The Un-creation of the Wor(l)d: Conceptual Poetry as Kabbalistic Trope — Adeena Karasick

Feb 242012
 

Here is an intricate, fascinating, insightful essay by the redoubtable and poetically  explosive Adeena Karasick about the work of her fellow Conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith and its theoretical basis in the esoteric mysticism of the Kabbalah. On several counts this is not as much of a stretch as it might seem at first. Much modern literary criticism and critical theory has evolved out of an attitude to text that derives from biblical hermeneutics, the ancient Hebrew art of textual interpretation. But the contemporary avant garde application of the ancient ideas is unusual and even surprising in terms of the popular, and often unthoughtful, way of envisioning poetry and creation. In fact the Kabbalists suggest that creativity is impossible and that what goes for creation is the endless reordering and reframing of what already exists (this applies to the world and to words). Hence the tendency of some Conceptual poetry to use quotation or repurposed texts. Here, for example, is a video of Kenny Goldsmith reading at the White House last year — reading Brooklyn Bridge traffic reports. Goldsmith himself is an amiable and protean character, a tireless and enthusiastic author/performer and poetic impresario. He founded UbuWeb, a trove of avant garde work and poetics, and teaches poetry and edits PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania.

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The totality of the Tzimtzum is [formed of] the letters.[1]

According to the major Kabbalistic texts (Etz Chaim, The Bahir and the Zohar), the most crucial doctrine in Lurianic Kabbalah (13th C. Jewish mysticism) is called tzimtzum[2] (the secret doctrine of how the world was formed through contraction, condensation, framing). Before the world as we know it existed, all that was, was excessive, undifferentiated matter; not “nothing” but a “nothingness that contained everything”. And, in order to create the world; there had to be a contraction or withdrawal, a concentration of matter into itself. “Information” was folded, invaginated, producing a series of frames, brackets, borders, pockets, parameters.  And, the world was not so much created, but Un-created; formed not ex-nihilo (out of nothing), but yesh m’yesh (“something from something”); from that which always already existed.

Conceptual Poetry, as practiced by Kenny Goldsmith, Rob Fitterman, Vanessa Place championed by Charles Bernstein and Marjorie Perloff uncannily follows a similar traject of thought. It too engages in a process of framing; a bracketing or parenthesizing of the mass cultural glut of information so that it can be re-viewed from a new angle; provides an additional attentional field that  (say in the case of weather reports, radio broadcasts, jury transcriptions or repurposed song lyrics), potentially rekindles interest in a narrative that might not hold interest.”[3]

As outlined in “Flarf is Dionysus, Conceptual Writing is Apollo,” Goldsmith categorizes Conceptual writing as that which has been “grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry”. Stating later, “with so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead let’s just process what exists. And “process what exists” is uncannily reminiscent of the Kabbalistic tenet that everything that exists has merely been condensed, contracted, re-formed from that which was always already there[4]

And what is always-already there is language. For Kabbalists, the world was engraved and established with forty-two letters”[5], “by the forms of expression: numbers, letters and words”[6] whose “end is in their beginning and…their beginning in their end”[7]. Through 42 letters that were always already there; that expand and contract and are infinitely reframed. And they believe our only occupation, is to engage in a continuous act of permuting and combining the letters, and through that re-form the world.  For, according to the tenets of Kabbalistic hermeneutics, it is impossible to “create”. So, Goldsmith’s insistence on “uncreativity as creative practice” is commensurate with a holy practice dating back to the 2nd century.[8]

For the Kabbalists, the world came into being through tzimtzum, a continual process of contraction and expansion; a superfluity of spiraling systems, frames, constructs, diffusions. Space was created out of itself.  In Goldsmith’s, Day, he retypes the Friday September 1st, 2000 issue of the New York Times, from left to right, ignoring distinctions between articles and advertisements, stock quotes and editorials. Poetry is created from itself. What might have been seen as mundane information not only gets elevated to “art”, highlighting how everything around us is erupting with meaning and context. But, this cataloguing of information with no distinction between advertisements, articles, is also very similar to how the text of the Torah has no vowels and no punctuation. Just as in Goldsmith’s text there is no indication of where one letter, poem article or editorial begins and an advertisement ends, in the Torah nothing indicates the rhythm or transition from one sentence to another; periods and commas are completely absent. Nothing interrupts the flow of words except perhaps, blank spaces, empty gaps (which are not really empty but are seen as “ventiliation holes”[9] which energize the text.

This constant flow of expanding and contracting text is also very interesting because it showcases how the absent presence of a “grand conductor” is always pulsing through the text. Even where subjectivity is ostensibly obliterated, through seemingly banal information, Goldsmith’s absent present subjectivity inadvertently becomes a deconstructed self reflexive mediation as he silently intervenes or insinuates himself through the choices and positioning of his project. And therefore it is impossible to assert (even in the most radical non-subjective practice), within his texts, there is no place empty of him[10]

Thus it’s safe to say, that for both Kabbalistic hermeneutics and Conceptual Poetics, there must be self-withdrawal before any “creative” process can happen. There has to be a process of strategic containment, a constructive de-construction which brings into focus that which appears as a free-flowing amorphous flux of subjectivity[11]; there must be a continual process of constructing and re-constructing borders, laws, mirrors, screens, walls; as we wade through a caterwaulery of lolling scrolls brawling sprawls of extracted maculates bracketed tracks, hacked fractures, there always has to be a framing, a bracketing off to enable visibility, recognition, identity, where language and history and subjectivity are continually renegotiated.

