Heritage Like Money Then:
Exaptation at the Margins
Risk to Reward Where the Word Meets Itself
To have been colonized by the Eastern for some six hundred years, to have helped shape the Eastern only to be dismantled and dispersed by it, dispersed into land (in turn) colonized by the Western. What is identity then? What is and towards whom does one feel loyalty?
meaning to dream to lost object to gaze
theme of human so unlikely but corpse still
baring mother seed on a still point = confusion
I am an Armenian-American from Beirut, Lebanon where a variety of religions, languages and nationalities coexist(ed) in a rare mixture of oriental simultaneity and occidental individualism. I have no mother tongue as my mother tongue has lost me. I implode within this loss, seeking the chaos sustaining the world of languages with a voice that has the body and place of an absent body, after a derivative of the past whereby the new would occur, time and history abolished because of what escapes or survives the disintegration of experience.
As daughter of orphaned parents, I experience identity like a self consuming artifact that hopes to deliver cross-cultural connections as it curates itself, the curating hopefully endorsing the commonality of being human as a continuous and inclusive enterprise rather than a dichotomous and hierarchical one, the longing to connect just because we're human overshadowing the politic of the human.
the sun declares a bright zero and you gatekeeper
rapture around the bars around you
a father's house lacking threshold
big huge eyes
balancing the need for obscurity
against the need for validity
These huge eyes face a contingency much like that faced by a 'word' meeting itself on the page or out of someone's vocal chords. Celebrating this contingency without augmenting or being paralyzed by it is what shapes identity. One keeps the eyes open to the past, shares its glory and shame because as human one is the beneficiary of both. Hence identity's pluralistic nature —
sliding down a story you know
of counter and inter questions
a multi part message
in mime format
a happening on pavement I pleasure in
gozen doyse/ gozen ayde
I now endlessly theorizing
as I have no ana dil
When the pluralistic nature of identity is denied, the ensuing hegemonic monolith exacerbates the distance between cultures, creates pressure, anger, tragedies, scapegoats. To create homogeneity is to avoid risk, while risk is in the very essence of life. No erasure will provide, as when it comes to humanity, one man's carnal is another's spiritual, outer is inner, light is dark, profane is sacred. Doubt, debate, disagreement and dissension expand and contract, overlay and mold. Side by side, near to far, parallel or implied, identities evolve as perception works with vision, consciousness and memory, connections develop, and the mutuality thereof reshapes the historical and the collective.
the last colony's eradicated
sing do not recite
the pull of the sun endorses heart
liturgy alternates the hour
the conditional stills
inward and outward the techne
between being and charity
parrhesic in nature
I had never met a Turk until I was 40 years old, then I wrote about her. Lale was her name, and one day she told me how she had silenced herself when an Armenian gas station attendant asked her if she was Armenian, having seen her car license plate, arac, her last name. That hollow feeling again. In Tucson, I do not frequent an Armenian grocery store like I did in Pasadena. That store in Tucson is called Caravan, and is run by Libyan immigrants. There, I see many Turks and products from Turkey (I had never seen a product from Turkey before because Los Angeles area Armenian grocery stores did not import Turkish products). Ah the titular! Ah the archness and brickness of categories! They validate and collapse. Turkish American Ozlem Ozgur Silverstein's painting titled, Silence is different from Arab American Nida Sinnokrot's documentary, Palestine Blues, and different from New York based Renee Nikita's Sarcophagus. Yet they all relate to one another because of the human. Titles and categories mask, take away, distract and distort as much as they clarify or inform. Turning away from them periodically is to be better informed by them.
Because this therefore that is ongoing, who what where when why how regardless. As I contextualize my self and the other, I am reminded that there are no protagonists, antagonists or narrators, only participants. That is where poetic engagement occurs with ethics, politics, spirituality and aesthetics. It is apocalyptic in nature, it is also a natural state of being, the Heisenberg Principle and maya, Higgs' neutral non zero and maya. Like dim sum, a weekend gathering of kindred folk tasting a little something to touch the heart, to your heart's content, like mezza. Identity belongs to such open ended evolutionary terrain of ethnic, cultural and socio-political identities. A terrain melting away the insistence, the maximizing and minimizing, re forming mindsets through a humanizing that focuses on the impermanence and insignificance of all things human, all things except the need to connect, just because —
memory feeds a hydraulic limb
fact to symbol gyrate
do I need an interface?
