Shadow Talk: Sites of Decapitated Majesties, Cites of Dethroned Words, and…(Part 1)

(An) In-cighte[1]

If noise occurs in the communication channel, the information flow acts accordingly in order to remix it. As an element of the communication flux, text is, by definition, in the service of the sovereign—language. It is also a form of resistance against contaminating noise, i.e., a means of remixing the noise. Language epitomizes the dialectic of consumption and creation. In language it is possible to express, say, tell, present, state, utter, but what makes language a double blessing is that it resists precise verbalization, or, in some instances, altogether resists verbalization. Language is frustrating because what it tends to distort the message that is to be delivered. However, besides being elusive, language is also protective. By making manifest the imperfection of communication, it silently acknowledges its limits. Analogously, it shows the limits of the human grandeur and reaffirms human potentials. It does so by demonstrating the impossibility of replicating what the contemporary pluralist discourse suspiciously  calls authenticity.

Creation is a purifying force in the communication channel. In the parlance of Terry Eagleton in “The Revolt of the Reader” (Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 1986), it means “to take over the means of production” (184) from the oppressor. As such, doing things with text is an ecorebellion. In order to present instances of green storytelling uprising, the analyses of Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations (1982) and Stewart Home’s Memphis Underground (2007) are centered around McKenzie Wark’s cultural critique titled A Hacker Manifesto (2004). They are mainly explored via the tacit content of the narratives because it is those  layers of the text that have the capacity to subtonicly  undermine the discursive. Relying on William S. Burroughs’s admiration of plagiarism, Acker’s Great Expectations is read in the light of the triumph of imagination and spirit, according to her testimonial  “Dead Doll’s Prophecy” (The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility 1994).

Extralinguistic and imponderable as it may be, silence, is also endemic to literary playfulness. It is the impalpable level of the story that suspends the reader’s belief, and yet sustains oscillating amidst uncertain certainties. It stirs the slumberous spirit, sedentary heart, and (un)dead soul. It undoes delusional  thinking. Of primary concern in this analyses is identifying the areas that can inspire suspicion about contemporary cultural realities. The critique is based on dissensus: a disbelief in what cultural mechanisms of control impose on one as the only way to live. It is resistance against the entertainment-military mentality that deprives human beings of individuality, and fellowship of communal cohesion.

Reading-writing against noise pollution is a creative practice, a form of resistance against oppression. It faces its own predicament resulting from the relational character of language. Yet, there is a noise filter that literature devises to silently clean the communication channel. The tone is the tacit layer that voices out the unsaid of the text, thereby enabling a fruitful exchange.  Through that layer Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations and Stewart Home’s Memphis Underground tell a story about how it feels to live in the  underdeveloped and overdeveloped worlds in an age of the oddly uniforming and isolating global politics. They challenge the reader, destabilize one’s trust in the narrative, and open up lateral paths of undoing the forged image of the totality of  discourse.

By extension, they render remixable discursive cultural realities, cultural constructs.  Reader-writer is understood to be  the DJ--the voice sometimes manifest, at times subtonicly present, a vessel for the free flow. As a re-enactment of the notion of construct, storytelling shows the limits of both dehumanizing and human control/power, thereby rendering remixable both discourse and cultural realities.

 Grace and/as Justice: Kitch’n’Sink Aesthetics of Ignoration

     Reading-writing across media, genres, and disciplines is a unifying practice combining words, sounds, and images. It is a remixed concept of storytelling demonstrating possibilities of analogous interventions on other planes. For example, it implies a critical reading of self as fluid and revisable through an exchange with fellow humans. Likewise, it opens up back alleys enabling silent disruptions  in the discursive, subverting the forged image of discursive omnipotence. By extension, it is reasonable to believe that culturally constructed realities we know are not immune from remixing either. For that reason, this is written in hope to reanimate the spirit that the novels analyzed propagate: freedom from enslavement by delusion that is transforming the world into a disney-babylonian market.

Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations (1982) portrays consumer paradise, the exposing the picture of Dorian Gray of commodity culture. To elucidate the thematic, the analysis is followed by an investigation of literary techniques in Acker’s story “Dead Doll Prophecy” (The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society & Social Responsibility 1994) Her metacritique of obsession by possession is taken as a literary tool enabling responses to oppressive cultural realities.