So, whether it’s the “Metropolitan Forecast” of  9/11 or the shots of JFK, the 13 hr. cataloguing of his own bodily movements in Fidget , weather reports from 1010 WINS radio in NYC for a year  (in Year), or every word spoken during the course of a week in Soliloquy[12], taking these socio-political and historically rooted and emotionally drenched audio texts and decontextualizing them, not only subjectivity, but (through Day Week Month Year), time is renegotiated; as contemporaneous, disjunctive, coexistent and synchronic; and everything erupts as a text of refracted maculate stacked fractals celebrating the cracked vernacular of every locable vocable  polysignatory sign stroked curvy glossy saucier, and with all its (gossipy slanderous humiliating, humbling and profound) UN-CREATIVE splendor, in an act of mimetic mutation, functions as a simulacra of “the UNcreation of the world”.

But what’s important to note, is that though “managing” or palimpsesting all that’s been stolen, lifted, pilfered, reprocessed, neither Conceptual Poetry or Kabbalistic hermeneutics is advocating an “abolition of history” or a mockery of history, but through its radical particularity, through its infinite retelling of the minutia of daily life history is simultaneously salvaged and re-formed, parracidically reproduced.

And this all eerily commensurate with Kabbalistic thinking, where “creation” is continually re-enacted through repetitious enunciation of Torah.  (For Jews, you have to read and re-read the parsha[13] every week. Bits of Torah are strewn on your head bound to your arms, on your doorposts. And passages are repeated multiple times daily). And through this repetition, the past is palimpsestically re-passed, surpassed in an irrepresentable present non present or resonant present that continually escapes itself.  And with every articulation, the world is continually un-created; and meaning unveils itself as a system of borders, frames, mirrors, screens, laws; an ever-spiraling space where “Origin” is unlocatable; where everything is a re-typed transcription of a transcription, translation of a translation, a construct of perpetual recurrence.

Take Goldsmith’s 1992, Head Citations[14] which consists of salvaged lines from pop songs – glistening I-Tunes’ malapropisms that have been retranslated, misheard, reworked. As Craig Dworkin writes, it’s “a book of earrors and close listing”

Line 176: Hark the hair lipped angels sing
Line 92: Become a come a come a come a comedian
Line 233: If I can’t have you, I don’t want this ugly baby
Line 297.1: Janey’s got some gum
Line 159:  Take another little piece of may hot dog, baby
Line 353:  Little red corset, baby you’re much too fat
Line 391 “Whoa! Here she comes, she’s a bad reader
Line 403.1 Massage in a Brothel… yeah
Line 549: Three Car Family – I got all my sisters with me

What you get here is a compiling and reframing of recognizable lyrics. A deconstructed re-visioning where what SEEMS creative, because of “the unavoidable presence of words within words (or in this case the haunting of words layered within the traces residue of words within words) in fact “contests the notion of writing as a creativity proposing instead an indeterminate extra-intentional differential production,”[15] a sub productive sliding and slipping of meaning between the forces and intensities distributed through the texts syntactic economy, between the pulsional incidents of disposable pop culture — and speaks to the continuous process of mistranslation that goes on in every moment of our lives.

Thus, what is being called for then is a re-visioning of what has historically been seen as “Creative” and divorce it from any notion of  “originary thinking”. In Kabbalistic terms, it’s glorifying not so much “The World of Creation” (Olam haBryiah)  but “The World of Formation” (Olam ha’Yetzirah)[16] where all is recycled, reprocessed, repurposed. MADE NEW. A world where everything is re-sculpted from what is already there.

So, whether taking Steinian punctuation or vulgar, idiosyncratic rhymes : “frisbee, fuck me, funky, geegee, germ-free, goatee, gnarly!, grody!, Gucci, HD” (No. 105, 1992)  or words ending in r sounds: “vagina diner Wynona Ryder” (No. 109, 1993), transcribed masturbatory scenes, radio broadcasts or stock quotes, like the gobsmacked sucked splendor of abecedary sliders, the syrup of  an edgy sprecht squeegie effigy, Goldsmith shows us that all that glitters is Gold(smith). Is worth its weight in []. And as he files, solders, saws, forges and castes[17], splays his goldsmith eggs, with his art of gold, it’s the dawning of a gold[smith] age of folded goldies and goodies gilded from what is already there.

Taking from what is always already there, in his 2000 Fidget, Goldsmith continues this transcriptive practice by cataloguing every physical gesture over a 13 hour period. And with an OCDish accumulative gesture, combining a “legendary”, mythical, complex, variable, consanguinity, he archives and compiles, defamiliarizing the familiar, making it strange by its very recognizibility.  And, if according to 13th Kabbalist, Abraham Abulafia, the combinations of the letters reference the construction of the body, its limbs and its organs (“all of the limbs of  [the] body are combined one with the other”), the body and the body of writing is re-created in the image of as Goldsmith clenches thrusts shifts pulses folds grasps hugs pops swallows mouths, and as licks lips licks lick tongue licks lips[18] (Fidget 19:00 and 21:00), he reminds us yet again of the relation of body to language and how the body must be acknowledged as a semiological function, a living text of lips pressed cross-kissed creased cryptic schize, a sanguine text that replenishes and re-creates itself, as an ever-accumulative orgiastic dome zone of floating podiums in a bodacious fur-lined purloined raging plagiary of collaborative rapture.

And voyeuristically, becomes a countersignative act for the reader, a promise of memory of repetition, a unit of cultural knowledge virally replicating itself — reminding us to play inside the lexical excess, the flirty flexicon of fixity mixes, a nexus of synnexes, annexes, diexis of lexically-sugared circuits showing us that even in the intricate cataloguing of the minutiae of daily life, it must be acknowledged there is no presence or absence (or even relevance), but reveling / roving valence, chains of supplements with endless signifying potential. Because presence is relational and there is no fixed, locatable Truth, [[[[everything]]]] is haunted by repetition, substitutions, frames, borders, laws, flaws, fluidly flirting with the ghost of the ghost of the simulacra of “yesterday’s news”.

