Thomas Lowe Taylor -- UNDICKING THE FICTIVE

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In the anthemic
we find man
prefiguring his extinction
mourning it in celebration

vaguely remembering
archilocus'
"in fucking
one remembers
that"
(apols to guy davenport)

and we have now
from stephen jay gould
that evolution isn't
necessarily Going anywhere
it's just the mechanism
for what it produces

and from my father--
to break the rules
you have to first know them;
& "maybe the journey is it"

in these homilies, then, something reminds the present, my own anyway, that it has its destinations and its appositives well suited to its own purposes, not that they are secret from us, but that they are there at all is the mystery. "Leakage," Pynchon calls it in an early short story. At a certain point in its own existence, the struct warps and distorts momentarily, as if it could not help but do so, it must reveal to us the fact of its existence, it is not content to merely exist and perform its function, it must at some point remind us of that fact. Odd. So you have to ask yourself, here at the end of time, what gives, what the fuck is going on. Scientific Enquiry, with its dependence on the random and on trial-and-error as defining principles of its absolute, what lies out beyond the godhead, eh? the bleak nothingness of the silent god, the oer'weaning presence of the great void, is that what we're selling with our syntactical weaknesses? Is that what's belittled among the special distances between words in our suggestive competition for what, actually, can go next to what

nay, better to live in the archetype, become the poem, become the dream of which you are center and particle, yet we see them among us defeated by old hippie clothing stores, i'd rather look like anybody just emerging from kmart. what does it mean, "live the archetype"? I still say that in the Information Age, language is control and who controls language controls control. And so the politics of the experimental is that it means to take control of the language, not just in the making of the dance of specifics and distances, not at all, but in the ability of the sequential utterance to modify consciousness in the fluxus of its origins and templates, where exactly it (the state meant, the flow of the stuff) hits in the brain and where/how it ferments into either forgiveness or ecstasy. but you can't Not Mean what you say and make it work, you have to mean it. Therefore, blatant mind control is impossible. He says.

"...it's a great swirling turbulent mix of stuff and its gets down maybe iside or under the neocortex and it starts working on consciousness itself and it teaches things that can't be discerned simply from the denotations of the words or even the constellations of connotations, it's language as spell and ritual, by which I mean language as poetry, and it just dwarfs...all the current poetical poses."

and "...He found there only what he sought to mimic in the speed of thought with its own disconnectedness and lack of focus...."

What, then, gives? What's missing in a lot of the disgust, er, discussed, is that there is a dual evolution taking place, mine and yours. in the intersection of our moment, that fraction of a second when our hands touch, when my fragment of language discourses momentarily into and through your electrical system, we are both doing our own movies, eh? but the consequences of these crossings is not has not yet been evaluated in terms of its failures as well as its successes, for what takes place in the interim graft of passion that is or is not poetry in its final throes of self strangulation, what takes place evolves out of one lingua into another, and mutations take one out across the epiphanies without direction if we allow our sentences an existence where the strongest survive and that the natural selection is power driven, not ero-driven, not, that is, pleasure driven. In a pleasure-driven syntax, then, the microprocessors and switching stations along the way to true feeling, or Sensation, in a pleasure-driven syntax, the path is always the one of least resistance, not the macho delineators of diagrammed sentences and paragraph construction from the Army Manual of Poetic Conventions (USA-AMOPC-1), nay, fay, it is far more plural than that, and evocative

so with the procreations of subtext and foretext, say, as interlineated suggestibilities, with what gets out of there you begin to have an alternate universe created within the bounds of the old experience, husked out, de-neal and poon. this is true for a lot of what passes for Now-ish stuff, whatever it is called this week. because finally it is the Quality of Emotion that is trans-substantiated, that is, made new, in our continuing theme of making something out of nothing. or was it the perpetual motion machine? or getting two objects into the same space at the same time? or of "itself through itself," which was it?

but at start recall, the push is just to be, how can it be other? you pick at the scabs of the period, but who wouldn't? why not, they itch and scream and pain has its lessons, too. I've my own stories to tell, isn't that the reason for them? and in sharing what passed for what passed, it is no recollection to make them something unaware or mysterious, but the true lesson is in the attitude from which they sprang, that is, as discoveries, and not their specificity or their gravity or their whatever, it is in the satisfaction of one's declension or postulated undesirability, in one's unreasonableness is the true nature of the discovery "discovered" and that's the little Aha that goes off, a little squirt of the inner juice that is potent, poetant. arrived at in (by) one's own particular trance-dance, ones, duh, private idaho... and in looking for the language for it, we, uh

no we have not looked too much at the interpersonal (i hate to use that word) mechanisms (that one too) in what we do, there Is a dynamic in the exchange that affects either and both, you and me (eye). bullshit, you say, the poem is no different now than before i read it. well, carry on.

no, we're talking about trans-self communication, from my unconscious to (through) yours, and intentional. that's the trip, it's not any kind of parallel sympathography, its a purposeful connection at sublevels, and the fact that it changes you is a byproduct, more a matter of the pathetic inefficiency of your existing set of diagrams, they suck, to put it simply, and a suggestive, pleasure-driven communication tastes great and is less filling. folks with the wrong DOS, for instance, will actually feel ill when hearing poetry, it'll make them feel vertigo or nausea (of the sartrean sort, if they looked, but who does, or knows to?).

so Where We're Going is just Where We're Going, no better no worse, and that's the legacy of the world we inherit. But "live the archetype" is no franchise operation, you know, it's not the old Davy Crockett hat with handles in your subcortext, like the Jen Hadar with their cocaine vials bred into their skin-uniforms, glue-on sentiments you can get off the net for free... it must be that in the free part of free association you get to link up your word choice (or whatever) with what you want, and it can be(come) purposeful or not, depending on your vision/version of what you're doing. "You cannot not think." requiring only the discipline needed by any self directed pattern, john of the cross in his cell with the ant, you know... the inductive fallacy

we need to think/feel we are living an "authentic" life, not some franchise, eh? movies don't teach that, they can't give you "authenticity" nor can the fictive, nay. poetry offers a hole with no bottom, but it doesn't have to be that way. poetry could ennoble if it chose to. currently it Chooses to ennoble a bullshit ennui as the stance appropriate to the collapsed age. let it. the R&D on methods (disruption, broken things, invention, etc) will continue to take place and will eventually work their way into common discourse. hopefully the freeing of common syntax into its playful and suggestive mode will do the same for its users.