            In England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (2001), Jon Savage contends that “history is made by those who say ‘No’” (541). The exploration of Acker’s writing reveals a genuine punk-rock contribution to the process of making-writing history, the process that should by no means be confused with monopolizing history. Rather, it means challenging and remixing bewildering realities thriving on possession and the exercise of sheer power. McKenzie Wark:

Even the would-be “radical” histories, the social histories, the history from below, ended up as forms of property, traded accordingly to their representational values, in an emerging market for commoditized communication. Critical history only breaks with dominant history when it advances to a critique of its own property form, and beyond, to the expression of a new productive history and the history of the productive. (A Hacker Manifesto [094] square brackets in original).

Great Expectations criticizes vulgarized aesthetics rendering spectacular both life and creation. Acker presents the schism between the everyday colonized by commodity on the one hand and, on the other, a counteracting cultural practice. Through a layered psychodrama, characterization in the novel epitomizes living in culture of fluctuating media, self, and storylines. The characters flow and mutate, thereby suggesting both their interrelatedness and diversity within  one.  

: ”What about the title? Does it arouse interest?” (William S. Burroughs, “Creative Reading, ”The Adding Machine 42).

The novel opens with a conventional introduction of a character. The narration is measured. The storyline linear. Ignoring conventions of documenting sources, this particular form of plagiarism remixes reader’s interest, as  Anne Humpherys observes:  “Acker appropriates not only one of the greatest titles in English fiction and many sentences from Dickens’s novels, but also the three-part structure of Pip’s expectations /childhood, which she entitles ‘I Recall My Childhood’ and ‘I Journey to Receive My Fortune’; then ‘The Beginning of Romance,’ and finally ‘The End’” (“The Afterlife of the Victorian Novel: Novels about Novels,”A Companion to the Victorian Novel 449).  As such, it is a manifestation of  refacement, sustaining provocative dynamic through narrative tactics that  paint an excitingly distorted jigsaw puzzle.  As much as it is a literary strategy, it is also a statement about the reconfiguration of control and power. It renders remixable both tradition and contemporary cultural realities.

:”And the characters? Can you see them? […]You can move character and the story to a different time and place” (William S. Burroughs, “Creative Reading,” The Adding Machine 42-3).

The instable identity of the characters is underscored by fluctuating narrative styles. The name of the antihero is Pirrip, which might mislead the reader to expect an overt reference to Pip from the pretext. Instead, Pip is transformed into Peter at the end of the opening quote that is not one. That is how Acker plays with liquid characters in liquid culture: O emerges from a conversation with Rosa, who is introduced through a series of letters to her boyfriend Peter, a well-connected, promiscuous, violent, and well-off cokehead.

Complicating the themes of societal institutions and the implicated artistic practices, the character of Kathy is mediated through the third person narrative. She, as an artist, is mainly portrayed from the prism of her private life that underpins the public plane. Yet, the poignancy of that sphere traverses the private. The spectacle bridges the gap between the private and the public, if one can even speak about the distinction any more (or, could one ever?). Focusing on the intriguing, provocative, controversial, Acker satirizes celebrity culture that humiliatingly redefines the human face in the language of face-lifting and sappy entertainment. Dissolved emotionality, imbued in human life devoid of intimacy and genuine passion is suggested through art, sex, money, and politics, sickly conspiring in corruption.

Understandably, the details from private life flashed out in this part of the novel are, actually, not private at all. For instance, Kathy’s husband is involved in the North Eastern power coalition, whose socio-political-financial positioning is enabled by the connections with the organizations and bodies in power (218). The story acquires the elements of a psychothriller. The husband orchestrates revenge against his wife’s father, recklessly instrumentalizing her. Moreover, he has sex with his wife’s mother. In the tradition of Greek tragedy-turned-melodrama, the father/father-in-law/husband finds out about the affair and kills his wife.

Provocativeness in Acker is a stylistic intervention against sensationalism. In order to criticize cultural realities by demonstrating an extreme version of the commodity-induced insanity, the text may acquire something of the sentiment it reflects upon. However, the tone, heavily relying on irony, ensures a distinction between those levels. The story, thus safely deploys shocking, destabilizing techniques without being domesticated by the sentiment it scrutinizes. It provokes the reader’s suspension of the belief that to be obsessed with possession is what makes a human being human. That tone is here to bring to awareness what William S. Burroughs calls “the conditions of total emergency” (Burroughs Live: The Collected Interview of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997  59).

Thus, the subtonic layers of the narrative, in a quite clearly articulated voice speak about how it feels to be alive in the world that makes the human face horrifyingly invisible. Insisting on the superficial, prosaic, and vapid, between abhorrence and abhorrency, the story shows the monstrous, inverted image of the human face. Logically, the absurdity of such culture is presented in the artistic context, which precludes creativity instead of enabling it to flourish. The voice is stunningly subtle, yet disarmingly direct and paralyzingly honest: ”All my family is dead. I have no way of knowing who means me harm and who doesn’t” (209). That is how a human being feels in a psycho-babylonian-disney world: family, money, family money, art, sex, celebrity, and inheritance conspire against a person enraged on the surface and sad deep inside: “I knew I was no longer a person to a man, but an object, a full purse. I needed someone to love me so I could figure out reality” (209). 

