Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink
Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink: Locus of the Enigmatic Polygeneration |
...you're not supposed to have any sense of place... a sense of place orients and guides you, is like an extension of The Self into geography, your Who gets all secured in a landscape... --Hugh Fox, Icehouse and Thirteen Keys to Talmud Not many publishers offer an inaugural list spanning three generations (if they were rural Mormons it would be four), almost as many genders, three times as many genres, several certifiable genii, and the same number of mutually contradictory cosmologies as there are monikers on the roster. Make that seven-- V. Ulea, Forrest Armstrong, Hugh Fox, GX Jupitter-Larsen, Duane Locke, Jase Daniels, Justin Aerni... The first, with ease, within her polyverse,In her illustrated novel, Snail, V. Ulea, the proud, beautiful Odessit ("a nationality, not a residency"), stalks Schrodinger's cat as it thrives and rots in many interlocked worlds. In this case, the kitty's shaven, declawed and quadruply amputated, but has been compensated for these depredations with a strange logarithmic spiral of calcium carbonate-- Each time you walk along the winding gloomy corridors of her mansion streaked with the moist glowing in space curvatures you wonder whether you are alone, or she is still hiding in the mucous dusk building a bridge between the mansion and your fearful mind. You cross the bridge, and your fears come to life, formless and slimy, coiling around your every nerve and whispering to you words about the Snail. The eponymous gastropod encompasses and comprises the theoretical-physical worldview which V. Ulea refers to as her polyverse. How does one arrive at--meanwhile, no doubt, departing from--such a curved space, unimaginable by most? More to the point, how does one come to inhabit these commingled strangenesses so naturally that one can, with communicable ease, write these lovely "storylettes"? One suspects an accident of birth--not hereditary or congenital, but, ironically, in the old-fashioned Euclidian sense of lieu de naissance. Say, time gone by, in an appropriately time-warped act of precognition, the Milesians anticipate their harbor catastrophically boogering up with Maeander mud half a millennium hence. So they select a point on the future Bulgarian coast where silting presents somewhat less of a problem. And, right there on the former splashing grounds of Jason, Orpheus, Theseus, et al., they plant a colony and name it Odessos. If we slide five hundred kilometers of plain old physical space along the northeastward tendency of that Euxine brim, meanwhile fast-forwarding twenty centuries in oldfangled time, we will have arrived within the ken, and under the sway, of another proud, beautiful Russian, a hippophiliac empress, no less, who mistakenly decrees the identity of the former burg to be that of the latter. Thus become entangled the two political entities, taxonomically and mythopoeically, if not in a quantum manner. Give it another couple hundred years, and a genius is born in the misnamed locale. To the extent that she identifies herself as Odessit, she grows double, dual as any wave-particle. Naturally, under such circumstances of chance and choice, she will invent/discover the Quantum School of fiction, and will pioneer Predispositioning Theory as applied to art and literature--for, as V. Ulea says, "Between chaos and order is an intermediate stage called predisposition." So, let ambiguous Odessos-Odessa be our leaping-off point into the chaos we're crossing. Let seven enigmatic ink-slingers serve as our psychopompoi, and hope against hope to arrive at order, or at least to make a predispositional pit stop or two along the way. Further along our anti-continuum we come to yet another incorporated municipality, a harbor city not unlike V. Ulea's hometown: a literal scene to be made here and now. And here, in violation of both the letter and spirit of this essay's epigraph, we locate the next two entries on the catalogue. While chronologically separable by a multiplicity of generations, Fox and Forrest can both be associated, in the spatial sense, with a single mundane population center. That may seem paradoxical, given the elder's facility at traversing the galaxies in their baker's dozens, which he does as beautifully as V. Ulea sauntering among the dimensions. A second prodigious accident of birth is suspected. This time it's neither genetic nor geographic, but theistic--as in born again. Say Hugh Fox undergoes a converse, inverse, obverse and contrapositional version of the maternal deathbed scene that plagued Stephen Daedalus' mind. And, instead of refusing to be pussy-whipped into kowtowing like a papist, Fox finds out he was a Jew all along. Does he, like the glam little harp before him, demur from taking on all the complexes which religification-under-pressure entails? Fuck no. We're talking about an actual matriculated student of Borges, a writer of nearly ninety books, Bukowski's biographer. Hugh Fox can handle anything. But, even for such a mentality, going kosher's evidently not as easy as Sammy Davis, Jr., made it out to be. The first drastic measure is to send his estranged son on a spaceship through thirteen galaxies representing as many keys to his newfound folks' holy writ. Before your father died...he made a series of tapes, re-creations of what he considered to be the main events in your life. He was a great one for imago-spectrum taping...I stole one copy of the tapes at considerable risk to myself... And I took that copy, broke it up into thirteen separate segments, acquired thirteen tapemachines in the galaxy. Or I should say galaxies. --Icehouse and Thirteen Keys to Talmud It's hardly to be expected that the author of the above could be pinned down to any sort of asphalt specificity, that he, no less than normal folk, would have Cartesian locality, right down to street coordinates, fixed in his gargantuan heart. But here's Fox nailing a particular parcel of three-D real estate in tenseful time-- In deep-REM tombsleep, dreaming (back) into olde streets ...(London, Boston--1890--Chicago?) when doorways arched and windows on the street curve curved, you closed up rooms with middle-close doors, and you were (green leaves in an after-rain, window-sun reflect-shine) young, and you were young and you were young and you were... Ice (steel) hand between (plunge) her sleep-tits, the 1890 street bundle-whorling up into a bat-wing-black cone, sun-blot-out, shrink-compress into... Eyes open... The big icicle next to the hot water pipes, dripping, 11.3 mos. a year, dripping, and caped, canopied over her... And here he is on the same topographical topic, in an interview-- I mean take a town like Boston... there’s a huge, vital subculture... Ibbetson Street Press... Cervena Barva Press... The Bagel Bards, who get together and read poetry in Somerville... it’s a vital, alive society... Please fixate and focus now on those very Bagel Bards. They are ensconced among the scones in that most extreme example of all spatial¬temporalities, a bakery, whose pinpointable presence in this solar system's present disposition happens to be as follows: 18-48 Holland Street--if google's not mistaken. With sandwiches going at twenty dollars a pop (according to one disgruntled online reviewer), it seems likely the bards all have tenure. How would they react to their franchised enclave being invaded by a penniless kid from the rough part of Boston who dropped out of high school in 2007? And what if this youngster, making his entrance--which is to say creating his point of ingress--the Somerville bakery wall to melt like sour cream on an unfrosted Jewish doughnut? Of course, after recovering from their shock at his means of making the scene, the Bagel Bards, being poets, would embrace the beautiful boy and buy him a fifteen dollar latte, in unconscious hopes that the dairy content might speed the day when he no longer shames everyone by looking so god-damned good--for he is impossibly young. The lad could be Hugh Fox's great-grandson, if this nosh pit were languishing among the savage Latter-Day Saints in the unincorporated municipality of Panguitch, Utah, instead of metropolitan Massachusetts. As it is, he's Bostonian in the same way that V. Ulea is Odessit: not just in spirit but bodily as well (a duality unacknowledged by more than one of our seven authors). This enigmatic Keats, this chaotic Rimbaud, is none other than Forrest Armstrong. And in his unjaded newness he starts from assumptions which his elders must hypertensively huff and puff to arrive at. Here he is penetrating a storefront in his beloved native city-- They stop short and turn into an alley. Dead end. |