pieces of human that I am
software software please
touch this heart perk
this essential
Identity, like money, is utilized then. Commemoration is needed no more. We have no truth but a place to stand, a place of grace we give ourselves. We have a say in the matter then. We have power. Elastic and interwoven. Then again, how do we come in? Lucifer, bringer of light, enlighten us to merge what is scholarly with what is literally with what is human. Help us feed our souls, unite opposing theories and people. Lawrence Lessig's Remix. Dink's Din. Otherwise we huddle and mimic in-between the huddling. A people, a person, a country, a nation with no connection, no departure, no renewal, no vision but that of stagnation and preservation, of what pray!
at times captured on canvas or film
alliterating our moans
because we wished to make a point in our minds
about staves from Turkish knives
and gold
These challenges seemed insurmountable to the Armenian for centuries. No one could hear us the way we needed to be heard. We also could not hear ourselves. I left Beirut because I wanted to get away from not being heard, and from the bourgeoisie. What good is an affluent society when all it does is perpetuate more of the same, more consumption, more ethnically cemented organizations that cannot historically and presently define a future in which we exist, not as we have existed but differently, freshly, not through unrewarding outbursts but passionate about curating ourselves vis a vis the rest of the world for years to come.
In school, science and math had been easy. The humanities seemed fluff. How could I benefit from a subject as deplorable and incongruous as the human kind. Laws of physics and mathematics seemed safer because I did not have to reconcile them with Armenian language, literature and history. The mere fact that we had so many words for 'genocide' and that they had come up at different times in history and because of or for different reasons reflected our very sad predicament in the world. There but not there, I felt truly and doubly orphaned. I once called myself an amorphous glob of pitch, other times, confused Jerusalem. I addressed Armenian identity as a web in space of triangles reaching out against themselves. I would have liked that to be a dance instead, Armenians looking for pieces of identity to patch up and go forward, exapting. I did not wish to evolve into a caricature of my self, false labor like false pain, asthma, titles all around —
well documented wet
where the railing matched horizon and I wept
because I saw it
I saw those well documented Sundays
rising for rehearsal to a prelude
the missing crack ditched somewhere
hardwood and dry rot and later
bungled into a statement about
the homeless the hungry
and I a thorn in your lap
an empty lap that's all
an accident so —
I ran away to the pines
after a new found hammock's tune
dim under light and guarded so
it only pokes when you un-camp
an equivalent
And so it is with a well documented wetness. One runs away to the pines, after a new found hammock's tune because a shameful complicity has been enacted when lack of identity further presses reality into signification. As an Armenian American poet, I attempt to undo this process by constructing (not describing) a space at the edge of meaning whereby identity is released back to its neutral non-zero field. This is how I deal with the frustration resulting from my ongoing inability to be distracted into an extinction of reality that has come about because of a long and incomprehensible past. So, what is given stands ground, prevails, no solving or re solving or dis solving but revelations — complementary or dissonant, outer and inner, polluted or pure. We have a choice to rename re pair re use our heritage without adhering to it. We are both artist and canvas, I say, heeding the plasticity and exuberance of intentionality.
We, naked, rigid, confused, hurting, ashamed, insecure, but not weak. We, haunted by ourselves, feeling singular at all points in history, detached and attached to an ancestry. We carry a stain. Is it a social or fiscal stain, or both? Is it voluntary? Virtual? We have consumed lack, cushioned in a foundation of lack, living within others' histories, speaking others' languages while boasting about our own. Is the Genocide our unheimlich we are accustomed to, or has it somehow activated the possibility of a new identity that represses the old to express the new? Here, I am reminded of the FOXP2 language gene in humans, birds and other animals, the gene activated to repress certain other genes for a bird song or language. Shall we look for that new song, that new language?
