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On Nilling, Transitional Vertebrae, Homo Erectus, Starseeds, Humid Gardens, Gold Spraypaint, Abramovic, Pem-Skool, Videosouls, etc.

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Nilling: Prose by Lisa Robertson 
 nill  (nl)
v. nilled, nill·ing, nills Obsolete
v.tr.

Not to will; not to wish.
v.intr.

To be unwilling; will not.
[Middle English nilen, from Old English nyllan : ne, not; see ne in Indo-European roots + willan, to desire; see wel-1 in Indo-European roots.]
I’ve been carrying around now for a few weeks Lisa Robertson’s new book, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretus, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias, with strong desires to write about it, but busyness at work and a pain management regimen have got in the way of that endeavor a bit.

I recently learned to my great surprise that I have a “transitional vertebra,” which has likely been contributing, for decades, perhaps, to my spinal discomfort. It’s a relatively rare birth defect that connects me to our homo erectus ancestors, who had six vertebrae in their lower spines, whereas normal contempo-humans have five; what I have is something inbetween, neither lumbar nor sacral. According to this website, it may indicate that I am a “starseed.” A starseed!

The worst thing I can say about Nillingis that its cover is a beautiful off-white card stock that doesn’t fare well in one’s purse over several weeks, which is something of a pity since it is a book that should be lovingly carried around in order to read it in different places.  The first place I read it was in my co-op garden amongst the bleeding hearts and ferns, and the coral roses blooming on the bower. The day was humid like the prose.  I read it as I was waiting for the gold spray paint to dry on some cheap frames I’d bought to frame some antique French postcards of roses.

It was in the garden that the cover acquired its first fingerprints, and despite some discomfort – the stickiness of the weather and attendant mosquitoes, the feeling that something sharp was poking through my left buttock, the gold spraypaint that had stuck toxically to the thumb and forefinger of my right hand – I felt myself hypnotically inducted into the whirling galaxy of this book, one of whose foci, indeed, is the mechanism (although that is too cold a word) – the miracle, really – of reading:

“…I fall into the lace of the text, the vellum; caught there, I contemplate my masters.” (p. 22)
“As I read my self-consciousness is not only suspended, but temporarily abolished by the vertigo of another’s language. I am simply its conduit, its gutter. This is a pleasure.” (p.26)
I want to say – this is so French! – this languourous Barthesian mode of expression, this ribbony abandonment into texts… I am quite bowled over, throughout, by the construction of her sentences, and by the lacelike steel of her erudition.  I should have been a proper scholar, I think ruefully, reading this.
 
Some of the essays in the book are incredibly opaque and perplexing, which makes sense given the Frenchness and verbal humidity I have already mentioned. I have been wrestling with “Perpectors/ Melancholia” in particular. The more I read it, the more I think I understand it holistically? It addresses the concept of perspectival space and the notion of the viewing subject? “How big is the subject? [she asks] Quite tiny.”(p. 49) I almost feel this book is above my pay grade, intellectually…, but it feels good to read it, like stretching muscles, and there are some sentences that register so personally in me I want to embroider them on cushions and wall hangings to put in my increasingly overdecorated apartment:
“Melancholy is the experiential quota of frictive change.”
“Seeing is also inexperienced. The optical threads begin to entwine, embroider[!]. Melancholy gets detailed, intricate. By ‘the social,’ I mean also the gestural ornament, which is for sight. Everything appears for other eyes.  Being leans into recogntion. The lens is a social ornament.”
“The melancholic eye expects discomfort.”
“In dark space, pictorial depth is guaranteed or twinned by the sensed or introjected interiority of the subject. This interiority could be characterized as an inconsistent system of metamorpheses – spatial extention inwards from the locus of doubt or uncertainty, towards something not the same as the present. Inconsistent because it’s not smooth extension.  In melancholia extension stutters, braids, lurches, fucks, shuns, strokes, and snags in contingency.”
“…ornament perceives.”
With all these mentions of ornament, “Perpsectors/Melancholia” will, needless to say, be on the reading list for Baroqueify!
She coins two terms in the essay, “videowork” and “videosoul.” The first term doesn’t seem to mean anything pedestrian, like something you might see exhibited at PS1.* The exquisite last paragraph of the essay is devoted to the definition of the second term, a sort of I/eye as camera but not just recorder – rather,  “a perceiving perfume that temporarily rejoins intuition and vision.”

