by Steve Finbow
Being circulates around a void that lies at its heart & limit.
Writing should be a rare thing,
this amounts to saying, if I am surrounded by absolute silence.
Robert Creeley’s use of white space
Larry Eigner’s use of white space
Stéphane Mallarmé’s use of white space
Asger Jorn’s use of modification,
Mark Amerika’s remixes,
Bob Cobbing’s retinal alphabets,
Velimir Khlebnikov’s The Law of Generations.
Ron Silliman’s Can you feel it? Does it hurt? Is this too soft?
Using questions, the interrogative mood.
A discourse consisting only in meaning effects detached from everything;
& this whole world of appearances
keeps afloat other disconnected elements of networks
that can be combined haphazardly
by collage from all places & all times.
Tristan Tzara’s scissors.
Your body in the process of writing,
your relation to the material of the language, to the dictionary that you manipulate,
Jacques Derrida’s Signéponge/Signsponge.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Osamu Dazai.
Just as an artist borrows elements that suit him from his precursors
& contemporaries, I invite my readers to freely take
& leave the concepts I advance
– Jacques Vaché, Stéphane Mallarmé – again – Suzanne Césaire.
All writing is theft.
The empirical world only appears, & becomes
– John Wieners, Tom Raworth, Bernadette Mayer
– writing is closing your eyes & keeping them open.
We can even say that the unspeakable here is guarded by language,
much more jealously than it was guarded by the silence of the initiate,
who disdained the desiccated signs &,
though still alive, closed his mouth.
The novels of Marguerite Duras.
L u d w i g f u c k i n g W i t t g e n s t e i n
Only in this way can the proposition
be true or false: it can only agree or disagree
with reality by being a picture
of a situation.
– the name is not a picture of the thing named.
Conversation is almost dead, & soon so will be those who knew how to speak.
Does this artifice not risk in turn creating confusions, concealing other things?
Pictures are more imperative than writing, they impose meaning at one stroke.
The marblings that bloom on the edges of certain books.
Do you like this? Is this how you like it? Is it alright?
If we insist upon a minimum of equilibrium, let us start screaming again,
let us do it with a passion, at every opportunity, proclaiming our minds at stake.
All sounds & images are already a kind of noise: data without meaning.
It’s not the noise, but the colour that makes me nervous,
sounds & colours can be used as vehicles of communication.
& the scream is the operation through which the entire body escapes
through the mouth. All the pressures of the body.
The writing is the sense of our thenness, our nowness, our whenness.
Thought & noise = language.
Between the noise
& the words for noise
they begin at night
countless noises of matter in motion.
Writing is a strange thing. The use of writing for disinterested ends.
Is he there? Is he breathing? Is it him?
Not the noise of books – the sound of a contiguous future,
the murmur of new assemblages of desire of machines.
Noise is a world where anything can happen, including & especially itself.
Desire is the motor of the repetition or substitution of oneself.
The perceiving self, is shaped by absence, & – writing.
The speculative turn nrut evitaluceps ehT
Lyn Hejinian’s My Life.
Incarnation.
Effulgences of human bodies
– Francis Bacon, Günter Brus, Yang Zhichao.
All creation is documentation.
What is your basic substantive?
A similar noise?
It is not destined to preserve them by naming them.
We end nonetheless by identifying it, by naming it even.
It camouflages the depths of the void, which come into view.
Silent mouths.
Erased words.
Saliva traces.
No, I won’t repeat it.
I no longer have the space.
& deny everything I’ve said.
Noise is death hiding in life, & it is true
that expectations of death clearly condition our sense of boundaries.
F é l i x f u c k i n g G u a t t a r i
Writing is an aid to oblivion & a map of forgetfulness.
The still life is time, for everything that changes is in time, but time does not itself change,
it could itself change only in another time, indefinitely.
The rising itself is a silent ringing, a hissing noise.
Is inarticulate articulate?
Only with a quiet voice
& with all the signs of deepest horror
did he speak about this secret.
Is it near? Is it hard? Is it cold?
The eroteme.
Question mark.
Opening instead onto the limitless multiple.
Futuristic atemporality.
Last abstract.
Start it.
It finishes.
It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times.
Yes, you.
L u c e f u c k i n g I r i g a r a y
In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence.
The surface.
To have been dangerous a fraction of a second,
beautiful a fraction of a second,
to have been anything, & then to rest.
– Hart Crane, Hölderlin, André Breton’s hatred of music.
If we picture to ourselves in their totality the sentences.
Hannah Weiner’s clair-style.
A gesture, a turn of speech, an inflection in the voice.
Excluded language, loquacious inanity, speech flowing indefinitely
outside of the reflective silence of reason.
Reading.
Concentric circles expanding about the stone, ripple noun verb.
Unuttered.
It is because this communication.
Heraclitus, Giordano Bruno, Baruch Spinoza.
We hear ourselves breathing that gives texture to silence.
Its mouth, open on the words it was spewing out.
Shut up.
Shut it now.
Swallow it down.
Henri Dumas, LeRoi Jones, Bob Kaufman.
Its expression has the excremental violence of a new writing of the body
that perforates the surface & attacks the subject,
all the spurtings quieted, inert, deadened.
I never felt you said anything.
I never thought you said anything.
I become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs.
The shattering violence of convulsion.
Steve Finbow‘s fiction includes Balzac of the Badlands, Tougher Than Anything in the Animal Kingdom, Nothing Matters and Down Among the Dead. His biography of Allen Ginsberg was published in 2011. His other nonfiction works include Pond Scum, Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia, Notes from the Sick Room and Death Mort Tod: A European Book of the Dead. The Mindshaft will be published by Amphetamine Sulphate in 2020. He lives in Langres, France.
Also at CREATRIX Magazine: https://creatrixmag.com//yes-yes-yes-after-the-flood/
Featured photo Niko van Egten, Echoes.
