A number of semi-manifestos were penned around the
composition of Apparition Poems in 2009 and 2010. The author introduced a
phrase which was meant to carry signifying resonance, as an ensign, defining an
aesthetic, defending a position, and opening a vista onto both what was then a
contemporary Zeitgeist and what literary creation entailed in America under the
aegis of that Zeitgeist— visionary deadness. The phrase centers itself
on a contradiction in terms— that, of course, the visionary, in both the broad sense
of experiencing visionary consciousness (i.e. not continuous, not cohesive
consciousness, and interpretive of what’s seen as the manifestation of symbols,
rather than quotidian, non-relatedly objective matter) and the tactile work of
imposing a newfangled aesthetic, as a product of untamed imagination, is itself
the product heightened, illuminated life, rather than decay, erosion, and
decomposition— perpetuators of inert matter into grounds of permanent
dissolution. The artist’s conceit— yoking together by force the harbingers of
illumination with harbingers of doom— was born of circumstances, both personal
and impersonal, warped by the turgid sense that the Aughts, in the city of
Philadelphia, had left excess waste products in all channels, which by 2009-2010
were eroding, moving the locale from dynamism into stasis.
How to find enchantment in this sense— dynamism to stasis,
the down-bound— must register as an appeal to the affective. When emotions are
thrust onto a skewer, by a sense of reversals, intransigence, and ontological
confusion (the being registering his or own sense of being as jostled,
shuffled, or physiologically wrecked), what the mind takes cognitive pleasure
in seeing is an acknowledged awareness that a low level of objective truth— the
existence and subsistence of states of decay, erosion, and decomposition—
establishes its own hegemony in the world of things which populates the mind,
creating a warp or sense of warpage by which darkness creates its own sense of
illumination, chaos creates its own simulacrum of order, and despair creates an
inverse mode or manner of exultation. Visionary deadness describes this
syndrome or sickness, this perversion, and warped jouissance, and works towards
a definition of what the book Apparition Poems is, and what it perpetuates in
its totality. The cognitive enchantment with death, and its own ensigns,
suggest that the mind relishes the game or challenge of transmuting what is
dead or dying into the living matter of freshly created art, and that the ultimate
game which emerges is a simple one— to blow Gabriel’s horn, summon things from
their grave, compel, by force, what is dying to live vibrantly again.
Stretches and strains appear in visionary deadness as
an aesthetic sign. What is summoned from a grave— dead, inert matter— would
seem to hold no attraction even to a warped writing consciousness, especially
one attempting to attune itself to philosophical frequencies. Dead, inert
matter, unilluminated by outside forces or energies, is quite dull and dreary.
How, with the flip of a light-switch, do we make the whole imbroglio of
visionary deadness palatable? When what is dull and dreary (dead, inert matter)
is moved up a few frets to a new key, it ceases to be dull and dreary and is
illuminated by both the mysticism and the mystique of horror, and the horrible—
what could bear the monikers eerie, macabre, sinister, ghastly, haunting.
Apparitions are often named as such. The matter informing the poet’s
consciousness, thusly acquires an imaginative glow. The appeal transmitted out,
through the book, is a mystique of the imagination, from within a haunted
house, where death boasts a patina of excitement and excitation, just by being
close to an ultimate suggestion of surface beneath the surface, life beneath life.
Words take matter and forcibly reanimate it, all done as a mirror to a higher
plane of objective intelligence— just as plummets into the warpage of the
moribund reinfuse and recertify the poet’s sense of the transcendental (surface
beneath surface, life beneath life), plummets into knowledge of flaws in the
structures of both reality and the universe which contains and shelters all
certain reality, are a flight upwards into (conversely, and perversely) greater
depth, and greater awareness, through the reification of this knowledge.
L'affiche
de Monroe, s'aspergeant de eau de
Cologne, étais-tu, toi-même, encore une fois être
parfait, comme vous l'avez dit; comme Jennifer était toi, vous-même à
nouveau, parfaitement, car vous n'en aviez pas besoin être dit,
n'aurait pas pu être de toute façon, alors. Je
t'imagine, errant jusqu'à cet endroit humide sous-sol,
avec un sens de symétrie dans votre cerveau sur
ce qui avait été, serait. Par le temps
était venu, tes cheveux avaient foncé, mais le
noyau de toi est resté brillant, aussi brillant comme dans
la maison de South Atherton Rue.
C'était à ton tour de couper le milieu, offrez
votre vision de la perfection à un homme qui vous
paraissait plus qu'une curiosité, plus aiguë.
Le choc de
faire l'amour au milieu d'une mer de papier, piles sur
piles - ma propre vision de la perfection était
arrivé, sur les ailes des Symbolistes, comme ils étaient
moi, moi-même, encore, etc. L'espace que nous pu habiter
cet automne, un d'ici saison
d'armistice contre l'Enfer, ne pouvait pas durer, mais nous n'en
avions pas besoin. Au contraire, si nous coupons dans chaque l'autre à
angle droit, une empreinte de coquillage fossile serait
laissé sur State College, & le monde entier; piquant,
assez ravissant pour durer notre propre
version non déformée de forever. Il a donc été pour
moi. Quant à où et ce que vous coupez au milieu
de, pendant que nous parlons - nous verrons si je suis assez pure
pour en savoir plus, Emily. Peut-être.
J'avais prévu de te rencontrer au Bar Noir le 18 ; tu étais là; nous avons bu. Ce qui s'estpassé ensuite, dans l'appartement de Logan Square, c'est qu'en défroquant tu as renversé une lampe antique que ma tante m'avait léguéeàMahopac. Sérendipité, pensaije, assommée puis
réduite au silence par l'élan de ta chambre. Dehors, une nuit étouffante
mijotait; cette nuit de toutes les nuits, du verre vert éparpillé jonchait le
sol de ma chambre, et j'ai finalement été emmené, passé l' alcool, vers ce que
l'éternité n'était que dans ta bouche comme si tu avais sauté d'une scène
forestière (fougères, séquoias), un monde de la magie païenne, dans une scène
encore ondulante de possibilités—
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