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PARODY, SO?
Paradise is re-entry into the womb. Let’s not get physical. Or etymological. Biology is impossible. Let’s get equivocal. Let’s Make a Deal. ‘[L]et’s make ambiguity’ (216). This is popcorn for the tormented. While others continue to get lost in regret, can’t we stage our own commercial pause in this linguistic feeding frenzy to confect a few of our own readerly rumors rewritten as ‘THIS SIDE (FED) UP’? Amidst this barrage of language, can’t we just say openly and without regret, alibi, or ‘lick-shaped excuses’ (245) that language is not a thing, the thing itself, or the idea? Interrupt the voluptuous hiss to say this, or write this, or come clean as a new-born isotope? This is a misreading appropriate to a misstepped, mussed-up writing, but it’s all words, for words and against words, across the clotted cream of the page. All this talk of fluidities is sonically extracted with surgical precision from the language tree and there is no stepping aside (para-), much less outside this text but in our own patently unstable missteps as readers writing and written producing our own social conjugations of this text. We lick with paper; we write over what we erase with white out and liquid paper. Texting me softly with his sarong. We’re in the language and we think we’re protected in our smocks, but when we look down at our chests we see that we’ve been typed and typed on: ‘lanolined miracle smudge front/ makes the white-out look gray . . . blank verse playing black on my mind . . . furtive flashes curtailed boldface’ (172).
And we have to, we must, in the face of, directly in the face of this onslaught (i.e., by means of ‘facework’), DO something. Our minds are being tattooed by this language of address as if we were envelopes and this message, this code is the fact of this address and what’s inside the letter doesn’t matter (content) because the inside’s already outside and the letters themselves are the needlings and needles and our own needs are also on the surface (and are they being addressed?), at cross-stitched purposes, meshed spider webs of intertextual, intellectual, interlabial hatching. You don’t have to look inside this language; it’s there, splayed on the page and you apply your own tourniquet to its flows, its spatter and machine gun spray, paintball epiphanic phantasms aimed at your eyes and splicing there. ‘Some scratch!: can words do less’ (220). Print choreography, the words don’t sit still and the who is you; i.e., a jury of your own appearances, a jury of another’s forgery. ‘[B]ut enough about you,/ I collect liquid’ (173).
So, in ‘Jupiter’, take your Lanolin, the words, the ‘pronominal wetting’ (231), the grammar is too slick not to refer to its other in things, the things are already there, things are words and they sense as senses make sense, they are wet and grieve and chafe, hatch not you too eyes? Have not words eyes? Do they not do all these things at a distance of no distance — in your face — this is a language of in-your-face and not in other words. Writing is labial, lingual — as Andrews might write, but thus far hasn’t, ‘parataxis ate my panties.’ Is it ‘paraphilic?’ (214). ‘Stick to fact ate my mirror’ (255). The critic’s eats its homework/ vomit. Is this your homework, Larry? ‘Tongue teaches/ letters in the eyes’ (233). There’s enough fluidity here to simulate The Flood — this is a pro-diluvean, an unapologetically apoplectic poetics, yes, squeezed through ‘babyfood lips.’
How can we say there’s no author here, sticking to the page and bugging us as if he were an electronic listening device (a bug) tapping the white noise of the social unconscious which breaches this text in the sonic surveillance of the overheard? He’s biting through this page the (w)hole time, this cunnilingual word-forker, tonguing the hem of the unbegun, he who is that ‘voluptuary in teeth’s clothes sliced same furry couch’ (233). This isn’t the language of the body, it’s the body of language; equal parts velocity and equivocity, with ‘gelatinous patting pressure/ tenderly pent-up — the pen beguiles/ broad hips producing milk, looking for tonguing a little lie’ (233). Andrews has done the Flaubert inkwell fuck; here are his own ‘quotable slaps’ to the sap: ‘the erotic life of words & clusters of words & phrases . . . word-to-word fluidities . . . the secret of the ooze’ (PM 259).
The ‘real’ history of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is this endless secretion of the equal sign — letter fucks letter, word fucks word and paradise is a manifesto of manifestation. How many books of poetry do have to pucker up for? Andrews say, ‘Me Puck,’ and we concur. We say, ‘Puck you.’
‘Alibi readdresses you’ (PM 263)
Alibi = elsewhere, thus, I is elsewhere.
If alibi readresses you, then you must ad lib.
To itch his own.
Nature doesn’t abhor evacuations.
