1. EUPOETICS
(Three Parallel Manifestoes)
“Even a dunce leaps out of bed inspired.” Sherwood Anderson
1 I will never imitate nature and beauty, because I'd never rob me of my own awe--what else do I live for? Leave the monkeying tricks to the money-raking itinerant crowd pleasers; magic has nothing to do with mimesis. I want to do the opposite of what nature can do.
2 I want to interfere with culture, the old logos-animus, the more masculine and less sublime axis. My aim is to help pass the culture through the sieve, collect the actual glossolalic seeds and reshape them not into the soft Galatea I’d like (I’m forever fighting my powerful Pygmalion complex which inclines me to animate marble Others with Spirit and Significance), but Medusa, whose splendid head it pleases me to be turning out to confront the world as its mirror-du-jour. I believe seeing is the opposite of believing.
3 I see language as a healing tool, and metaphor as cathartic as any mass violence. The achievement of the ancient tragedies was to purge by causing pity-and-fear (culture-inspired awe); even though a thousand years of soap operas have mutated the genre, it is that brutal power of the word that I relish. If I didn’t abhor new-ageisms, I'd say my writing is shamanistic--meant to exorcise demons and overpower common sense. Art keeps me from feeling unceasingly ridiculous. So I can enjoy, not endure, reality.
4 I have no interest in realism, because I'm so interested in reality. Reality is unspeakable, which is why I write, to stretch the language to express the fringes of what’s real (it’s my “last three clauses of Beckett’s “Unnamable” syndrome). Reality is the echo of a time-bound smell. Reality is unimaginable. Reality is an ancient mammoth Klein bottle filled to the brim with sound and fury.
5 I don’t care to decipher memory. I’d like to find “the one word that rips apart the world.” Writing helps me face my mortality which I live to overcome. Writing saves me from my female onus and absolves me from my body's limitations. Finally, fiction is my way of usurping the making of history from the bullies-that-be.
6 I couldn't stay sane and articulate, or intelligibly clad and mannered, if I didn’t release words. All my writing is an act of rebellion. In another era I might have been a woman possessed by satans, sooner or later burned on some stake. But I’m alive, now, at Cinderella’s ball, waiting for Godot, in a society itching to cover up my little-girl shame.
7 I write best as an exile. Because language in the mouth of a woman can be deadly, preliterate, alchemical-- woman is literacy’s untouchable, an ineffable catalyst in reaction to which language was created and which continues to prove its inadequacy--it can both undermine the stability of any sacred cow and turn into a potentially “natural” language that bridges any distance.
8 I can only live as a foreigner. It is an honest modus that highlights my difference, and sets me free. I am not expected to know and follow the mores of the locals. It allows for a relative degree of ignorance and naiveté that punctures life’s hot air balloon. I obsess about America from an inside-the-seams outsider's point of view, because its ideology has the ominous power to permeate and homogenize the world. I’d like my work to span the lonely treacherous soul of America. English is not my first language; this allows me to hear it objectively, free sign from referent, use and abuse the vernacular without the learned or sentimental hesitations and respect for vast traditions that restricted me in my own tongue; I write in American because it is our Latin. Every writer is an outsider; and all human activity is a striving after the wind, so those less weighty among us catch up the best.
PS There is no greater art than the art of daily life. The talent for living well is the most substantial. My first task is to fashion my life as I would create an artwork or a text, driven by sheer desire and imagination, shaping it in a new unrecognizable form, with no regard to limits or fears, feasting on this bottomless world.
II
1 In other words, Realism is our greatest linguistic compromise that made our madness comprehensible and comprehensive and propagated an illusion of order by defining its codes and norms; until Modernism eloquently mourned our loss of romance and conquest, and the abrupt end of “accurate” perception, and, soon after, Postmodernism celebrated our chaos, rejoicing in its newly begotten perverted cynicism (John Barth, for instance, has made a career of reveling in the death of every literary genre) so that the text was written in order not to mean but to be, fetishizing the structure and the epistemology, instead of the epiphany. But no longer. We now seek the irreducible clean nonverbal revelation, the intuition, not the analysis. We now perceive the classical and the innovative as synonyms. We’ve played “connect the dots” so often since Rimbaud that we’re impatient; especially as our continuous present is taking us straight into an unimaginable cyber-renaissance. Sartre was happy to spend life looking out the back window of a moving car, seeing everything present as having happened already. We’d rather act up our writing; so we hide less, want more, face proudly the failing world of which we’re symptoms, walk our talk and talk as prophets. The new writer is an apocalypsist.
