epoetica

“A labyrinth of symbols,” he corrected. “An invisible labyrinth of time. To me, a barbarous Englishman, has been entrusted the revelation of this diaphanous mystery. After more than a hundred years, the details are irretrievable; but it is not hard to conjecture what happened. Ts’ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.

–Borges, Jorge Luis.  “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Trans. Donald A. Yates.  <>

Last week, I provided a fairly straightforward reading of Neruda’s “Ode to Broken Things.”  This week, I am torn among proliferating approaches to the question of “context” in relation to the poem.  As readers do, I started first with a basic reading of the text (broken pots and clocks and things of that sort).  From there, as readers do, I began to interpret, translate, and decode more aggressively.  Next, I moved on to the human life process that is implied by the passage of time and the inevitable breaking of things.  What began as a lucid description of physical processes became quickly a meditation on physics.  And, always anthropocentric, I shifted my reading from physics to metaphysics, once again looking for the human story that the poem is telling.  From one text, I managed to generate anywhere from two to four different ideas about the realm in which it operates (objects in the concrete, humans in the concrete, objects in the abstract, humans in the abstract).  And, each of these approaches, I suspect is immediately prone to retranslating and further forking.

But, before I go any further with this struggle, I have to ask myself: “How much of this is simply a result of poetry?”  Not “poetry,” in the sense that my confusion was caused by this poem.  Not “Poetry,” in the sense that poets are possessed by some eternal muse who inspires the human soul towards infinite creativity.  But poetry, in the sense that I have pushed myself to interpret based on the expectations I bring to a culturally loaded term.  You call something poetry or art, and suddenly people start to look for meaning.  If we called it a manufacturer’s warranty, I would staple it to a receipt and put it in an envelope in a filing cabinet.  If we called it a romance novel, I would imagine it to be full of pirates and a headstrong woman who, in this exceptional case, wants to be dominated by a musky (but not stinky) swashbuckler with good looks (and without syphilis).   But, since we call it poetry, I am invited to active close reading and the presumption of literary care on the part of the writer. 

So, I am compelled to interpret by the codes that are put into place by the contextual frame that poetry offers.  This, in itself, is not a revolutionary insight.  But it is something to be mindful of when we consider hypermedia art, electronic literature, digital poetry, new media, interactive fiction, etc.  There is a pressure in the field of new media studies (or should I say, “cyberstudies” or “literary criticism” or “communications studies” or…) to figure out which designations are solid and which are yet to be defined.  Much of this is a consequence of the pressures of postmodern life, in which cultural existence is tied to successfully distinctive branding and life is defined by a morbid drive for novelty.  And much is a consequence of real and actual change in the way that people read, write, and store information.  But the specific labeling crisis of new media studies really ought to be understood as a synergy of the two impulses: We know that new media brings something different and we know that writing technologies/techniques are limited by how we think about them.  While many critics might be driven by their own desire to distinguish themselves in the academic world or to solidify thinking about new media, there are surely just as many, if not more, who enjoy the freedom of breaking up the paradigms of language.  This was true of many literary modernists—they struggled to create new forms.  But the contemporary creative scene, the writing techniques and technologies, are geared specifically for the creation of new forms.  It is inherently slippery, multiple, and entropic.  The struggle for practitioners today is to create something that can hold together, to deconstruct then reconstruct.

So, as I struggle with Neruda’s work, I have to think whether I can represent, in a language other than alphabetic text: a) objects in the concrete, b) humans in the concrete, c) objects in the abstract, and/or d) humans in the abstract.  How do I imply a reading of the poem that would capture each narrative trajectory?  Or, do I have to imply a narrative structure that implies all of these paths, since they all exist in my mind?  And, additionally, which representation implies which narrative path?  (Does an image of a table imply the potential fall of an object, the scene of a human drama, the relationship between order and chaos, or the place of humanity in the cosmos?  Does a vacant image of the void of space say something about the future of clay pots, the tragedy of life, the physical realities of the universe, or the existential angst of the human?)  Just as representation tends to proliferate and expand to multiple meanings, we also want it to cohere (see, for example, my previous comment on Charity’s e.e.cummings image).  We “split” and we “clump,” to use the terms that Helen has introduced to this symposium. 

So, having said nothing in particular, I am off to take some pictures of potential scenes of collapse.  Hopefully, they will imply something about “broken things”…

And this is what I found.  This jumble of images is my attempt at an “implied poem.”  It’s not an attempt to imply Neruda’s work, although the photo-excursion that it flowed from was done with “Ode to Broken Things” in mind.  It is a composite of four images.  The first, which I used as a background, was the picture of a closed Best Buy put up for lease (which I used last for last week’s posting).  This image serves as an appropriate backdrop for the entropic suburban picture that I am trying to paint.The second was an intersection, with green lights added to suggest the scene of an impending accident.  The automobile is the lifeline of the suburbs, without it, there are none.  On the other hand, it is the number one threat to personal existence in the suburbs, and, some argue, the number one threat to global existence as well.  This intersection was used because, like most other intersections, it is the scene of frequent collisions and a strange attractor for feelings automotive aggression.The next was some kind of telecommunications obelisk, surrounded by cryptic markings, as if to suggest that the obelisk was going to be upgraded or something was going to be buried.  I like this image because it flaunts the corporatist ethos of modern civilization.  Only in the context of commerce do we tolerate cryptic markings and/or offensive messages in public space.  If I paint the sidewalk with my message, I go to jail (even if I intend to dig the sidewalk up at some future date).  But, this paint has been there for weeks.  And there are similar marks for several blocks along my daily path.  I also like that the marks represent the perpetual obsolescence of economic development…  the ground is going to be torn open, the cables replaced, and the sidewalk patched up…  only to be torn up again in a couple years. The final image is of a dumpster, the ultimate symbol of “creative destruction” that I have described above.  A command from above, and at malls across the nation, dumpsters roll out, facades are torn down, and new ones emerge.  Every day, focus groups and strategists create new atmospheres for shoppers to embrace.  And every day, these new atmospheres appear on our horizons. Taken together, these images have very little to do with the process that Neruda describes.  Instead, they reflect a new religion: That things are broken before they even leave the store, that we are broken, and that our society is broken.  And so, I piled these things up, one upon another, like a vertically arranged triptych, with the dumpster seated high in the heavens, and a sublime glow (a “diffuse glow,” as Photoshop refers to it) permeating the scene of life, death, and renewal.