‘I evacuated reality for you’ (237)
INVITATION TO A MISREADING OF LIP SERVICE, or Stand by Your Mons
You can’t get any more ‘insider’ (‘DISABUSING sense to refuel the big insider’, 244) than in this discourse/ intercourse. Past the vagina and into the uterus — intra-uterine. Insider trading. Secret secretions. It’s as if Andrews is a mole who has infiltrated the inner sanctum of the Society of the Speculum. ‘Exterior wants you back’ (PM 270). He has a crush on the crushed velour interior, ‘a crush on the possible’ (PM 268); that is, ‘the possible that cannibalizes the real’ (54). Gatecrasher gazing at the Gates of Paradise. This is not art’s official Paradiso. Nor is it Paradis Artificiel. An orificial parasite, Andrews sings the aria ‘La Donna è Primum Mobile.’
Andrews adamantly refuses to cater to a reader’s expectations. His address is not an invitation, rather it provides you in advance with all the reasons for neither coming or going. ‘Refuse the invitation to join what you are already a part of’ (PM 139). If the poem is a vehicle, the reader is a hitchhiker; but the vehicle never slows down and if the reader wants to get a ride he needs to accelerate in his own terms to match the pace of the vehicle — more like the baton pass between relay runners. You must be up to speed.
SAPERE AUDIENCE
This is not an audience. No one is listening; pace Spicer, no one ever listened to poetry. The addresser and the addressee communicate across (trans-) the page, as language mediates mind by calling it forth and qualifying it in various visions and revisions of words. The audience, the sense of an audience is ‘outside’ of this relation (transaction). It is an historical construct, an abstraction of ‘public,’ or ‘cultural’ spheres, or a matter of the historical record. No one is listening to this recording. Poetry has always missed the Mass (Missa Solemnis) and the masses.
Whose sense is it that believes the audience to be a mass of consumers choosing products? HURRY UP PLEASE, IT’S LATE. ‘Last call for retorts!’ (269). Late Capitalism, late Marxism, working late on the late work of an age past its bedtime. It is already too late: ‘the trouble is:/ antithesis, why always late’ (265). Except that we know that there is no ‘point of no return’ — and this is Utopia, a reassertion of naivete, a splinter of idealism. Who has marked this as a discourse of the market? Who markets what no one desires?
Poetry then embraces the failure of communication in terms of masses, but not between individual readers and writers, addressees and addressers. Advertising communicates to the masses by producing slogans which remain empty enough to be filled by anyone as if this emptiness were the very definition of fulfillment. But no one should be surprised when confronted by the language barrage that seems to bear no message, no product to buy, only endless aural dissonances as by-products. Perhaps it allows the reader to knock herself out — knock your ‘self’ out, stop dead in its tracks, and go in the opposite direction; i.e., infinitely minimize any potential audience. Speak only for those who still listen for ways of thinking about what they don’t already know. The poem doesn’t offer satisfaction; there is no money-back guarantee. You lose yourself and gain perspective on this loss, but you don’t ever become an ‘other.’ You don’t gain access to some superhero’s closet where you can replace your vacuity by exchanging masks. If you accept the challenge of the work, then it’s your responsibility to work on changing your own face. You have been slapped by Bruce Andrews. You can either turn the other cheek, or match the ‘cheekiness’ of the one who slapped you.
This strategy of offense is actionable in that it is meant to provoke you to action. You have been paralyzed by the way the world has been packaged for you. Your only option is to take a risk. JUST SAY KNOW. The poetry that faces you across the divide between the page and your eyes spits in your face the interstitial grumblings of the overheard. This is not a gift: ‘the literally ecstatic — gliding on a plane alongside, outside, your ‘self’. We’re responding in fluid. Gift dishevels’ (PM 266). Poetry is the ripped pages of the present — there is no reason to continue to look for what is past. Send this miscommunication to the next neo-human telephone you see. Perhaps they will pick up something from the static as they wait through the silence of the on-hold music.
He puts the ‘pop’ back in apoplexy, the ‘lips’ back in apocalypse.
If cosmetics are applied to the external body, the internal body is equally made up. At times, Lip Service seems to do for cosmetology what Dante attempted for cosmology. Fictionalized & frictionalized. Factionalized & fractionalized. Is it not (ad)diction? The social body is made up of exchanges between subjectivities — the glue that holds these interiorities together is a bodily fluid, a florid fluidity. Andrews brings to surfaces the same attention usually reserved for ‘depth.’
