My promiscuous dalliance.

I have loved language more than truth, discourse more than reality, and so allowed to spread, in myself and in others, an intellectual virus that uproots the plain sense of the word.

I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. I altogether and totally, completely and throughly, without reservation, quibble, or question, and with newly faithful heart, abandon the false doctrine that meandering, digressive, or paratactic prose, prose that fails to state clearly its meaning, sentences that get caught up in their own rhythms and sounds and cadences, nuances and nooks, rather than in getting to the point or meat or heart of the matter or meaning or substance, as I say, I abandon and renounce the false doctrine that crooked and bent prose can have any value for truthful discourse or accurate representation. I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and aversion and the many related errors and aversions that flow inevitably as a consequence of the aforesaid error and aversion, as a baby inevitably flows from its mother or an ocean from its rivers or a false conclusion from a flawed premise or a disease from a virus or death from repeated blows with a blunt instrument or gorging from a starving child given food. Clearly written expository prose, with a delineated argument including a beginning, middle, and end, is the only guarantor of Rational Mind.

I was wrong, I apologize and recant. I altogether abandon the false doctrine that ambiguity and irony are anything more than sophistry. I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and apostasy, which I have lapsed into again and again, like an habitual drinker seeking his five o’clock martini, or an erotomaniac seeking nonprocreative sexual experiences, or a worker idling on the job, or a habitual truant passing notes in class.

I am with regret filled and by errors o’erwhelmed, having chosen the broken path over the righteous, the warped over the erect. I cant and recant. I altogether abandon the false opinion that advocacy or partisan positioning has any place in poetry and poetics. Poetry and poetics should be reserved for those who look beyond the contentions of the present into the eternal verities, the truths beyond this world that never change, as represented in the Books of the Accessible Poets. I further stipulate that I recant, categorically, that poetry is an activity of the intellect and herewith and hereby declare and proclaim that true poetry is an affair of the heart and only the heart.

I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. Like the black sheep who strays too far from the adoring flock, or like the drunk with a pale green beret who, deep into the night, and desperate for one more abinthe before closing time, babbles uncontrollably to the deaf and crippled barkeep, I embraced an elitism that puts me out of touch with the sentiments, feelings, convictions, beliefs, preferences, perspectives, and dyspepsia of everyday, ordinary, run-of-the-mill people, the Johns and Joans and Janes and Jills, the Billys and Bobs, the Shirleys and Toms, the Frans and Fritzes, Millys and Moes, not only thinking I was better than John and Joe, Mary and Harry, but that their sentiments, feelings, convictions, beliefs, preferences, perspectives, and dyspepsia did not matter. I spent my time hunting for thoughts rather than hunting quail. My solipsism overcame me, so that I wrote, and professed others to write, words that communicated to no one, that meant nothing, that defied the laws of meaning and fundamentals of grammar; praising—over and above clear sense and good syntax—the incoherent, the nonsensical, the aberrant, the foolish, the deformed, the contradictory, the awkward, the frivolous, the ungainly, the self-indulgent, the infantile, the stubborn, the phony and fake, the prevaricating, the disorderly. In my promiscuous dalliance with affect rather than emotion, I cast my lot with the excessively cerebral and the cerebrally excessive. I recant this cant. Now I stand before you to repudiate and abjure, to cast away and revile, this stiff-necked arrogance in order to dedicate myself to the freedom in right thinking.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN, from Recantorium (a bachelor machine, after Duchamp after Kafka)

Maker.

In ancient Anglo-Saxon, the word for poet was maker, a term that blends the meaning of weaving words with that of building the material world (what the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario called “celestial lightning rods”). Makers shape things into being, granting them their intrinsic identity.

Language, for Döblin*, is a living thing that does not “retell” our past but “represents” it: “it forces reality to manifest itself, its burrows into its depths and brings forth the fundamental situations, big and small, of the human condition.” It lets us know, in fact, why we are together. Most of our human functions are singular: we don’t require others to breathe, walk, eat, or sleep. But we require others to speak and to reflect back to us what we say. Language, Döblin declared, is a form of loving others.

The reality of the world conjured up through language was, paleontologists tell us, first presented to our consciousness as something magically material: in our beginning, words appeared to us as occupying not only time but also space, like water or clouds. The American psychologist Julian Jaynes argued that long after the development of language, when writing was invented some five thousand years ago, the deciphering of written signs produced in the human brain an aural perception of the text, so the the words read entered our consciousness as physical presences. According to Jaynes, “reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture-symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.” Language, as we once knew, does not merely name but also brings reality into being: a conjuring act achieved by means of words, and by means of those accounts of reality’s events that we call stories.

Stories, Döblin argued, are our way of recording our experience of the world, of ourselves, and of others. Stories are our memory, libraries are our storerooms of that memory, and reading is the craft by means of which we can recreate that memory by reciting it and glossing it, by translating it back into our own experience, by allowing ourselves to build upon that which previous generations have seen fit to preserve. In the mid-eighteenth century, Rabbi Uri of Strelisk asked: “David was a gifted man, capable of composing psalms. And I? What can I do.” His answer was: “I can read them.” Reading is a task of memory in which stories allow us to enjoy the past experience of others as if it were our own.

