In mysterious corridors, endless bookshelves ornament the walls of the ancient building. Databases are its impalpable decor. Silence, looming above the minds immersed in the texts as versatile as they get, is saturated with pondering whose vehemence can only be compared with the pounding of an infant’s skull on the pulsating membrane of the placenta. Thoughts have weight here. They are hanging from the ceiling…brooding thoughts are looking at their own generator. A jungle of neurotransmitters’ electrifying trajectories. Galaxies full of orbits of unpredictable movements. Pulverizing impenetrability of riddled strings of words. Infinitely puzzling. Infinitely secretive. Endless strings of words. In books. In the book.
In one’s surgical adventures, Name uses sharp-edged tools in order to remove alien tissue darkly attached to the hidden bends on the soft inside of one’s cranium. Faced with one’s hand reaching for the goodies from the collection of what to a more aesthetically inclined eye may look as curved, crooked, metal devices of astonishing delicacy…sinuous artistry…For Name, however, they are just surgical tools—for digging the archive. Here’s what Name’s dug:
How political is political? There is no description of the future dystopian enough to be scary of. True. Because no such a description depicts an unlived historical moment. A poetic expression is a process through which the mind propagates thoughts and images, all the while transforming itself into a modified version of its original condition, fertilizing the soil for the next occurrence of a metaphor harvest. For example, the situation in which a subject, or, a character is seated in a room that separates one from the scenery (evidently so appealing to oneself) is clearly meant to symbolize the predicament humanity was faced with in the postrenaissance era. More precisely, the increasing polarization between the mind and the body—not to mention the soul—was proportionate with the degree of the human innerness being torn between the urge to think and a simultaneous impulse to physically exist.
Somewhere in the semilost debris of what had been regarded as an inherent trait was a halfmuted cry for something that had to do with belief. Arguably, the split resulted from a serious (some would even characterize it as soul-shaking, but one needs not use jargon-free tools to negotiate theorizing), unprecedented shifts in the ways the society was structured and, more importantly perhaps, the modes of an individual’s positioning in the restructured world. To elucidate the point, we will briefly consider the rise of the industrialist culture rendering identity definable in monetary, rather than cosmic terms. In particular, the revision of the social and private alike went from the dismissal of the Great Chain of Being to embracing the great order of producing. Reducing a person to a laborer—exploited to death—had a devastating effect on one’s experience of the inner space as much as it forever changed human understanding of societal institutions. The overall impression of an individual inhabiting such a new world was that of incorrigible hostility.
An exposé of this new social situation was provided by the eminent theoretician of the post-Great-Chain-of-Being culture by the name of George Turner. In his most recent study Looking and Being Looked at (2045), quite in accord with his previous theorizing, Turner delivers an explanation casting light on the condition in which the humanity experienced something that would linger on for the next couple of centuries--a dark cloud over civilization sewing a seed of what was believed to be an irrecoverable sense of inexplicable anxiety. He claims that not only a major aspect of human existence was profoundly shaken, but that it practically disappeared (51). Discarding religious vocabularies from the specter of descriptive tools, in Turner’s opinion, was a major contribution to phantom theorizing. Strangely, one may argue, the discharge of insufficiently factitious descriptions of the world and evidence-free cosmologies, brought to man’s chest another kind of burden: an irreconcilable states of having certain experiences and the inability to talk about them.
Although widely accepted as a plausible, historically informed take on post-Great societies, Turner’s speculative apparatus features potentially flawed argumentative maneuvering. As is convincingly explicated in The Comprehensive Guide through the Allegedly Phantom Culture (2050) by Larsønae Emoęn, Looking and Being Looked at impartially succeeds in rationalizing the complexities of the newly arisen social structure, inner turmoil, and theoretical tribulations. Vital to Emoęn’s critique is a lucid insight into Turner’s falling short of giving a more elaborate defense of his views, thereby finding himself faced with the caveat that he is thematizing. The paradox of such a theoretical impasse is further brought to the reader’s attention in what can be regarded as the thesis of this impressive work of Emoęn’s:
To say that a certain way of experiencing the world persisted after tectonic social movements changed both how we realize our communal being and the modes of talking about them is to lose one’s theoretical threat in the foggy realm of the irrational, that peculiarly existed and did not at the same time; to track the civilization’s unease through the scary, untrodden woods of the lost world is to speak the language that cannot tell whether one intended to be a flash in the obscurity of thought. (721)
To sum up, given these divergent, yet highly regarded and utterly informative views, we can say that to sit does not necessitate cognitive engagement, although such an office is by no means excluded from the range of human capacities in such a situation. To break the spell of crypticity, let’s point out the fact that if seated in an unmoving position long enough, the body experiences kinetic energy equal to the force developed by a spaceship at the moment before it starts landing. True. It is to realize the paradoxical dynamic of extremes: poverty and wealth, when manifested in their respective radical forms, both have an astonishingly detrimental effect on the human soul, heart, and body. Furthermore, to cognate seemingly inhibits the forces that can reach the fruition of the prevailing attempt to live freed from the threat of amputation. It is to watch behind the window pane and be focused on the sill. It is to dissolve oneself in the burning ocean of the blueness that no glass can keep distant enough from a mind’s grasp. It is to be colored in the shades of mixture that no space can keep contain, or, prevent sparkles from spraying up. It is to live whosever dream without feeling slightest fear that it can do something to the innermost smile.
