Speaking Volumes

by Bradford Morrow

  COMPLAINTS

  Along the way were lumps of amber big as figs. Too beautiful for words. This is a complaint.

  What Nothing does Zero mean?

  In Notarikon, the letters become a moving target. When you fill each word’s letters up with other words, the topics shift faster than the alphabet. You can’t keep up with them or with yourself. Language takes over, saying too many things. It is always the wrong idiom, the unnecessary periphrastic word. Awkwardness rules. There can be no follow-through of any metaphors. The arguments cannot be consistent. The text becomes a field of broken arrows. Excess rules.

  For instance, in Notarikoning English, one finds way too many th’s. What with the and there and them and their and these plus those and this and then. It looks like not enough good words begin with h to make this all worthwhile. Or they are the wrong words and cannot match the words that start with t. It’s a thorn in one’s side. I cannot make it work.

  All the poems in the book tried to stand against the book, and yet they were inside a book—

  how then to critique the merely literary. Again—how hard it is to make it work.

  Destroyed. And disgusted. And destroyed once more. Ripped, remade. Began in 1979. Began in 1964. Began again in 1983. Began in 1986. Began without. Destroyed all “my paintings.” Destroyed all “my objects.” Destroyed the work by not doing it. Destroyed the work by overdoing it. Never one thing. No making pretty images. No making reasonable objects. No rhetorics of elaboration, no consolation, few expected conclusions. Discontent and resentment. Poems? No poems. No books. No nothing.

  *

  Can this be both a book, be several books, be no book? Can it open the pages and unbind them beautifully whilst keeping them together, also beautifully?

  Can the book keep open while sometimes closing? Who closes it? The reader might. The writer might. Claims of authority might. The book might also wait silently until its moment is ready. Look how I have given agency to the book! But the temporalities are, anyway, multiple, mutable, and diverse. The book, it seems, can be both open and closed.

  Can there be a book at the same time about nothing and everything, only about words, and only about concepts; about rips of feelings and pressures of historical fate?

  Wouldn’t you want to say that this is every book?

  Every meaningful book?

  “Whilst” is British. I’m not, but I like how it sounds.

  Writing goes in one direction only, but seeing—can go out in vectors way beyond the frame. This is another unforeseen challenge, to offer the sense of vectors and pulse inside the book without an overload that cannot be read.

  How can a book be polysemous and also thesis bearing? It is an inexplicable mystery of writing. Whenever you feel this double air, just breathe deeply in with openhearted breath. And exhale deeper still.

  Our universe may or may not have an edge. Most people can think only to that edge. If at all. But a book clearly has an edge. This fact helps us think beyond the edge to what may not have one, or be beyond the all, in a multiverse (in multiverses) of excessive temporalities and explosive burgeoning.

  Books are universes of edges.

  Books are edges of the universe.

  We still do not understand that particular “the.” Probably it is less painful to accept it.

  *

  Why do the extremities of language occur so frequently—the claim that words should just be things, the claim that words are only words in and for themselves—color without resonance, or letters without etymology, or phonemes without a past, or marks without sociality, or messages without specific decoders, their necessities, and their practices. Remember redundancy? remember nuances of tone? remember the intricacies of syntax and of word placement? And what about the claim that anything can be done with words, the claim that matter can become pure text?

  Why? Because it all has to be experienced, tried, essayed, experimented. And done once more again. Generally this kind of science will have no inhumane consequences. But every once in a while, the experiment goes awry—and some demonic slogan allows for broadside lust in slaughter; then some shibboleth or little lisp or glottal stop or mispronounce will mark your unfortunate head with battered blood.

  Anything can be done with words, but what makes those things worth doing?

  There is a kind of traditional Korean pottery known as buncheong: freedom of design, unusual shapes, and coarse potting. This is, of course, a poetry of bunching, a kind of text known for freedom of design, unusual shapes, and coarse potting. Which is why I am mentioning it.

  Walk the seam

  with monitors of dusk.

  Words fail. Yet there must be words.

  Do not cede that territory.

  Despite impossible transitions.

  Meaning cannot be rescued from commerce, power, war. It is not rescue that’s needed. These uses must be accepted, enveloped, and yet unveiled as such. These are no more real than any other use.

  Draw the rope of the poem tighter and tighter around the words. Despite the unfortunate metaphor, such tightness “is the only way to achieve the floating or uncertain nature of things.” This is the paradox of strife. Of an open closedness.

  Ambiguity and the between—these are what abide. Though they wobble and vibrate continuously, and they might thereby be hard to track. So no sitting in a vaunted mythic hut is possible. In the between, there is no mystique. Only tacking, and a few stops for rest, inside a restlessness that does not cease.

  There is nothing terrible about surplus meanings, but there is something odd about too many of them all at once.

  “Here” and “there” are words in geography and grammar, not in ethics.

  Thereupon a blessing, the metaphor of starry skies pouring down. Poiesis is that blessing.

  *

  What is encrypted here?

