And Mark Tursi has another question:

 

I really like this notion of your ‘larger structures’ as a kind of territory or a way of “getting into” a certain space and a certain moment. It’s very similar, it seems to me, what Deleuze and Guattari explore in A Thousand Plateaus (at least in part); i.e. that certain kinds of language, action, or activity deterritorialize or territorialize space depending on what is crossed or traversed. And I think the playground metaphor is quite apt. It’s as though through the structures of writing, a kind of new plane of immanence is constructed (i.e. a playground), in which one can construct and deconstruct (territorialize or deterritorialize) to their hearts content, and still manage, somehow, the articulation of a life. And, this seems to gel with Charles Bernstein’s assessment of your work in Content’s Dream: “Ron Silliman has consistently written a poetry of visible borders: a poetry of shape. . . (that) may discomfort those who want a poetry primarily of personal communication, flowing freely from the inside with the words of a natural rhythm of life, lived daily.”¹ So, to continue this metaphor, I wonder this: where is the ego (the self) situated in this playground? Where does it emerge from and how? And, how does this connect to your idea of identity as always a plural condition, whereby the self is “exploded” and “challenged” that you have suggested elsewhere? Or, does this conflict with your prior ideas about self; i.e. is the subject’s emergence from “one’s life in one’s writing” a kind of reification of identity (i.e. a kind of subjectification)?

 

“Exploded” is a loaded term, so, if I ever said that, I’d try to use a more value-neutral characterization today. The word that comes to my mind is discontinuous – we experience the world not as a stream of consciousness, but rather as a series of far more finite events. Let me give an example that will show what I mean, one that comes from an activity that has been compared with my writing before, riding the bus. There is nothing quite as perceptibly jarring as pulling the cord on a crowded bus – a miniature society that changes at every stop – and then stepping off onto a cold empty street corner. The transition is immediate & the shift – even just from motion to stillness, indoor air to outdoor air – is total. I’m using this example because literally this is where I first noticed and recognized this – if you pay close attention to the phenomenological experience of daily life, it is filled with such junctures & they’re always abrupt. The phone rings and suddenly you’re no longer alone. You step into a public restroom only to discover that it is its own milieu, there are dozens of people there going about their business. In this sense, changing one’s shoes can trigger a radical re/visioning of whatever else is going on.

 

Nowadays, one need not even resort to such out-of-the-house experiences to see that one’s consciousness is not a unitary continuous experience. Just turn on CNN or MSNBC – there is the talking head, alongside which there are graphics and invariably some key words to “identify” the topic of the story. In one lower corner, you have the logo of the network, often with some promotional language wrapped literally around it. And then alongside that you have a news crawl. You may even have, during the daytime, a second crawl of stock prices. All that simultaneously on one screen – which of those images are you watching? All of them, and discretely – it’s not that hard to do.

 

In 1973, Frank Morris released a nine-minute animation called Frank Film that I’m sure I first saw as part of one of the Canyon Cinematheque – it was still “Canyon” in those days – shows at the San Francisco Art Institute. It was a rapid romp through all of art history, and you can still find it being taught today in history of animation or history of film courses – I googled two classes online that had paired it with Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight, one of which also included Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera. What I remember 30-plus years later aren’t the visuals – Morris, I believe, went on to become an Oscar-winning editor in Hollywood – but the sound track, which was two or more voices talking simultaneously. It was immediately clear to me, listening to that movie, that I could hear two lines of thought simultaneously with no trouble. I must have seen Frank Film two or three times when it first came out – it had a huge impact on me and is one of the secret sources no doubt for Ketjak. I would still list it as my favorite “poetry film” ever, even tho I don’t think Morris thought it was about poetry at all.

 

Now I had been reading Joyce & Faulkner a lot in the years immediately preceding the release of Frank Film, and I was slogging my way through Stein’s Making of Americans, and the flaw that I saw in every one of these projects – even Stein’s – was the presumption of a continuous consciousness. From my perspective, it doesn’t stream, rather it pulses or throbs, it’s just like a heartbeat and I’ll wager that’s not accidental. So what I was working on when I began Ketjak was precisely an attempt to identify a form that would enable me to break away from the habits of continuity – which really are the path of least resistance in any work of writing, and always feel like it – and the predetermined (“artificial,” “inorganic,” “non-spontaneous”) location of sentences in that work allowed me to draft my original sentences in a way that then placed them into this wider framework, this mix of multiple lines of ongoing thought, sometimes contradicting, sometimes overlapping.

 

I have enough friends who are psychologists, psychiatrists & psychoanalysts to know that your “where is the ego” question is something of a bottomless pit. It probably makes more sense for me to say that “the ego” is not something I have a problem with when thinking about my work.² My sense is that it moves – it is literally what is felt by the reading mind (the writing one too!) as the point of immanence as it passes through the text, through the sentence, as it sweeps left to right across the letters of any word, even within the letter of a word. Right now you can feel it just reading this, precisely because it’s what you bring to the text, that sense of presence (because you are present), that little light of consciousness that is never stable & always moving, point to point.

 

¹ Bernstein, Charles. Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1084, p. 408.

 

²Yes, I am sure that there are people who think I have a Big Problem with my ego, but that’s not what you mean by your question.