Latent pain speaks particularly through the episodes about Claire’s relationship with her family—an aloof, negligent, elusive father and a disturbingly self-centered mother,  enmeshed in an inner storm, eventually climaxing in suicide. The family scenario is a devastation script for the daughter: “My mother is adoration hatred plan. My mother is the world. My mother is my baby. My mother is exactly who she wants to be. The whole world and consciousness revolves around my mother” (176). As a consequence, Claire is growing up into a person who will later be looking for a consolation in crude, nymphomaniacal, sadomasochistic, self-oblivious placebo.

Syntax signals the state of the mind in a limbo where the broken family narrative meets the erosion of communication on the communal level. The closing paragraph in Great Expectations is a breathless flow of speech disjoined from thoughts. Punctuation is scant. It delineates the horizon of their disappearance of the invisible subject and the hardly identifiable object. The punctuation, sketching the ghostly dummy subject, is also suggestive of the subject/object recuperation: “What is, is. No fantasy […] I know the only anguish comes from running away” (242).

Amidst that detrimental noise, a noise filter arises. Acker’s voice is blatantly defiant, yet astonishingly elegant with a queer twist. Its delicacy is in surgically meticulous (dis)obedience and wild lyricism. It is also exaltedly-humble, as subjectless sentences evidence, showing a radical change in the character. From such broken beat narrative is born a peculiar form of subjectivity. Antonio Negri:”These paths are rich—paths that lead not to undefined nothingness but to the fullness of destiny, to an objective and dramatic limit, that will, through pain, become subject—a process of redemption” The Labor of Job: the Biblical Texts as a Parable of Human Labor 107). The path to redemption is humbleness. In storytelling, it can be manifested, as it is in Acker’s prose, in subjectless sentences, suggesting deselfing, but anticipating reindividualized subjectivity. Liquid identities in liquid culture.

Subjectivity in Acker’s prose is an answer to the dilemma presented in Cora Kaplan’s Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (2007). She wonders why the Victorians still inspire us. Kaplan indicates that some writers are trying to respond to the postmodernist “prematurely[,] announced ‘the death of the author’”(8). Some such attempts are, in effect, uncritical revamping of the Victorian monolithic subject.[2] However, there are readings of history that remix it. Kaplan claims that a correlation between Victorian sentiment and that of our epoch lies in our need to rediscover humanness and innocence. She puts emphasis on a humble acknowledgement of human imperfection as a basis for empathy with the Victorians from a contemporary standpoint.

That certainly can be part of how a human being can be described today.  However, instead of asking why the Victorians still inspire us, one is rather inclined to accentuate the inquiry differently and ponder the question about why they inspire us now. One wonders whether the reemergence of innocence, romance, and the simplicity of the everyday in that context indicates a disguised susceptibility to sentimentalism, sedentary imagination, and dormant spirit. A possible reason for the interest in Victoriana can also be that today there is an aspect of the antecedent era that resonates with contemporary predilection for denial. As there was in the time of the Victorians, today there is also a need for  undoing fabricated realities. Back then, it was the imperial myth of omnipotence. Today, it is the delusional belief in the totality of discourse. Therefore, postfuturist research seeks “the sediments that must be there if one is here” (Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace 29 emphasis in original).  

Jon Savage, for example, looks for the other Victoriana in England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (2001). Situating the study within the subcultural milieu, he criticizes the misconception of punks. More precisely, he points out that a reductionist perception of those subcultural scenes as aggressive and destructive results from a failure to recognize the subtext of intensity in punk expressive modes. Namely, the extremity of their idiosyncratic idiom comes from the investment in resistance against the imposed ways of living.

In that other Victoriana that Savage seeks, he sees the correlation between the twentieth century and tradition: “With their syphilitic, archaic language – ‘vile’, ‘poxy’, ‘bollocks’ –and this costume which theatricalized poverty, the Punks were the Postmodern children of Dickens” (374). Or, perhaps, the postfuturist renegades of Dickens. Punk rock writers, remixing the words of historical mafothers, are not nostalgically trying to reestablish the past, as no historical epoch seems worthy of complicity in restoring social inequities, austerity, and inhumaneness. Instead, literary DJs critically reimagine the past to reawake the future, by resurrecting the present.