Identity is never given, received or attained. It just is. We cannot survive it. While mutually exclusive states create conflict, opening hearts and minds to explore shared and intersecting pasts for a present and future reconciles Ranciere's perception of 'the regime of perception in society' with Soltau's 'stitches', no problem. Purity at large, parts missing, interfaces, iterative and locative. We will convene for a transnational ecology. Lesions come from visions too, and lesions have visions. Greatcoat where are you, with a telling enchantée, I nod at you. For as one experiences the opaqueness of reality, one moves further into the realm of its antennae. Dualities do not alter the possibility of harmony in that space. Does absence increase presence? Is union unveiled by separation?
it was a gun — a day — an ana baba gun day
because of some dissertation to connect
to break down signs that do not
at the same time help build
rehab retail
simulations
theory we all are amado mio
they left we stayed
where lines meet a corner delivers notion
facing dawn to salute its jet black
thought reversed in the heart
my lens against your compassion
so many pieces the color of self
l'histoire de retrouvailles
things like that don't just happen dearest
ana baba family & relatives all
a yes and no for a nation
under passage
gunlar ve gunlar the road
a song of huzun painted on each side
and a cloak that spells
bill me for the need
combing combing
re membering
our backs to the street
What transforms will always be the expression of feeling and not the intellectualization of it, the remembering of our power and limitations, our diversities and commonalities, subsequently and increasingly losing identity to a pure, raw, abstract hyper-identity of sorts. We face a new space-time for identity these days. These days we can dismiss the right and wrong, leaving behind a blurry insignificance to draw from, an I, motherless and barefoot by the tracks of a multicultural wind. And where does wind come from? Hawa = wind = love in Arabic, and Yahwa = God = He loves.
While convictions create an asthmatic climate and philosophy reflects flat faces, identity moves towards a fluidity of culture, is a site of conscience, an event, cherchent, changent, Bergson's souvenir du present. What happens there is what we really want, that something new, at the edge. We human expats, nomads, exapting, without con ceit con coct con jecture con cording cordance, hearing listening responding con templative, con vivencia. Identity and authenticity dwell within this uncertainty which is not historically conditioned.
you and me computationally irreducible
the sun's epinoia I am glad to tell
the kings the queens blanked
Here is exaptation = expanded adaptation, a fairly and newly revised evolutionary concept, quality and generosity driven. It heralds evolving through adapting but also through active and conscious will and effort. "All unities are false until they are constructed", said Homi Bhabha. One inhabits and celebrates one's strange-ness without the singularity of the short lived 'i', the person, the nation, the gender, the word, the electron destined for chaos. Here is receptive elegance, swirls and layers of Milosz Forman's 'floating platform', an otherwise unknown but hopeful future that modulates over trans-national territories, driven but not bound by history and heritage.
Perhaps the borderline of a transaction is where one self ends and another begins. First, there are no words but a churning, some kind of energy focusing to materialize. Logos that binds, gathers, relates without entrapment, moving onward, taking the ghosts of other possibilities along. Homi Bhabha's "being obliged to forget becomes the basis for remembering anew". A translation is occurring at the moment of enunciation as the 'word' meets itself, a re-articulation or negotiation has been made at the edges of meaning, difference has been embraced. Uncertainty is operative, so is solidarity.
The meanwhile is here, and there is a new Tanzimat in the horizon. How shall we call this somewhat (indigenous) feminist with splashes of queer theory movement?
Celan reads, "... There are roses in the house ... where they beat my father and mother to death: what bloomed there, what blooms there?"
Poetry in culture:
There but not There, at The Concession Stand
A hybrid mentality has both plagued and graced the poet who rattles, sways, floats, fluctuates and dances, caught between light and matter much like pan = thing = word, about to rupture when articulated. An in-between and diasporan existence. The poet's passion comes from a longing to negotiate the multivariate nature of realities, the elements, how divergent from one another are they, where are they?
Granted chance and chaos are part of our simple yet sophisticated universe, localizing faculties allows the poet to access this eclectic climate, as the brain responds differently to sensory perception marked logical versus illogical. Then again, what are the roles of deteriorated or stored genes and faculties, of memory, history, culture?
The poet is star resuscitator of soul death. While most academic and cultural institutions huddle among themselves with concepts that postpone exposure to 'what is' for fear too much may be unleashed out of the bag, the poet incessantly dares experience what is seen, heard and felt, groping and turning stones to face the marble, passionate reason at work, a uniqueness driven by the necessity to do justice both to the constraints of theory as well as lived experience. Because culture must continually realign, modulate and relearn itself. One must dream and act at the same time without feeling what's out there cannot or should not be dealt with because it will be too much trouble or dangerous. Culture gaps are screaming and wide. The object-centered Western continues to suggest quality. Dennis Lee said, but if we live in space which is radically in question for us, that makes our barest speaking a problem to itself, for voice does issue in part from civil space.