  What is the shadow of this word?

  These pens are inadequate for the perfect scriptorium—and will always be.

  Why is the not-yet disclosed so palpable and yet so evanescent?

  Wake up, change clocks, download. Uptick.

  These pens will only work in the imperfect scriptorium.

  Understand that internal translation will never cease.

  *

  Electric light blue snow at dusk marks the side shapes of structures. Beauty is true (though is beauty truth?), but what about the support systems for all this heightening? Timelessness only exists partially. If at all. He called me up to say that she had died, “in a way silent, mysterious, difficult to discern.” What is this world of such disappearance that I am in it? At least those hairy lichens like tinsel on the tree say the air in this forest is still free of impurity. Or so the docent said. But when we did an Earth Day cleanup in another creek, we dredged out bottles, cans, pill boxes, softballs, and Styrofoam. She had looked so pale and hairless, then well coiffed. “It’s a wig,” she said. Always ready to dot that i with utter honesty. Sign in the ladies’ room: “Hurting? God Cares.” Can’t top that, right? A Dedalean tuft scrolled overall like a finial, a cherubic decor. As for me, I’ve made no secret of it: want deformed words, want bits of alphabet formed into statements facing a sudden encounter, want to know what is really there, want chakra phonemes hanging over the page as from a void …

  if you want these things then work with work upon work.

  *

  Trying for an ultimate, that point of X crossing intensity with fervor and yet beyond those emotions (of excitement, say, or pleasure, or fear, or even awe)—I realize quietly that the ultimate is a filled silence. A silence of matter and languages so rich (yet not turgid), so clear (but not plain), so poised between all and nothing, between poles positive and negative, that it could be called both enlightenment and endarkenment. It does not pass in any way through the ego. It happens outside and yet suffuses the thing I sit insi
de of—self. The incipient has precipitated. And yet the world is ever in motion and does not stop. This moment cannot be—not as such, not permanent, but perhaps it can be reconstituted, opened by chance, stumbled upon. It’s probable that the only way to indicate it—I mean enlightenment over and under endarkenment—is not through the full but through the progressively more eroded, more erased, more empty—that nonetheless feels adequate. Adequate to what is. Representation (as such, as we know it) might simply be beside the point. The conventions of tuning, the consonances, are simply irrelevant. But one might want to show. To demonstrate. To offer.

  Language pulses

  with all that can be made of it

  along the lines of understanding.

  Vulnerability, said the mite,

  and Yes, said the dot.

  Various tree stuff floats through the air

  on puffs of wind, and lands with little pings.

  The words

  people write, the things they say

  are investments in

  that oddity.

  The froth and pleasures of representations—and they are lavish and lovely—somewhat confuse what choices of words might indicate such a filled and silent space. Call this space “and yet.” Call it “as such.” The dates and days of the week. The works inside those days. The books are pebbles, stones, boulders, even mountains. Do you feel it sometimes?—a fecund emptiness in which there are works. Yet it is not about following one trail but accumulation into continuum. The first day’s sunset had a purple streak; the second day it was a bowl of orange pink.

  At least imagine cryptic outlines of something

  for a variety of materials that forward,

  poetry porous entity trying continuance

  poetry positing but emptying

  poetry spontaneous entryway

  sang the nightingale wildly

  blurting song out

  as it often does

  at dawn.

  *

  His passport photo—with its restless, worried look—had gigantic crackles of glue that had worked through the old photograph, making open spots on the page. It looked like two bullet holes had just missed his head. How not to be haunted?

  Setting out, yes, but the journey becomes much more wayward than the traveler had planned, an experience out of range. Turning to verbs means into risk. What was the ordinary diagnosis? Accounts and additions. The sourness of too-warm milk. Unheard words—that contained directions also unheard. Soldiering on, somehow there were traces. Even though it was vast. The traveler had one plan, but the journey had another.

  Two days later, Sudler was on a gurney, being wheeled back to her room after a test. “Do you have my oxygen tank?” she asked the aide. He replied, “What tank?”

  She began to cry. She realized she was breathing on her own.

  Nationally, 1,600 people are waiting for lung transplants. In

  The thinnest light of the needle settled at the small pool where the birds alight and raise their little throats to swallow. Two universes meet, page to page. Shapes of delicate and fibrous air pass above us. And the hawk clawed the nightingale as they flew along the edge of sky and out of sight.

  The Particulars

  Brian Evenson

  I.

  In the second volume of David B.’s Incidents in the Night, there’s a shoot-out in a used bookstore. It’s a fairly straightforward gunfight until the moment when one of the villains cries out and looks down to discover a book clamped around his leg like a pair of jaws. A moment later, another book wraps itself around another villain’s face, nearly suffocating him to death. “The books,” the villains declare, horrified, “they’re marching against us!”

  When asked by another character what he thinks his books are doing, David B.’s bookseller replies, “They’re not MY books, it’s their words that bite.”