1. Realism--our gigantic linguistic compromise--made our madness comprehensible (and comprehensive) and propagated an illusion of order by defining its codes and norms, until Modernism eloquently mourned our loss of romance and conquest, and the abrupt end of “accurate” perception, and soon after, Postmodernism celebrated our chaos, rejoicing in its newly begotten perverted cynicism (John Barth, for instance, has made a career of reveling in the death of every literary genre); the text was written in order not to mean but to be. Most postmodernists fetishized the structure and epistemology, instead of the epiphany. No longer. Today we’re primarily interested in the irreducible clean nonverbal revelation, the intuition, not the analysis. We now perceive the classical and the innovative as synonyms. We’ve played “connect the dots” so often since Rimbaud, that we’re impatient; especially as our continuous present is taking us straight into the cascading millennium (maybe an unimaginable renaissance). Sartre was happy to spend life looking out the back window of a moving car, seeing everything present as having happened already. We’d rather act up our writing; so we hide less, want more, face proudly the failing world of which we’re symptoms, walk our talk and talk as prophets. The new writer is an apocalypsist.
2 But can we listen? Less and less, as the info-assaults escalate and what used to be communication is war for imagistic dominance. Myth means to us “untrue.” The only lies we can still stomach are our own. (Only what we can physically consume can we trust; the edible is the new Muse.)
3 Dante distinguished all words between pexa et hirsuta, the hairy and the combed (the punks and preppies). Andre Breton, simplifying matters, said that a real writer is one who takes up a gun, goes down in the street and randomly fires at the crowd until the gun is empty. The term is: terrorist. Do words kill?
4 If you juxtapose W. C. Williams’ dictum “No ideas but in things” to Rene Girard’s assertion “Language stops where reality starts,” and Henry James’ “The only thing we can demand of a novelist per se is that he should be interesting” to Gertrude Stein’s “You can write masterpieces only when you are not you as your little dog knows you,” you get Baudelaire’s “A writer must be both a somnambulist and a hypnotist”; a simple equation.
5. Joyce and Proust show us that all trivial men are transcendental and thus eternal (i.e., “instantaneous”), so regardless of our ever achieving freedom from identity and unleashing the forbidden text beneath the surface, our battlefield must always remain the world’s great banal surface. A surface is like Conrad’s rotting river: we penetrate it to find it is impenetrable. Something is always fleeting: that is the essence of all writing. (To implicate Hegel, a. Thesis: all is in order, and b. Antithesis: nothing is in order, leads to: c. Synthesis: there is order which lacks a center, and that missing link--the little wailing gorilla--drives our need to tell every story. That is, to pose the question: “Why am I not a chimpanzee?”)
6. For, as Nietzsche and Derrida make clear, we must invent & posit a center to say anything; as the surrounding structure develops, we find there is no center, yet keep chasing it (good ol’ rainbow); for God is a game player forever dividing the universe, and once we catch on, realize that the division is false and start uniting the, we transcend; for the self is a stray animal being chased (caught between loss and recovery, hunger and disgust). All in all, I think literature not only is not conveniently representative of any society or even of a rebellion against that society, but that if in its unpredictability it is representative of anything, it is representative of the non-representative: it is resistance.
7 Or, as Colette said of love, a primordial battle. All true love is a quotation; on the other hand, love teaches us more about creating fiction than anything else in life, because it can continuously appear urgent, new, self-generating, arousing, & out-of-time. That’s why love is the lens I use to understand the world.