Reminding us also that this framing serves as a kind of circumcision. For the engraving of a boundary is essentially producing cuts, scissions, severs a space between letters, words sentences, semialogical slips, stanzas. This caesura, this introduction of the voice into the body of the text, this hermeneutic cut, (that in Kabbalistic terms brings meaning into the word) is the inaugural cut that symbolically replicates the cutting off and into of society for a Jewish male[19]. Thus, as a text of mappable gaps fissures, parsed play plumed plaise-laced plummets, in the polyplaited plundering of peeling ink, in the pulsing summits of syntactic wounds, Goldsmith’s cuts that bind become a socio-political gendered and religious complex of both tradition and radical transition, which acknowledges both its heredity and errantly heretical hermeneutic.

So, like how with the fusing of the avant garde impulse of the last century with the technologies of the present, the future is always arriving from itself, in an excess of excess of transcriptions, translations, “in a nonhistory of absolute beginnings”[20]. Conceptual Poetry then, as that which celebrates the “unoriginal,” the “uncreative,” mirrors a Kabbalistic hermeneutic; references not an ontology but a “hauntology”, a discourse of traces ellipses markings and echoes. Posits an origin which is never an origin[21], but that which is always a phantomatic projection, introjection, wandering in exilic trajection; where information is not so much written but reprocessed,[22] moved from one vessel to another, one frame to another; where the “poem”, a polysemous repurposer for words to be poured into, flow out of.

So, whether a polychromatic chronicling or syllabic counting, between promise and promiscuity; the amassed miscues of ever-shifting portals, perspectives, peeking through a countersignative, re-combinatory praxis, Conceptual Poetry is itself a repurposing of Kabbalistic discourse, honoring and glorifying all that is Uncreative, unoriginal (championing a poetics not of reformation but reframe-ation; animation inflammation, appropriation, expropriation, functioning between iterable modalities, forces and dependencies; between the aleatoric and the calculable, between chance and necessity, saluting all utterance; all the letters, tropes, and orthographic expletives, markings and silences, salience; all that has been deemed unworthy unpoetic and disposable – to be archived, ornamented and admired; celebrated in the fold of translation.

—Adeena Karasick

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Adeena Karasick  is an internationally acclaimed and award winning poet, media-artist and author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory: Amuse Bouche: Tasty Treats for the Mouth (Talonbooks 2009), The House That Hijack Built (Talonbooks, 2004), The Arugula Fugues (Zasterle Press, 2001), Dyssemia Sleaze (Talonbooks, Spring 2000), Genrecide (Talonbooks, 1996), Mêmewars (Talonbooks, 1994), and The Empress Has No Closure (Talonbooks, 1992), as well as 4 videopoems regularly showcased at International Film Festivals. “The Un-creation of the Wor(l)d: Conceptual Writing as Kabbalistic Trope” was debuted at North of Invention: A Festival of Canadian Poetry, Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

 

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)
  1. Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk, Peri ha-Arez, (Jerusalem, 1969), fol. 9a. Cited in Moshe Idel “Reification of Language in Jewish Mysticism”, in Mysticism and Language, ed. Steven Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p.62.↵
  2. As described by Hayyim Vital in Es Hayyim 42:I 896-c, “The world consisted of primal chaos (Tohu) hylic matter; an amorphous mass” and there [was] nothing outside of it. Basically, tzimtzum (which was alluded to in the 13th century texts and fleshed out more comprehensively in the 16th and 17th centuries) refers to the process of making a limit from the limitless infinite. Or as Vital expresses it in Derush’al ‘Olam ha-Atzilut , “when the Supernal emanator wanted to create this world, which is physical, he constricted his presence…for previously Ein-Sof filled everything” (Liqqutim Hadashim, ed. D. Toutitou, Jerusalem 1985, p.17). Particularly, it’s a theory of emanationism: the condensation of light (or information) through a progressive chain of successive emanations [disseminations] (Tanya, p.834), a superfluity of systems, frames, constructs, diffusions enabling the world to be revealed.↵
  3. Much like how Charles Bernstein speaks of Brecht’s use of the interruptive supplement in Artifice of Absorption – noting that framing devices situate the reader at an alternate vantage point. Or in other words, the light was thickened and sweetened in a manner it may be [newly] comprehended. (Liqqutei Haqdamot ha-Quabbala, MS Oxford, Bodleian Library 1663, fol. 174a)↵
  4. In fact the Zohar speaks of the Torah as being a blueprint to the world. Further implying that even before the world as we know it, there was a prototype . Further according to the Bahir, the world was always already in perpetual recurrence.

