manifest(oh!)
(assignment : to write a manifesto)
I will not write another manifesto! NO!
For I have seen all too many declarations put to paper: propositions for change of heart, for new winds, new words, new ways. And to what end?
To make manifest :: to make something evident by showing or demonstrating clearly.
The hope is that if I write it, then you will understand me. If you feel it too, then it can appear before us.
What of all that cannot be made clear- the things that are only ever, if ever at all, evident in a glimpse or a glimmer?
What must be made manifest is that nothing can ever appear clearly.
Nothing is ever as it seems. The rational character of language enforces a wall between utterance and the tender experiences, emotions, etc. The things I cannot bring to you by speaking. The pauses, breaks, elisions, emotional experiences, a sigh, a breath taken in.
I cannot put it into language; I cannot bridge the wide chasm between my interiority and you, between the world and myself.
I will allow it to die with me before I kill it in words to you.
I had a thought on the train today. Can I train myself to stop thinking in words, in whole sentences? How could I translate to myself in imagery the concept of ‘training?’ How could I access this image before I found the words for it? I tried to see an apple while trying to clear my mind of the word apple. This is tyranny! I cannot think about language clearly because I cannot stop thinking about it in the very language I am trying to reflect on.
Wittgenstein dedicated a whole book to investigating logic, lived experience, language. He finds this tyranny, this boundary of language and thought. What we cannot extend ourselves out of to objectively look back at.
After pages and pages of propositions and explorations, he declares: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
I have nothing more to say.
Bob Perelman:
Excerpt from “Movie”
originally published in Captive Audience
History is not a sentence,
but this is. And though history
is a word, what it names
isn’t. And though I’m a person
who puts words next to
recognizable scenes where
your entertainment dollar
is hard at work, and I understand
there’s only so much anyone
can put up with in any given
sentence, still there can be no
straight lines in this mass
of air representing itself
visually as broken into pieces,
and temporally as a single care ride with
a unified driver, following
the machine’s nose. The landscape
is placed sentimentally on either side
to make the view visceral, poplars,
a starry night, crows over a wheat field,
all engraved in an edible
freeze frame called
taste, that worldly shrine
coextensive with its financial backing
where everything is above average
and the weather gets past the cloackroom
only in the form of haircuts.
It’s the pure part, the whole thing,
the last word first, once, and forever.
History is a sob story
that should have known better
except that its head is always being
removed and placed—just this
once, the better to
address you with, my dear—here.
About suffering we are therefore
wrong, the neo-masters, as we use
money to display art,
then write off the money
that mounted the display
in the first place, the only place
in the sun that counts,
up to one and then
it stops, its shade
cool & pleasing, its death
always a story told
—to someone who’s not dead, of course.
But if the present is either
eternal or false, like
Tycho Brahe’s silver nose,
then what about the calendar,
standing there, a self-
contingent ficition, hands
on hips wide for child-bearing, yet
slim as a jockey’s, too, in
a display of semantic undecidability
that American-century language can only
suffer through in a silent
automatic display of arbitrary
displacements. Icarus fell
into the sea long ago. His suffering
is over. His father, the general
whose grandson was born deformed
by Agent Orange, says he would
do it over again. His suffering
is displaced onto the only remaining
figure, the peasant ploughing
in the foreground, just above
the bottom of the frame, the
virile threshold where visibility
stops and deniability starts.
So then the grammar is
one big evangelical conspiratorial
set of embedding procedures
on top of which certain pleasures
crow to their father in heaven
while far below people get
burned, blown away, or compressed
into expostulations of gratitude.
To call this a language
flies in the face of all fictions
wearing the pre-Raphaelite
cloth-of-gold togas
under which, in ever case, beats
the same modernist heart, also of gold,
with an improvised mythic
history on its left sleeve
(so uniform is the power of grammar).
But you have to start somewhere.
What we ordinarily say when
an airplane is flying overhead
is that, though we are not
on board, people are, and thus
collectivisms ground the forms
and directions of every event. If
the particular plane is dropping
white phosphorus do we then
exercise our option to begin
to initiate the process of
disinvestment from whatever name
is painted on the fuselage?
A bit slow for the power grid
automatic as electronic relay
tinged with the smell of Xerox
rising from the certainty that
the sun would never have to set
if you own enough, and the night
in which all communists are
theatrically black
could be rolled back to the other side
of the world where it belongs
because my earnest face, voice,
and illimitable earning power.
The art of governing, using
the obvious to state the monstrous
—-but monsters are human, too—-
begins by separating the names
of the countries from the people
who live there. The family
is then placed in the sky,
between the transmission towers
and the individual antenna. So that
mother’s not dead, she’s only
a picture, feeding me pictures
of what is to be full.
This nothingness, taken off
the truck and wrapped in plastic,
and weighed, labeled, and priced,
has to have come from somewhere, though,
or else I’m an autonomous phenomenon
and in fact, God. But when a spider
the size of a period
tried to garner some flat dad beetle
as big as a grain of rice
the body, that had been hanging
by some thread, fell.
(Sorry to be taking up space
acting out the vacuity of description
in an antiterrorist program
aimed directly at the senses.)
This happened, fated, on July 11,
1987, the past hermetically sealed
from the present by the obsessive
cries of “I was there, I saw
what was given, plus what I took
by right of need,” as the calendar,
a Salome of classic proportions
was stripping it seemed like forever,
while out in the alkaline foyer
of the family ranch the H-bomb
stage-whispered, “I want
to start over,” wearing a corset
straight out of the Restoration,
such is the interference of time
with thought’s straightahead appetite.
The result is a continuous need
to defend what are called
our needs aching for a clean
language because no word
once spoken, launched without
warning through the fence of the teeth,
can be called back without
getting dirty in another’s mouth give
the puritan imperative under which
we still live, trusting
in God to back out money up
with that clutch of arrows
in his right claw
and those words, immutable
and humbling, over which
blurring life histories pour,
straining to keep the sense
single and the biography straight,
all the time floating
down page towards the apocalypse
where silent surface crumples
abruptly to noise. No more
cool grey monuments where A =
A, ironically perhaps, but with a thin,
deferred, café-like openness
and portable. Political
one-time individual animals
of the free world, born free
and paying at all points
to see the movie, it is you
I satirize with my death’s head
outnumbering the camera’s gaze
by one when the sun shines,
two when the rain falls heavily
on the thick-slated memory-laden
roofs of past centuries by mistake,
regrettable error, inconsolable
recall. Facts still obtrude
smog-stained facades too modular
to serve as faces, too stressed
by the forced yeses of the building trades
to pass for art, behind which
public turns private
for only dollars and hours
a day. The meter never stops……