The Sonosopher

Saturday night, at Ken Sanders Rare Books, the DVD for The Sonosopher was released. (Contact the store for a copy.) Alex performed new and old work and, because the store was absolutely packed for the event, I got to stand to the side and behind him so I could see the score—the text and images Alex spoke and sounded. The film itself often weaves text and sound together in a similar way. 

Once again, Alex's reading made me come alive with unexpected insight, with sudden wit, with—as always—a profound focus on words and language. My head is a more spacious, more interesting place this morning after having heard and seen Alex Saturday night.

He drew me out of and into myself. He made me laugh — that laugh that accompanies wit (and the word has its root in Wissen—to know).

It's a beautiful object, the DVD, rich with an image of Alex in mask and rug, with a self portrait, and with an enigmatic thin-lipped drawing.

Travis Low and Torben Bernhard are the filmmakers and in this, their first (but not last film), they have created a film so thoughtful and striking and even audacious that I'm left to wonder what marvelous films might be slouching toward us from the future.

alex caldiero's NINETEENSEVENTYSEVEN

sky like paper

Alex gave me an early birthday present, one of eight copies of his book NINETEENSEVENTYSEVEN, handmade and with a warning: "this may not be your cup of tea."

I answered: "Your tea is my coffee. Your mystery is my metaphor." I put the book up to my cheek and brushed the rough paper. I put my eyes to the dappled, thick paper inside. I put my mind to the images and felt it warp.

Anxiety & the Antidote

Woke up this morning from a dream: 


in a big city, somewhat unfamiliar, suddenly aware that I was supposed to play a gig in Aztec, New Mexico in 30 minutes. My saxophone was home, missing a pad, and with no reeds. I finally found a music store, small in the front, expanding inside to include Ken Sanders and his rare book shop. When I finally found a tenor sax reed I started sucking on it and looked for another. There was none to be found. I went to the back and asked Ken. He took me to a side wall where there were little cabinets and pulled out a very dark reed with what looked like a little soul patch. I thought it was weird and beautiful. I took both reeds up to the counter. The woman behind it pointed out that the first reed required a special mouthpiece, which I didn't have. I left with only the other reed, already late for the gig. Alex Caldiero was outside waiting for me. He was late for the same gig. We set off . . .


Anxious, I think, about the things I want to do this summer —Zarko's and my books, Sam's and my book, the barbed wire book, Immortal For Quite Some Time — obviously too much and too little time.


If I had remembered, instead, in my sleep, these vistas from last night, I might not have worried so much.

Fixing the Sonosopher

[Forthcoming in the DVD of the film “The Sonosopher”]

Fixing the Sonosopher

by Scott Abbott

About three years ago I was bathing with a young man whose development at that time had a wonderful grace about it. . . . As it happened we had just seen, in Paris, the youth pulling a thorn out of his foot. . . . Resting his foot on a stool, to dry it, and glancing at himself as he did so in a large mirror, he was reminded of the statue; he smiled and told me what he had seen. . . . He raised his foot a second time, to show me; but the attempt, very predictably, failed. In confusion he raised his foot a third time, a fourth, again and again, a dozen times: in vain. He was incapable of reproducing the movement. . . . From that day, or from that very moment, forth the young man underwent an unbelievable transformation. He began spending days in front of the mirror; and one after the other all his charms deserted him. (From Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Puppet Theatre,” translation by David Constantine)

            About three weeks ago I had lunch with a man of my age whose performances as a “Sonosopher” have a wonderful, if sometimes terrible, grace about them. We spoke about a film he had recently collaborated on. After seeing himself through the camera’s eye, Alex said, he has been unable to reproduce the movements, the gestures, the sounds the camera recorded. At least he can no longer do so naturally. His charms, he fears, have deserted him.

            I mentioned the young man in Kleist’s essay.

            Exactly, he said. I’ve been robbed of the grace of un-self-conscious movement. I’ve been pinned to a specimen board for observation.

            You feel like you’ve been fixed? I asked.

Yes, he answered. The film has fixed me, neutered me. How do I continue? My work is process, my media are temporal, sonorous, fleeting.

To what extent is that true? I wondered later. Has this film, in fact, fixed the Sonosopher?

As with all works of art, from one version to the next there’s a sense of panic brought on by the knowledge that the composer or writer or painter or filmmaker will have to settle on the final, fixed version, knowing all the time that it is just one of an infinite number of versions. Documentary films of a certain kind work to make their audiences forget that fact, constructing a seamless and supposedly truthful narrative. This, I take it, is what Alex most feared.