At the same time he shows that interiority, especially bodily interiors, are equally sites of decoration and ornamentation. His ‘scriptive depthcharges’ (PM 250) recall the depths back to the surface. ‘The activity of defamiliarizing reference is caught up in a defamiliarizing or contesting of depth. It articulates and foregrounds a surface’ (PM 259). The writing, writing itself, is a series of ‘chargings & rechargings & dischargings’ (PM 259). How can you diss this honorable discharge? What do you think writing is? But enough about you.
‘OBJECTIVE REALITY DETERMINES CONSCIOUSNESS’
‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’
‘Bytie opredeliaet soznanie’
Bite me, O pre-delight sews anomie
‘Bite! Bite!’ (268)
‘Language replaces consciousness’ (226)
Social being determines word choice: where diction is addiction to words and vocabulary is the lexicon’s reservoir. A certain unreserved seeing of how words shape what we see happening in the world; linguistic transactions, what is exchanged (fungible) between speakers is not what ‘you’ think, but ‘how’ it is. Consciousness has webbed feet. Writing tattoos Y-O-U on your chest, which makes it difficult when you are trying to point to yourself and say ‘ ‘I’ think’ because, therefore, I see only ‘you.’ But my objective reality must also be subjected to the same withering ironies; the same dialectical vortex splitting extremes into what ‘it’ means. Do my eyes deceive me when I see ‘you’ tattooed on your chest? What’s happening beneath the surface? What’s eating you? Is my ability to read you up to me, or is it just that ‘The Legibility is Enforced’ (PM 250)? There must be some mistake. Or is some ‘Government practice-typing on the heart’ (250)? ‘Do you copy?’ (8). Can you read this ‘scripted dizziness’ (PM 250)? A missive martyr of ‘stigmata kisses’ (278), Andrews plies his trade at the Orifice of Dead Letters. And this particular postman always rings ideologically. I don’t come without remembering where I came from. ‘I didn’t come here to leave’ (22). And neither do you. Reading is fun and fungible because it’s mental (let your eyes do the laughing). ‘It’s not a criticism, it’s funny!’ (168). Reading is fun because it’s funny — a quasi-tautology. ‘It’s so funny/ because I was just thinking’ (256). It promotes interchangeability; it promotes a translation of words for words. Language is a fungus. Molds, rusts, mildews and smuts. Smuts? Look it up. Reading is a re-learning experience. ‘Ah-hah! I hear you learning’ (256). In response to one who writes ‘I think in trouble’ (233), it is to be expected that ‘intrepretation waits for troublemakers’ (PM 249). Perhaps you think that I am being unreasonable, but you should remember that ‘to laugh is to ruffle clarity’ (228).
THE ANECDOTE OF THE SWEATER or, ‘Don’t do to my sweater what you did to my pants’ (187) or, ‘yo, bedwetters!’ (160)
To make a stone feel wordy. To make a word feel stony. To make a stone feel stony — word.
As far as objective reality is concerned, it certainly does determine consciousness.
But in art it often runs counter to the consciousness. My brain is busy with the daily grind. The high point of the day is morning tea.
And that is too bad: some artists shed their blood and semen. Others urinate.
Net weight is all that matters to the buyer. (Third Factory 63)
Speaking of objective reality . . . On a recent visit to cardiologist’s office, I witnessed the following exchange between an elderly couple in the waiting room. The wife started picking at some stray crumbs on her husband’s sweater and snapped, ‘Look at that sweater!’ To which the husband retorted, ‘You look at it!’ This kind of thing happens every day in ‘objective reality.’ Reading Andrews makes me realize that others are out there listening to and monitoring such crude exchanges of language.
When Andrews writes, ‘I wet my pants — wet yours!’ (86), it’s funny; but there is an undercurrent of mischief in noting the structure of these exchanges. The artist can substitute any number of words for bodily fluids and still be witness to the wetness of all exchanges. I and thou. ‘Get wet = do it yourself’ (148). Think of how of much our daily communication involves ‘pissing’ on each other. ‘Others urinate.’ Others wet their pants. And things are even more complicated when you think. Andrews writes, ‘I am but the loudspeaker/ of a symptom’ (50). He marks with critical urgency the underlying aggressivity of our everyday language patterns and thus implicates ‘us’ in the very structure we often wish to deny — where ‘wishes are metaphors for words’ (226).
