Cooperider's Expansion

León Ferrari. Cuadro escrito (Written painting). December 17, 1964
Ink on paper
26 x 187／8" (66 x 48 cm)
Collection Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires
http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/153/1630

A few weeks ago the Society was invited to create a form of ekphrastic response: a piece of writing that responds to a visual work, or vice versa. The request came from our friends Joseph Starr and Alicita Rodriguez in their call for work for the next issue of Marginalia. Carrie Cooperider FWS came up with an expansion that somewhat resembles the oulipian procedure of "larding" (le tireur à la ligne),which amplifies a preexistent text by adding language internally, words between words or sentences between sentences. Larding is a fine collaborative procedure. In one session we each wrote two consecutive sentences, one at the top of a page and one at the bottom. Then we passed the page to our neighbor, who inserted a sentence between these two before passing to the next person, who had a choice of which pair of sentences to insert a sentence between; and so the page went round till it was full, the original sentences serving as beginning and ending of a now quite variegated and sometimes doubtfully continuous paragraph.

Cooperider's Expansion works a little differently. It is ekphrastic in that it responds to a painting recently shown in New York, Leon Ferrari's Cuadro escrito from the Tangled Alphabets show at MoMA.

The actual raw material for Carrie's piece was two sentences from the catalog of that show (Andrea Giunta, "León Ferrari: A Language Rhapsody", in Luis Pérez-Oramas, León Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets [NY and São Paulo: The Museum of Modern Art and Cosac Naify, 2009], p. 51). Carrie broke the two sentences into groups of from one to five words, following the natural rhetorical pauses. She then turned each word-group into a full sentence that incorporated that word or those words.

Here are the original two sentences: "The Manuscritos series includes Cuadro escrito, a piece of writing, a conceptual operation that describes the painting Ferrari would make 'if I knew how to paint.' This is not, however, a cold list of portrait, landscape, or still life subjects to be described with the materials of painting ('marten hairs on the tip of a flexible stick of ash drenched and submerged in crimson oil'); it is instead a motley gathering featuring birds."

And here is the way they were broken down and expanded, the original words in boldface:

Once jutting forth with proud angular insistence, the letterforms in the Manuscritos

have been eroded, sanded into scattered particles that blow in susurrating clouds across the desert floor. In that series of doublecrosses with which history likes to mark its events in time and space, the exiled letters betray each other. Their sad display of exclusive self-interest includes several members of the alphabet – A springs to mind, or, shockingly, S– of whom one had thought better. Look: you can see them crowding together, jockeying for position as they vie for a place of prominence in the Cuadro escrito; there is P’s elbow jabbing into O’s soft pillow of surprised dismay, and there, F’s arms reach to menace Y’s slender twigged throat – and above that, M’s double plough shoves W dangerously close to the rim of the page’s white cliff. Despite everything, the letters somehow manage to arrange themselves into the portrait of a piece of writing. But their posturing is merely a conceptual operation, an idea whose time may be just beginning, or is already lost. Breaking away from the picture, a flock of words that describes the rise and fall of a hundred notions shimmers above a sentence’s long horizon before settling in uneasy syllables among the dusky branches of its letters. The painting, watching, waits for light. What Ferrari would make, if words were less treacherous and pictures less deceitful, are colorful nests of entwined letterstrokes where inscriptions could safely roost. If we were ever to meet, León Ferrari and I, – in a footnote, say, or at the end of an epilogue – he might ask me if I knew into which sacred grove the nests could be securely placed. And if we had come to a time when all sacred groves had been obliterated, I would try to remember how to paint one into vivid existence for him. At least, this is what I tell myself when, in dreams, fat correspondences drop ripely at my feet, their messages pleading for divination. Our meeting is not, however, likely to happen. If one were to draw a line in the sand, and on one side make a cold list of things likely to happen, and on the other, an equally chilly list of unlikely things, one side would stutter quickly into silence while the other would loudly riff on “what ifs” with baroque logorrheic flourishes. Let me ask you: do you think it is better to allow a portrait, landscape, or still life to dictate history than to give words permission to engrave the boundaries of our understanding? These, and other subjects worthy of discourse, are questions which I realize may be more usefully answered through gesticulated rather than articulated thought. Whether our experience is to be described with phrases that coil themselves into paragraphs upon a page or with paint-strokes that float images onto the surface of a canvas is a matter for fruitful debate. Perhaps the materials of painting, with their gorgeous color and sticky allure, are more suited to seduction than the drab, dry artifacts left behind in the wake of a pencil or pen can ever hope to be. Nonetheless, Ferrari understands that penstrokes, as fine as marten hairs, may assemble themselves into either word or image. Expression may be on the tip of one’s tongue or the tip of one’s fingers, or both. It may even be conveyed through the agency of a flexible stick, like a conductor’s baton ushering an orchestra through the corridors of a score toward music’s more spacious rooms of meaning. Within those chambers we find sadness, but also liberation, in the confirmation that we are only made of ash, which had begun to fly apart beneath the weight of our first breath. Though drenched and submerged in life’s generous juices, we burn white-hot. We may, in our interval between water and fire, anoint the pages of our lives with crimson oil whose stained presence then attempts to retell the past and augur the future. However, the story thus created can never speak a whole truth; it is instead a phantom record of mixed desire and delusion; falsehood and forgetfulness. But, listen – let’s not lose our way in a melancholy thicket of words, some motley gathering of marks sequestered within the walled garden of a page. Any decent picture or poem, while proudly featuring its author’s best intentions, must also include a legible expanse of emptiness between thoughts where we latecomers may infer our own lives. Then, stepping into the gaps between words, the mark we will leave will be like the inscription of birds on the shore of a vast ocean.