Because theirs too is a documentary film, Travis Low and Torben Bernhard are generically bound to reach for a truthful or even Platonic portrayal of their subject. But because the person casting most of the shadows is Alex Caldiero, a self-described “recovering Platonist,” and because Low and Bernard have made their film after Nietzsche’s assertion that “truth is a mobile army of metaphors,” this film approaches fixed forms with trepidation. Like Caldiero’s lifework, the film longs for the transcendental signifier while anchoring itself in epistemological humility.

The film begins with a blurred image of a belltower seen from below; indistinct lights flicker to the wavering tone of a guitar; the sound of breathing precedes the poet’s voice: “I want to go where the sound goes after the bell stops ringing.” “I’ve always been blessed with visions,” Alex asserts later. And yet the most revealing statement of what the silent sound is or what the vision reveals is the performance for Park City television of “This is not it.” As long as the transcendent remains articulate, the words must insist that “this is not it.” And when the words break under the load of meaning, when they reach beyond themselves, they cannot articulately state what “it” is and must eventually return to “this is not it.”

The film performs this double dance as exquisitely as does Caldiero.

For instance: about twenty-four minutes into the film, to the rhythmic twang of a jaw harp and to a low chant, the film presents a performance of its own, a collage of sorts, a sequence of quick and sometimes overlaid images of cobblestones, aisles between high book shelves, multiple self-portraits of Alex and multiple scenes of him painting and drawing and writing. Near the beginning of this cobbled curriculum vitae Alex gestures back across a field to the filmmakers and/or to the audience: come with me the psychopomp seems to say, come into my heads, into my bodies. “How many ways will any path be approachable in the imagination?” a typed text asks as it progresses across the screen in this sequence: “You don’t want to answer this question, because it would mean that what you are seeking for is nothing but of your own making.” The rich scene and the film in general imagine many paths, paths unabashedly of the filmmakers’ own making; and somewhere in the complexity of splendid multiplicity my worries about fixing the Sonosopher evaporate.

For instance: at about the film’s thirty-sixth minute, the film performs Alex’s poem “foam and sand.” We hear Alex’s voice and at times see him reading his own text from the book Text-Sound Texts edited by Richard Kostelanetz. Again the filmmakers juxtapose and overlay and insert images of Alex as a child, of his impassive face, of mysterious white circles, and most wonderfully, of moving lines of text from the poem. To hear Alex read what sound like herds of consonants and schools of vowels while the literal animals pass by in all their fontal glory is to experience this poem in a collaborative performance neither Alex himself nor the filmmakers alone could achieve. As “foam and sand” nears its end the special effects drop away, leaving Alex in his basement workroom reading the last lines of the poem from the book he holds in front of him. He finishes, closes the book, rubs his nose, and turns away. “This is not it,” the film admits, “but isn’t it fantastic!”

A final note on this scene: A cardboard box perches on the filing cabinet behind Alex as he reads “foam and sand.” The box is labeled by hand: “LETTERS KEEP.” And I, who have always wondered where Alex keeps all those letters at night when he’s not training and exercising and playing with them, suddenly have an answer.  He keeps them, the film unwittingly reveals, in this very box!

A third example of a humble reaching for the name that cannot be named, for the shape of the shapeless, for the language beyond language: radio journalist Scott Carrier suggests in one scene that Alex is “trying to be the actual thing when he performs it.” The film demonstrates that with another attempt of its own to be (rather than document) sonosophy. Alex holds a drum close to his head, sounds a bell, and the scene flickers hallucinogenically to a shamanistic performance in Alex’s basement. We see rapid and spooky images of a davening figure wrapped in a Native-American robe and wearing a black wooden African mask and a thick black wig. If we let ourselves go we can follow the shaman’s chanting to unknown places, to unspeakable experiences, to unthinkable thoughts. The trance continues, the chanting and smoke and flickering lights endure even as the robe comes off, tentatively, then the wig, and finally Alex lifts off the mask, exhausted or perhaps disoriented, and puts on his glasses. Inexplicably (unless of course we subscribe to Brecht’s theory of dramatic alienation – and we do), ironically (and surely this is an irony fully intended), the merchant’s tag explaining the mask’s origin and meaning still dangles from the black wood like the price tag from Minnie Pearl’s hat. Again the film achieves truth and beauty – and then winks. No fixing going on here.

I could cite many other examples in the film where a fine piece of documentary footage is accompanied by a surprising turn that both calls the footage into question and reinforces its truthfulness. The emotionally charged scene in which Alex disparages poets who need grants for “time off” is left by the patient filmmakers to find its way to a final statement that poetry is about energy and then to wind down to a close-up of Alex’s face, slack after the expenditure, and to the sound of a tired breath. The confronter is confronted. In the context of the entire documentary film, the set of black-and-white discussions Alex has with the camera, the last of which shows Alex shutting his eyes tight and then saying “I close my eyes. Please, now close yours,” introduces a self-consciousness about the whole idea of film that asserts and questions simultaneously. These brilliant scenes, shot by the filmmakers but constructed by the Sonosopher himself, make clear that this is not Low’s and Bernhard’s film about Caldiero. This is performance from beginning to end, joint performance, collaborative performance, the work of a trio of artists working in various media.