Lee also said, a good piece of writing bespeaks encounter with emptiness as its source. What does it do versus what does it mean is at issue, having mastered the production of gaps between identity and authenticity. Forethought (the sensation). Poetry comes from it. Language helps write it. Using language to create passive consumption is a sin. Wired is as bad as barbed because it deploys time, while temporality exposes the uncertainty we're running away from instead of allowing it. Vulnerability and flawed citizenship play an integral part in the recognition and appreciation of any human endeavor including works of art and socio-political systems. No one profits if profit is ultimate goal rather than the good for humanity.
and the last head roams the streets for mother
muscled eyeballs into a crown of sunflower
a prickly convention of stars not yet recovered
a blind man's glove promised to the next
that one will do—
mother thug
turn the knob
The witness has authority over an event, the victim laments it. When witness and victim are one and the same, what occurs is a continuum and resistance to it until something gives. We want that thing, that reconstruction of events on the basis of physical traces at the level of neurotransmitter receptors. There are latent traces within memory, it is not representational, as perception embodies stimulus and processing. A multi-disciplinary approach better describes the importance of not being cemented in the telling of facts or perspectives because the substance of history is far more sophisticated yet simultaneously simple and fertile than a stand alone entity of facts or concepts. Perception and memory are active processes that need to have their own life. Then the wonderful will emerge where real and unreal are undifferentiated. What happens there is what we want, that new and religio-aesthetic withdrawal into the eternal simultaneity of essential art. Panic is the moment when we apprehend the divine in the fabric of the everyday, a glimpse of the void itself, that regenerative, all-consuming nothingness from which we all emerge, into which we are destined to return. Poetry allows that moment, that breath for emanated being, the paradox of locating the site of one's dwelling in the world by embracing self-forgetting and celebrating one's estrangement and otherness. In Old English dwellan means 'to lead or go astray'.
the last head roams moon ruffled streets
septum secum cellophane
blocks
and it's absolutely poached gray
eyes looking for body parts maybe
holiday ashes
a spent overcoat
Dwelling is a process, not a state. And art does not need to negotiate or be negotiated. It is complementary or dissonant, dynamic, a beholding to 'what is' rather than what needs to be. There is no i but an us whereby motor and mirror neurons interact and share. To consider utterance apart from the consciousness receiving it is missing the gem of utterance, the temporal to spatial. The constant flux, déjà vu, déjà eu. Ergo ergon, by work, by song, by transgression. Minh ha said writing is an act of historical solidarity, a relationship between creation and society. No radical change can occur as long as writing is not recognized as a mode of social inscription. Words are think tanks loaded with second and third order memories that die hard despite their ever-changing meaning. Shake syntax, smash the myths, over-turn all known literary conventions and grammatical laws: the classical, the narcissistic, the self-reflexive, the tautological.
we are not about structure angels fall into
we matter
pin clamped and molten lead
the unfurling breeds
Perhaps human nature follows principles similar to those of superconductivity or nanotechnology when under non-ordinary conditions it loses focus and behaves other than humanly. That is an only way we can explain the cruel and unusual of civilizations. Perhaps we can be saved from such trappings by reminding ourselves of our humble origin through culture — the poetry of life. It's gratifying to feel the roots of that amorphous glob of pitch one calls identity, the observer and the observed. There, risk redefines itself, and poetry over-rides it, attempting to maintain a threshold above which there is meaning and articulation, below which there is nothing but a cry of impaired linguistic capacity driven by the need for a state of being yoked with the self at the same time realigned with "the other", at play with the spaces of the world where a breakdown (dark) of all systems (matter) has occurred, where there is nothing, and where one is forced to stay, in stasis, here and now, within time zones that coexist yet no time signatures are at hand, where one can simultaneously be at various places, yet nowhere. There but not there, the poet has no center but borders, liminal and luminous — interchangeable. The work is on the page in a way that does not stem from conventions of language, that in fact circumvents logo-centric -isms, seemingly distracted. Throw it away, wear it, bury it, the collisions and collapsings. Heeding the plasticity and exuberance of intentionality, in a 'garden of forked paths' (Solnit), the poet is conduit, efforting towards a derivative of the past whereby the new would occur, time and history abolished because of what escapes or survives the disintegration of experience.
