Antenym 6 Online Part One
^ Sun in Aries 1995 ^
Table of Contents

Steve Carll:  "Humanity and Politics"
Lawrence Fixel:  "In View of This It Begins"
Jeff Conant:  "Dinosaurs"
Norma Cole:  "Contrafact:  Anacoluthon"
George Albon:  *I Too Feel the Air of Another Planet.*
W.B. Keckler:  "A Massing of Time"
Elizabeth Robinson:  "Mortar"
Kit Robinson:  "Orientation"
John Byrum:  [hover and]
Paul Wiedenhoff:  "Vanitas"
Andrew Joron:  [Speechless, the law comes down.]
Avery E.D. Burns:  [It's getting light]
John Byrum:  [mouths]
Leslie Scalapino:  from *New Time*
John Byrum:  [A OR]
(SEE ALSO PART TWO)

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Bathysphere Press
 
"It's Deep!"

&&&

HUMANITY AND POLITICS

	Humanity reduces its presence, both universally and very specifically, to
the extent it attempts to announce itself with the voice of politics.  This
statement requires some deflation, since the terms "humanity" and "politics"
are weighty words, and the game of slinging around sound-bites already
constitutes a deference to politics.

	What does it mean to be human?  The obvious biological definition will
ordinarily suffice:  a human being is one which can be classified as a
member of the species *Homo sapiens*, et cetera, et cetera.  In this sense,
one need not strive to be human; a living being is either born human or else
is some other type of animal (and in a strictly biological definition *Homo
sapiens* is just one of many members of what is tellingly called the Animal
kingdom, that hierarchy of beings who possess anima: spirit, breath, life.)

	But to stop with the merely biological attributes does not tell the whole
story of human being; although it is (however barely) an adequate
description of humanness, we are inquiring into the nature of humanity.  And
humanity has something more to it.  Humanity is, to be sure, roughly
synonymous with "humankind."  But, to use a negative example, when we lament
"man's inhumanity to man," we are, presumably, lamenting a lack not of
*humanness* but of *humaneness*.

	Humanity, then, is both the quality or state of being *human* and the
quality or state of being *humane*.  We can draw fine or even coarse
distinctions between the two -- obviously being human is no guarantee that
one will always be humane -- but in that one word "humanity" they are
inextricably linked.  True, they fight for foregrounding within the
polysemic structure of the sign, but one never triumphs permanently over the
other; both are always present in the word "humanity."

	The point of all this etymological digging is to reveal what I hope to be a
very simple truth: it is easy to merely exist as human, but one cannot
properly be said to possess humanity unless one is simultaneously *humane*
as well as walking erect and having opposable thumbs.  And (to work our way
back down out of the etymological tree), unless one possesses humanity,
one's humanness is only partial, provisional.  The fullness of the human
only comes to light for the first time in the word "humanity," when it also
reflects and shares the semiotic space of the humane.

	Let us shift our focus now, and try to determine what it means to be
humane.  Humanity separated from the notion of humanness is humaneness, just
as the converse is true.  What is humaneness?  A common synonym would be
"compassion."  Compassion comes from the Latin and, at its roots, means to
bear or suffer with.  Note:  not just to feel suffering, but to feel *with*.
This notion of withness, the com- in compassion, is what points to what is
most humane about humanity: the ability to *relate*, and relate through
*feelings*.  This can be seen with a bit more clarity when we remember the
similarity between the Latin "pati" (passion) and the Greek "pathos"
(feeling, as in "sympathy").  And when we say feelings, we are not referring
in an offhand way to feelings as opposed to thoughts, or any other such
formalist reduction.  We are referring to consciousness itself, and to
experiences; to feel is to experience by means of consciousness; more, to
experience consciousness.  To relate to another person is to share in this
experience, to experience a shared consciousness of experience, if you
follow.  True sociality grows only out of this shared experience, out of
relating in this grounded space, out of compassion.

	Where does "politics" enter into this social space?  In our place and time,
politics represents a kind of counter-sociality.  Taken in its broad sense,
it is the governing of people, which may seem to be a *way* of relating to
them, but in a very important sense is a *substitute* for relating to them.
Laws arise to proscribe relations between and among humans, and to punish
relations which occur outside of their boundaries.  Customs and other
conceptual constructs for behavior intervene in all interactions between
people, and become more important than that interaction itself.  No longer
merely mediating, politics determines how people will stand with regard to
each other.