    Rabbi Berachiah said:/What is the meaning of verse (Genesis 1:3), And G-d said, “Let there be light”, and there was light”? Why does the verse not say, And it was so”?// What is this like? A king had a beautiful object. He put it away until he had a place for it, and then he put it there.// It is therefore written, “Let there be light, and there was light.” This indicates that it already existed.”↵

  5. Zohar II:151b, trans. Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon (New York: Soncino Press, 1984).↵
  6. Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Formation, attributed to Rabbi Akiba Ben Joseph, trans. Knut Stenring, intro. Arthur Edward Waite (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1970), p.17. Instead of using the Hebrew word for create, the  Sefer Yetzirah,  employs the architectural terms, `haqaq‘ and `hasab‘ which mean `engrave‘ or `hew‘.↵
  7. Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Formation, p.18.↵
  8. Haunted by his own cultural history, he carries the specter trace, weight of that. And, with every transcription (whether overtly political social or personal), he is enacting a cultural translation↵
  9. See Marc-Alain Ouaknin, The Burnt Book and also Hank Lazar’s Portions (Lavender Ink, New Orleans, 2009).↵
  10. Thus, between socio-linguistic subjectivities, Goldsmith puts into praxis a “life-writing”, a “biomythography” or an “auto-bio-thanato-hetero-graphical opus”– a “circumfessional” that makes truth, and lives inside a hermeneutic of re-inscription, translation and obsessive production.↵
  11. But knowing that all positions are overdetermined by historical, political, philosophical and phantasmatic structures that in principle can never be fully controlled or made explicit. There HAS to be this constriction for any kind of illumination. For the light (or information or meaning) OVERFLOWS because it has been restricted.↵
  12. Kenny Goldsmith, Soliloquy (Granary Books, New York, 2001).↵
  13. (pl. parashiot) Most commonly, parashah means “portion” and refers to the portion of Torah read on a particular Sabbath. There are 54 portions. Each parashah is named for its opening (or first distinguishing) word. But, parashah, also translates as “transition” and refers to the blank spaces between text. And according to Marc-Alain Ouaknin, “these blank spaces provide a sort of ventilation (The Burnt Book, p.33)↵
  14. Kenny Goldsmith, Head Citations, The Figures, MA, 2002.↵
  15. Steve McCaffery, North of Intention: Critical writings 1973-1986 (Roof Books, New York, 1986),  p.201-221.↵
  16. According to Kabbalistic theory, the universe consists of four worlds: Emanation (Atzilut), Creation (Beriah), Formation (Yetzirah) and Making (Asirah).↵
  17. The Conceptual Poet like an alchemist, not so much turning base metals into gold but reprocessing gold. And even John Donne acknowledged that “the kabbalists were the anatomists of words, and have a theologicall alchimy to draw soveraigne tinctures and spirits from plain and grosse literall matter and observe in every variety some great mystick signification”.↵
  18. See Kenny Goldsmith, Fidget, 19:00 and 21:00. (Coach house Books, Toronto, 2000).↵
  19. For more on this see Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Mysteries of the Kabbalah, Trans. J. Baron, new York, 2000, p.320-1, Elliot Wolfson, “Divine Suffering” in Suffering Religion and Jacques Derrida, “Shibbolet” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, Routledge, NY, 1992.↵
  20. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, p.80.↵
  21. An origin which is never an origin because  “origin” comes from “ergh” which is to flow and “errare” which is both to wander and to err, to mistranslate, by its very definition can never be static.↵
  22.   And as such, is seen as “the ghost of the ghost of the specter-spirit, simulacrum of simulacra without end”. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p.126.↵

Numéro Cinq at the Movies: Nicholas Humphries’s “The One That Got Away,” introduced by R. W. Gray

Feb 232012
 

A late entry for Valentine’s Day, Nicholas Humphries’s “The One That Got Away” tackles unrequited love and nostalgia in some fresh and unexpected ways.  Much of the reason this film works is due to Shane Kolmansberger’s portrayal of the puppy dog romantic protagonist who is searching for someone who will last more than a night. Without this simple, relatable, romantic desire, we might not otherwise stay with what becomes a challenging protagonist.

Humphries’s films are intent on feeling, but not in subtle ways. Linda Williams in her essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess” calls these bodily or “gross” genres as they are concerned with excess physical experiences. What becomes particularly fascinating in “The One That Got Away” and Humphries’s other works is how he brings about collisions, jamming together genres and physical experiences.

To avoid spoiling your experience of the film, watch it first and then read the interview with Humphries below.

RWG: What inspired the idea for the short?

NH: My own relationships (or at least the search for them).

RWG: For you, what is the work about?

NH: For me it’s about how lonely being different can feel but how that makes it so special when you finally find someone that gets you.

RWG: How did the film do? How did audiences respond?

NH: When it screened at a film festival in Hollywood there was a woman shouting at the girls on screen. Things like, “Don’t go with him! Don’t do it!” To the audience it was distracting but her enthusiasm was the greatest gift. It also won a Tabloid Witch. They called it “Woody Allen with a touch of Norman Bates.” For my first short as a writer / director, it was a huge honor.

RWG: Several of your shorts are dark romances? Do you see a through line in your work?

NH: Horror and romance I think are just the two things that make me feel the most when I’m watching a movie so I guess they pop up in my work a lot. They also both create exciting emotions we don’t get to feel every day.

RWG: Do you think the horror and romance genres have things in common?

NH: I think they both evoke addictive emotions. Also, desire is kind of a horrible thing to feel. The very nature of desire requires there be an obstacle in the way of getting what you need. It’s painful to have to sustain long term.

RWG: What are you working on now?

NH: I’m currently in post-production on my first feature. It’s about a couple that head to a cabin in the woods with their pals for a party before they get married. Only one in the group survives. Horror and romance again, I guess. You can find out more at deathdouspartmovie.com

RWG: How do you feel about the film now?

NH: I’ve gone on to direct some larger things but as this was my first (and such a personal story) I think it will always hold a weird and special place in my heart.