Isn't that what literary scholars and patrons of cultural institutions need to appreciate in poetry? What else would they want from it? Poetry has a cultural indefiniteness. It is a voyage with no external goal, refusing the tyranny of arrival. Let intent be a by product of our practice against the narcissism of self generation, of monopolization of culture in a space just giving shape to itself, the risk quantum levels have taken. Let a new syntax be derived for a new semantics evolving as we speak. A loss and a gain at hand, itself and its proxy adding to itself while emptying itself, interrupting the prevailing homogeneity. Where oz (self) meets ozlem (desire), rupture to rapture, self at non-self, a negotiation the scalar Higgs' provides. We begin to see through our eyes and not with them. Trust it, trust the poet and include. Once a field is described all particle gyrations make sense, take life. That is the reward of the risk one takes to imagine the physics of it all as an emergent fore-thought to thought to final utterance and rupture that causes the word. In the physical world, the interaction between a system and its environment produces a de-coherence that unites opposing theories and people. Superposition, entanglement, correlations and other means help achieve the unity. There is risk in this process never the less the process goes on, it must. Doubt, debate, disagreement and dissension coupled with dogma, doxa, dicta, data. Theory views the theater of it all, expands, contracts, overlays, erases scattered, side by side to near and far from space. Spaces on top or opposite or parallel or implied to one another designate, miss or betray sound. The word collapses, modulates, and is signified like a lepton or quark splayed over Higgs' Field, not boson but field. Otherwise denial is unresolved dependence, and aesthetic values increase as art disappears.
victimized and orphaned yet tenacious and patient the poet
lamenting and creating because of the lament
because of light
the additional lurking to be registered
while light slowly if it were ordinary language terrain
life riding over
one bears witness to
with the body and place of an absent body
disclosing addressing negotiating
for place
Risk in Arabic means riches, and backwards it means small. Life is a risk. Without risk one is living a small life. Constraints lead to transformation in an age of intensified uncertainty and unpredictable technology. To explore risk is to mediate reality. The aim is not to seek better schemes of risk management but to observe how the future of our disciplines may be tied to the structural transformations of our times that necessitate fresh outlooks on fear, values, everyday life, the post-human. Poetry may be an ordinary looking, out of the way spring one is heartened by, or a dazzling fountain that douses our unfettered glut, aiming. To ignore it sets us in boredom which neither affirms nor denies, is vain and relates nothing to an event horizon. Institutions and scholars need not be anxious about the ceaseless resistance to naming and purpose within the creative process, about the leading nowhere of what is seen and felt. After all, when did life begin? Syntax of language breaks at the extremes of experience, fragments are the witnesses for what did not escape so as to be told, the testimony if you will, eternal presence without origin, a passivity so as not to be in rivalry with the source from which it emanates, a way of getting to the world's reality through eternal moments stringed to one another. This is how poetry makes language happen. The whole is established through the shedding of its parts in space, in light. What is left over from the ether (Awir) — light (Awr) without the i, the additional (musaf) most at home when farthest from the i, over ground for the experience.
Elytis said, "I write because it charms me to obey one of whom I know so little, myself". One cannot treat a poem like a crossword puzzle. The word has no past, nor environment. It is a sign that stands, an act. Our heroes and assumptions need to crumble into such state instead of being delivered as conquerors of or solutions for some state. There would be no need to do poetry if it were to use ordinary language. Anticipating between sleep and drowsiness, fed by aggravation, danger and fatigue, waiting and hoping for a new revelation, the poet's experience generates many questions and no answers, fruitful tension towards finding a common minimum, crossing boundaries, accepting differences. Hunter-gatherers had no leaders. We do, and that's the price the Cro-Magnon paid to establish society and culture. Let us remember that trading off creates what (in physics) is called the Meisner Effect where instead of a temperature rise, heat produces a larger magnetic field and current. Munch's scream, nothing but zeros inside the mouth. A hushed up dis-ease, a hum, not about but because of.
