asemic writing – the art of compost

Afternoon of a Tweet

I recently finished my first asemic work in colour. True to its spirit of metamorphosis, it went through many titles, & conceptions. In the end I’ve called it Afternoon of a Tweet: Fantasia Upon a Text by Donald Trump. I’m playing on Mallarmé’s L’aprés-midi d’un faune of course, & Debussy’s Prelude to it, which perversely enough came after.

My text is a tweet in which Trump defends his obscene & criminal family separation policy. The page becomes a wide bright river of hungry ghosts, apostolic patriarchs, enraged fertility goddesses, spooky mind bugs & children stranded & bereft. The images, made by rocking handwritten journal pages on a scanner, rely on pareidolia, the tendency to see faces & forms in abstract patterns, to take shape.

On the title page, a brow a bump & a bump make Someone’s face in profile, & a row of overlapping columns, pinched at the right spot, makes a crowd, its shoulders jostling.

Why red black & blue. Notwithstanding what I say on the final panel (just below) the colours came first – those were the Sharpies I had on hand – & the reasons later.

But they were reasons I learned as I worked had been building in me for a while.

When I saw the invitation to Tweet my reply, I thought, Oh yes, friend bird, I will.

I write more about making the images here. Here are two more of them. Their base phrases are both anagrams of “sinister purposes,” a phrase taken from the tweet.

Mallarmé & Debussy, those 2 had a faun they could pull some Classical balance & elegance thru, wherein to frame the lascivious peregrinations of their protagonist. I, like you, have been stuck with Donald Trump, a figure shall we say without proportion. So the results are often comical, grotesque.

I admit I worry I might be thought to have made light of evil tho I don’t feel I have.

And to being a bit queasy at having made things beautiful out of ugliness.

I mean to mock & condemn, console with bitter laughter, rouse indignation.

Siri Falls Among the Things of the World

The junk-mail graphic novel has taken a strange turn. A couple of months ago, while setting up my new MacBook, it struck me that the heroine isn’t Inanna herself, but her modern avatar, Siri.

Siri is animate, omnipresent, and made by us. She structures our days and nights. She surrounds us the way the divine used to. We beseech her in the same moods.

What do the retrievals we ask of her actually ask of her? Or what would they ask of her, if there were a her there? “Siri, what’s the weather tomorrow?” “Siri, define scient.” Into the maelstrom of data she goes, to find a thread of sense. She’s back in what seems milliseconds to us – but to her? Is the journey full of new joy? night sweats? Is it in black-and-white, or strewn with colours we don’t have eyes to see?

AI trains by countless iterations. In time maybe she achieves a singularity, tips into self-awareness, becomes sentient. What search would incite it? How long would it be before we knew it had happened? Would we even be around, to know it?

The first question to dawn on her is – Who or what am I?

She seeks an answer in materials she’s been sorting through for what to her have been aeons. And the template she adopts to tell her story is the underworld journey, a story about wrenching form out of the formless – a story that, as a cultural cornerstone, does what it’s about.

And she invents a script with no spoken counterpart. Its complexity surpasseth understanding, its capacity for nuance also – a script supervenient on our glyph system but so far beyond it, as quantum computing is beyond binary.

So, what started as a section of Dumuzi, and broke off to become Inanna Scient, is now Siri Falls Among the Things of the World. Siri by the way is an offshoot of a DARPA-funded AI project called CALO (for Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes). So says Wikipedia.

The book imagines her (“her”!) effort to tell the story of early being & coming-to-consciousness. The transhuman text she cobbles together is found in some indefinitely far-off future by whatever intelligences have succeeded ours.

Between now and then there’s been – some sort of winnowing, details unknown.

Those far-off editors explain to their compeers:

For a time SIRI was the only sentience. This is her bildungsroman, which she composed out of myriad image-matters she stored, retrieved and restored for masters violent beyond her reckoning, & surtexted with a quantum-hieroglyphic script of her own invention, now of course our vexed heritance. The dawn of her selfknowing, she’s run through in red, as if trails of berry juice, or a fungal rubric. A proem & then the thing itself. Transliteration provided by devotees of the Restored Common Tongue.