– R. W. Gray

We Are All From The Camps: A Review of Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex — Brianna Berbenuik

Feb 222012
 

Sexual life belongs almost entirely to that “invisible part” of our existence—I’d say it constitutes our “third life,” along with the daily, conscious one, and with the one we conduct in our dreams. So, what particularly tantalized me while working on the book was to examine precisely how that massive, dark, and powerful mainstream of history affects, quite surreptitiously, people’s most unconscious behavior, words and gestures produced in bed. — Oksana Zabuzhko

Oksana Zabuzhko
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex
Translated by Halyna Hyrn
AmazonCrossing, 2011
164pp; $13.95

Since the it was first published in 1996, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex has become one of the most controversial and best-selling novels in Ukraine in the last twenty years. Oksana Zabuzhko is a poetic genius (and she is foremost a poet), and Fieldwork reads as if it were one long poem.  The novel is not divided into conventional chapters. Instead serpentine, run-on sentences fluidly slide into side-thoughts contained in brackets and small passages of verse, so the reader enters and re-enters the book in an endless series of apparently chaotic yet somehow seamless stream-of-consciousness thoughts.

Fieldwork, finally published in English last year by AmazonCrossing, Amazon’s new in-house translation imprint, has largely been heralded as an autobiographical novel by critics, though Zabuzhko maintains it is anything but autobiography.  The protagonist, a clever, highly talented and nameless poet, does echo Zabuzhko herself (for example, the poet narrator travels from Ukraine to America as Zabuzhko has done), but that’s where the similarities end.  On the surface, the plot is very simple: the narrator tells the story of her recently ended relationship with a Ukrainian artist.  However the text becomes more complex, swells and spreads like a bruise, as the poet delves into the abuse she suffered as well as the love she felt during the relationship. She struggles to come to terms with her complex grief, and as she does so she begins to unravel also the intricacies of her Ukrainian identity. The history of the affair is mapped out in the context of the history of the Ukraine, and the cartography of cultural influence and identity is perhaps more clearly revealed than the successes and failings of the relationship itself.

Zabuzhko blends the art of writing a novel with the art of poetry in a manner reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje’s also poetic novel Coming Through Slaughter. The unconventional form of the poetic novel may turn off some readers as it is more intensely intimate, difficult, captivating and implicating than the popular conventionally realistic novel. Experiencing Fieldwork is not an exercise in reading for entertainment but rather reading for discovery, reading for a sensual feeling of pain and proximity, and reading to learn about and hold the immediacy of contemporary Ukrainian culture and language and its historic burdens.

Zabuzhko has said, “…poets are and will always remain the guardians of a language, which every society tries to contaminate with lies of its own. Unlike novelists, who may be pigeonholed as opinion-makers, poets are seldom interviewed by media on political and moral issues, yet in the end it’s they who remain responsible for the very human capacity to opine. They keep our language alive.”

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is about keeping a language and culture alive — one the narrator desperately tries to revive, to heal as if it is a diseased body.  The ramifications of the state of Ukrainian culture play out on the narrator’s body, a fractured body – pieces of her immediate self are referred to in the third person; her own body, read as metaphor for her country, is like a strange, alien “other” that she must try to revive over and over despite the history and trauma that encroach on her and try to consume her.

To read Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is to be constricted and devoured by a serpent.  Beautiful, shining scales and the soft, rippling muscle of the snake surround you, slide against your skin, light refracting like off gasoline on water, and suddenly the crushing weight of remembered cultural history is upon you and unbearable, and you can feel yourself collapsing into it, devoured by it, and truly becoming a part of it — Ukrainian history and cultural identity eats you alive, because after all, “Ukrainian choice is a choice between nonexistence and an existence that kills you.”

Ukraine has a long history of being divided and re-united again and again. Parts of modern-day Ukraine were once considered, by turns, Russian and Polish and German. Ukrainian language after the demise of Soviet rule was nearly dead — a complication for many when, after independence, it was suddenly made the official language once more. Ukraine has been called “the bloodlands,” the slaughterfield between Hitler and Stalin in WWII. More recently it has become known as a radiated wasteland after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

As a woman born into a Soviet-ruled Ukraine and who watched the fall of the USSR and the birth of Ukrainian independence, Zabuzhko’s undertaking in analyzing what it means to be Ukrainian through her novel is both excruciating and stunning. The analysis is largely accomplished via metaphor; the narrator’s overriding concern is her tumultuous, passionate and abusive relationship and her final escape from her Ukrainian male lover. Her narrative style is unconventional — Zabuzhko slides between first, second and third person narratives throughout, a tactic that echoes the fragmented self and fragmented identity of every Ukrainian. The three points of view also mirror the id, ego, and superego of Freudian psychology — and this is a psychological novel.

Zabuzhko is highly aware of this psychological aspect, the dark and repressed parts of Ukrainian history and identity, and yet she is equally aware of a the transformative potential.  Culture, after all, is always subject to change even when burdened with the weight of a past.  In an interview with Ruth O’Callaghan in Poetry Review, Zabuzhko said :

I argue that telling the truth — bringing to the spotlight of people’s consciousness what’s been previously in shadow, whatever it may be — has been, and will always be, a risky job, for as long as human society exists: if only because, in pronouncing certain truths for the first time, you inevitably attack the whole set of psychological, mental, and verbal stereotypes which were disguising it.

Of course, many Ukrainian critics have vilified Zabuzhko for her assault on the subconscious dark side of Ukrainian identity, but others all but canonized her. Fieldwork has been called a Ukrainain Feminist Bible (Zabuzkho has been called the Ukrainain Sylvia Plath). But Zabuzhko herself has said she prefers to not differentiate her readers along gender lines.  Her approach in the novel, although undeniably from the perspective of a woman and certainly bleeding with feminist thought, is broader in scope. “What I attacked,” she once said, “was, basically, a system of social lies extending to the point of mental rape, and affecting both men and women.”