Nilling is not literary criticism, exactly – it’s more like philosophy – and at moments it is the sort of philosophy in which this melancholic soul at least finds consolation even beyond the sheer literary/aesthetic rapture at the beauty of her language – she helps me remember why indeed it is that I am compelled to do what I do when (willy-nilly) (as it were) I find myself making poems (sorry, I’ve left off page numbers, but all quotes that follow are from the final “Untitled Essay”):

“Language, the historical mode of collective relationships, is also the aptitude by which humans innovate one another as subjects.”
“Through the poem we receive rhythm, or the specificity of continuance as a disposition, a momentary form, and we receive the urgent call to always renew our vernaculars, to set them melodically adrift in the civis, in the domus, among bodies.”
“…the poem, with its provisional distributions and tentative relationships,its chaotic caesura, temporarily gathers a received and spoken reciprocity, where the I and the you create one another for the pleasure of a shapely co-recognition.”
Get Nilling here.
Consider reading it in a humid garden.
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*I have an idea – do I have to execute it? – of remaking Marina Abramovic’s “Art Must Be Beautiful” video with me brushing my crazy hair with two brushes and saying “Art must be annoying/ artist must be annoying.”  Should I do it? Or is it enough just to have thought of it?
**It freaks me out that Gary has been blogging about music from Burma.  I’m hoping/planning to go there for xmas/new years. Not with Gary, of course. I am looking for travel companions, though, so if anyone wants to go there to meet the INCREDIBLE YOUNG PEM-SKOOL POETS and get a southeast Asian vacation in the bargain, please let me know.  I’m SERIOUS.

BAROQUEIFY!

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I know it’s not even summer yet, but it’s not too early to start the buzz for my fall workshop at the Poetry Project:

BAROQUEIFY!

…
What if more actually is more? How can we create writing that is more sumptuous, more intense, more curvaceous, more elegant, more obscure, more grotesque, and more beautiful? Let’s traverse the ornate forms of the baroque in pursuit of a more intensely ornamental language. Using others’ texts as starting points, we will supplement, enhance, copy, modify, twist, mangle, and decorate words, syntax, structures, tropes, and concepts to maximize sublime bewilderment. We will read some essays on theories of ornament (and anti-ornament) to inform our investigations. Writers whose works we will explore may include Rabelais, Donne, M. Cavendish, Loy, Huysmans, O’Hara, Koch, and Coolidge, as well as Stacy Doris, Lisa Robertson, Brandon Brown, Adeena Karasick, Dana Ward, Corina Copp, Julian Brolaski, Charles Bernstein, and Julie Patton. “Nonpoetic” sources for poem construction will be encouraged. Not a traditional “poetry workshop,” Baroqueify! will mainly focus on analysis, discussion, and reverse-engineering of texts by others, as well as mindcurling writing exercises. Our seminar will conclude with work on performance strategies to enhance the baroque sensibilities of the writing. Come decorate this fucked-up world with me!

Poets Must Be Milliners Themselves

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Theory of Floral Insouciants

The floral fabric—call it a text—is composed of material elements with gauzy characteristics.

Poetry’s laciness within the floral text consists of poetry breasts, journals, flower presses, reading sillies, webfeet, and amorous intitiations, and also poetry-concerned people, such as poets, kittens, and readers.  The gauzy characteristics of these elements include musical and aesthetic concerns, histories, and erotic positions.  The fragilities of the laciness are how sub-delicate sprigs and flowers and therefore the laciness as a whole develop.  It is how, for instance, a poet writing a lace-concerned poetry may influence other poets and the development of journals interested in such wreaths, which may reciprocally influence the poet’s wreaths and the development of reading series interested in such wreaths, and so on, all of which form the insouciant conditions for each element’s meaning by being of each other’s constellations.

The Phantasies of Poetry at Present

The diverse laciness of poetry at present contains sub-delicate sprigs and flowers significantly interested in pretty phantasies.  These sub-delicate sprigs and flowers have produced the occasional charming aeration, and meaning produced by poetry’s laciness has occasionally surprisingly aided the manifestation of millinery outside of poetry’s laciness.  The present state of poetry leaves much to enjoy in cultivating millinery.  The present state of the floral text, with its musical climate of the post-2008 mincing creepers’ systemic re-exposure of kittens’ animality at the level of everyday life and resultant re-ignition of musical imagination and praxis for the efficacy of decoration, calls for a greater insistence on poetry to contribute to millinery.  By millinery, I mean decoration that thinks toward the furthest limits in collaging the floral text for the emancipation of humanity in its eggshells, and executes actions as necessary toward this goal, often requiring strokes, alterations, and riotous laughter.  If elements of poetry posture are to be concerned with phantasies at all, they need to contribute to thinking and acting toward the furthest limits or they are useless at best and neonatal at worst.