Perhaps that’s why it makes us feel so uncomfortable. He’s hailing us as the ‘I’ hails the ‘hey, you!’ We breathe and breed and evacuate. Ideology as system of bodily fluids. Do we ever do anything but exchange? ‘Whenever I speak, I wet your pants’ (50). Who’s pissing on whom’s parade? In the first instance, the writer writes (wets) and cajoles or commands us (readers) to write (wet). Here, the writer tells us that whether or not we write (wet) our own (texts/ pants), he has already written (wet) us. And we are unavoidably implicated in this exchange: ‘we can stay dry, grammar pisses for us’ (291). As a former president may have said, ‘I feel your irony.’ Because this ‘funny’ exchange about wetting one’s pants is all too political. Whenever GW speaks, I feel that he has wet my pants.
Andrews’s bark is worse than his arbeit. This is precisely the opposite of the arbitrary. I got your indeterminacy right here. Well, no, I guess I don’t. Andrews works through ambiguity: ‘It’s all over because we’re not through’ (162). His grasp exceeds his reading. His argument for absorption is that it’s exorbitant: ‘exorbitantly — so ex-orbitally’ (PM 269). Andrews is a poet who has been absorbed by language, by the discourse system, so that he has joined its flows; as ‘author’ and authority he has absconded with and been absorbed into language. When the writer reemerges in these words, he can be seen as the agent of its tampering, as evidence of its being and having been tampered with.
Hypocrite Lecteur, — c’est moi! Say more . . .
Writing as action; reading as action, not a behavior observed by a text, sitting there, bored, looking at us.
Binary, with the text as switchman
Blurs, so fast = mesh
Texts read the reader (PM 12)
If the text isn’t looking at us, we cannot become fixed by the text — trans-fixed. Something is coming across, getting across. Smells a teeny bit like translation: ‘Each intimacy a translation, and a theory of translation. We do not have to listen. Text cannot expropriate the labor of reading’ (PM 266). The text isn’t motionless; it moves on and can switch tracks — shunting as an attitude and act toward risk. The text becomes a train that moves ‘so fast’ that it ‘blurs’ — mass becomes mesh. Fixed mass becomes mixed mediation. If the text is a train, it still doesn’t train the reader. This doesn’t require training. The text is a moving object (target); a verb that doesn’t train, but texts the reader.
THE SUBLIME: You Can’t Say It But You Can Overhear It; or, I Hear You Quoting, But You Can’t Come In; or, Why Ed Meese is Not Sublime, but the Discourse of Porn Is; or, I Know It When I See It Vs. I Know it When I Don’t See It; or, I am a Little Dog Because I Know Myself
‘For, as if instinctively, our soul is uplifted by the true sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard’ (Longinus)
‘refining pleasure to resist/ in love by yourself; self-willing sublime/ ain’t ashamed that “we” is a rare locution’ (61)
‘the silent language/ the visible languages misnamed sublime’ (239)
‘With this, purchase paradise/ helps it sublimer wish not want not/ so then give me my ring string attached/ releases the subjectivity of destroyed subjects’ (101)
Did I mishear you correctly? ‘Longinus describes the operation of sublimity as a kind of imprinting process which includes moments of expropriation and identification’ (Guerlac 275). For Andrews, the sense of quoting from overheard speech explicitly stakes out an aesthetics of expropriation rather than appropriation. Whereas to appropriate is ‘to make one’s own, to take possession of or make use of exclusively for oneself,’ expropriation means fundamentally ‘to deprive of possession; to transfer (another’s property) to oneself.’ Andrews is engaged in the transfer, the exchange between speaker and hearer, addresser and addressee, writer and reader. He is not interested in the process of stabilizing subjectivities through the process of identification. He doesn’t care what ‘you’ think — ‘You, scare quotes outside of the body’ (137).
Let us quote now, you and I, now that we are outside our bodies and miming our minds. We are what we quote (eat, wet, teach, learn). Exchange changes ‘us.’ Exchange is based on a series of artificial equivalences and not on self-same identities. If the reader is meant to identify with anything, it is with ‘language’ itself, the mobile and motile ‘scare’ codes that course through a data stream that is never stabilized in a coherent union of personhoods (little red readinghood or writinghood) whether of writer or reader — ‘ain’t ashamed that “we” is a rare locution’ (61). ‘The speaker vanishes into his text. The listener, on the other hand, undergoes a kind of traumatic inscription’ (Guerlac 275).
