by Craig Reynolds
from Basta! v1n4 (Summer/Fall 1998)
In 1994, upon graduation from a thoroughly (typically) canonized Midwestern university, where the word was a given (the voice of one instructor explaining to his “creative” writing class, “J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, now that’s the way you should all be writing!” still rings in my ear) and James Joyce was the only experimentalist to successfully justify tinkering with the classical formula (and because he did, no point moving forward), I endeavored to learn my materials.
My journey took me (paradoxically) back to the cut–up collages and word–games of the Dadaists, and forward, into the unabashed futurism of the postmodern. The first thing I learned, upon inspection, was that the internally–complete short story, boasting its well–wrought narrative, did not exist in nature––or if it did, played the same role as the Victorian garden planted in steely rows: an internally justifying fiction masking itself as reality, masking itself as nature, an emblem of an absolute. The well–wrought short–story exists in defiance of the actual materials of verbal articulation, just as the controlled garden exists apart from truly organic wilderness growth, an easily–assimilated alternative.
On the simplest level, narratives can be broken into paragraphs, and in turn, paragraphs can be divided into sentences; I began to build my narratives line by line, as poetry . . . but even sentences failed to ward off language’s essential entropy, revealing the autonomy of the single word. In an attempt to engage words but void linguistics, I began a series of cut–ups and collages (exploring words as surface entities) that could be substituted for proper word choices within a given narrative. Nonsensical or surreal language could be exploited to mock the pretense to realism that traditional writing claimed to uphold. I combined crass pornographic texts, classical literary erotica, the officially–sanctioned ecstasies of St. Teresa and purely religious texts in what turned out to be a seamless, complementary linguistic field defined by a common vocabulary. I wasn’t doing anything particularly new, but these more or less Surrealist experiments and word–games were necessary to the fullest realization of the exploded text, which would come later.
By focusing on letters, words could be fractured further, into entirely abstract linguistic motifs in which the a-b connection to a pre–determined meaning was no longer possible to assert. Finally, by looking at language microscopically, I had severed the connection between meaning and language’s essential materials . . .––but then again, even letters derive from the cool interplay of completely non–literary, non–linear effects. Partly, the architecture of printed language was to blame: although the cut–ups fractured common sense, and smashed the logical strain that held the traditional narrative together, they nevertheless retained a linguistic bias in so far as one still read from left to right––even if what one read didn’t make any sense, or ground the narrative to a halt. Furthermore, the nature of books, arranged in such a way that one must turn the page in order to reveal the fullness of the narrative, implies a linearity in thought (and action, to which it corresponds in so far as narratives provide realistic description, or depiction) that springs forth from and in turn, serves to justify the traditional Western view of time, its beginning in nothing and its end in the return of Christ to Earth. Books, and the strict ordering of text orchestrated by the printing press, ultimately necessitate the a to b, begin/end movement that defines linear thinking (as opposed to the all–over details of oral speaking), supporting social structures such as the Capitalist rise up the social ladder (with no over the shoulder look since nowhere suggested by the hierarchy of Western progress––in contrast to the communal leanings of oral societies, which tend to spread out their centers of interest), or the Industrial stream–lining of human activity to its barest, most mechanical aspects––in the service of increased production.
To combat the linearity of print, I printed a 70–page cut–up on transparency paper, which allowed every word to interact visually, verbally, meaningfully. Further, I published the book 4 times: one face up, one face down, one face up but upside down, one face down but upside down––hinged around the book’s periphery so that no page would occupy the first or last position and no word retained any special privilege in the all–over field. The reader could experience every possible approach to the book without engaging the inherent bias of up and down, back and forward. One could encompass the entire book at once or fragment it in smaller page increments––and, of course, the book’s content became that much more exciting and fluid (its meaning determined only by the dictates of the curious eye)––but one could never really limit oneself to the page to which s/he had opened, because something always existed on the other side of the page to flow through and obliterate the “written” text, another lesson I learned happily and utilized for later exploration.