	Today, politics governs more and more the relations between people, as more
and more people become afraid to commit themselves to the attempt at genuine
communication, concern, and compassion, which all involve *listening*.  To
listen is to stand within another's speaking, to move one's viewpoint into
the perspective of another, to share experiences.  Instead politics provides
an easy interpretive grid that allows us to get a handle on people, to
identify "where someone is coming from" without having to actually deal with
the reality s/he experiences, without having to listen to and engage that
person's speaking, without having to "expend" or "invest" one's energy
actually communicating without the incentive of gain.

	As politics (which involves the communication only of power relationships
between people) holds more sway, humanity is more and more buried by
reductive modes of relating, and with it buried, politics becomes more and
more mean-spirited, if indeed spirit of any kind can be said to be involved.
Thus the politically dominant forces cease to concern themselves with
"humanity" in its meaning-fullness at all; while the "politically correct",
though rightly appalled by this turn of events, find themselves unable to
launch an authenticating, enduring alternative to such destructive behavior
because, embattled by the political climate, they insist on fighting it on
its "home field" and become obsessed with relating to all phenomena through
a political frame.  In this field, "correct" may still be *wrong* with
regard to human *being* because that being transcends politics, still needs
compassion and to be listened to at a level untouched by the political.
Likewise with the being of the earth and of the world which it grounds:  if
there are solutions to human and environmental problems, they lie in paying
attention to, in listening to our world at a very deep level, with concern
and compassion.

	This is not a quietist manifesto (which would be a bit oxymoronic anyway.)
As *beings* we must inevitably confront the politics existing within the
structure of a global hegemonic materialism (such as the current one) as it
closes in on its goal, which is, as Steve Evans puts it so powerfully in his
introduction to *Writing From The New Coast: Technique*, to achieve "its
dream of self-identity in the purge of its final, potentially fatal impurity
-- people."  However, we must keep in mind that it is not only the politics
of the dominant forces which get determined by this (or any universal)
structure, but the politics of the oppressed and the oppositional as well.
So while it is neither desirable (nor possible, I would argue, since all
presence involves some structure) to be *apolitical*, we must make certain
that our goals are not fixed merely within this politics, but that our
politics as expressed arise from and hover always near our attempt at
compassionate relationship with Being (and its manifestation, beings; this
includes our own being and that of others, and, by extention, that of our
whole environment.)

	The work herein is both a vehicle and the space in which the vehicle
travels.  The reader inhabits the vehicle, and thus "drives" it.  It moves
by opening a space in the world into which it inserts another world, and
merging the two to some greater or lesser degree (we are told by science
that two things cannot simultaneously occupy the same space, but science is
silent on the question of whether two spaces can simultaneously occupy the
same thing).  In this way, by inhabiting the work, the reader transports out
to the utter limits of what can be said (out where language approaches the
unsayable), and then, hopefully, is dropped back off a little closer to home
than when s/he caught this ride.

	This work listens to the call of Being (the primordial, pre-linguistic
language), which listening requires groundedness in compassion and concern;
and is trying to become and/or evoke a response to that call in what we are
used to thinking of as language, with its visual, aural, and syntactic
components.  
                  This magazine's reason for being is to give a way of
accessing these responses, of being able to enter into the space created by
the writing: those otherworlds which turn out to be this world seen from a
unique and singular location in it.  The accessibility of these works lie in
their sensitivity (because they listen) to the musicality of being and
language, and this provides us with motivation to inhabit the works; and it
is my deepest hope that our dwelling within these works will allow us to
bring their otherworlds into our own, to multiply the possibilities not only
of our individual being but also of our relations with each other in a
larger field of being grounded by compassion.


     *    *    *    *    *

IN VIEW OF THIS IT BEGINS

	To be in at the beginning.  For whatever it is, however it turns out.  An
offering of some kind.  A contribution to be made.  A niche to be filled --
or is it "a need"?  (How often the two are confused!)  For now though this
is premature.  All one has to think about here are the words, the sentences.
And of course what they are about, where they might be leading....

And so it is that the writer remembers that he is also a reader.  That he
wishes for the reader what he wishes for himself as a reader.  That his
attention is not a small, unimportant thing:  to be played with in some
"game" which is more self-display than meaning.  More momentary than
memorable.  That which appears and disappears, leaving no "afterglow", no
invitation or urgency for return...

