqueness of it becomes more pronounced. Importantly, however, the emphasis is not on “Stefans’s weird language” or “the weird language produced by Stefans’s software.” Rather, it is enough to know that both were involved to read the poem successfully; the “weird language,” if it could even be reduced to that, is made acceptable the fact that it is a hybrid product, a text written both by machine and human.

Enter to Continue

Theory aside, Gulf is a fun read. It’s quirky and surprising, smart, vivid and, I guess, “poetic.”

And that’s encouraging. Taken alongside the research I did while reading it, the book expanded my thinking on computer poetry. I’ve also added a new entry to my reading list.

I’ll finish up the research post in the next few days, then get back to my writing. Watch out for text-analysis poetry soon…

I’ve always liked to imagine that somewhere, somewhen — whether anciently on this planet, or else off in a distant galaxy — there’s a language that merges music, dance and text. Like the inverse of synaesthesia (the merging of senses), it would combine all methods of communication into one: a single, high-bandwidth channel of sung, full-body sign language.

But these bodies are rough-hewn and unruly, of course. I can’t even force mine to wake up before noon sometimes, let alone dance the divine names, etc.! Hence copy-pastes and intertextuality–like this soundtrack.FLASH TO ASHES / LUST TO DUST is what I listen to as I write, and/or what I imagine the things I write to sound like (and/or listen to).

That means cold strings fast-beating climaxes, psych-folk guitars synth-&-scratching. It means distance and closeness, melancholy and abrupt ecstasies, insight and obfuscation (stumbling out of a fog, into mist).

In other words, this is what the world sounds like (these chapters):

1. Mikael Fyrek – Do you think it’s just a dream?
   I can finally see what darkness looks like, 2005
   Waking up with fog in the head, in flight over the earth. What’s this?
2. The Books – Smells Like Content
   Lost and Safe, 2005 / Playall, 2008
   A confirmation from the universe that things are more complicated than we can contain. All we can do is acknowledge this. Chop yr thoughts.
   
3. Four Tet – Ribbons
   Ringer, 2008
   Wake up in the night, still intoxicated, chased by lights. It’s happening!
4. Majessic Dreams – Have to Go
   Majessic Dreams, 2005
   But back up–what was it, before? Yes: there we were, and someone walked away…
5. Björk Guðmundsdóttir – Ambergris March
   Drawing Restraint 9, 2005
   (Someone marches, trailing holographic tentacles of flowers + embers + microchips.)
6. Xiu Xiu – Wig Master
   The Air Force, 2006
   Strings slice the body into tiny cubes, then sing cold enough to freeze them.
7. Philip Glass – String Quartet No. 3 (Mishima): Blood Oath
   Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass, 1995
   The strings river the body downstream, thawing and reassembling it slowly on the shore.
8. Panda Bear – (Untitled #2)
   Young Prayer, 2004
   Stands up and breathes!
9. Disasterpeace – Ensis
   Heartcode (A II Music Compilation), 2008
   Fire-breath! The journey is this: there’s too much here to hold, but some things fit good in these arms.
10. M83 – Staring At Me
    M83, 2002
    Across the many distances the many distances, there are some things worth running/waiting for! Like you?
11. Portishead – Machine Gun
    Third, 2008
    In all your terror? They see now: their love for you was too dark.
12. of Montreal – The Past Is A Grotesque Animal
    Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, 2007
    But then, maybe it has to be like that: you are a necessary kind of terror. None of our secrets are physical.
13. Trash80 – Sodium Sonet (Extended)
    Icarus, 2008
    (Running the many distances the many distances, holding the sky in the head.)
14. Mogwai – Sine Wave
    Rock Action, 2001
    “Tiny cubes of bodies in the river, what do you say to this? Your strings are awash in electrical static like hearts of drowning robots.”
15. Four Tet – Everything Is Alright
    Pause, 2001
    From the wilderness: drums, and resolve:
16. Odd Nosdam / Thee More Shallows – Freshman (Remix)
    Pretty Swell Explode, 2008
    The text must be revised more wisely, like channeling spirits. Things are more complicated than we can contain and all we can do is acknowledge this.
17. Black Moth Super Rainbow – Untitled Roadside Demo
    Dandelion Gum, 2007
    (Resting on the road, transcribing this narrative, pondering.)

For me, it is desperation. There is no in-between: only mania or atrophy-death: only salvation, or else nothing. Ah!

Some moments, I cannot press myself close enough to the screen; do you know what I mean? The desire is of course to fall in! Like walking into the close-distant images of mirrors: like standing in the dressing room at a Richardson Square Mall department store as a child and awing at the infinite tunnels, each shrinking sub-room filled with me; if only I could walk to myself over there, where space bends in on itself a bit, perhaps the dress pants would fit better; perhaps I could end the shopping trip for a climb through the non-euclidean space of destiny/adventure.

But no: I am always standing in the way of myself in those other spaces, with my droopy pants and hate of shopping, blocking my own movement and vision beyond. And anyway, Richardson Square Mall was demolished in June 2007:

The major retailers had left (with their mirrors, presumably). So where would I be now, if I had entered that space? As trapped with myself as I am now, only more literally, I guess, right? I wonder if the conversation would be any better.