In response to the past, one can create “quite conventional and nostalgic novels in both form and content” (Humpherys 444). By contrast, the postfuturist storytelling engages playful juggling of the pretexts and aftertexts, thereby discovering “what has been ignored, diminished, mis-stated, or distorted” (Humpherys 451). Of particular significance are Humpherys’s remarks about the aftertext subverting the pretexts to tell a story of resistance against politics of exclusion (Humpherys 449). Therefore, one can hardly imagine such remixes of the heritage to be nostalgic, especially if resisting the non-existent death of the subject entails a re-enactment of an authoritarian subjectivity:

For history to be something more than a representation, it must seek something more than its perfection as representation, as an image faithful to but apart from what it represents. It can express rather its difference from the state of affairs that present themselves under the authorship of the ruling class. It can be a history not just of what the world is, but what it can become. (McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto [091] square brackets in original)

Indeed. Envisioning such prospects, the looming shadow of the past legacy, coupled with the opacity inherent to literary fabric, the relational nature of language complicates devising new narratives. There are at least two aspects to this conundrum. One concerns the problem of power; the other is related to the question of novelty. The former’s complexity lies in the fact that the ruling class creates historiographies that accentuate its power. Creating alternative narratives can be a NO to the fabricated scenarios. The latter (the question of novelty) reflects Paul de Man’s ideas from Blindness and Insight. Opacity of language is both an obstacle and an inspiration for sustaining perpetual dialogue between modernity and historicity through postfuturist storytelling. Thus, the only thing postfuturist reader-writers can do is never stop naming: “Her name is not important. She’s been called King Pussy, Pussycat, Ostracism, O, Ange. Once she was called Antigone…” (Kathy Acker, Pussy King of the Pirates 163 ellipsis and emphasis in original).

---

[1] Rage Against the Machine, “Take the Power Back”: “In the right light, study becomes insight” (Rage Against the Machine. New York: Epic, 1992. CD). Through this slight alteration in spelling I also reference jan jagodzinski’s homology site/sight/cite  reflecting the three registers – the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic – but also indicate the triad, constituting the liquid poetics deployed in this work: site, cite, and insight, unified in signifying spatio-cultural positioning, narrative exchange, and vision. Implied are also Paul de Man’s ideas about blindness and insight. Note that the reference to the RATM track emphasizes the process leading towards insight—vision—rather than championing the idea of taking power. This reflects the overarching idea in this dissertation about the limits of human powers and control. It is the platform that enables refocusing the debate onto the remix based on mercy.

[2] See Kaplan’s analyses of A.S. Byatt’s Possession: a, David Lodge’s Nice Work, Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, Fowels’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and particularly Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George.

Inn the Hearth off Mediation: Tropiod Transsupracrossbeyondness (Part Two)

Seven: Professional Perspectives

Basher:  I could not sympathize more with the weary fella…But my frustration is of a different character. To be more precise, I’ve been stigmatized as an arrogantly ignorant, badly-styled offender of everybody and everything else--sometimes intentionally, at times inexplicably misreading their words, emotions, and thoughts. Here it’s worth mentioning that I moved to this country as an adult and, for that reason, was more familiar with acquisition of language than with learning it…In any case, the point I’m trying to make is that such a situation made of me a handicapped person forever excluded from the club of indigenous lovers of a good laugh. You may wonder why.  I’d hardly swallow the last bite of my favorite cookie and the lightening ’ld hit you, opening your eyes to the sad truth that the reason is another form of deprivation: (in this particular case)  of the ability (mind you, not the right!) to enjoy the benefits of good pun. One does what one can…some things are just to be accepted. That’s sad destiny of a non-native speaker, innit? Going back to the theme of accusation, I must admit that it’s not so hard, though, to bear the stigma…as it is to explain that all the guilt results from my inability to either remember or understand my own history. Why? You may want to know. Rightly so. Because it is written at once, starting and ending in a zerolike statement. What could be more bewildering? How to think of geography shaped by such history? How to know one’s own date of birth? How to produce a decent epigraph? How to learn the alphabet that includes numbers? How to count when the first and the last number in the string are zerolike? How not to be weary? I’m asking you.

Truly moving…Puts my lousy verbal capacities to shame. In such situations I always turn to what has already been said about the topic in question. Many people have articulated thoughts about it much better than I can. Furthermore, as someone who suffers from the same ocassional memory blocks, I usually slip into other people’s diaries because, if nothing else, they keep exact record of time. I even tend to stick to a sample and take it as a recuring pattern of my own thinking. Here’s one of them…Stay tuned to WELD/Program. Awm.