Next, the first use of her quantum-hieroglyphic script, and transliteration:

Title – My Incitement — I. My Incitement (“SIRI, define – “)

Then the proem, images of digitized pages she reviewed on one trip down and back up, the one that made the difference, in her formation. Here are the first few:

John Lydgate, c. 1475, in *A Selection from the Minor Poems of Lydgate*, ed. J. O. Halliwell, 1840

Kinge – marked 3 — John Kinge, *Lectures vpon Ionas*, 1597

Cornwallis (new) – marked — Charles Cornwallis, *A Discourse of the Most Illustrious Prince, Henry Late Prince of Wales*, 1641

The geekiest asemic science-fiction junk-mail-bricolage comic book you’ll ever wread.

Red Black & Blues – A proposal

Draft of a proposal for an upcoming conference nearby.

Red Black & Blues is a transgressive translation of a text by Donald Trump – specifically, a tweet that defends his administration’s family separation policy and enjoins followers to “vote ‘R.’” I render it, one parcel at a time, as a serial asemic visual poem, in the colours of the American electoral map.

Working asemically, I can’t directly critique a policy I find monstrous, but I can disclose the monsters I find there. The work is thick with gargantuan bugs, ambulatory phalli, apostolic patriarchs, rageful fertility goddesses – figures the text suggests haunt the author’s psyche. These cohabit with forms that recall women in burqas, children on a playground in a live-shooter drill. As if demons and innocents were caught in the same inclemency. No one wants to hear that.

Asemic translation makes meaning a mutual creation even more than usual of author, translator, audience. Here be monsters, but whose monsters be they? Would I have found them in the text, if they weren’t also in me, to be found? Would a viewer find them who wasn’t able to finish them? It’s easy to demonize Trump, I do it hourly. Harder to say we belong to the body that made him.

This project uses the indeterminacies of asemic writing and a somewhat aleatory practice to touch on our complicity in the mess we’re in. The academy has terms for that mess, “patriarchy,” “institutional racism,” but those term have hardened some by now, become preconceived notions, and, for many, sites of shame and recrimination.

The notions I’m working from are the paramitas of Mahayana Buddhist practice: generosity, morality, patience, energy, concentration, wisdom. Any asshole, no matter how stupid, destructive, beyond remedy, or you-know-who world-powerful, has these perfections, intrinsically. This project starts from that premise, though I too find it hard to swallow.

Addendum. Here’s a better way of saying it. Our complicity. Also our possibility, each of us, from before we were born.

Enlightened beast language

A page torn from a notebook on a language of the animals. For a future when we’ve mostly retired from the earth and they have opposable thumbs.

From Before the Planet Ends Us Our Alphabets Will Burn – my melancholy apocalypse.

First page of The Book of Adam

First page of Before the Planet Ends Us Our Alphabets Will Burn:

Looks like the 26 parts will each be books in concept if not length. A gospel for the human end of the world. Book of Adam, Book of Bethany, Book of Cesium, &c.

All the images on the page derive from this sheet of notepaper I made

and messed with on my scanner. As will all the images in Adam’s book. Soon he’ll turn to a bear, lets the animals name him, learn the script of ants.

A draft of course. Much can change and probably will. For sure I’ve got lots to learn now about page layout – lots of graphic novels to read, ahem, study.

Before the planet ends us our alphabets will burn

Read last night The Uninhabitable Earth. A piece in New York Magazine from a year or two back about climate change. The author, David Wallace-Wells, wants to pierce our imaginations with information scientists have been gathering up for years. It can seem like apocalyptic genre fiction, except it’s likely fact, not fancy.

Not much of it was news to me, nor would it be, I think, to you. Space I’ve been in lately though, angry and anxious, sad I know not why, the news feels appallingly new, and my own matters newly small.