Carrie Cooperider, "Cuadro escrito" (published here with her permission)

Carrie originally presented this in the form of a table that placed the word-groups across from the sentences that expanded them, a presentation that emphasized the visual-schematic nature of a writing about a written painting. We still find that quality even in the presentation we have given it here, since it allows a connect-the-bolded-words reading that serves as armature to the expansion.

We liked this piece very much. The Society used it as the basis for a similar exercise, and the first round consisted of creating a reduction of Carrie's piece: take words from any of her sentences and build a text from them. Andrea Giunta's words, the bolded ones, could not be reused. Participants were at liberty to use the selected words in the order in which they were found in Carrie's writing or in some other combination. Of course we always prefer to go for the limit and so kept them in order.

If you find this constraint interesting and wish to try it, let me suggest as a base text Walter Pater's famous passage on La Gioconda in The Renaissance (London, 1893). Begin by choosing two consecutive sentences; break those down into word-groups; then proceed by expanding each word-group into a sentence. Send in the results as a comment. Here is the passage:

The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

Happy holidays and happy writhing!

Tree of Hands and Schurink's Universe

Last week the Society tried its hand at a new constraint, the "Tree of Hands." It was inspired by a sculpture on Second Street in Park Slope, just off Prospect Park West (below). Fashioned in bronze, it consists of two trees twining about one another and then extending branches with human hands sprouting from them. The hands are gesturing in the various signs of the American Sign Language alphabet, and thus this tree can be read. To know what its message is, you need (besides a knowledge of what letters the signs represent) to work out the sequence. Is it to be read from root to twig? Are the two trunks separate words or sentences? Which way does the reading proceed where the branches fork?

As a compositional constraint, it could hold different signs, emblems, images, a sort of ramifying Tarot. If the branches were to cross or interconnect, the system might be constructed in a less arborescent manner, more like a subway map with intersecting lines, and in fact some artists have created variants on subway maps by giving the stations new names, as Simon Patterson did with the London tube map in "The Great Bear." To see a detail click here; the stations are given the names of philosophers, musicians, and so on, and the "lines" are thus categorical. (See a "rude version" here.) The concept is actually better than the use Patterson made of it. His map is a "constellation" filled with "stars" — that's his joke, though even so one would like the stations where two lines cross to be given a name meaningful in both sets, so that Rock Stars would cross Saints at (I suppose) Kurt Cobain. But Patterson has not really understood the use some subway riders make of the system maps to trace imaginary journeys, even with the names the stations really have. A thoughtfully named map could inspire any number of narratives required to pass through a set of stations and take instructions from their names, while a lavishly branching and intersecting system would grant sufficient choices in the story-making.

We didn't think of the subway-map concept in time for last Wednesday. Some of us tried to make trees with armature wire and a large collection of rubber stamps, or just created hieroglyphic system with the stamps on the paper, placing the images so that various directions of reading were possible. We talked about world trees, the Norse Yggdrasil and the Mayan ceiba, and Erik Schurink FWS was inspired to create a universe (above left). Erik's tree, made from a camera stand and a coil of armature wire, represents the middle-earth by a sheet of paper with the four cardinal directions on it: feast, worth, qwest, and south. It is upheld, like the real universe, by a turtle (visible to the left).

Next post: Cooperider's Expansion.

(PS: The published post looks nothing like the preview. If someone can tell me how to size and place images, I'd be grateful. Apologies for the messy layout of this post.)