  Books are curious creatures in that in one sense their materiality is of little importance: It’s the words that bite, and that has nothing in particular to do with the book itself you hold in your hand. In theory, at least, the words bite whether they’re digital or printed on paper, whether they’re read aloud or silently—though, of course, as soon as you declare that, you can’t help but think of the exceptions: the books that can’t be read effectively aloud without limiting their meaning, books that gain or lose something from being in one format rather than another, and so on.

  Books exist in that strange space between materiality and immateriality, where on the one hand (if hand’s the right word) we feel that their materiality doesn’t really matter and, on the other hand, the physical qualities of the book are absolutely inseparable from the reading experience. The specificity of the reading experience is based on the particulars of the copy of the book you hold in your hands. On the one hand, the digital, hardback, and paperback copies of a book are all the “same” in the same way that all the chairs in the world supposedly partake of Plato’s chairness and point back to an ideal, virtual chair. On the other hand, however, once you’ve verified that the chair you’re sitting on has chairness, the peculiarities and the comforts of the particular chair you’re sitting on really come to matter.

  When my son was born last year, I realized that while I couldn’t juggle both him and a book very easily while feeding him a bottle, I could manage to read books on my smartphone. On the screen would appear a page of maybe ten lines, forty words or so, and then I would swipe my thumb across the screen to move to the next page. I could hold my son in the crook of my arm, hold his bottle with one hand, and hold my phone with the other. I could put down the phone, turn it off or on, without losing my place. It was, no question, convenient. In many ways it wasn’t just the most comfortable book I could manage, but the only book, given the circumstances, that I could manage.

  And yet, even knowing this, I missed things. I missed most the act of turning the page, that quite minor physical effort. I missed being able to thumb forward to see where the end of a chapter came. I missed being able to tilt the book and compare the thickness of the pages I’d already read to the thickness of the pages left to read. I missed the weight of the book, its so-called heft. I missed balancing a book on my chest in bed as I read myself toward sleep. In addition, after reading several books on my phone, I began to miss the tactile shift that comes from moving from a book with one sort of cover and heft to another with another sort of cover and heft. There was part of me that thought—and still to some extent thinks—that what I was doing was akin to reading a book but wasn’t exactly the same, in the same way that listening to an audiobook both is and isn’t a kind of reading.

  True, I was “reading”—I could discuss these books with others, in some detail. I was getting all (or nearly all, since there are sometimes formatting shifts that do impact the content) of the content and even of the form that I could get out of reading print versions of these books. What I wasn’t getting was the experiences that I associated particularly with reading a print book. Rather than turning a page, I swiped. Rather than putting in a bookmark, I touched a corner of my smartphone’s screen and got a virtual bookmark. Rather than standing up and getting a pencil to mark a passage I wanted to refer back to, I pushed my thumb against the screen and moved it until the passage was highlighted.

  The materiality of the book is what particularizes the reading process. It has little if anything to do with the content or even the form, but everything to do with what stands between us and the words that our eyes pass over and our minds string together to form the reading experience. It is an excess or a remainder: It’s not really needed. At the same time, it’s comforting and soothing, habitual, even addictive in the way a regularly repeated habit like smoking cigarettes can be. We know we can take the nicotine in another way, perhaps even in a better way (a patch, liquid, an electronic gizmo) but there’s something about the habit itself, about what we’ve lea
rned to do with our lips and our hands, that we cling to. Which suggests that on an important level reading is not just about receiving the form and content that make up, say, a narrative: Reading is a repeated gesture of comfort brought to bear on the particularity of a copy of a given book, the joining of habit to a slightly and subtly unique experience.

  When we think back to books that we read, particularly the books that had the biggest impact on us, we remember not only the words, not only the story, not only the form and the content, but the situation of reading, as if that has become for us part of the book itself. I remember reading Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes while camping alone in the middle of the Utah salt flats—something about the terseness of his objective descriptions seemed relevant to the severity of my situation. I remember the smell of the fire I read it in front of, and the way the book smelled of smoke for years afterward. I remember reading Ulysses in the Brown Deer Public Library in Wisconsin when I was supposed to be going door-to-door as a Mormon missionary—I remember among other things the table I read it at, the feel of my elbows propped up against it. I remember reading Peter Straub’s In the Night Room in a streetlight-free and utterly quiet suburban neighborhood in Indiana and the impact that that had on my reading. I remember reading The Twenty-One Balloons as a kid, wrapped in a blanket. I don’t remember where in my parents’ house I read it, but that feeling of being wrapped up, enveloped, still comes over me every time I look at the cover of that book.

  None of those memories have anything really to do with these books, and they’re not things I can pass along to others. But all of them particularized those books for me, made the experience of reading them material and specific.

  Of course, in a way, reading books on my phone while holding my child has done the same thing. It’s not that that’s an immaterial reading experience, just that it’s differently material, and that since the device I’m reading on is identical from book to book, it’s the experience of reading on my phone while holding my child that’s material, more so than the relationship to any specific book. The books blur together. My phone, unless I change the case between books, always feels the same.