are known than are concepts. Thus, the text as imitation of physical movements/gestures (yet) as language is utterly separate from its conceptionalization. Both are empty in that the motions have no generalization (motions have no language, which is what they are there). For example, in The Weatherman: running is ‘spoken’ (“As from not being liked and so without there being anything runs”) by The Other as she runs hurling a bar into the wheel spokes of cycles on which people attacking ride.
Conceptualization separate from action is observation of what? Occurrence does not bring these even with each other; so in occurrence (of either at the same time) they (‘motions’—which are the occurrence—and ‘conceptualization,’ the occurrence) are utterly separate, are ‘gone’ there, and one realizes that.
Occurrence being separate from itself ‘there,’ “experience” is ‘seen’ from the viewpoint of its dissolution.
Giving up the outside as ‘conversation’ and at the same time giving up the interior ‘conversation’ occurs in the ‘viewing’ of performing (these becoming the same). ‘Making’ writing impermanent. Disjunct instant is neither conceptualization, nor “contemplation”/metaphysics, nor ‘solely’ action as in an action film (which is as if ‘not’ in life, the ‘plot’ of an action film being only segue of actions). Neither any thing nor its concept.
Agamben’s notion of experience having been “expropriated,” the individual supposedly no longer being able ‘to have’ experience (‘they’ say)—as one being separated from one’s action and perception of it, or by their saying that this is so?—here (‘viewing’ text or viewing action as performance of it) the practice of separating occurrence as a form of attention—of there being no relation, of one to occurrence—is ‘other than’ alienation (renders “alienation” irrelevant, not what’s occurring; rather, it is observation). Without being a message or polemics, this attention of itself as an activity is: ‘watching the experience of one’s mind at once as if ‘with’ one’s physical actions—and watching as being itself action.’ In other words, it reinstates “experience” as (separate from ‘their’ definition of one’s, or one’s own prior, experience) a different activity.
Notes
The Radical Nature of Experience was first given at a talk at the Assembling Alternatives conference at the University of New Hampshire, 1996.
1. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy & History / Essays on the Destruction of Experience (New York: Verso, 1993).
2. Philip Whalen, Heavy Breathing (Bolinas, Calif.: Four Seasons Foundation, 1980), 54. Hereafter cited in text by page number only.
3. Dōgen, Moon in a Dewdrop, Writings of Zen Master Dōgen (North Point, 1985), 108–109. Hereafter cited in text by page number only.
4. Susan Howe, “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time,” Singularities (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990). Hereafter cited in text by page number only.
5. Postmodern American Poetry (New York: Norton, 1994), 648.
6. Susan Howe, Frame Structures, Early Poems 1974–1979 (New York: New Directions, 1996). Hereafter cited in text by page number only.
:: The Cannon
Political/Social Demonstration of the Time of Writing
The role of poetry in society is a secret doctrine—One is the visitor, yet the man reading first takes up most of the time. At a reception following the reading, a student engaging one, says, “It seems to me your work is like Gertrude Stein.” The man, one’s reading partner, immediately inserts himself and says, “Gertrude Stein. Certainly not! Gertrude Stein is the human mind—she [oneself] is merely human nature. [Reading of] someone dying of AIDS!” he scoffs, “Her writing is human nature, not the human mind,” he instructs the student. At a reading with him a few days later, he insists that he will go first and “read for a very long time!”
Any interpretation or reference to this instance is merely experience/anecdotal, it is of human nature—therefore impermanent.
“As, one example, Godard’s ‘The immediate is chance. At the same time it is definitive. What I want is the definitive by chance.’”1
the man’s death—from
being sick at a young age—as not a
senseless point—not to—
by desire—reach such a thing in
that way2
This segment is from a long poem, way, in which each line and poem-segment is qualified (changed from within) by, and in, the entire structure of the extended writing. Yet the unplanned, forward structure is at once entirely changed by the minute, present-time unit. Real-time events ‘recorded’ (as only events as written, fragments that are sound patterns) were frequently so minute (with the exception of a friend dying of AIDS) that in passing, they could not be remembered later, had existence only as writing. Any event is qualified by the future even—in the writing itself.
One feels a sense of despair—trying to unravel a dichotomy that is despair. It’s impossible to undo it because it is similar to the conventions that exist.
I have to unravel it as that is (one’s) existing at all—interior instruction.
Yet someone else thinks that maintaining the dichotomy hierarchical is existing—for them.
Seated in the audience, much of which is volatile—two men are to arise—yet a destitute man is lying on the floor (he’s come in because it’s cold outside), he’s stinking, only a few teeth, drunk raving, lying he has no arms
drunk he can’t hear their asking him to be quiet.
The armless is dragged raving from the room by a crowd of men and put outside on the street. A young woman in the crowd comments that some people, disturbed by this, are voicing “sentimentality.”
When one of the two men arises—an outsider, strong, frisky, who has arms, also drunk, rises voluble and is dragged from the room and thrown into the street—he returns with a huge lionish cat in his arms and says “Look at this big cat” and is hurled through the door again—One of these men later says to oneself “And to think that you noticed this—there at a time” (one had written it in a segment—he hears it being read): as if one did not exist—as if only their existing occurred then.
He is no more responsible for that occurrence than oneself, although he was regarded as ‘in charge’ of that context in which one was an outsider. One as the outsider sees oneself as observing actively and at the same time being inactive in the past event and the insider as active yet unobservant there. The event itself occurs ‘between’ these.
(My) intention—in poetry—is to get complete observing at the same instant (space) as it being the action.
There’s no relation between events and events. Any. They are separate. Events that occur—(regardless of their interpretation—). (But also that they are at once only their interpretation and only their occurrence.)
Radicals