The Future of Fiction

In its July/August number (30:5) the American Book Review asked 64 writers, mostly innovators (ABR is a great champion of innovative writing), to explain briefly what the future of fiction is, and 13 of those to elaborate their response. ABR's editors left open the question of the sort of fiction meant (mainstream or innovative), how "fiction" is to be defined, and whether it was a prediction of what fiction's future was likely to be, or a recommendation of what fiction would have to do or become in order to be a useful, meaningful practice. Respondents combined these variables as they pleased, and so the results did not form a consensus. Some recurring themes were the persistence of story-telling, the increasing importance of independent literary presses, the need to deal with, or to resist, electronic delivery systems and compositional tools, the increasing importance of collaboration and anonymity and recombinant texts (and by implication other sorts of constrained writing).

Here's my manifesto, to wrap up this series of posts on innovative fiction.

1. In the future fiction writers must place a higher value on prose and prosaics. They must invent and deploy a diction, a phrasing, a sentence more expressive than the default gesture of American demotic speech that too many writers use in order not to seem pretentious, and equally must distance itself from the stilted stylistic "literary" flourishes imitated from European literature in translation. I am not calling for a single American prose style. We have operated long enough with the Hemingway-Carver Elliptical Gesture to want to find some real alternatives, a lot of alternatives. Parataxis is good, syntaxis is good, the Attic and the periodic still survive, but could we call some other taxis now? We need to renew the fleet.

2. It must be readerly, that is, it must engage readers who read as creative collaborators, instead of offering to fiction-consumers no more than entertainment and information, the combination of autobiography and journalism that marks so much mainstream writing. Leave the MFA the-reader-must-relate! tricks to nonfiction. They use them more effectively anyway, if sales are any indication. If all the fiction writers in America were to down pens for a year and instead read in all the Englishes that have ever been written, from the Scottish Chaucerians to the Guyanese, we would see a surge in the level of American language-consciousness. Herman Melville read Sir Thomas Browne; we have to find our Urne-Buriall.

3. Fiction can no longer be taught in the universities and colleges. Whatever good MFA programs may do to the apprentices who enroll in them, they are poison to the writer who teaches in them, who must articulate and apply canons of correctness. Instead, let a scholarly professoriate be trained to teach literature defined as broadly as possible, to redouble the energy with which prose and poetry and drama and nonfiction are read and studied, so that BAs graduate having read a few books and with some sense of the possibilities that language might offer a writer. And how about requiring the study of other languages and literatures?

4. Fiction can no longer be thought of as a commodity in the possession of an author, to be sold and paid for in royalties, celebrity, grants, fellowships, residencies, prizes, and professorships. Fiction writers must make their living doing something else. Fiction, like most of the arts, belongs in the gift economy. For gifts made in good faith, without expectation of reward, there will be a return.

5. Fiction must be a telling and a teaching. Tales differ from stories by making the teller present in the narrative, and fables extend tales by proposing a teaching. Fiction should be fabulist: not "new wave fabulist" in the mode of some recent anthologies, where most of the work is mimetic lifestyle-realism with a few elements of magic, fantasy, or horror. It should function as a fable, and its agents, if not animals, should be creaturely. Its prose should be creaturely. Writers working in New Media won't be able to practice this kind of writing, but then what such writers produce is more poetry than fiction.

I don't know if this will be the future of innovative fiction, but most of the other avenues don't offer much hope, if narrative prose is to keep evolving and make itself useful and desirable. Steve Katz, surely one of the sanest and freshest voices in American fiction today, wrote two entries, one short and one long, in the ABR, deploying in both an extended metaphor drawn from nanotechnology:

I write this from among the tubules, where the nanoguys assemble themselves into organizations sometimes useful.… Though miniscule in my expression of myself, I am not diminished. Fiction is my citadel and its future my obsession. I see God in these nanotubes, and realize that is where It sequesters these days. There the future of fiction abides.…One thing I've observed about the nanocritters is that all their molecules are on the surface. How to translate that into the production of fiction is a conundrum, since authors' molecules are invariably found at differing depths. Nanos are almost impossible to influence, particularly into useful thicknesses and functions..… Fiction is their priority. They have many priorities, and fiction is one of them. (12)

Steve has composed a fabulist fiction here, and it remains for us to decide what the molecules are and how the nanoguys can be harnessed to their task, or simply allowed to perform it on their own or in collaboration with "authors." Deleuze and Guattari's distinction of the molecular from the molar may help, for those who have had the patience to tackle A Thousand Plateaus. But surely those molecules have to do with language, with the combinations of language-phenomena, so rarely entirely within a writer's control yet so necessary to respect.

By hanging with the nanos, although I can hardly say I've hooked up, I can't but present great hope for the future of fiction.