8 Which leads me to womanhood: the use of love as a means of socially normalizing women has declined, as women too are producing virtuoso seduction texts that are coital acts. Phallic penetration of the woman’s vaginal ear is no longer the sweeping function of language. Because language in the mouth of a woman can be preliterate, alchemical (woman is literacy’s untouchable, an ineffable catalyst in reaction to which language was created and which continues to prove its inadequacy), it can undermine the stability of any sacred cow and turn into a potentially “natural” language that bridges any distance.
9. No disenfranchised voice can avoid being appropriated by the status quo once it is defined as art. As soon as it acquires any prestige and power, it loses all potency (look at Duchamp or Basquiat). To be potent, art must be able to decay before it can be consumed and canonized; it must be apocryphal. The author must denounce it as failure as soon as it is public. Once you enter the fancy gates, you’re the sultan’s eunuch before-you-know-it. The sultan doesn’t make love, or money, or jihad; he collects taxes and spends them to make puppets of himself; only those who stay out of the cozy palace can see the strings holding us up and recognize his intimate chuckle: this short cautionary metaphor was my first childhood fiction, a product of both phobia and imagination, with the former using the latter to justify itself.
PS Every notion of progress is refuted by the Iliad; it was a perfect act of provocation and defiance toward the waves of lesser articulation in the centuries to come. We’re still trying to match its sharp and lucid radiance.
III
1 It is my project to discover or invent a language and a structure that will not simply mimic the still-lifed formula of realism. I’ve wanted my books to pulse like body organs and to fill (and name) a gap.
2 I have followed a simple artistic rule of thumb: to write fiction that cannot be filmed and shoot films that cannot be turned into novels and make art that can’t be translated. This guarantees for me that my art is not redundant, derivative, or easily interpreted. My goal is to create a lucid and moving chaos.
3 I see my role as that of the original artist-scribe: a doomed-to-fail record keeper. I transcribe the present, a realm that has no shape. I don’t aspire to make sense. I simply record the refuse of history (the tales of the anonymous extras), writing against infinity. This way, I always find myself at the beginning.
4 I like prose that ecstatically and resolutely resists the contemporary anemic conservatism of both left and right. As a woman, I also want my writing to be virile, irreverent, unexpected, unsentimental, close to the pre-literate intimacy that language becomes in every woman’s mouth.
5 I see f/32 as a surreal erotic fantasy that turns into a moral fable. "f/32" refers to the aperture of the camera lens that presents the central symbolic transformation (vagina into lens). The narrative follows Ela's urban quest for self-understanding and unification, as she fights her alienation from her sexuality and from her culture. Ela's unleashed female signifier (literalized as her estranged vagina) is out of sync with the signified world. In the final redemption, Ela reunites with her dismembered vagina, and by that act redefines the world. I assumed my vagina-turned-Pantagruel was imagination-gone-rampant. Then Lorena Bobbit castrated her tedious husband. And there was a moment, described in the news, when a policeman stumbled on the severed penis which Lorena in her angst had thrown out of her car window at an intersection as she fled her house. That small-town cop found himself retrieving John Wayne’s lone cock and taking to doctors waiting to sew Humpty together again. It is said to be a working penis to this day. Reality had proven me prophetic against my wildest attempts at creating a fantastic world. I don’t know yet of a camera that can view as if through one’s genitals, but I won’t be surprised if that happens too. Since then, in order to preempt the outside world’s tricksteries, I’ve been using reality as my inspiration.