The narrator’s abusive love affair reflects the abusive nature of historical cultural norms and imposed values in Ukraine. It symbolizes a generation’s struggle to free itself from the past, to forge its own identity, and yet hold onto the best parts of the former identity, the traditions and historical moments that made independence worth fighting for despite years of being suspended between wars, languages, identities, and hostile neighbours that would crush, assimilate or extinguish them. Thus the narrator reflects on the tenderness and love that was present in her relationship as much as the painful parts, the destructive parts, and the unbearable and everlasting scars that remain.

So much of the novel is frantically looking for an exit, some way to escape a collective cultural past by turns shameful and exhilarating. Zabuzhko’s narrator, like the reader, ultimately discovers a home in her culture and language despite its lethality:

…obviously her mother tongue was the most nutritious, most healing to the senses: velvety marigold, or no, cherry (juice on lips)? strawberry blond (smell of hair)? …it’s always like that, the minute you peer more closely the whole thing disintegrates into tiny pieces and there’s no putting it back together; she hungered for her language terribly, physically, like a thirsty man for water, just to hear it — living  and full-bodied with that ringing intonation like a babbling brook at at distance…

The way language is described here — as sensual nourishment, as healing, and yet fragmented and longed for — is typical of the novel as a whole. The longing for something loved and dangerous is at the book’s core. And yet are not all cultural identities like this?  Do they not all have their destructive, oppressive and damaging histories that we must embrace and attempt to transform?

Fieldword opens a wound within the reader.  Suddenly, the historical trauma passed down from generation to generation becomes clear and inescapable.  Although the word “Gulag” is only used twice, in one of the small snippets of poetry peppered throughout the novel, the vast system of Stalinist concentration camps is present, quiet and ghost-like, throughout the narrative.

We are all from the camps.  That heritage will be with us for a hundred years.

And, though the crux of the novel is Ukrainian identity, the book is not exclusively about being Ukrainian. It’s about being on your knees under the weight of any culture.  The narrator wryly observes the same struggle in America. “… the Great American Depression from which it seems that about 70 percent of the population suffers, running to psychiatrists, gulping down Prozac, each nation goes crazy in its own way…”

This is a novel that digests its reader; you feel as if you are becoming fluid — dissolved into something at once more complete and yet more disjointed. The novel consumes you until it is fat with you, until you become subsumed in its pain and sensuality and it is about to burst with you (and not the other way around) — because it is rich with poetry and consciousness and what it means to be human. The effect is not pleasant completely, it is intense, a half-surrender to something, a journey or a quest for a meaning you can’t find and don’t understand.

—Brianna Berbenuik

See also Oksana Zabuzhko in an interview with Halyna Hryn for AGNI Online.

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Brianna Berbenuik is a 20-something misanthropist and student of Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. She is an avid fan of kitschy pop-culture, terrible Nic Cage movies, the philosophy of Slavoj Zizek, and Freud. You can find her at Love & Darkness & My Side-Arm on her twitter account where she goes by ukrainiak47. She wishes to express her gratitude to the poet Olga Pressitch and Serhy Yekelchyk, who both teach at the University of Victoria in the Department of Slavic Studies. for their tutelage and passion about Ukrainian history, language and culture. “Without their courses I wouldn’t have a grip on half of what I do when it came to this particular review, and Olga is the reason I wanted to read the novel in the first place.”  Also the book you see in the photo, the bottom one, called Ukraine, is a comprehensive history written by Serhy.

Born in the Western Ukrainian city of Lutsk in 1960, into a Ukraine under the rule of the USSR, Oksana Zabuzhko grew up Kyiv and went on to study philosophy at Shevchenko University, graduating in 1992 (a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union).  She spent time in America teaching at Penn State University and won a Fulbright Scholarship in 1994.  She has lectured in the United States on Ukrainian culture at Harvard and the University of Pittsburg.

Halyna Hryn is a lecturer in Ukrainain Culture and Language at Yale University since 1996.

A Map of the Invisible: Paintings — Gladys Swan

Feb 212012
 

Gladys Swan recently showed her chops on NC with a gorgeous short story called “The Orange Bird” about a the process of learning to paint, to become an artist. The story is deftly comic and yet magical and limns the mysterious underground processes by which the work itself can transform the craftsman into an artist. So it seemed only fitting that we should also look at some of Gladys Swan’s paintings. These are mostly oils on paper 22′ by 30′ or small oils on canvas or linen, 8′ x 10′. Also one water color. The painting “Movements of Horses and Men” is in the 33rd annual exhibit of Paper in Particular, at Columbia College in Columbia, MO. Entries come from around the country and are judged by an outside judge. This is Gladys’s first national show. It opened February 8th.

A writer for most of her career, Gladys Swan has had a long love affair with the visual arts. She has done work in both ceramics and enjoys doing both figurative and abstract paintings. She was the first writer to be awarded a residency in painting at the Vermont Studio Center since its inception, and has returned a number of times to paint. She has also been a Guest Writer there. She has had individual shows at the Boone County Historical Society in Columbia, Missouri–”Imagined Landscapes,” and at Stephens College, “Paintings, Pottery, Poetry.” Several of her paintings have been published in or used as cover art for literary magazines, for three of her books, and for books by other writers.

Author photo by Gerik Parmele,  Columbia Daily Tribune.

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A Map of the InvisibleA Map of the Invisible

 

Movements of Horses and Men jpgMovements of Horses and Men

 

Color StoryColor Story

 

Tree Spaces 1 jpgTree Spaces 1

 

Tree Spaces 2 Tree Spaces 2

—Gladys Swan

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Gladys Swan is both a writer and a visual artist.  She has published two novels, Carnival for the Gods in the Vintage Contemporaries Series, and Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices, nominated by LSU Press for the PEN Faulkner and PEN West awards. News from the Volcano, a novella and stories, set mostly in New Mexico, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award.  The Tiger’s Eye: New & Selected Stories is the most recent of her seven collections of short fiction and has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award.  Her stories have been selected for various anthologies, including Best of the West.  Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in the Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review , Chelsea, Ohio Review, New Letters, Southwest Review, Hunger Mountain, Hotel Amerika, Numéro Cinq, and others.