In Andrews’s case, a strange repositioning occurs. As writer, he inscribes the moments of overheard, quoted speech and in doing so places himself at the interface of listener/ reader and speaker/ writer. These moments inspire him to lose himself in others’ words, to transport himself out of himself and into the discourse. ‘I cater your none soon pale exit words/ less than half absent Quotation marks on the throne/ I don’t like new’ (97). Make it neutral. One should note the insistent literalization of the marks of writing as stigmata, print itself as imprinting or coding the reader before the reader can decipher the codes; simply to enter into language is already to be subjected to this imprinting process. The listener is ‘voiceprinted’ by the moment of the speaker’s vanishing into the text, so any identification which takes place occurs between the listener/ reader and the text, and through the text to this now dispersed, imaginary speaker, this ‘other’ of the text as text. ‘The transport of the sublime, therefore, includes a slippage among the positions of enunciation, as the destinateur [speaker, addresser] gets ‘transported’ into the message and the destinataire [listener, addressee] achieves a fictive identification with the speaker’ (Guerlac 275).
This ‘slippage’ between addresser and addressee is certainly one of Andrews’s main topoi, but I should stress that that any identification between listener and speaker can only be ‘fictive,’ precisely because the speaker has already disposed of and dispersed ‘his’ identity into the text — ‘Now as I other quote posed’ (71). Thus, the subject becomes anonymous and ‘Anonymity transacts address’ (PM 249). ‘This is not so different from what could be said to take place in the much milder, everyday occurrence of quoting. Indeed, the structure of citation appears to be embedded in the very operation of sublimity, while the sublime itself might be characterized in terms of the inevitability of repetition or citation’ (Guerlac 275-6). In the case of quoted speech, there appears to be a significant inversion or reversal of the process inherent in ‘sublime’ citation. Andrews in no way as a writer imagines or feels that he himself has produced what he has only quoted, rather he ‘loses’ himself in the act of writing as overhearing (his writing is underwritten by the overheard as much as it has overheard the unwritten). Since he is repeating the words, his agency is not attached to the source of the utterance, but instead it detaches from the cited speech’s (i.e., the vanished speaker’s) author-ity, ‘releases the subjectivity of destroyed subjects’ (101). In the very act of quotation, he is able to detach his own subjectivity and disperse it into the cross-connected historicity of language itself, displayed and splayed out across the panoply of social beings.
What does it mean to say that subjectivity has been transferred to the reader? First, the author’s subjectivity is ‘transported’ to language itself where it enters the discourse stream in order to lose its ‘self’ there — to disperse, dematerialize, or mimetically camouflage itself; to disappear, or become invisible in the language itself only to rematerialize in the ‘labor of reading.’ What one has been able to decode is the fact that one has been encoded. Writing that employs quoted speech is an example of a practice of selection which manifests the concision of writing as reading as much as that reading must first have inspired the writing. The reader must then take up the baton, receive the message of this missive which has been addressed to her and thus respond to the invitation to have conjugal relations with the text. Self-reflexive, or grammatically aware, writing takes the writer’s private monologue (with and in and within language) public and makes it dialogical. It takes it to the streets, where the streets are paved with good quotations. Thinking is not a private affair. Andrews’s marks of quoted or overheard speech are the stigmata which ground his external interiority, his euphoric pessimism, his infernal Paradiso, his deoxyribonucleic acid tongue.
STARVE A CODE, FEED A FETISH
One’s gaze animates the inert thing — commodity fetish — but that thing then takes up residence in one’s own vision as a pair of cement shoes say, or better, as the incipient germ which causes the slow infection which transforms one’s own agency itself into an inert thing. The trick, if trick it is, would be to treat this infiltration as an inoculation against the full-blown, rampant spread of disease throughout the system. Or else to imitate the virus itself, to camouflage and change one’s own coloring to perform a counter-insurgency from within the very midst of the enemy, using its own codes and forms of discourse as camouflage and by making its own agency invisible to therefore highlight by contrast one’s inability to actually resist infection because by placing oneself at all in this discourse stream one is already infected by the toxicity of this system. ‘If you work within the system, the system works within you’ (168). The residual medication (this will help me more than it helps you) of a capitalist reference system flattens people into things so that they can be more easily packaged and exchanged for the promise of a value (happiness?) that can only be realized by forfeiting one’s agency, thus canceling out any chance that one could ever collect on this imaginary reflection of a real debt. Subjectivity is subjected to the pure products of American objectification. There is nothing to fear in the process of commodification but the fetish of fear itself.
Have you been listening to what is produced by this mill of slogans? Sprite: ‘Image is everything — Obey your thirst.’ Virginia Slims: ‘You’ve come a long way, baby’ (165). And just a few pages further, this rejoinder: ‘we have not come a long way & we are not babies’ (168). Dow Chemical: ‘Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible’ (263). Andrews’s oxymorons become foxy morons. We live in a country where ‘too much makeup is our national bird’ (56).
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