By Way of a Social Commentary
Deep chasms of the privileged compartment of the Truth in the faculty of poetry was soon to be discovered and classified as poetics of oblivion. Overpoeticized and rhapsodic interpretations of reality were to be shunned as inappropriate representations of what really constituted human life. The anxiety shaking one’s positioning in the ever growing web of societal categories was to be questioned from the perspective of the validity of the vocabulary utilized for talking about such a state of affairs. Far from claiming that existential concerns were no longer being expressed through the language of poetry, this article aims to show the shift in narrative devices that in a much-more-to-the-ground manner told stories about what it meant to be human and alive at a certain point in history. The pillar of the argument is the idea that the establishment of social institutions, paralleling the reinforcement of a particular policy on what is nowadays called global plane, reconfigured power relations classwise in the way that gave rise to the voices of the overexploited as much as it was a playground for the overprivileged to contemplate upon and reaffirm their social positioning. So restructured social relations were impossible, to say the least, to be expressed in a poetic vernacular; instead, a new, prose vocabulary was launched as a fresh means of telling the world about how it felt to be part of it.
In her revolutionizing study about the social and literary phenomena in question titled Why We Still Long for the Impossible Naivety of the Times Bygone (2047) Channa Kerrion exposes to the reader a notorious truth about the importance of refocusing on the poetics of the everyday and the magnificent powers of the typically downplayed mundane language of the prose that depicts a historical moment. S/he stresses the much ignored fact about the potency of the language of an ordinary man pushed to the margins of existence through the severely broadened gap between the overprivileged and the underprivileged in the orbit of monetary ideology:
Once man found himself stripped to the basic ingredients of what would have otherwise been called life, s/he came to fully realize the fatality of the development caused by the growth of certain social strata. Poverty was firmly established as a cultural category determining man’s identity. That fact forever changed the way man experienced himself; it also undoubtedly altered the possibilities of readwriting about the new existential situation. (1)
The new possibilities Kerrion has in mind can be found in the rich literary legacy left for us from that period. It is small wonder that they still inspire our linguistic curiosity about the nuances of everyday language and awake the sentiment directing it towards seeking the secret that enabled big social truths to be revealed through such simple narrative devices. To illustrate the point, one is, time and again, drawn to the example found in the literary treasure chest from that period. A section from the novel Life and Love as They Are Imagined by the Rich to Be Lived by the Poor (3077) by Sannuu Dation is an instance of such an idiosyncratic subtlety:
S/he stood by the window. S/he was sitting in the armchair, waiting for her final decision: now was the moment when their destiny was to be determined by a simple Yes, once and for all freeing them both from the respective predicaments. If s/he agreed to marry him, his identity would forever change from that of a harshly impoverished factory worker to a member of country gentry. For her, it would be a passport to a promised land that disposes humiliation or bigotry as surrogate keys to family psychodynamics. (615)
This passage evidences simplicity of a literary expression, clarity of the train of thought, purity of genre, and crystalline nature of emotions. It also bears witness to deeply depressing social realities, from which naivety emerges as an extraordinary power reflected in the world of the letters. It is due to the preservation of that sentiment that we are today still able to confront the escalation of social inequities and political vandalism, claims Kerrion (130).
Anti-Ludites Culture: The World That Takes No Brains for Myths
The window, like a willow.
The eyes. I see with;
The space behind it—
Never to be spaetciousal enough.
Or, it really is?
Many a thought has so far been devoted to Alliana Nusraum’s coded, enigmatic language in her poem mystically titled “Is Really Or” (4040). Most interpretations literary theoreticians, critics, and literati by and large have based on the playful, yet eerie, relationship between the words denoting physical objects and the abstract nonobjectness suggested through their sparse presence. What singularly catches one’s attention is the concreteness of the opening: the juxtaposition of the animate with the inanimate prompts the mainline of the grist to Nusraum’s mill. The contrast between them is sharpened through the use of punctuation. However, other figures of speech—such as alliteration and simile—simultaneously bring these elements closer to each other. In her groundbreaking analysis Or. What Space. Is Never? (5501), Maergareth Olegalestic, the leading analyst of the culture of anti-ludites, characterizes this relationship as “edgy rubbing on a brink of softness” (202). The second line features assonance that enhances the repetitiveness of the audio component. It introduces phonetically the theme that is in the next line lexically realized. However, Nusraum rarely lets her verses speak up—the punctuation cuts the breath of the trope, defragmenting the potential unity. This “shallow breathing,” as it is sometimes called, is allegedly Nusraum’s poetic device suggesting the world’s suffocating and attempting to breathe again during a series of wars and the phunkie peace interrupting them. Further, the dash in the third line is not merely a reflection of the poetess’ inventive use of punctuation; it is a social commentary referencing the previous era and the prevalent implications of the social relations that characterized it. Finally, the word order in the closing line is deliberately bewildering, as it invites a question ignoring the traditional syntactic requirement for the subject/predicate inversion.