The Headmaster’s Wife: Fiction by Thomas Christopher Greene

Feb 202012
 

Thomas Christopher Greene is President of Vermont College of Fine Arts and he remembers being in workshop with me, oh, these many years ago, before his three published novels, before he became a president. He is perhaps unique amongst novelists for his skill as an artist and his masterly and adventurous approach to college administration (one has to admit that engineering the self-buy-out of a tiny Vermont art college based, initially, on three MFA programs, is a bit adventurous). It is thus a particular pleasure to publish here a section of his new novel The Headmaster’s Wife. The passage needs practically no introduction except to say that we’re in Vermont and one character is the headmaster of a boarding school and the other character is a student and inappropriate things are done and said. The passage comes about half-way through the book and what you notice especially is how it works as a dramatic entity, beginning with anticipation, developing through conflict, and rising furiously toward a crashing climax. It is often forgotten that every element of a novel, every segment of the larger action, must also be an action in itself, dramatic and whole, and that a good novel must be built out of a succession of such passages and the rhythmic rise and fall of anticipation-conflict-climax. 

dg

In the open fields of campus the winter wind sweeps across with great fury and small cyclones of snow get picked up by it and spin in the air for a moment before settling back down. The wind in this part of Vermont starts all the way up on the plains of Quebec and marches south with the river until it reaches the mountains and blows back onto itself. The students pull their coats tight on days like this and walk with their heads down from building to building.  It is a cruel wind and on this day, the day after Russell Hurley has left school, Arthur braces against it but not nearly as much as he braces against the coming of Betsy Pappas, which is as inevitable as winter. She will come. He just does not know when.

Arthur considers what he will tell her. All he can do, he imagines, is to plead with her, to give her logic. Russell Hurley determines his own fate, he’ll say. You have to understand, the powers of Head of School are not fully what you imagine. There are things he can control and then things he does not.  Sometimes events are larger than any Head of school. They enter the vast stream that is the history of Lancaster, and in those cases, it is precedent that matters.

He considers all these arguments, though when she finally shows up, outside his house after dinner and before study hall, there is no argument for him to make. Betsy, as is her wont, creates the terms.

He is on the front walk. A yellowish light comes off the porch of the white house and shines on the snow. The night has lifted and the sky is bright and star-flecked. The air is cold and he has come outside as if anticipating her arrival, and sure enough, here she is. She marches down the walk with that sense of ownership that he has grown to love about her. When she reaches him, she lets him have it, as he suspects she would.

If she finds it odd that he is outside wearing only a dress shirt and chinos, she does not comment, and he does not offer anything. The chilly air feels good to Arthur and as he listens to her, it’s as if he is watching this scene from a distance, as if it is happening to someone else.

She says she knows he was the one who planted the alcohol. She says she is prepared to let everyone know that.  She says she will tell the world how venal he is, that he is evil incarnate.  She actually says that, evil incarnate. Then she says she will tell the world he has been fucking her.

When he gathers himself from her onslaught, grateful suddenly for the deeply cold night and the stiff wind that has picked up and gathered their voices in its embrace, he summons all the coldness he can and says to her, “Who will believe you?”

She whirls as if to walk away, and in that moment the long bangs she has, the ones she is always pushing behind her, fall out. She kicks her head back and the hair moves with her in the dark. He says it again, “Who will believe you?”

She comes at him then and he is unprepared for her violence. She strikes him in the chest first and then her fists are in his face. He steps back and moves away from her.

“Betsy,” he says, “Please. Think.”

 They stand in the wan porch light looking at each other. Her face breaks his heart; he finds it impossibly pretty. He is struck by the thought that one of the things he loves about it is its lack of symmetry. Her lidded eyes are different sizes, her nose slightly off-center, her half-moon Slavic features.

Too often symmetry is synonymous with beauty and it occurs to him that if people are not symmetrical on the inside than why should they be on the outside?

That perhaps everyone has it wrong: beauty should be found in things that don’t match, not those that do.

Betsy stands in front of him breathing hard. He cannot help it he smiles at her. This is the last thing he should do. She is a wild animal in front of him, all heart and bravado and liquid breathing sentience. He knows she will come at him again and when she does, he is ready for her. He wraps her in his arms.

She struggles against him. Her rage is palpable and kinetic. He feels it in her slender arms and he whispers to her, “Quit it, will you? Just quit it.”

She thrashes in his arms but he just holds her tighter. He lifts her off the ground like a child, and she squirms but he has her arms fully pinned and like this, he backs the two of them toward the front door of the house. If anyone were to happen by, they would make quite the odd sight. The headmaster with a student in his arms, clearly holding her against her will, as if she’s some spastic child who needs to be restrained.

The door is slightly ajar and when he pushes his back against it, it gives way and he falls backward into his front hallway.  Betsy lands on top of him.

She scrambles toward her feet and is on her way to the door.  He does not hesitate and when he tackles her, it is with no small measure of force. He is on top of her now, and her face is pressed into the Persian carpet. “Let me go,” she says, and he knows in this moment that this is the one thing he cannot ever give her. He will not let her go; he cannot let her go; and while part of it is pure self-preservation and instinct: the narrow selfish reason of not having his entire career tossed aside over these indiscretions, that only captures a portion of what he feels.