*

I stand and walk toward the shelf.  What I'm looking for is somewhere in the
lower lefthand corner.  I anticipate some difficulty, a bit of a search.
But no, I extend my hand, and it is the right thing -- that feeling of being
guided which has happened so many times before.  It has a brown cover,
angels astride the globe, and various other mysterious objects.  I open the
magazine, and read these words on the inside page:  "Once there was a man
whose grandmother was a powerful magician."  The magazine is Kayak #11; the
publication date is 1967.  I read my own name in the table of contents, and
turn to the page indicated.

*

"PROCESS: I have this to bring into being -- this that does not yet
exist.  As I give the work form, it acquires presence as itself.  The
work completed, released, then becomes available for its own
subsequent history.  Thus it embodies, anticipates and shapes the
future.  More difficult to express, to believe, is that it does the
same with the past: it changes our view of what was there; it
activates and animates what was rigid and consigned."


*
This from a piece called:  *Soundings*.  The first of a series of
conceptual, aphoristic texts which led to the publication of THE BOOK OF
GLIMMERS.  (Cloud Marauder, Berkeley, and co-published by Menard Press,
London, 1979.)  A beginning which led to a series of beginnings.  And which
I now refer to in this month of February, in this year of 1995.  Words of
this kind, searching and learning, to start the day, to ask impossible
questions of the night.
 

     *    *    *    *    *

DINOSAURS

Dinosaurs don't remember when we ruled the earth for sixty billion billion
years.  Black holes exist where dinosaurs' footprints were, and now museums
live there, subsidized by the children they once ate.  Did dinosaurs live in
places like Yosemite until the tourists arrived and made cartoons of them
the size of twenty-story buildings?  Their eggs are diamonds now.  If
dinosaurs drove cars they'd grind up human bones for gasoline and pump it in
their tanks.  The thunder lizards billow up in flames from pipelines in
Alaska where they froze.  Modern warfare's built on skeletons of stegosaurs,
those pea-brained herbivores who never harmed a soul.  Credit cards are
dinosaurs in disguise, come back to walk the earth, controlling us; give
dinosaurs the credit they deserve.


     *    *    *    *    *

CONTRAFACT:  ANACOLUTHON

ECCE supervacuus...
Ovid, *Tristia*

Or you see all of it after all as an accumulation of tone,
running, climbing, sliding, the day was burning, we are our
day, the ruined fact.

There had been sand in the bed but we made no explanation.
We return to the beginning of the organization of the field
shaking bits of dried leaf and pine needles out of the
blanket.

Picture it one way, then listen closely, there are no apples
here, something that reads together shall invade the separate
parts of the mind.

We discovered it, why not dance on it?  We discovered its
sightlessness, the streets clogged with concerns, with a kind
of proliferation like mange clogging the intersections and
creating a labyrinth blotting out all light, careful reader.

After all, the first images were a name and a house without
the frame, and the woman had four eyes, it's part of the
unities, an invention that changes

As we sing memory, memory, over and over, again as before,
these piles of cypress burnt not for content but rather a
question of spelling.


     *    *    *    *    *

*I Too Feel the Air of Another Planet.*
*Hopes Dashed by Captions.*
*Stand by Me*


There is a slate that you want in the sky
an ozone tablet you breathe to live in
Your future will never be up for review
(I am moving through this slate, neck arched)

Electrical silences undone by the la la
the specter of the unambiguous like a looming field
Her voice mutes, hesitates around groups of notes
Some thoughts move in a path others circle

As when you think of the way to intervals
they set them down like hard crocks in their time
Bark in sun showing the patterns of allowance
and hints of grasp (moving toward the end of a sack)

Her full singing voice lost in oxygenations
now has to be ground re-picted, lost/owned
What pitches engage by wavering in a blank
(the centrism, dusk-clue)(the roofs are moving)


     *    *    *    *    *

A MASSING OF TIME

*The Walls Collide as You Expand, Dwarf Maple*
by James Chapman
Fugue State Press (P.O. Box 80, Cooper Station,
New York, NY, 10276), 1993, $6.00 (paper)
92 pp.