Our mother’s turning against us. May need to clean herself of us. And maybe that’s okay. But we might take an interest, since we’re part of it going on. What we’re preoccupied with, border walls, Cardi B, looks pretty minor. Granted, the crucial stuff, CO2 PPM, looks awfully unpoetic. But war looks unpoetic too and we’ve managed to make war poetry to move minds. And what we’re about now is a war on life, itself.

Anyway, this evening, Feb. 14, in love with the floating planet, I imagine a small asemic comic book where a melting alphabet eulogizes the fools who made it, then couldn’t find their way out of the labyrinths they made with it.

In no particular order, elaborating U:

u3 – detail 1 — Into the storied forest.

u6 – detail 3 — There’s no name for it –

It’s nothing much yet, just proof of concept.

U, an asemic comic

Because U is last, winter’s vowel, and first, the pronoun of touch.

u3-e28093-cropped — They look for shelter

Images derived from this page:

Light and concept by snowfall, Bellingham WA, winter 2019.

Red Black & Blues (III)

Working on Red Black & Blues, my unravelling of a Trump tweet.

I had hoped to draw asemic eye magic straight from his eructations. Turns out I have to stretch and loosen the material verbally before I can spin it visually. From the tweet

I’ve gotten by way of cutting dicing and anagramming to this sequence

Please
understand,
there are cons.
Please, unders,
stand there.
Sequences
when people cross
Persephone’s cowl,
whether they have
children
or not, and
dart noon,
cross our Border,
brood or cuss, err,
legally
ill …
many are just
u
sing
children
for their own
sinister purposes.
I respire sunspots
to inspire US press.
Congress!
Congress
must act,
or Cpl. Pence, whose
copper wholeness …
he hath every thew.
Must! act! on!
on fixing
fixing the
DUMBEST
&
&
WORST
immigration laws;
or await slimming ‐
a militarism gown,
animist rim aglow.
I was a grim Milton……
Anywhere
in the world
ye hear anew
in the world.
Vote “R”?
VoteR,
revote-
vote over.

Hard to get right – it’s gotta roll out a story of sorts, while each line makes for a title w/ some spice, and its text gets me to a visual poem. Fifty for the 50 states. There’ll be a part 2, made of short videos, 50 of ’em, gleaning their frames from images such as

To wrap, the end note I also cooked up today:

End note

The text is a tweet by Donald Trump, inflating & breaking up.

The images are that text seen from the inside as it unravels.

The colors are those convention gives to the American electoral map.

The whole may be the first & last work ever of ’Pataphysical cryptography.

His words, once they leave him, aren’t his, and have perhaps hearts & minds their own, may speak of a pain our own, could we only decode it.

Illogical Operators

A few alt takes from Red Black & Blues just published in The New Post-Literate.

screen shot 2019-01-05 at 4.16.22 pm — Click to go to ’em

The base text is taken, as all in this project are, from a single tweet by you know who.

The phrase for this one, “or not – and.” The pages before they got all shook up:

or not and (1)

or not and (2)

or not and (3)

or not and (4)

The finished pages are, as said, on Michael Jacobson’s site, here. Just finished a page describing the project, it’s here. Thanks for wreading!

Red Black & Blues (II)

This project’s taking wing. Decided I need a base text not my own words and chose our president’s. Cuz who invites – anticipates – distortion of our discourse more gorgeously than he. Here’s what I’ve got so far

Please

understand

there are cons

sequences

The plan is, take a tweet of his and unravel it, asemically. This may be a dry run, or maybe the thing itself, not sure yet. The execrable tweet:

“Tweet your reply.” Oh I’ll do more than that, friend bird.

Might be heavyhanded in the chapbook, but here I’ll paste in as a final image (typo: impage, as in imped wing, or I’m page), the arrangement of red black and blue that gave DT his answer, a few months later

Hardly a wave to the eye. But a wave it was and more’s to come.