the infirm spill to the wind
confirming
simultaneously the sky
provocates
economy is regulation
Capitalism multiplies desire by multiplying signs, feeds hyperrealism, and utopia behaves as if already achieved. Most people are other people, their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their passion a quotation. Getting involved in the arts has been considered dangerous. "One realizes one's soul by getting rid of all culture", said Oscar Wilde, yet in 1939 President Roosevelt proclaimed, "The conditions for democracy and for art are one and the same", and President Kennedy set up the National Endowment for the Arts. There is hope for culture and the arts however. Institutions can start feeling comfortable with instability and struggle because those are the backbones of the creative process. When we deny and do not appreciate the anxiety and revolt inherent in this process, when we minimize the texture of an artist's life, the day to day realities the artist deals with, the courage with which he or she consistently attempts at dealing with feelings and ideas hard to grasp to begin with, we are shamefully living backwards like the Romans did with their literature. Facing backwards is the death of death, there is no living then, style like the rainbow has dissolved in apparitions. We were never created, we were always light, how dark we have become with the blinding thought that we have indeed come after ourselves. Theory is human reaction to experience, is tautological, appropriative and intentionality driven, a hyper-spherical existence of I am before, after and at where I am. Unlike philosophers and politicians, poets come from nowhere, surrounded by nothing (icon), seeing nothing (idol). They are at the khora (khoran in Armenian). No Klein self-referentialism here. They are much like photons with no trajectory (location or direction) while gravity warps light. Saluting them renews culture blinded by its own lucidity.
There is a reciprocity in poetry and art that fosters grace, a giving and receiving — communion. Perhaps out of laziness, convenience or ignorance, institutional preservationist ideologies have been partially responsible for the delay of change that has affected our collective. A culture cannot be pickled into a jar. The ground has shifted and a very system is being validated in the process because survival techniques have been bountiful. Yet, it may be a while before we know what we really need as it may be different from what we want. The one animal in a herd cares only about its own survival following the rest in an attempt not to be noticed lest it be slaughtered. We do not come from herds yet we are both animal and social, aggressive and humane, and to that extent we must evolve keeping balance thereof. We forage for food for our body, mind and soul, and there are risks involved in the foraging. Our brain to heart connection must always be a healthy one, otherwise we are going against our selves, have missed the mark (amartia). Sin or evil are just that. To go forward, ozle, to be dispassionate about the choice of words at the same time allow for emotion and passion is inclusion. Opposing ways zing, vibrate, oscillate. No useful and fresh insight comes about otherwise, for when we dampen fear we dampen success (quarks are in opposing pairs, elementary particles too). The urge to develop and mold a notion of reality is a human need, how we think more interesting than what we think. There is no right or wrong. The assumption that there is a point of origin for things may be a problem, evidence may or may not be definitive, and what is definitive may or may not be evidence. Semantic fields are vast and creaming, our core domain faces them daily. But then words are in their own way, and recursions go back to when we had enough of silence so we started using them. Same difference, loose operatives or principles. Same conundrum parsing time. Language may be depending on genes, experience and a universal grammar. An asymmetry may be triggering sound, words, syntax, semantics. Contingencies and constraints add charm and emotional satisfaction to it all, as aesthetics without romance is like an ethics with no individuality. Cut it loose for a goat out there. If art is murky, so is the future.
we can't catch the lie basting over the slow
coals of our misery because it splatters
we rub againt it
hoping movement defines shapes we would rather be
reels and reels of maple star plastered over the sun
Narcissism has many faces but no wings, for which reason misconception of power has driven us to using external power to dominate. Fear has dampened our wisdom, and guilt has buried our moral compass. We wallow in sophisticated metaphors just so we won't have to shed our fear laden mask of sterility, it is our haven, energy and emotion impoverished heaven. But there's hope and wishes for every reality gone mad. We need reverence, not to respect but to honor those very histories that brought us to where we are. Let us rid our selves from anti-concepts, ask questions instead of providing information or value judging per some agenda. Let us feel the warmth of our blood, evaluate its preciousness so reason and emotion can dance together, the cognitive and the normative that is. We can say yes to fresh narratives so we won't continue to swim in the ocean of our fear with guilt ridden swim gear. Are we non-original minds? Is our gene for language tampered or hampered by centuries of alternately reaching out and falling back into the cracks of our inner core? How can we make sense of this displacement that actually is a search, a (diasporan) continuum — the i, the id, the idea, ideolog, ideology we utilize and dispense with, what is scholarly with what is literally with what is human merging artfully, feeding the soul.