	The protagonist of this work is a young girl, probably an adolescent, who
inhabits a forest afflicted by a strangely human silence at the opening of
the novella.  While various family members (father, mother, sister) also
inhabit this forest, the girl never engages these characters in
conversation.  Only body language is used, sparingly.  Mostly, she watches
them from afar.  When she wishes to sleep (like a true Grimm heroine) under
moonlight, "she pulls moss over herself."  Her mother and father engage in
similarly inexplicable, ritualistic behavior.  The girl's father may be a
sculptor; he engages in this activity at least once and sculptural oddities
abound in this lush landscape.  There is a pond nearby where "a dozen carved
heads float, following the faint current...only the tops of the heads show.
All the hair is black hair."
	The description of life in the forest is richly Roethkean.  A profusion of
chthonic imagery fills this portion of the narrative:  "Where the soft furry
face of the white fungus is touched, it turns brown a day later."  There's
even a Roethkean greenhouse and a house whose attractive windows glow warmly
through the night, yet no scenes are ever set inside that potentially
familial structure.  Chapman keeps his characters in green nature, whose
indifference to human life is subtly, but continually brought home.  There
seem to be many unspoken tabus in this silent forest world, the sort of
tabus one encounters in fairy tales.  The girl approaches the house briefly
once and presses her face to "the long pane of the French window."  She
cannot see what is inside; all is "beautiful dry yellow."
	There is much in *The Walls Collide...* that is reminiscent of the mood
landscapes of our brilliant expatriate, the still productive Julien Green,
particularly the solitary settings and young female protagonist of his
masterful *Minuit*.  One can find *le merveilleux* on practically every page
of Chapman's often filmic work, for this unconventional "biography" reduces
a girl's life to moments of visionary contact with the sensual world in
solitude.  The author's sometimes frighteningly objective eye merits
comparison with other French authors, particularly the Robbe-Grillet of
*Snapshots*.  Indeed, as in Robbe-Grillet's work, unvocalized thoughts
remain private thoughts and objectivity itself is found to be productive of
opulence.  Out of scientific exactitude, the description of how red vines
spread in the forest, for instance, comes fortuitous and formidable beauty.
	The novella increases its velocity when the young protagonist finds a
rotted-out trolleycar rusted to its rails, vegetated over in her forlorn
landscape.  When the girl climbs aboard this seemingly haunted vehicle, the
story is suddenly thronged with spectral passengers who seem rarely to
notice the protagonist, the observer of all their moments in transition.  It
is a panoply of human natures, suddenly, which the girl must assimilate in
rapid order because events, along with the defunct vehicle itself, at this
point in the narrative lurch madly forth, seemingly fluent in time.  This is
a giddy acceleration, reminiscent of Nikolai Gumilev's poem "The Lost Tram,"
in which a similar spatial-temporal disorientation is occasioned by a tram
ride.  Chapman presents an eerie sort of FitzGerald-Lorentz Contraction of
events, a xiphoid shape to time.  The girl meets her suitor on this
time-compressed ride and, after a strange courtship which elapses in
instants, quickly lives out the rest of her life.  We are left wondering at
the void within which this life was a dark pocket -- a pocket whose surface
alone we knew.  Somehow, she had seen it all within that tram's interior and
her face pressed to its windows:  "Over the moon is texture."


     *    *    *    *    *

MORTAR

Beholden or enlarged,
this mosaic,
its plaiting mid-entry
makes me follow

My uneven center, its mortar
comprehends the way, its pleasure
in the single tile

Enlarged and, now, unlettered
the pattern cannot redeem its
visceral spelling

Light enters the stomach,
reverting to the eyes whose
ceramic patterns

won't be burned
They can turn and expose

what passes for guidance, chip by chip

can illumine the fatigue
strewn in this path
of nourishment and flint

To prefer inadvertent knowledge, to recognize
nausea as something more than illness, its new circuitry


     *    *    *    *    *

ORIENTATION

Mind takes off like a bat -- 
the door open or closed -- 
get up close to it and you're
in position to pick up on
what happens, but is it
more than just that?  A fine
point argued silently inside
the self: does any particular stand
a chance of representing the whole
schmear?  Is there such a thing
as "it all"?  That movement
toward generality sweeps out from
the shivering, desirous awareness
scanning the available horizon.
Given the limits, a pulse, light
like a lighthouse, febrile metaphor
waning in backhouse spleen,
generates beads to calculate
the spread, cuts open, one
folded, doubled back.


     *    *    *    *    *

 hover and
    over
  sluices
   again
how to say


     *    *    *    *    *

VANITAS

My memory is tied to the clay walls of the mountain.

