Saturday, March 24, 2007

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- SLASH AND BURN POETICS

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Who controls language controls control

Vincent wrote, ‘you have broken the sentence’. Like a virgin. The broken sentence meanders through its own leadership across the page strewing itself among its processes, the meaning of which, you might say, are its altruisms and its intent, even as it rolls through its structureless & wandering length deliberately yet hopelessly entangled in what it is passing through, itself really, coming out upon an end which is not necessarily described in the process, the process being both medium and message. How can you not, then, allow it access to the reaches from which you cannot defend or deny yourself the conviction or experience or the act itself remunerating your exchange. A sentence is in fact an exchange of energy, at least in its familiar strategy of definition and action complacently encased within the form of its structure.
At word and sign, we contract-out into the cosmic element with some destiny or reproduction intent in the forward seeming allowance of our acts themselves. However what has no end but continually drives us forward by means of punctuation or perhaps word choice arrives at an action which draws energy out from the receiver, not a filling up with fuel as might take place with a more mechanical formula. That ‘matter is neither created nor destroyed’ might be tested inside this model in the sense that provoking an organism into filling in an otherwise blank form, that is, that which is provided, would involve ‘making something out of nothing’ or ‘drawing from the void’. Every thing comes from the void, in violation of the laws with which we are familiar, which govern our interactions and meditations as if there were some balancing input and output in an equation of compensation and balance as the transcendentalists comment, proficiently enough to have outlasted the usefulness of its engines and displacements away from consent or promotion of an absolute, so that even the absolute itself loses some of its totality in favor of an unremitting inflexibility which belies the flow of the sentence unwinding around its topic and center with suggestion and refinement of distinct points of contact and equally distinct momentos of emptiness…
Eliminating the transient sentence in favor of one that is translucency, to traduct internalized messaging within its style, a cellular microscopy undiluted among its selves from which a subtextual meaning is inherent in the structure of the energy movement forward or backward across the term or channel of the flow of what comes ‘through’ the agent or writer. Any slacker of attention generates a paranoia of disattachment allowing the inevitability of control to slip from the end of the process in the distributor into an energy restoration of definition within the process itself, leaving the sentence intact in its own dynamic and kindling a kind of mimetic, muscular penetration into the heart of darkness where matter itself originates by means of withdrawal and survival. Nor obfuscate calm in its own dimension, a tactical estate for the regenerate gesture met in its realm of suggestion and intent as a focus of the procedural into a definite which is then evacuated in favor of a more potential eloquence and provide the ammunition for an assault on the structure which carries it. This message will destruct upon completion.

So memory and intent are both unwilling contributors to the sentence which has begun in its innocence and then moved beyond calculation into a structureless realm which meanders as the stream does through that which resists its energy, finding safe harbor in the nature of its own completion irrespective of that which it carries, as if the load itself were tarrying in the hold, waiting for the sun to shine properly to ensure the character of its disillusion inherent in the passage it has undertaken from an unspoken promise to the fallacy of its conclusions which only energize the soul in its passage through the wind and fog of the paragraph, resulting, finally, in an energy which has been neither diminished nor refreshed, but which seems upon its arrival not to have had anything ‘in mind’ at all but which responded, rather, to its need for existence upon the intent of the speech to be spoken, the speaker to have been implied and furthered beyond what was contained in the medium’s message itself and which finally contradicts the rules by which it operates and functions in a denial of containment. The word gets free.
There’s nothing worse than a word which has lost its way, abandoned its context and refused the energy of its potential relief within a temporary structure of some kind which can at least allow it to morph into a predicament of its own making. The rest comes to get it, cannot permit a meandering soul to exist in an unmentionable vice of detachment and disenfranchisement from a whole which surrounds its essence-within-definition. The rock is not undisturbed in its precarious balance, but rather inhibits itself by its placement from falling out of the picture and onto the next page where it might not really belong nor even feel comfortable, enshrined at the top of its subject matter and its minions in the parade of times and spaces surrounding process like unwilling participants -- really more like the frame around which the image balances and withers under the influence if its own time, and not the other way around.
What is one to do in a definition without structure but look inside it for what has been omitted in its progress from here to there, strategies of transmission lurking in the form of the question itself draw you forward into the realm of the disestablished possibilities which themselves are the fodder and plutonium for light itself which dispenses purely from the froth of the canyon you’ve entered foolishly unprepared for disuse and panoply, not used to the mark of the maiden on your forehead burning slowly from the inside out into an illumination which goes before you like a flashlight drilled into your forehead with a solar battery on the baseball cap riding atop it as an identity or a delayed publication in the world library of aphorisms and other elusive fragmenta, hai-ku destinations at the end of the line, wha?
You arrive at the end of the sentence at the beginning of the next effusive expulsion which is fueled by the void of its own crossover, crosses which burn at the edge of the field of fission which are themselves destinations and results thrown in the face of what cannot be defined yet which itself demands and creates the conditions for its own radical survival in the face of inevitable control from outside the sphere of action in which the witness believes in his own fact and center but from which he or she is denied entry by the very tools with which he or she sought entry, a denial which is both fruitful and empty, allowing us to see within a machinery of our own making that which is both cause and sentry, passion and recluse, shadow and fact of our sentimental existence. (TLT)