FIRST
THE RETURN TO ZERO
can take playce in many wayes. (Opening doors so that anything can go through.)[2] It might be brought on by linguistic or lettristic or graphic oddments that slow the skimming glance, inviting a kind of meditative awakening to the material text. Calling attention to the arbitrary splendore of grammaticall forms & enigmaticall epithetes as "the sun at noon illustrates all shadows" (to recall Sir Thomas Browne and invoke past as "other"), we might notice that it's become difficult to ignore the rank contingency—word by strangely delicious word—of what seemed only a moment ago to make necessary, sufficient, and relentless sense. That is, a startling departure in spelling or a rupture in syntactic momentum can bring into relief how all words might be other wise. (When to "thInk" requires Ink.) Or better or worse yet, how words might or might not be more or less wise than we think, since it's so hard to think without them just as they/we are—vis-à-vis, tête-à-tête, foot-in-mouth … "uncallEd for … Splitting' the idea of /the real" in this Large City of language with its fragmented traffic.… just as it's always been.
At the moment of any disruption of habit (grammar or traffic) a generic question can arise: Might it be possible to move through our lives in other ways, guided by other processes and structures, perceiving connections, even constellations lost to our habitual grammars, seeing the side streets, getting lost and discovering something new? In a new mode of moving and noticing will we be enacting, to some degree, slight or grand, a different kind of humanity? Can we really move so quickly from one word to one world to the next? Should we, in light of 20th C linguistic theory (Saussure, Whorf, Wittgenstein, etc.), simply conflate the two into wor/l/d? This may be the poethical question implicit in John Cage's return to zero—a question of the relation between the structures of our language, our art, and our forms of life.
The writing below, both despite and because of its occasional unexpected shifts, makes a clear statement against the illusion of possession by identification that underpins the logic of depicting—whether graphically or linguistically. All the modes we find in books that implicate the world in a conspiracy of "and then of course" are designed to relieve the uncertainty of anything new (unrecognizable) under the reflected light of the moon.
| itS | |
| shaPe | |
| And | |
| coloR | |
| exActly | |
| what you've Seen | |
| in bookS | |
| make It | |
| eaSy | |
| to reCognize | |
| the fiRst | |
| tIme | |
| you See it | |
| we Possess it | |
| thAt | |
| iS to say | |
| before we Put | |
| hAnds on it | |
| this is not poetRy | |
| which is hAving | |
| nothing to Say | |
| at the Same | |
| tIme | |
| Saying it | |
| onCe | |
| we'Re | |
| In | |
| the foreSt nothing else | |
| recognition Puts | |
| in one's heAd | |
| a certain Sense | |
| of accomPlishment | |
| thAt leads | |
| away fRom poetry | |
| Away | |
| from uSe | |
| towardS | |
| possessIon law and order | |
| and then of courSe | |
| John Cage, "Mushrooms et Variationes"[3] |
But this language doesn't radically breach "the law and order" of a linguistically based logical sequence. There is no necessity for the reader to go beyond an appreciation of what is being said about a poetics of "useful" defamiliarization and enact its principles. This language has not achieved the form of poetry it implies: that formal structure, in a movement away from "possessIon law and order," must look more like Cage's Empty Words, with its fragmentation and reorientation of all linguistic units, or like the beginning of Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else. Notice the continuation of its exploration of new associations between parts of speech—in a sense, freeing the "Ions" from "possessIon" and allowing new exchanges to take place:
space being represented in it my work feeds Upon itself i think it is a
| play oR | |
| placE | |
| tO be' | |
| liFe is | |
| accustoMed to thinking | |
| it's verY | |
| Form[4] |
Buckminster Fuller used to say the most important thing to remember about structure is that it is an inside and an outside. Given this, it's worth worrying about our insider's tendency to take the walls and ceilings for everything there is. We have known—and forgotten this—many times in many ways from Plato's cave to Whorf's snowscape. And "now," is this not what we may be doing with language identified as the paradigmatic human structure? Whorf informed us that we don't see anything that isn't prefigured in our vocabularies, and Wittgenstein moved us from "the world is all that is the case" to "the limits of my language are the limits of my world," although he himself never believed that, except to mean "my social world." The number of times this latter has been quoted with all its problematic implications rival's McDonald's astonishing hamburger statistics when corrected for the mean deviation between hamburgers and ideas.