My experiments with overlapping texts confirmed the obvious––that words become unreadable when stamped atop one another, initiating further re–evaluation of the written utterance. Rather than retreat into clean typography, I looked forward and found that language, as a visual medium, could be simplified even further than letters . . . to the visual reality of black ink on white paper, or vice versa. Once reduced to this purely visual element, it became impossible to distinguish between blobs of ink created by words and those created with no vestige of meaning––that is, it became impossible to distinguish between a meaningful verbal element and one for which meaning is entirely irrelevant. Ultimately, it became impossible to distinguish between meaning in the larger sense and meaninglessness; the cut–ups had blended real and unreal statements rather satisfactorily, but now, I had fingered the meaning–godfather; as a result, the medium could no longer be trusted. No longer would I privilege words over images, print over sound, meaning over meaninglessness––without blinding myself to the essential nature of verbal articulation. Once the page–curtain was pulled, all aspects of language bled–together; it was here, in the obvious, natural, empty (artless) space that the opaque page had so long obscured, that I found my freedom. It became clear that any verbal instance that denied its meaningless essence asserted a false reality, a phony authority that would inevitably prove destructive to all that which it excluded. People do this all the time, and are forever condemning themselves to the Hell of personal fascism, but the same architecture supports a conception of reality that takes itself seriously as reality. I found joy in Buffalo’s unsparing inability to take itself seriously, its ecstatic embrace of the spaces inside modern reality, in the discontinuous fragments that continually render its existence questionable, as in a dream.
In the end, I discovered that the word did not exist in nature; but neither does nature. I substituted abstract letter–splotches for photos of old women I met on the streets, wrote narratives with thumb–prints and sneaker marks. But what in the end was the difference between these abstract markings and the “realities” behind them––the old women, for example, or the shoes themselves?
Suddenly, I found myself returned to the world from which I felt exiled since early adolescence––that is, I had managed, in my own way, to slip behind Blake’s doors of perception. With no language–dirt remaining on the window to Ultimate Reality, everything glowed according to the realization that nothing matters and everything is real. The great contradiction I had sensed in Blake––did his mind, open to the angels, project its inner reality onto the objects he saw so fabulously, or would those objects buzz into oblivion on their own (that is, where is the center of interest?––in the tree in which Blake saw his angels or in the mind that imagined them there?)––suddenly ceased to matter. Everything was fictional, everything was real. Language, objects, spaces all bled together, occupying a single, limitless plane of indeterminate depth and non–apparent meaning. I could not distinguish between my words and the objects I had used them to describe, I was writing with the word and treating my words, my images, my dreams as if they were what the world successfully described, and the description, fleeting, inaccurate, obscure, overblown, hyperbolic , disfigured, ecstatic, joyous, destructive, explosive, blown away with the storm, somebody hid me in a raindrop, dig on the dewdrop, was absolutely true.
I could embrace everything fully because fictionality excludes nothing. The universe suddenly slipped comfortably onto the plane of fiction, like a pent–up ocean let bleed across a limitless earth. Even had I wanted to, I could not retreat into hard and fast realism, because I had looked into the void at the heart of realism, I had seen how little existed behind the realist mask. To cling to reality now would be more than merely reactionary, it would be insufficient, a temporary hedge against a dawning indefinability. Walking the streets of Buffalo in silent observance of an entire population’s descent into memory convinced me of the over–arching probability of my vision. It used to be that words would describe my thoughts but now I realized that the act of writing about them was a distinct epiphany of its own; and then I realized that the non–literary epiphany was the act of poetry made manifest in daily activity. I had left myself no choice but to approach the wor(l)d as fiction, to realize the gracious surfaces of everything, to abandon meaning, to forget reality, to concern myself only with possibilities, the unknown, the unreal––that is, to make myself more than a mere seer (what was there to see?), in the romantic sense of the word, but to lock my eyes only on nothing, to stare at the limitless void always, the grand open vistas in which everybody bristles and the world at its core is alive.