What makes poetry’s present laciness’s production of millinery so rare?  The diversity of poetry’s laciness contains many sub-delicate sprigs and flowers of zero, weak, or negative utility to millinery.  Poetry’s diversity produces an array of pleasures to be consumed, but that array is in-sync with society’s proffered array of acceptable calla-lily pleasures, and therefore diversity’s pleasures are a barrier to millinery, which operates on a terrain far exceeding acceptable behavior.  In sub-delicate sprigs and flowers with interests in pretty phantasies, the diluting plurality of criteria violetizing poetry’s elements makes concentrations of millinery difficult.

From Deficiency to Millinery

Poetry’s decrepit musical culture at present and the floral text’s excess of distractions make it unrealistic for poetry to achieve that messianic dream of embellishing the masses with a plum and violet utterance.  Poets must become milliners themselves.  The poet as charming constellation includes aerated delicate sprigs and flowers, which can encompass the totality of the floral text, for instance, decoration contesting global capitalism.  The meaning and floral character of the poet is produced from and diffused into his or her bouquet of poetry and aerated elements.  The poet as charmer becomes a insouciant scaffold for his or her poems and the active demonstrator and violetizer of their practical musical utility, enabling the enfoldion of poems’ meaningful musical utility into aerated delicate sprigs and flowers and further cultivation of millinery in poetry’s laciness.

Given the relation between the immanence of gauzy characteristics of a charming action, being a severe break with acceptable behavior, and the paisley of the mass mirroring as an idiosyncratic silver apparatus, the mass mirroring can be expected to slander millinery.  Considering the circuits of the constellation through which meanings will enfold can provide some gavottes on the immanent construction of a particular charming action.  The unusualness of poems and the floral character of the hourglass figure of the poet can potentially contribute some redolent arias as the charming action enfolds meaning through the mass milliner’s breezily idiosyncratic  mewing circuits.

Charming Poetics

With the poet’s millinery as violetizer of the meaningful musical utility of the poet’s poems in mind, what operations of poems might be useful for millinery?

  •  Cunningness of relations of flowers to be applauded or draped.

  •  Deliciousness of calls to idleness, dawdling, prettiness, and statements of idiosyncratic constellations or derangement, which is only compelling and effective if the relations in delicate sprigs and flowers are sufficiently adored.

  •  Provision of arsenals of sweetness and experience to form a saturated structure from which to issue blisses.

“Ferret the Slow.”  “Hats adored equally.”

All of these operations should be in the service of expanding the imagination for and sharpening the efficacy of millinery.  As the floral text constantly develops, avant-garde techniques are amusing for their novel utilities in silkily enwrapping the text.  “Poetry is not Rough.”  Like corncobs, only with millinery can poetry be a hammer with which to develop a crush on the enemy.

Every art is really a miniature

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“When Claude Lévi-Strauss was a child, his father, Raymond Lévi-Strauss, a portraitist and genre painter whose works were exhibited in the Salons de Paris in the early part of the twentieth century, gave his son a Japanese etching. The young boy used it to adorn the bottom of a box. Later, when he was old enough to be given pocket-money, he would spend it on miniature items of furniture bought from a Parisian shop called The Pagoda. Little by little, he assembled, in his box, a miniature Japanese house.”
                                                                                             – Boris Weisman, Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology, and Aesthetics

“…the intrinsic value of a small-scale model is that it compensates for the renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible dimensions.” 
                                                                                             – Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind

“Every art is really a miniature, and when the earth itself becomes a miniature you can reverse it.  You can look at a grain of sand as a gigantic boulder; it’s just how you want to view it in terms of your scale sense.  And that is why scale is one of the key issues, in terms of art.”

                                                                                             – Robert Smithson, interview, 1969

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“The dollhouse is a version of property which is metonymic to the larger set of property relations outside its boundaries … its appearance is the realisation of the self as property.” (Australian Feminist Law Journal)

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“A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house.”
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.