Words not only grant us reality; they can also defend it for us. In the Middle Ages, Irish poets were supposed to be able to protect the fields of wheat and barley from vermin by “rhyming rats to death”; that is to say, by reciting verse over the fields in which the rodents had their nests. In the sixteenth century, Tulsi Das, the greatest of Hindu poets, author of a version of Ramayana that includes the epic of Hanuman and his monkey army, the celebrated Ramacaritamanasa or Holy Lake of the Acts of Rama, was sentenced by the king to be locked up in a stone tower. Alone in his cell, Tulsi Das spoke his poem aloud and from recitation rose the monkey hero Hanuman and his army who burst into the tower and freed their maker. In 1940, sixteen years after Kafka’s death, Milena, the woman he loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a conclusion, but a mad and meaningless state of brutal suffering, brought on through no discernable fault and serving no visible end. To attempt to survive this nightmare, a friend of Milena devised a method: she would resort to the books she had long ago and unconsciously stored in her memory. Among the memorized texts was one by Maxim Gorki, “A Man Is Born.” The story tells how the narrator, a young boy, strolling one day somewhere along the shore of the Black Sea, comes upon a peasant woman shrieking in pain. The woman is pregnant; she has fled the famine of her birthplace and now, terrified and alone, she is about to give birth. In spite of her protests, the boy assists her. He bathes the newborn child in the sea, makes a fire, and prepares some tea. At the end of the story, the boy and the new mother follow a group of other peasants: with one arm, the boy supports the mother; in the other, he carries the baby. Gorki’s story became, for Milena’s friend, a sanctuary, a small safe place into which she could retreat from the daily horror. It did not lend meaning to her plight, it didn’t explain or justify it; it didn’t even offer her hope for the future. It simply existed as a point of balance, reminding her of light at a time of dark catastrophe, helping her to survive. Such, I believe, is the power of stories.

ALBERTO MANGUEL, The City of Words

*Alfred Döblin, author of Berlin Alexanderplatz

Today man has no physical body.*

Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.

Literate man, civi-
lized man,
tends to restrict and to
separate functions,
whereas tribal man has
freely extended the
form of his body
to include the universe.

Language
does for intelligence
what the wheel does for the feet and body.
It enables them to move from
thing to thing
with greater ease and speed
and less involvement.

MARSHALL McLUHAN
& DAVID CARSON, The Book of Probes

Pictured: “hornymantic” @ dudesnude

*Today man has no physical body. He is translated into information, or an image.

This world* is white no longer and it will never be white again.

Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.

A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one’s compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.

JAMES BALDWIN from James Baldwin: His Voice Remembered; Life in His Language by Toni Morrison

*[i.e. history]

“Tongue-suicide.”

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?

Word-work is sublime . . . because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

TONI MORRISON, from The Nobel Lecture in Literature, Stockholm, 7 December 1993.

S-I-S-S-Y

“I’ve always lived my life as if I were taking down shorthand dictated by someone else,” she [my mother] said. “Don’t you dare do that. You be your own special word, Kevin. I know people call you a sissy. I know Daddy did a lot of the time, God rest his soul. Even I called you that in my own way when I’m beside myself, and teasing the nearest person to me seems the only solution to the severity of one of my dark moods. She handed me her pen and a piece of stationery. “Write it down. Write down that word. S-I-S-S-Y.” I obeyed and wrote the letters as large as I could across the paper. “Now, whenever anybody calls you that again you remember how pretty that looks on there. Look at the muscles those S’s have. Look at the arms on that Y. Look at the backbone that lone I has. What posture. What presence. See how proud that i is to stand there in front of you.” “The souls of words reside in their sounds, Kevin. Always remember that. That’s where music is in language,” she said. “Even a word we think of as a mean one can be pretty if you listen to it in the right way,” my mother insisted. “Meaning has no meaning if you train your ear to listen how lovely language is. it has its own scale. But don’t ever scrutinize it,” she warned. “Feel it. Form it in your mouth.” She took a deep breath as if she were about to hit one of her high soprano notes in a secret lyric. “Sissysissysissysissysissysissy,” she instead incessantly whispered in my ear and began to tickle me. “Say it with mommy. Sissysissysissysissy.” I did as I was told, gladdened to hear the hint of happiness hidden somewhere still inside her. “Sissysissysissysissy,” I called myself, our voices melding into a sibilant giggle . . .

KEVIN SESSUMS, from Mississippi Sissy

Register Your Sissy Boy For Vacation Bible Gun Camp!

Guy Maddin’s Sissy-Boy Slap-Party

Above: Michael Harwood. Among Boys and Men, 1996.

Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow.*

The love of liberty is the love of others;
the love of power is the love of ourselves.**

Language is our common denominator.

Literature is the opposite of dogma. A literary text lies constantly open to other readings, to other interpretations, perhaps because literature, unlike dogma, allows for both freedom of thought and for freedom of expression, and is, like those essential genes that granted us the power of imagination, self-reproductive. I find it moving that no literary text is utterly original, no literary text is completely unique, that it stems from previous texts, built on quotations and misquotations, on the vocabularies fashioned by others and transformed through imagination and use. Writers must find consolation in the fact that there is no very first story and no very last one. Our literature reaches further back than the beginnings our memory permits us, and further into the future than our imagination allows us to conceive, but that must be the only barrier. “Freedom of expression,” declared the Egyptian theologian Gamal Al-Banna, commenting on recent manifestations of Islamic extremism, “is an integral part of the freedom of thought. I believe that all opinions must be accepted. Otherwise, there is no freedom. Freedom can find its own limits, but to impose them from outside is contrary to its nature and risks destroying it.”

ALBERTO MANGUEL, The City of Words

Artist: Martin Creed Words Fail Me @ MOCAD ’til January 20, 2008 Photo: NYTimes

*Freedom, baby. Freedom.

**William Hazlitt, Political Essays, 1819