Medical Profession: I’m honored to be part of this remix. My only concern is (how astonishingly in tune with the sentiment of your recurring diarist pattern, me-ms-ess-ta--DJ …sadly so)…anxiety some would dub it…that there is little I can contribute to it. My imagination is inhibited, my mind operates at a pace normally associated with the kinetics of lower species such as snails…my spirit is crippled, my vocabulary repetitive, limited…my ideas uninteresting, my heart hollow, my soul shallow, and my body…nonexisting. When I think about the ways that might…perhaps reanimate my being, transforming me into a potential contributor, I see no way…All I see is an indigo world, spreading a curtain over the roof of the Milky Way. It’s a dripping world. What from here looks, or, may be imagined as either an atmosphere or vacuum is, actually, a rich blue ocean. When I am not engaged in devising tactics for reanimating my slumberous soul, I am a surfer — a rider of ultramarine oceanic waves. When I come back from across the curtain divide, I bring on my torso ink droplets. I don’t wash them away. Instead, I let them dry…Slowly. It’s a dripping world. I don’t know how long it takes for one micropond to evaporate from my skin, but while it’s happening, I am not more alive than I was before I went surfing. That makes me think that surfing is not quite the best reanimating tactics. I spent many an hour brining people back to life. I’m a doctor. But I need another fella-of-the-trade to recreate me. My name is Alle. If there’s anybody among the participants worthy of the title, please find my contact info on http://www.WELD/Program. Awm and DO NOT hesitate to get in touch.

You remind me of the dream I had on December 2^nd, 20=

Working Class Standpoint: I was patient enough, waiting to see if there would be light at the end of the tunnel…of this infinitely nonsensical logorrhea. You either have no philosophical gift, or, you are so hopelessly in love with being manipulated by plagiarizing your own thoughts. No wonder you live your life like s*it when the content of your “philosophizing” is platitudes. Not that it’s not worth thinking once in a while, but how you do it certainly does not problematize it in a way sufficiently inspiring to be food for other philosophers (proper at that!!!). Also, your poetic potential is on the level and of the scope of a three year old child. “Damp leaves,” “window pane,” curtains everywhere…milk galore…life of ultramarine affinities…drizzling…dripping…dr…NO BIG DEAL!!! I am a businessman. I work. Have neither time no inclination for kindergarten poetry and chicken-brain theory. I work. Do YOU?

Stupid Perspective: I don’t. I’m a rascal. An edgy bastard. A provoking poseur. I pose a lot. I take no opinion as well-intended advice. I find it offensive when my pose is criticized for being too provocative. Then I become vengeful. Blood-thirsty. I take no offence. I will have no novice telling me what style is. I’m bad-styling. And I bite. Back. Now, YOU, Mr. Busy…were you talking to me? Wait for your response I shall not. Rather, I’d revenge right-da-phunkie way. You scum…bad-styling you call me…HUH???!!!! Feel free to find my contact info on http://www.WELD/Program. Awm and DO NOT hesitate to get in phunkie touch, so we can “TALK” OFF phunkie line!!! Poets of desire, philosophers of architecture, painters of replicas, walking bulls, sitting foots, photographers of time, salesmen of other people’s grandparents, couch-comforters…you know where you can find me. Don’t let me wait too long to taste the odd droplet from your jugular…CHEERIO!!!

Domestic Perspective: Anybody in need of style cramping? I have no hope that theory can ever be improved as long as it is writ in ink. Desolate and overpowered I AM faced with the bleakness of the conversation. Truly discouraging. A kind of revenge as disparaging may be, I am deeply ashamed by the vulgarity of your motives, me dear participants. Not that I expected noble spirits among you. Can’t even say that my aspirations reached any height…I never had a slightest trace of a thought that compassion could be at stake. But this is below the lowest threshold of dignity.

Scholarly Perspective:

Education It’s the school days that turned out to be the greatest source of inspiration for such a sudden urge to re-enact the state rather different from what one knows now. For one, there was no need to worry about tuition fees. But then, neither was it there when one was in college. How strangely mutably-invariable. In comparison to what it is now. Anyway, not having to be concerned about mindbending  maneuvering in order to make ends meet and still get some education, one was pretty much disburdened and could navigate the lifescape with astoundingly immense (for some characters) ease.

one was frequently asked: what is thy phunkie problem going to be? one would answer: oronot. one was again asked: how do thou imagine thy future career-phunkie-job? one would answer: dunno the difference between ye idea and ye yeme. one was told: how do thou think thou sceolde live if thou has no vision of site? one would answer: don’t give a s*it about your introgation. one was told: that’s not how people speak—thou spake no good runian poetry. one would respond: don’t care how you say *sameGAbri* in etruscan; ich says *bite this one lucky Bastard*

