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Hacking Through The Discourse
I'm going Gonzo. Feel free to curse me for it!
I'm supposed to be writing my regular column on technology and art. Usually it's lots of fun. I keep a high tone, say a few shocking things, etc. It's all very dada/augustan. The perfect mix. And I have many excuses for not doing it. The best one: In my office, my machine sits on an old desk. Also on the desk are various post-it notes, and on the yellow slips I've scrawled a series of tasks. An impossible series. There's no way I can get all that done today. It's my own fault: I hacked my job description in a moment of ambition, and now I'm stuck with it. The world is too much with me. But that's not quite it. It's more like I'm walking a lonely road in fear and dread, because that yellow papered monster "doth close behind me tread." But darn it! That's not hacking the discourse, that's alluding to a couple romantic poets, one rather better than the other, who were mildly conventional even in their times. Where am I going? The truth is I'm angry. Yes. I'm mad at a certain distinguised poet. She is wrong wrong wrong. Don't believe the irony here is lost on me. She's got over a dozen books in print, and me? So what if I'm scattered all over cyberspace? So what if some magazine has declared me a "writer of the information age"? If the plug were pulled tomorrow, I'd cease to exist. But she's still wrong. Here's the story. I've been working with a young writer for going on two years, mostly because years ago an older writer took the time to work with me. I told her 'forget about what you're trying to say. Just sing!' And sing she did: she has a good ear. Gloriously, she stopped making sense. She did something completely different. She started hacking the language, just to see what she could make it do. And she made it do some lovely stuff. And that got her into this poet's workshop. But, evidently, this certain distinguised poet said something to the effect of 'That's beautiful, but what the hell does it mean?' Curse me for telling the young woman she needs to listen to her. It was the only ethical thing to do. But if I had this poet in front of me right now, I'd say 'Who cares what it means? How does it sound?' I've had enough of making meaning in verse. (I know, a dozen people are going to send me email now, quoting Jabberwocky. But that's not what I mean at all. That is not what I meant , at all) And I'm not talking about trying to purify the dialect of the tribe. Both those terms offend me. And please don't give me that stuff about the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds, much less a human speaking to other humans. Or 'Cleanse my heart and lips, almighty god, who cleansed the lips of the prophet Isiah with a burning coal.' I want to make the language do what no-one thinks it can do. I don't believe in images, and I don't believe in rhetoric. I want to hack the syntax, and I want to do it in pentameter. How's that for contradictory? It's not that I want to make the subject disappear. I want to foreground the referential, the peripheral, and to background the subject. You'll say this is not new: Breughal did it with Icarus. But what if that small splash didn't even appear? What if there where just brushstrokes and more brushstrokes and more brushstrokes without walls? What if all we really had were words, and sequences of words? What if we really did simply articulate sweet sounds together? What if we really are just playing with our mouths, trying to see what we get? I want to hack the great sparc station of syntactical code, not to send a spoofed message, or even to break grep. I want to hack straight to the root, to see what, if anything, is there. My best guess? There's nothing in the core dump. This is all just a bunch of pixels on your screen. It makes one wonder. Specifically, you're probably wondering right now whether I'm actually insane. But think about what most poets do. The vast majority just want to write something that will fit the contemporary definition of poem. Once they've done that, they want to write a good poem, as defined by editors and eventually readers. Then they start thinking about the purpose of what they're doing, promotion, tenure, cultural role. It's all about social capital, and even I was guilty of that for years. But once one has that capital, one can afford to throw it away. I have thrown it away. I want something different now. Love songs are nice and all that (I've quit quoting Rilke). Instead, I'll quote some anonymous woman from the Cote d'Azur, who was giving a reading of Hugo's poems: But, from a poet of forty, "on attend autre chose..." We expect something else. But what? The beauty of the phrase is its ambiguity. It doesn't say. What the hell does it mean? What the hell does it mean? Sounds like the comments I get on my poems, from places I've never been, from streets I never thought I should revisit. 'That sounds good, but what the hell..." It means I'm getting closer to the core. And so what if it's a Zeno's arrow kind of thing? Better that than to live in some user_public directory, never busting out, and counting one's attraction by access. But how to get closer? Should we just look at the harlequins? Should we simply do unexpected combinations? Try to hold the world in crystallized syntax? I don't know. I haven't gotten there yet. All I know is what I don't want. I don't want some well established poet telling me, or someone close to me, to start making sense. Even if that's the best thing she could say to the young woman. I just want to hack the kernel. Thanks, Bill |