O-graphe Part II

 O - Graphe  (Winter/Spring '21)

The Occupy Movement of 2011 — Taking “text” or “poem” in the highest material & embodied sense: collective political action. The greatest example of poeisis in the world that I’ve been a part of. Experiencing the combination of rejecting the sociopolitical status quo and doing something about it, building something new, where the rejection is simultaneous to making a new field of the possible. Perhaps most critically: the always flawed and provisional work of these collective enunciations.

Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” — This lecture/essay embodies the always local work of praxis making the argument for the omnipresence of Black folks in the canon where there is an invisibility that is a void, not a vacuum. This invisibility masks the domination but also the constitutive nature of the invisible, subjugated class: a sort of double-bind where whiteness claims superiority and endogeneity but desperately needs to hide the fact it generates out of the creation of Blackness. It lead me to interesting new connections, especially an intellectual dialogue between Morrison and Althusser on a theory of reading where poetry, literature, art is able to reveal that actual relationship of subjugation and necessity, invisible/visible. But where the revelation is not delivered top-down, but made in a complicity between reader & author, indeed a relationship that abolishes the distinction between who is doing the writing.

Lenin, “What is to Be Done?” — The location where Lenin first articulates a theory of the revolutionary party. I find reading Lenin to be much like Marx, like reading poetry because often there is often no Theory of Theory given. What we read is a praxis which is a poeisis, a relay between theory and practice, where Lenin writes a union of poetry and philosophy as a doing of politics, a responding to the always local, moving and heterogeneous political conditions. His conception of the problems of spontaneity and organization have helped me create a model around my practices of creation, how best to avoid the fatalism of waiting for the spontaneous upsure but also how best to organize myself to prepare to advance the spontaneous upsures that do happen and form major creative openings—or as Lukacs described in Lenin the augenblick, the art of seizing a moment. 

Before Trilogy — Richard Linklater’s trilogy spanning 20+ years starring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawk in roles they take up first in 1994 and finally in 2013 and also roles they began to write along the way. Before influences me creatively  . But also in the provisional but deeply passionate presentation of love: the first film takes place in Vienna where the two characters (who just met) walk around and talk. The longing for connection, the simplicity and joy is what reverberates in me still. And the Mallarmean dice throw, the risking of it all, the leaving nothing in reserve—but also to complicate things: this is a point of interrogation for me & the desire for desire to be filled and in the filling of desire, the reciprocation, the transaction of love, being complete. The uglier truth, like Moten says: love doesn’t complete us, love fucks us the fuck up, love incompletes us, destroys the very notion of self and other that love relies on.

Sleep, “Dopesmoker” — 63 minute single-track album of droney-stoner-sludgy-doomy ecstasy, I genuinely “lose myself” in the meditative repetition that always carves deeper into me at the same time that it is the score up the trickiest, most dangerous paths up the mountain. Every year since the first year I heard “Dopesmoker” it’s been in my Spotify top 5 tracks (if not number one, the most listened to). The repetition speaks not to redundancy but a presentation of a clear confusion that makes each new experience new, marked with creation and excess and ambiguity, not domination, discovery and knowing.