On more than one occasion one would be challenged to defend the provocativeness of  the jungle-mess which sometimes passed for essays. One would answer: All the power that anyone can ascribe to destabilizing techniques does and does not exist at the same time; all the power attached to the effect of the demand for plausibility melts like towers of dust on a sandy beach when confronted with the dispeller of the approximately following context: ich been the creatore in possession of a bottomless  wellspring of mindless bulls*iteering—incomprehensibly incomprehendable at that. One was secretly pitied for having such murky prospects ahead of oneself.

One was a lucky bastard. And so were a couple of similar characters in one’s class, V.

Work More than once, one was either accused/condemned of, or, fired because of seriously threatening  the existence of a considerable number of people and students. If what has just been said sounds  to you like a chant coming from a deranged shamanistic liver at noon of an August day in Sahara, it is because there is an insurmountable problem with translating lexical meaning of etrurian phonology into the morphology of any language imaginable to a human kidney. If not, who cares…In any case, such a professional history presents, or, more precisely, could present an impediment to one’s successfully climbing the social ladder—!upwards! Alternately, one gets hired at the institute for queer-twisting remixology of retro-fungi under the auspices of the society for damage-minded saharian thinkers amusing themselves with enchanting sand in the interregnum between two beaches at the tower. Lucky bastard.

: :Cheers! Honorable listeners / participators, we are going to take a short break and hear from our correspondent who is conveying heated discussions currently partaking at the friendly battlefield of ideas on Half Floral Avenue. Yo!

Inn the Hearth off Mediation: Tropiod Transsupracrossbeyondness (Part One)

1 On Air: Take One

 :Welcome back  to 1000 FM. You are listening to WELD/Program. Awm.  This is your DJ NNY speaking. It is Friday. 9:40 AM and you are tuned just phunkie right. This is the Program. Keep sipping at your iced tea, while the gentle rhythm floats through the waves from this turntable straight to your homes, suckaz! And whilst rocking to the swaying beat, feel free to move your lazy ass and pick up the cell phone lying next to the bed on which you are decomposing, immersed in the slumber of the heart. Take that phunkie device, press all the right buttons, and you will soon hear a husky, yet melliferous voice that will enrich your dull day with even a lamer conversation. But all is not in what is said…unowadamsayin, hu? So, yeah…put some phunkie muscular effort and grab the phone. Talk to ME…Hello?

Yeah…

/ Whassup!

 : Sure…I call to proclaim strong and irrevocable disbelief in science, thereby shattering the myth of religion and altogether dismissing the notion of faith. Bless!

:Fierce, dude! Care to say something about your anxious self? Hello? Um…Looks like the conversation was just what you’ve heard…But…hullo! Who’s there?

V: More Air

: Awrajt… I am here. HowboutYOU?

Long time, bro…Just callin to address the issue previously raised by one of the acquantices…Not that tis a reply…more like a comment or something…

Go ahead…

Sure… Having recovered from the shock of shattered faith, I now live in the world in which myth is not possible, dreams are nothing but elegant devices for passing from one psychedelic to another tranCelike state, vectors do not connect two points, tangentiality does not imply the spot of contact, the body is what you write about it, mother is that who has no womb, and father is the fable one creates dashing through caleidoscpoic corridors…Are you with me?

Head to toes…

Having said that, I am now free to behead you on a basis of the premise claiming that I am the hand on your turntable, happily leaving you with an illusion that you host the Program. Furthermore, I am free to actually be that hand and immerse myself in the beauty of the fact that I am telling you a true story. Needless to say, I am also free to believe that it can leave you somewhat puzzled, but that will—and cannot!—affect the way I live in the postmythical world. Under no bloody circumstances (and/or conditions for that matter!) shall I abandon the safety of the new world with no boundaries and no hosts!

I sure will not interfere with your idea of safety, truth be told…

You shouldn’t! Because not only does it provide ME, but also YOU with an opportunity to indulge in the escalation of good, boundless friendship…What is more, my sense is that (if properly appropriated) the newly arisen situation can (and MUST!) lead towards unprecedented imaginary possibilities. This is where my atavistic mind gets halted and I continue to be free…free to be lonely…Nobody can deprive me of that liberty…Liberty to love a thought of who you are…To talk to you, all the while keeping to myself. If I so desire. And I do. So, see…I’m talking to you as if you were a non-host, deluded into an idea of trust that to live a life is to shuffle records all day. And night.