Jolly good and neat indeed. Name finds oneself reflecting on the portion of the dazzlingly critical mind, freed from emotional superfluousness. But lo! A pang in Name’s chest speaks up instead of one’s vocal apparatus: an article like the one from which Name has just read an excerpt betrays the spirit of the era it criticizes. Simply put, it is blasphemy of a sort, as it violates the very cornerstone of the new way in which the world of letters was being imagined. Particularly heretical is the observation about the dash—it introduces in the debate the social component absolutely unthinkable within the literary vocabulary of the anti-ludites culture. The rest of Nusraum’s analysis is seemingly in tune with the anti-ludites demand for poetic autonomy. Yet, it, essentially, leaves poetry in the backyard of its own house.
The way back to the house leads through unconscious memory of the future when the past pursuit was going to be accomplished as a secret code that obliges the reader to unveil the subject matter through the decrytoprocessor of one’s interpretative apparatus. Although adopted as an emotio-mental pattern, the mechanism gets domesticated so the host has no memory of not having had it as part of his or her biological being. What is more, the decryptoprocessor gets automatically activated when the one finds oneself faced with text of the approximately following content:
October 27th, 20X
I see you in the arm cut off and falling from where it used to be. Joined…attached to the shoulder. Its departure is an avalanche of gushing blood, torn tissue, broken bones, and spurting lymph. I am looking at what used to be the point of junction; now it is a howling crater fully prepared to devour…backwards…the lava of life…suck it into its depths…let it simmer the juices springing from its cradle…is processed and ready for another passage. Entering where the arm once was. And now is cut off.
Encountering the piece entitled “October 27th, 20X” by Anonymous, Seemrole Yock, the leading critic in the field of acquapatternism and director of the PostFestAfterWhat program at the Department of Retroimprovement, University of HowYesNo, provides the following account of his / her reading experience and presents the interpretation resulting from it. Professor Yock, along with the unavoidable, interpretative subtext, finds it necessary to consult the bible of acqapatternism—Myths, Holes, and South Roles (6442) by Barnara Cordhajmo. In the light of the theory discovered by Cordhajmo, the text becomes available for interpretative investigation when the first veil of the subtext deactivates its codebreaking disabler. Once the sine qua non is obtained, the process is set in motion. Cordhajmo claims that the first stage of reading, following deactivation of the disabler, happens while the reader is still perplexed by the impenetrability of the subject matter. Put differently, the first two stages of reading, actually, start in the crepuscular haze, reminiscent of the misty dawns of the days primordial. Devoid of unnecessary, human-related burden of existence and reading, the contact with the text in the key of the desert immemorial ensures purging of the interpretative channels from the noise of the autobiographical, socio-political, and/or isms of their ilk. Such purity of vision is another prerequisite for distilling from the text the radical essence.
Cordhajmo devises another angle from which to approach the language of the text in question. More precisely, s/he suggests that in order to impregnate the reading material with the imprinted code, the reader needs to inhale a significant amount of a haphazard mixture of linguistic patterns, hold it inside one’s verbal chamber for twenty-four seconds, and exhale it onto the surface of the text analyzed. By doing so, the organic concoction gets exchanged between the two poles of the communication tunnel. A matter of fact is that this infusion of the seemingly nontextual components, actually, dislocates the insipidness from the otherwise futile linguistic substance.
Myths, Holes, and South Roles further explicates the evolution of the reading process by exposing to the investigator the facticity of determination inherent to the nature of weaving the web of meaning. The most prominent aspect of that unshakable fact is revealed through innovative strategies of making the imprinted pattern visible to the interpreter, albeit not before the first unconscious and the second semiconscious stages are completed. Thus, with the beginning of the third phase, the reader starts applying reading tactics in the way typically perceived to be a creative discovery of meaning.
Terry Eagleton: “Surely life itself must have a say in that matter” (The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction 67). Ken Wark: “The thing other than life through which life is thought can take one of three forms. One: life is spirit […] Two: life is time […] Three: life is form” (The Beach beneath the Street 97). What, then, is reading-writing? What is storytelling? Providing a possible definitive answer to such question feels like a leap in the dark. But then, “[w]ithout the gamble on welcome, no door can be opened when freedom knocks” (George Steiner, Real Presences 156).
For some writers literature is memory. For some it is the character. Some claim that the tone, or some other literary element, is what makes reading a literary experience. There are opinions that the decomposing corpse of the signature has conquered the everyday and became letters. Many are prone to think that writing-reading occurs because there is nothing else to do. There are readers-writers who believe that storytelling is a dream’s reincarnate. For some writers beauty is what we make. Others think pleasure is who we are. Some, however, weave the unsayable fabric out of the fusion of the aforementioned threads. The fabric called the remix.[i]
[i] All pictures by the author. This essay, in a modified version and entitled "Nonprescriptive Narratives: Disruptions in Discourse, Wellspring of Words," was published in New Formalism Of/On The Contemporary, guest ed. Nicholas Birns. Spec. Issue of
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