	Deep forest.	   Is as humid as a factory.
	         Hold my body with your hands and do not
	         forget this form or this texture.

I will fill this sorrow with cool water
	   and the hum of mosquitoes.
 

     *    *    *    *    *

Speechless, the law comes down.

Flows, the habitat
     of accident.

A solid object asks for silence.

     -- where the voice is working
To override the breath.

No meaning
     has the discipline
     of the sound that it makes.

Moonlit, the arrival of waves.

To understand *distance*
     as a plain
     populated by pillars of bone.

     -- where the organism is waiting
For the signal of its ghost.
 

     *    *    *    *    *

It's getting light
distinguish the flame

night blindness is an error
of shadow

light & shadow
thoughts of each other


     *    *    *    *    *

mouths 
of if &
the tex-
tures 
they 
bite on


     *    *    *    *    *

from *New Time*

	it's theirs
	breath night

~~~~~~~~

		another time -- what it's observing floats on the moon


	~~~~~~~~


		other creatures --  they don't cause us.


	~~~~~~~~


		the image arising of some other's (wild) suffering -- that is the
	woods -- that draws into it without time to anything else.


	~~~~~~~~


 		sobbing frame leapt up of some one's recurring image, their
	pattern in their life (it did) -- calm -- is not -- in order -- I will never
	be anything --
		where one is raised
		day-moon in early sky isn't there.  I made that up, which (as:)
	occurred.

	~~~~~~~~


		the people in Gaza --*are* -- the poor tortured imprisoned un-
	employed curfewed relocated born in camps


		live moon doesn't float off of it
		the observing mind in the very young -- as being the woods --
	both -- is thwarted -- to be the cheerful here

		as if that were -- not -- the woods -- it is not


	~~~~~~~~

 		flying -- crator sky -- sliced red -- blue with the dim black
	under it -- there isn't having been the very young being the woods -- 
	here, here as sliced black


	~~~~~~~~


		drop into sleep -- there's a jungle. not sleeping -- there's no
	jungle. no sleep occurring -- or the trees and rain. rain and no
	sleeping.

	~~~~~~~~


		Galileo watches the motions of planets and doesn't have to be
	bound (by previous suffering)

		he uses only the mind of observation -- nothing outside, floats
	on itself the night-moon.  day-moon exists early there.

	~~~~~~~~

 		it's out of one's hands -- the moon in live sky

	~~~~~~~~


		the mind that's observation -- as their ridiculing -- isn't -- blue
	-- green -- land itself
		as -- what's observed
		floats on land -- land -- on it

	~~~~~~~~

		I thought one's mind that's observation was as a base -- to
	struggle at it
		land floats on it
		it hasn't land -- blue -- green -- there -- floats

	~~~~~~~~

 		one's own mind that's observation -- doesn't struggle -- not --
	"what's observed" -- the mind that's observation is the woods -- then.

		that's a joke -- floating.

	~~~~~~~~

		the rain forest is so closed in -- calls dropping -- the trees the
	same -- one being depressed it doesn't sustain it.

		it doesn't enhance -- being -- (or) depressed.


	~~~~~~~~

 		the rain forest -- not the call dropping -- that doesn't have an
	instrument -- only hearing -- the call itself isn't enhanced -- hearing
	isn't enhanced

		or any attention -- one's being depressed

	~~~~~~~~

		the broken neck is in the rain forest -- only hearing -- the trees
	are the same -- closed and so in attention -- and one is -- 

		call dropping -- isn't -- a neck. non-stop whistling -- rain.


	~~~~~~~~

		non-stop trill (isn't call dropping) -- not consecutive -- rain

		the non stop whistling doesn't enhance rain


	~~~~~~~~

 	the non-stop bouncing whistle is insect not enhancing the rain
	forest -- one being depressed either

		thunder -- resting

	~~~~~~~~

		rain is in hearing. there's no sleeping. one slept hearing. there's
	no sleeping or rain, when raining -- then.


	~~~~~~~~

		whistling on green -- there's no sleep, just that. whistling isn't
	from flying things or green, which floats. dense but light (in weight)
	cloud sky isn't on green -- floats, not on it; single whistle of the insects
	neither on green or on single light dense cloud on it. there's not light
	dense vast cloud on green that's not floating -- or floating -- as -- both
	-- land.

	~~~~~~~~


     *    *    *    *    *

  A OR
 THE AS
VALVED