Say what you will…but my job is DJing and whether you are of the opinion that I should shut up or whatever, I can only say that once uopn a time I’dl recognize the sign that’dl determine my existence by the parameters of the permanent vacation called DJing. This constitutes the acquired habit (some weird folks also call it commitment) to respond to my audience. Thus…wassup story listeners!

foYr: Autobiographical Injunction

Aye..yeah…Here…

Likewise…What kind of joy will your words bring to my and our acqantancies’ ears…?

Inspired by the previously heard ranting, I thought I’d share this anecdote with you guys…

Nothing can be more welcome than that...So…?

Yeah…This  autobiographical extract from the memory of my grandfather on my mother’s side is about a shamanistic dream that my great grandma on my father’s side once had during an afternoon nap. To be more precise, in her dream she was sitting in the middle of the ruins of the ancient temple when the telephone rang. An unknown voice called to announce the end of the empire of the wrestlers who ruled for the sake of rugbism. It seriously disturbed my great grandma and forced her to stand up from the previously assumed sitting position and look around to try to find--in retrospect--the heralds of the event.This made the actual great grandma toss and turn in her comfortable bed, fighting the news coming from beyond the conscious. Some call it denial, but I’m not sure I’d subscribe to such a definition, for denial implies conscious awareness…Or something like that…Some kind of reality…Some say that even being consciously aware is the epitome of the unreal. Perhaps. As I agree with the previously shunned religious myths and all the nonsense related to faith, my vision of reality is shrinking…And so was my great grandma’s—both in the dream and outside of it. You may claim that she would have avoided all the trouble by NOT having answered the call, but rebЯta…davayte…ona sama kogda ta davnooo bill wrestlёrom I znaet chto takoE “rugbism.” Esli bi kto TO skazal ёÕ chto ne vse forms of that sportism odinakie, on bЫ smog spatЬ I ne volnovexevatcЯ ob mirovom kataklizmiчeskom prospecte. No, ona takжe bill шamansküm priestessoi. Voila! Ona RegledA at the apparatus thininkng that it was simultaneously announcing the collapse of everything she had been up to up to that point. How so very outdated…After she woke up and told me about the dream, she also said that part of her unconsious in the dream suspected that the voice was mine. Her Id, however, decisively refuted that idea. This left me with an identity of an unworthy suspect. It also savagely disabled a possibility of my entering this memory excerpt as a protagonist. So, I decided I’d just tell it how it was…

If any, my anxiety is that there’s no wonder. Or so you tell me, me phone-in contributor…I might have got it all wrong, being a nonexpert specializing in what serious participants in life and culture consider to be paid for being a self-centered turntablist…You tell me…If not, I’ll just treat myself with another tune and you’ll feel tremendous benefits from that V…Do we have somebody on the line to confirm or deny my words…?

Five:Molest Me Not With Memories, Please!

: Hellyeah!

: iQue Pasa!

Can’t remember…I don’t believe in memory…I believe in identity created from the image of what I imagine it was like before…yesterday, for instance…But my imagination can stretch further in the past…then I imagine what it was like long before yesterday came…and my identity is being built…and my conviction that I am based on what I imagine to have been in the forgotten past is growing stronger…And I feel like I am more alive and all…The more convinced I am, the better for you…Because your atavistic shadows of the postmyth shock are thus fading and, consequently, you think of yourself as an increasingly lively person…or something like that…At times you wonder how reliable that basis for imagining is, but you’ll recover from suspicion…My image of nonexisting memory is embedded in something beyond you…So much for memory…As for the rest, unlike the previous contributors, I do not shun the faith myth because I do not have such word in the vocabulary of my mind. Long story short, nothing to shun…As far as science is concerned, my image of identity is disinterested…That leaves me with a vacation of an enactment. More precisely, I act as if I were an artistic philosopher preaching world politics…So, I act as if it were October 26^th, 2=9. And I open my act asking a questION: What’s your favorite color?

-- New blue--Is the new red--Is the new green--Is the new white--Is the new black.

But it’s not what you wear… /  No, I know—it ‘s how you turn…Right / Is the new left.

What color!!! I am an enactment, wandering along shady allyes, strolling past estuary brooks, drinking smoke, inhaling bread, hearing flavors, touching nothingness…If smell could kill, I am dead every year in June when a linden-lined street embraces me with the supersaturated atomosphere of the poststarburst dispersal of sticky droplets…That imbudes in my mind a sense of floatful playfulness and I let the drops infuse in the float more of the congealed substance…This for my consciousness is what to some people is memory. They ususally say that my acts don’t pass for philosophizing art from the perspective of world-policy-preaching…But that’s because they don’t know how to breathe gelatinized plasma…Undercurrent…Underscoring…Underlying…something that no memory can make more alive than it is.