The soul is set on eternal fire then, and all the colors of light dwell in that sacred and soulful immanence while color is absent from darkness. We evolve as we establish a much needed and long overdue narrative, in dialogue, we learn from the experience of our long and troublesome histories, as fear between nations is the reflection of fear between individuals. So much goes into collective identity. Change of doctrinaire vision needs to start at the level of institutions, for as Chomsky said, in order for one system to be reduced to another root level system, a revolution has to occur in the root system first. Case in point, physics evolves so neuroscience can advance, and neuroscience evolves so linguistics can talk to it. The elasticity for the i and the we is here, what is meant by beauty, harmony, culture. Elementary particle theories come and go, the physics of the universe stands. Similarly, nationality, language and religion are there for the service of humanity. Otherwise lost, we huddle and mimic in between the huddling. We feel the symptoms of our dis-ease yet do not know where it comes from, do not want to know either. We need new eyes more than new frontiers, someone said. How far are we going and how long, where is that and who is there to see? The pull and push of this road manifests being, it is intransitive, like melting. Laws are as good as the order they manifest, and law is to order as language is to poetry. Exploring the creative domain sedates or puts to rest our amnesia and anesthesia so we are not convincingly and pretentiously expressing values, claiming eternal truth. The spiritual and scientific combined is art, is poetry. Poetry offers a curatorial process, what is given stands ground, prevails — a present and future that promise differentiated rather than symbiotic relationships. Poetry opens hearts and minds to dialogue. Words and phrases meet circumstance without competing, continuous, non-restrictive, inclusive, exposing, denying, re-evaluating, freed of gendered tropes, self absorbed, instinctive, less observant, more open. Like laws of nature they inhabit long range patterns, each element affecting the other along a vastness of nothingness that belongs to no one, in which there can be no colonization, quantification or discrimination.
dab into the red and draw monkey limbs and tail lacerated from the climb
stray roots and wrinkles
then spare the grounds in black boxes with no labels
for supper we'll plough soft land
for rooster muscle
The work may feel like an aggression against established concepts as it seemingly delivers a lack of meaning in addition to the order of meaning that adulterates meaning. It may feel like a litany, like Scheherazade tales, an all news station or the Nareg (lamentations of Naregatsi, 10th Century Armenian monk imploring/wrestling with God), talking as if to the computer, the promise of one's own reply in the air. Here are arrivals and events with no arrivals. They help see what is going on or what is needed at any given period in history. Unlike monkeys, we have hierarchical dependencies besides local ones when it comes to language and culture. We do not need brain or heart overhauls, just new connections as to how to extract commonalities and identify constraints, which is which, which are time related and which are powerful or important? Do we have thematic differences? What is their schematics, their syntax? Because there are no more crown jewels for any state, people, nation or institution. All of consensus, controversy and deviance is together, not in the wilderness or the ruins, but in the heart of the city. That is where our peculiar relationship towards one another will create the new. Internal tides deflect course as they attract and breed repulsions. All breeds friction, Jupiter around it. Take your pick. Genuine singularity can and will crush matter into oblivion. Choose, black hole or naked singularity. If edges of galaxies do not conform to physical laws we discard the laws not the edges. Ah the tail from it but not of it. Twigs one picks to make fire.
We must act as a community, issues debated, collaboration activated. There has been a collective failure in dealing with the challenges poetry presents, and culture seems like the orphan of government policy making. Fear of art and culture comes from losing confidence in democracy, conflict denied at all cost. We continue to support institutions with history but not with memory. The textures of memory are denied. There is a hesitation and a timidity, a fear of engagement as definitions and redefinitions scare us. Cautionary strategies of academic and cultural institutions simultaneously open and close possibilities through constructed and strategized imaginations. There is a wariness when it comes to the individual artist, a fear of the independent mind and imagination because the artist is after integrating unpredictability. Hence, the institution is orphaned of art, and the artist is orphaned of the institution. Deal making and power brokering own the house because memory and creativity are a hindrance to the economic expansion sought by these parties. To know when to value homogeneity and when not, to foster cultural dialogue towards preserving and maintaining the dignity of life with innovative language appropriate for the times, to become a window that allows sight through what otherwise is a wall, the pupil of the senses expanded at all times with intention rather than intentionality is what we need. We face a new space-time, that of The Concession Stand, where through the ethics of love, one can will "the other" into existence, for mutuality. Beware of judgment, lean on art, someone said.
