Yo! Ron Silly-man be talkin’ ’bout my homie & bes’ girlfren Marianne Shaneen over on his b-log. While I am thrilled that he perceives the uniqueness of her piece, “The Peekaboo Theory”, that appears in the feature spot in Drew Gardner’s latest issue of _Snare_, his characteristic “external formalist” critical method adequately addresses neither its energy nor its content.

While he does point out some formal features that contribute to the onward rush of the piece (which is simultaneously novel, essay and poem, a trans-genre work whose classification I am surprised perplexes Ron) such as a missing article, long lines, etc., he says not word one about the subject the motivates and necessitates its compelling rhythm.

He also makes the odd assertion that he sees in it no evidence of “ear” — as if “ear” meant only assonance, alliteration, and the whole list of prosodic techniques we learned in English 1A. Wouldn’t “ear” also be rhythm? And doesn’t any instance of language have it, as any instance of language “has emotion” (for as Tom Mandel once pointed out in one of the talks in _Hills_ magazine, emotion in language is like calories in food)? And isn’t the peculiar rhythm of “The Peekaboo Theory” akin to that of a bebop drummer (how fitting its appearance, then, in _Snare_), banging madly, making the sound of falling down stairs over and over and over again? And isn’t that the sort of rhythm that Marianne’s subject — obsessive love — proprioceptively demands? To talk about this piece without mentioning obsession is a little like talking about today’s paper without mentioning Iraq. Or just off the mark, like calling Alan Davies a surrealist instead of a NY School practical-language philosopher Zen formalist-sensualist.

When I introduced Marianne’s reading at the Flying Saucer Cafe, the interdisciplinary reading/performance/lecture series I ran with Alan Sondheim, I looked at Marianne’s work in terms of The Loquela, a term that I learned from Barthes’ _A Lover’s Discourse_:

The Loquela

loquela

This word, borrowed from Ignatius of Loyola, designates the flux of language through which the subject tirelessly rehashes the effects of a wound or the consequences of an action: an emphatic form of the lover’s discourse.

1 Trop pense me font amours — love makes me think too much. At times, result of some infinitesimal stimulus, a fever of language overcomes me, a parade of reasons, interpretations, pronouncements. I am aware of nothing but a machine running all by itself, a hurdy-gurdy whose crank is turned by a staggering but anonymous bystander, and which is never silent. In the loquela, nothing ever manages to prevent these repetitions. Once I happen to produce a “successful” phrase in my mind (imagining I have found the right expression for some truth or other), it becomes a formula I repeat in proportion to the relief it affords (finding the right word is euphoric); I chew it over, feeding on it; like children or the victims of mercyism, I keep swallowing and regurgitating my wound. I spin, unwind and weave the lover’s case, and begin all over again (these are the meanings of the verb meruomai: to spin, to unwind, to weave).

Or again: the autistic child frequently watches his own fingers touching objects (but does not watch the objects themselves): this is twiddling, which is not a form of play but a ritual manipulation, marked by stereotyped and compulsive features. As with the lover suffering from the loquela: he twiddles his wound.

2. Humboldt calls the sign’s freedom volubility. I am (inwardly) voluble, because I cannot anchor my discourse; the signs turn “in free wheeling.” If I could constrain the sign, submit it to some sanctions, I could find rest at last. If only we could put our minds in plaster casts, like our legs! But I cannot keep from thinking, from speaking; no director is there t interrupt the interior movie I keep making of myself [NB: Marianne is a filmmaker!], someone to shout Cut! Volubility is a kind of specifically human misery: I am language-mad: no one listens to me, no one looks at me, but (like Schubert’s organ-grinder) I go on talking, turning my hurdy-gurdy. [pp. 160-61]

I can’t put it any better than Barthes does in my favorite of his works. But to me it is essential to go beyond looking at any text’s formal features to its raison d’être, or at the very least to its motor, or its generator. I ask myself, “What makes it go?” “Whence its energy?” and proceed from there.