A Performance Piece
]Out of the Giants Mouth[
Inn began God^1 wayward northern
lights^2 shimmying (dance_glow.yhwh^3 )
till the tetraheathen^4 quaked awake^5
]hohohohoho[^6 the sorror^7, the drawer^8
tis’^9 OPEN^10 agape agrape^11 am orchard!^12
Winepresh schlurrs pashh the inn’d^13
so sober, so cold, so-so wishy (again
with schlurry ov frusshchrTREYATION!^14
-k it, ten^15) paws so soft, so-so^16 warm
skin (my skin?) buh-bye^17, buh-buh-buh
Bum! buh-buh-buh-BUM! Bum looking a
round for Wehs^18 to grow to blinding
Trees across shapely and uprighteous…
(but this is where I draw the line^19 )… … …
through lines and through planes
through cubes, through hyper(cubes)repyh^20
Recurse, recurse, recurse! that wretched
fractal!^21 So alien, so bright, so-so God^22
ly down and hope for noon to fold
Into itself. As on is in my mine^23 laid up
On, the altar of is, laid up and up until
There it’s gone! And my wine unclouds
My water is cool and I understand everything.
My fears are real, and I embrace everything.
The giant has spoke, and he said everything^24.
Flarf by Me
Footnotes by u/damonstrator
Posted Apr 19, 2017, 10:45 PM UTC · edited
^1 This is a neat pun, trading both off Jesus birth and "In the beginning". One images the narrator thinking of Christ's birth as a recreation
^2 I do like this line break as a creation of two potential meanings depending on whether one inserts a punctuation there
^3 This is an interesting idea but I don't know if it's entirely successful. It comes out of nowhere and I don't see this link between God and programming/computers/whatever really making much of itself (maybe the references to recursion?) Regardless it hasn't payed off for me yet
^4 It's a nice portmanteau but I worry that one really has to have read your "Tetrahedron" piece to get much out of it.
^5 I think this pattern of never quite allowing an image to form (quaked awake requiring a person but the not-quite-writ "tetrahedron" requiring impersonality) is certainly interesting. It forces almost a bimodal engagement where the lines can be regarded as a series of sounds or as a series of ideas but not quite as communication.
^6 Don't know about this. It's not that this is tonally out of place--the piece has been baudy and absurd up to this point--but it is visually and syntactically distinct and I can't put anything even connotative by it. Like maybe it's "ho" as in "ho Christo", thus linking Christ to the "tetraheathen" on the one hand and the "drawer" on the other. But even attempting such a reading falls because it is so much more obviously laughter and one cannot help but read it as malicious laughter. It definitely segments the piece and perhaps (given the title) is meant to cycle it, but the two parts I find so amorphous that trying to comprehend nevermind relate them is beyond me.
^7 I think the problem with colliding play right up against such highly loaded concepts (God, Christ, light, Tetrahedrons) is that it becomes very hard for the reader to tell which move is for fun and which is trying to be productive. This produces a paranoia in the reader that might work in some cases but I don't think works here where there is so clearly both levity and deepity. In this particular case I am left panicking that there is something I'm missing (does 'H' represent Jesus and 'S' the serpent/devil; is the sorror the fallen state of the world?) and also that thinking about it too much is "not getting it". (This complaint may be hypocritical given what I tend to right, but I do think it is legitimate. I would say that I would rather a piece be interestingly hostile than blandly accepting.)
^8 Nope. Just don't know. I'm also not sure drawers are resonant enough to work free floating like this.
^9 So my computer BSODed and lost my comment here. So I'll replace it with a simpler [sic]?
^10 Hypocritically, again, I'm not sure the caps is working for me. Partly though it's the formatting in general that seems a bit wonky. The enjambment is quite good but the lines are quite regular in length and with no stanza breaks the weird capitalization and punctuation usage spackle the column of text indistinctly and form something that is a little hard to even process visually.
^11 This is what I was talking about with the high subject matter and the play. I feel like there's something here about "turning water into wine" but also am I really trying to put so much on something so ludic?
^12 There are yet more paradoxes in the experience of reading this. "agrape" is so firmly tied to "agape" that it feels wrong to force it to become the subject of "am orchard". I generally like "X am Y" constructions, but I feel like so much is being asked of me here: I have to make some syntactic sense of these past few words, have to introduce the idea of an identified subject, have to link this subject to the ideas of grapes, agapeness and orchards and have to through this subject link grape/agape to the idea of an orchard and I just don't think I can do it.
^13 I'm not sure I want a narrative. In a piece like this it feels pro-forma and a dangerous admission to convention
^14 This is my favorite construct here, the mixing together of frustration, creation and being sloshed to me is effective and speaks perhaps to the idea that this is a piece about the process of poetic creation.
^15 Apparently I'm bad at this because I totally missed kitten. I actually like this quite a bit because to me it forces one to think about "kitten" as a composite: the visual kitten as a composite of pixels, the physical one as of atoms, and the verbal one as of smaller word units and the decomposition of one suggests the decomposition of the others.
^16 There's a lot of individually cool things being accomplished here. I really like this just because it forces me to think of the repition of "so" both as an intensifier and a mediator and because it trades on something so colloquial to destabilize the everyday voice as something capable of precise meanings
^17 This might be another case of being overly difficult just because there are so many things that "buh-bye" could be addressing (skin/kitten/God) and there are so many choices
^18 I gave up on Finnegan's Wake for just this reason: that there's a threshold of ambiguous play beyond which the play is no longer fun and the ambiguity no longer resonant.
^19 I like this line. There's something warmly familiar but also a muted resoluteness (given the content and parentheses). There is also some distance but a distance with clarity with the sentence readable as both an idiom and a literal expression
^20 --Is this correct? Can't make anything of it if it is.
it's hyper backwards--
--Hmm. Not sure I would have ever got that and even given that it's a bit mystifying
^21 I like there's an inversion here. Recursion is frequent ly thought of in terms of a breaking down but here it's as building up of dimensions. I think I might have to retract some reservations about tetraheatheb in this light. There is definitely something I think to not only what is happening here but also with k it ten with there being these different scales of compositions
^22 I do like the link back to so-so warm, trying to bring God into the tangible
^23 this should be mind. I neeed to make sure stuff like this is free of typos--
^24 I realized that I left the end uncommented. That's because I really have no truck with it. It has a lyric poetecism in the conventional but quality sense. It just feels sort of odd, like we have broken through to a clarity that clears up very little. I'm guessing that this piece is working on the theme of the artist as creator compared against God as a creator, one who draws out poetry from the Chaos of frustrated confusion akin to or even simultaneous with drunkenness some Sober but not exactly rational creation just as the creator in many myths creates buzzing order out of inchoateness. The piece though recognizes an opposing uncreative also present in itself and poetry generally: that of entropy a la the Gospel myth of wine from water. Hopefully I'm somewhat close at least in a partial sense. It's definitely an achievement in conceptual density and I do want to recognize that. I think might have had enough of density for now though as I imagine I would have been much more positive on this piece just a few weeks ago.