Quality, generosity and meticulous interactions belong to this space-time, to the process of evolving through active and conscious will and efforting for a purpose, a non-self-congratulatory purpose. The limitations of what I want to do and how I am going to do it are huge, bok bok, cram bam bless me Sam, breath missing. Where is why and who for and and.. the Lorca thing, the Schrödinger's Cat thing, we the chorus for a dynamics, a politics. Let us revisit agendas, leadership, the exclusionism dazzled by wit and conceit, the self consuming sermon. Ceremony after ceremony takes place to no avail. It is all ritual which is an everyday distraction from pain; hungry and thirsty therefore ceremony. The alternative is not self sufficiency. The many mirrors the poet wears deflect gaze yet the ensuing dizziness nourishes, is the recovery of a lack uniting gesture and speech, more about opening up to what is around and within, the ecologies per se, a horizontal versus the vertical, the worship, the lament. It breeds historical destiny, some conscious, some unconscious, drawing up hypotheses and interpretations to get as near to some truth as possible. Truth has many faces, it is also a continuum of approxiamtions, diasporan as in light with matter, matter and non matter, in the world but not of, much like the Diamond Sutra. States come and go, people stay. They (not the state) are the humans (perhaps that is one reason why a corporation has to dissolve at one's death in the Muslim Culture). Let us not ascribe intent rather, let intent be a by product of our practice to curate, contextualize, appropriate so we breathe without compromising the freshness of experience and life.
We work with -isms but hopefully use and not adhere to them. We could experience the creative differently if institutions were not driven merely by fundamental thought and logic. Looking for the good brings about the good, much like the saying: neurons that wire together fire together. Let us exploit ourselves to reinvent ourselves — planet, land, people of lack, of consumption and greed because of lack, lack of conscience and power, inner power that is. We need to resurrect the ancient versatility of thinking, the absence of which has created a supply and demand predicament. Mother always said dag daga cavousmaz insan insana cavousir. We also say, one cannot hold water in a cracked container. With one eye in the present and the other in the future we hope to come together because eventually the politicized and genderized society or culture or economic condition destabilizes the human. Scrutiny outside of compassion, communication and cooperation is hegemonic in nature. We will salvage to save our selves. When afflicted or insecure or pressured, the human reaches for ideologies to be redefined. Distorted narcissistic states creep in. Some things need to be done then, some huge things. Unity around similarities allows for differentiated states to coexist, rendering sacrifice unnecessary, rendering harmony. Structure and change can go together, polarization and reconciliation too. The 'what is' can be embraced, no blood needs to be shed. After all, the nature of nature is nothing more than an arbitrary and insignificant phenomenon that contradicts itself. No sacrifice is worth it. Poetry brings change and culture together. Through poetry the nature of the human dwells in communicative harmony. So what is acquisition, and what is imitation, and what is innate? Feel the poet, include.
the endothelial woman wakes
she has orange hair
rancid roses of crystal in it
hello coughs out the sutures she's grabbed for years
stuck to the insides of everyman
hello! she looks up
light panels on the ceiling
simple soldier gray
she's alone
pushing
the bloody face in rapture
Birds have rhythm, chimps have categories, humans have both — chords and rhythm as in jazz, poetry. The human is poetry.
Ekleksographia:
Wave Three
May, 2010
Essays
Arpine Konyalian Grenier
Arpine Konyalian Grenier is a former scientist, musician and financial analyst, a graduate of the American University of Beirut and the Milton Avery Graduate Center of the Arts, Bard College, New York. Her work has been described as a mosaic of narrative that takes us out of our provincial concentration on American life to encompass broader social and geopolitical issues with a decidedly urban and postmodern sensibility. She has authored three collections of poetry, and has been featured in numerous publications including several anthologies.