6 I was inspired to start writing "EHMH" by historical coincidences: the Waco tragedy whose flames proved how potent a 1,500-year-old text (St. John’s Apocalypse) can be; the nationalist civil war in Yugoslavia, which revealed the propensity of the past to destroy the present; a Greek sailor’s legend about an immortal mermaid, Alexander the Great's sister, who met his ship; and the nascent literary movement to overturn the compulsory linear narrative and the patriarchal, canonical tradition using electronic transmissions and interactive, more Promethean, nonliterary languages. “EHMH”’s first chapter, "Before"--the hypertextual exposition--pivots on a medical (viral) metaphor; the second chapter, "And"--the Dantean complication--develops a biological (anatomical) metaphor; "After"--the neo-biblical climax and denouement--is supported by a physics discourse (on black holes) which enables EHMH to become the New Jerusalem. The first chapter introduces the main characters and the end-of-century realities they inhabit: Atalanta, Medea, and Pasiphae, whose distinct lives converge in their need for liberation from a life of absence, seek salvation by jumping into the sea. . Atalanta as the celestial, Olympian aspect; Medea as the terrestrial, materialist instinct; Pasiphae as the infernal, creative force. Together they formed a human trinity. They meet EHMH (Yahweh-gone-softporn Emmanuelle) is a mythic mermaid whose giant body shelters thousands of history's disenfranchized, the countless victims, their killers, and the prophets. The second chapter relates the voyage of the women who find themselves drawn inside the gargantuan EHMH; they chart a hazardous course through her body until they reach her brain, where they blast open the abandoned safe of her consciousness and initiate EHMH's decision to come out, into the world. The third chapter describes the apocalyptic changes EHMH's shocking presence effects on the socio-political prejudices of the West (where she is treated alternately as God and Godzilla), and on those inside her, and culminates in a celebration of the end of history-as-we-know-it on EHMH's body, capital of the new world
8 I still follow reality. When I watched the orange-suited police crews walk into the Tokyo subways like astronauts setting foot on a new planet, I knew how the police would tread on the body of EHMH. Days later, Aum Shinrikyo had joined Jonah and the chetniks and UNPROFOR rapists populating the inner arteries of EHMH. Asahara sold his blood for millions of yen, a postmodern Christ. This made me consider the commodity value of EHMH’s blood. Yes, EHMH’s ass is the size of Taiwan and her hymen is the sum total of 3,000 maidens. But outside of EHMH, average citizens drive huge Ryder trucks filled with fertilizer and fuel into skyscrapers, and unleash sarin into subways, for no real reason. At least, EHMH has deep internal meanings, a logic that drives her journey: she is a world filled to capacity.
9 I’m afraid human logic cannot begin to fathom what human beings are capable of. That is the great difference between fact and fiction. Fiction is the relentless attempt to humanize fact and shape and expand our sense of reason. Fiction turns life into summary to save the world from chaos. At its best, fiction becomes a communal healing rite that has surpassed all meaning. At its best, fiction too is a bottomless pit. When fiction seems more realistic than reality, something is awry: our writers are scared.
10 It’s because since the Enlightenment we’ve used fiction to homogenize ourselves and perpetuate the artificial stability of our civilization. Reality has always been greater and riskier than fiction. Besides, the information highway is a great equalizer. In late capitalism, power is in numbers. Sensationalism (just like sarin) is proof of a vital democracy. It reminds us that reality cannot be uttered, that all our words are euphemisms; that life is not the sum of its parts, and that, if fiction is to explain life, it has to overcome its limits. There is no cause and effect. We’re back to the world of Gods, where anything goes.
PS In short, my writing is the equivalent of:
1. feeling pregnant forever, ever since I unexpectedly found myself,
2. running from the earth-churning military tanks deafeningly firing at everyone around me in the familiar crowded streets before the sealed-off University of Athens and slipping on the spilled blood,
3. and later that night pulling up my nightgown under the heavy sweaty bedcovers and whispering to the cavernous dark, “Fuck me! Fuck me!” frantically,
4. then taking to the air, lifted by my billowing world-size hunger high over the old city battlements,
5. fleeing the windblown waiting room of the dead compatriots, escaping from the circle of my existence as if from an old terrible crime, and, burden-free, sinking my claws back into the open earth,
6. sensing for the first time a man’s eyelashes batting against my labia, as if I were being flayed,
7. and afterwards lying smeared silver with sperm inside a foreign boy’s daydream,
8. watching it drip over a beauty mark and through fine hairs tickling me lightly as I was scribing this.
(THE FUTURE OF FICTION IN THE FICTIONER'S HEART)
Hopefully there'll be another Faulkner. Hopefully it's me.)