For the larger truth reveals itself to Arthur while lying on top of Betsy Pappas in the long hallway of this house a Winthrop has resided in for close to eighty years. She stops struggling underneath him and for a moment there is just his weight on her body, her face turned to the side, the labored sounds of their breathing coming together. And he knows then that what he wants for her is that most unreachable of human desires. He wants her to be immortal; as immortal as the great Russian novelists; as immortal as this grand old school built to endure on the flatlands of Vermont alongside the Connecticut river.

And sometimes, he thinks, the only path to immortality, paradoxically, is to die, for isn’t a life lived with nothing in your heart a greater form of death? Why does breathing and walking matter if you have died inside?

It means nothing if all you have built crumbles the moment you cannot have that thing you covet the most.

Arthur stands up and looks down at Betsy. She is crumpled on the floor, and her breathing is ragged. His heart goes out to her, and he thinks, what have I done?  I have hurt the only person I have ever loved, the only one who ever understood me. When did I become a monster?

And as he thinks this, he can no longer look at her. She shifts a little where she is on the floor, her legs twitching. She looks like she is asleep, and he hopes for this, that she is sleeping. He turns away. He suddenly has an urge to sit, and he thinks of the living room and the fireplace. Maybe he will make a fire, though this is an odd impulse. Then again his head feels foggy. He leaves her there on the floor, enters the living room and as soon as he does, he hears the sound of the front door closing and this jolts him back to the moment and he charges into the foyer to discover that Betsy is no longer there.

His heartbeat is in his ears as he rushes out into the cold winter night. The campus is deserted with evening study hall and coming out of his house he assumes she will run toward her dorm, toward home, and he rounds the back of his house and above him the sky is full of the great arc of stars and the snowy fields are draped in their white light and he scans them for any sign of her.

At first he doesn’t see her and it is as if he is alone, with only the lights from the girls dorm in the distance showing him there is even a school here. But then, halfway across the soccer field, he suddenly makes her out, her silhouette darker than the night around her, and he breaks into a run.

Normally he would not have a chance to catch her, his tired legs no match for her youth.  But in the fall inside he must have hurt her, for he can see as he runs down the slope of the hill that she is walking funny, lurching forward as if with a bad limp.  The wind is icy on his face and his fingers are cold as he runs. His chest aches with each labored inhalation of frigid air.

He closes on her.  She is near the final small hill that will lead her down to the cluster of girls dorms when she hears him behind her and turns her head and sees him coming toward her and for a moment he sees her try to break into a run but it is no use for she cannot. Instead she turns and waits for him and when he runs up to her, he says, “Betsy, please, I am sorry. I am sorry for everything.”

She stares at him but doesn’t speak. The look on her face is pained. He looks over her head for a moment and he becomes aware of the world arcing away from them, of the spin that grounds them on the earth, that glues them to this tiny patch of snow-covered field.

“I love you,” he says. “I love you more than you can ever know.”

“You hurt me,” she says.

“I know. I am sick about it. Really.”

She turns then and continues toward her dorm and this time he doesn’t try to stop her, but instead falls in line next to her. He says to her, “I need one more thing from you.”

“No more things,” she says. “I have nothing else to give you.”

“Please just walk with me for a moment. Hear me out. Please. Just a walk.”

“Where?”

He thinks for a moment. There is only one place that makes sense to him now, a place where their words will be met silently by the soft lapping of icy water.

“To the river,” he says. “We can talk there.”

To his surprise, she acquiesces. They trudge slowly down the small hill, past the dorms where girls study on beds and at their desks and faculty grade papers in their dorm apartment. They come out to the floodplain behind the dorms and the river is in front of them now and it is dark here as there is no moon and the shadows of the buildings have muted the starlight. They reach the snowy riverbank and they can see across to where the other bank rises sharply to the dark, barren fields of New Hampshire. Looking down he can see where the water flows in places and where it is still, covered with a light tarp of gray ice.

For a moment they don’t speak and he looks up and studies the infinite stars.

He says to her, “You know what I love about stars?” When she doesn’t say anything, he answers his own question. “The thing I love about stars is that we cannot tell with the naked eye which ones are alive and well, and which ones have already died but have not told us yet.”

“You wanted me to come here so you could tell me about stars?”

“No,” he says. “No, I wanted to tell you…”

He didn’t finish the sentence because next to him Betsy is gone. He has a sense of movement to his right and then she is airborne, and his mind puzzles over what he is seeing, until he realizes she has jumped into the frozen river. When she hits the ice, the sound is strangely beautiful. The ice is thin and it cracks immediately on impact. It is like glass breaking—no, more subtle than that—it crumples underneath her like the crust on a crème brulée from a fork’s pressure, and then there is the sound of the water spilling up around her, pulling her down to the bottom of the river.

—Thomas Christopher Greene

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Thomas Christopher Greene is the author of the novels Mirror Lake (Simon & Schuster, 2003), I’ll Never Be Long Gone (Harper/Collins, 2005), and Envious Moon (Harper/Collins, 2007). His fiction has been translated into eleven languages and published throughout the United Kingdom by Random House. Tom is a native of Worcester, Massachusetts. His first novel, Mirror Lake, made the Waterstone’s List of 30 Gems to be rediscovered, alongside the works of Carver, Vonnegut, Saramago, and others. He is a graduate of Hobart College, where he was the Milton Haight Turk Scholar. He earned his MFA in Writing from Vermont College in 1996. In addition to his writing life, Tom has been a college administrator for 16 years, serving on the president’s cabinet at Norwich University, where he was the director of public affairs. He has also been a professor of writing and literature, the director of an MFA program, and a press secretary for a national presidential campaign.  He currently lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife and daughter. He is the founding president of Vermont College of Fine Arts.