Sometimes, like this morning, when I wake up from the embrace of the presence in the dream, welcoming me into a new dawn, I see iron clouds in the sky. And I know it was going to be a wonderful day (contributing to the previously heard acquaintance’s vacation of an enactment, I act as if it were 25^th November, 20=). Cheerio!

Six: A Question

Calling neither to rant about science, prophesize, nor shun a phunkie thing. The reason for calling is actually to ask if you ever go home i.e., spend time not working. If so, (a) What do you do? (b) Who do you talk to? (c) How does it feel?

: Not an easy questION, ol’ fella. And I don’t think I can give you a straightforward answer, given certain specificities that complicate the references of your words, expressions, phrases, syntagmas, and sentences. Firstly, if by home you mean a physical place, then my answer’ld be:

Yes, I do sometimes leave my booth. But then, quite frequently I relax on the sofa, or, even sleep for a couple of hours dividing my sessions. Secondly, the notion of doing is extremely problematic for those who (like me good self) have two spinning records for kidneys, an impressive groove along the surface of the liver, and a pump of a sort where other humans have what they boast of calling a heart. So, I guess my answer’ld be: No, I hardly ever not DJ. 

The third parameter complicating our dialogue is the questION of talk. Specifically, if your idea of human communication is limited to phone-in talks, then I have to proudly confess that I’ve spent many an hour listening to inner voices of the partners in the conversation. This by no means diminishes the significance of the listeners of the Program. Quite the opposite. Finally, how does it feel? You are asking me. Figure it out, fella.

Pleasure participating. /  Same here.

I’m calling to testify my weariness too…It’s been quite a while since I was marked…labeled…if unofficially…you might say…accused, some would call it…dubbed a notorious exoticizer, appreciator of other cultural heritage, merely a self-indulgent exile. Simultaneously, my taste and interest in, for example, the music of Etrurian peasants have constantly been misinterpreted as arrogant neglect of the contemporary Tuscan scene. By analogy, my scorn for my own traditional Hasidic tradition has been argued to have been inspired by the Madness cover of “Israelites.” To this I can only answer by refuting the analogy based on one simple and logically worthy thought---that my main love for the modern Italian cuisine is founded in the fact that it (modern Italian food, i.e.) did emerge from the old Tuscan legacy, whereas the lineage between Madness and Israel holds no such a connection.  Secondly, I also find it wearisome that my true passion for broken beat narrative, hijacking metafiction, IS, despite all the seeming counterarguments, entwined with the tradition that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. However, I resolutely, decisively, and irrevocably deny the relationship between that kind of literary descent with what will have been created in eighty-first century. So much for excavating my reading  posthistorical  dystopian present some time from now on. The remaining part of my testimony, as I previously requested in the conversation with me-ms-ess-ta--DJ, will be read by that very person for the reason known to me and the ones that you will shortly familiarize your good selves with, as well. Specifically, the details of the life of the person who lies here and whose name was writ in smoke are too delicate and soulshaking for the holder of these memories to be conveyed in his or her own voice. With NO further ado, me-ms-ess-ta--DJ, the floor is yours…

Dear me-ms-ess-ta--DJ, it is my pleasure to share this, to me and hopefully other participants in the Program, invaluable experience and provide a kind of testimony of the years spent in search for something that some call purpose, others meaning, some say it’s the absence of whatever the former would propose as a candidate for signification…and I just…choose…well…to write…The specific situation of a person diagnosed with a viral disease (that some mistakenly--and confusedly for that matter—think is contegious and infectious and, therefore, curable by the magical power of chemical speech) prevents me from physically participating in many a social event. Needless to say, that severely limits my inner world by simply restricting the number and kind of the persons that I’ve been in touch with. It, on the one hand, makes my world somewhat deserted; on the other, it broadens and deepens  my breath and makes my thought clearer. Not to mention the benefits my imagination draws from it. Thus, it could be said that it affects my creative potential to the extent and in the form ungraspable to those complicit in shaping the scope of my world. It is also worth noting that scale should by no means be equated with content and unpredictability of the ways it is being generated. But to elucidate the present moment, let’s excavate what it will-have-may-could-potentially-whatever-MUSTBE.

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During a Surgical Intervention: A Case Study

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 27^th, 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 27^th, 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]

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[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 Pennsylvania Literary Journal 4.1 (2012).