Finally, for this essay too must come to an inevitable end, I’ll end with the scene in which Alex stands in Salt Lake’s Gilgal Sculpture Garden and explains the “Joseph Smith Sphinx.” “Joseph Smith,” Alex, says “was a seer and a revelator. A prophet and a charlatan of God. He was a coyote figure, you know, the dark/light figure, that told the greatest truths in the greatest lies. . . . What a sweetheart.” A sweetheart, of course, just like Alex himself.

And, it turns out, just like the makers of this sonosphistic film. A fantastic marriage of filmart and sonosophy raises the film from documentary to performance, exhibiting charms that will desert neither the Sonosopher nor the filmmakers because they are temporal charms, fluid charms, seriously ironic charms.

SILENCE

Over the last couple of days I devoured Terry Tempest Williams' new book When Women Were Birds.

Devoured is the right word. The meditative form of the book was, as my friend Alex Caldiero has said, "the food that fits the hunger": "Fifty-Four Variations on Voice."


Devoured is the right word because I was hungry for this women's voice: "I am fifty-four years old, the age my mother was when she died. . . . 'I am leaving you all my journals,' she said, . . . 'But you must promise me that you will not look at them until after I am gone.'" She looks at them a month after her mother's death and they are all blank, empty, untouched. 


Twelve blank, white pages follow before variation II begins: My mother's journals are paper tombstones.


Devoured is the right word because Williams describes a life hungry for voice, a voice silenced by male politicians and by male church leaders and even by a crazy man intent on sacrificing a supposed virgin Williams with an ax.


I'd like to quote the entire book.


From Variation XXV:


[In the Mormon temple experiencing a ritual "endowment"]


"As I listened to this biblical text being read on the eve of marriage, the only word inhabiting my mind was fuck. I blushed. This was not a word within my vocabulary as a chaste nineteen-year-old woman. Shocked by the betrayal of my own imagination, I tried to clear my thoughts, keep my countenance clean and pure. But the word kept pressing me, fuck, fuck, a word I had never spoken out loud. . . . 'In the beginning was the Word.' Nobody warned me about which one."


Devoured is the right word because Williams' experience here is my own. The last time I entered a Mormon temple, there for the marriage of my oldest son, I was asked to be one one of two official witnesses to the ceremony. The man performing the ceremony began with something like "before Gods, angels, and these witnesses. . . ." My mind flooded with profanities of the worst (or best) sort, uninvited, disturbing, and revelatory of what my subconscious already knew: this place and this ritual was antithetical to the person I wanted to be.


From Variation XXVII:


"My body is my compass, and it does not lie. As women, we are quiet about our personal lives, especially when it comes to sex. We are quiet because there is a history of abuse and harm committed toward those who tell the truth."


. . .


"When we were children, we visited Mother in the hospital. We were told she was having 'corrective surgery.' Later I learned she made the decision to have her tubes tied, not a common practice among her peers. 'Freedom,' she said.


"Birth control gave me my voice. It is perhaps the only thing in my life about which I have been utterly responsible."


. . .


"If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently.


"What a woman never forgets is when she allows a man to make love to her, she enters a pact with angels that should a child be conceived in that moment, she holds the life of another. A man can come and go, he pulls out and walks away. But a woman stays. . . . Until she bleeds, she imagines every possibility from pleasure to pain to birth to death and how she will do what she needs to do, and until she bleeds, she will worry endlessly, until she bleeds."


My mother's journals tell me nothing.


My mother's journals tell me everything.

Günter Grass: What Must Be Said

Quick translation of the poem published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on April 4, 2012


What must be said


Why am I silent, silent for too long about
what is plainly evident, about what is drilled
in war games at the end of which we
survivors are, in any case, footnotes.


It is the asserted right to a first strike
that could eliminate the Iranian people
enslaved and made into organized celebrants
by a mouthy hero because in his realm an
atombomb is supposed to be in construction.   


But why do I not allow myself
to name that other country by name
in which, for years — although kept secret —
a growing nuclear potential lies ready
but not monitored because there is no access
for investigators?  


The general silence about this state of affairs
in deference to which my silence exists,
I experience as a burdensome lie
and constraint with punishment implied
the moment it is disregarded;
the verdict "antisemitism" is understood.


Now however, because my country,
a land of ancient characteristic crimes
without comparison,
again and again taken to task and called to explain,
once again and as a business transaction, if also
claimed cavalierly as reparation,
is to deliver an additional submarine
to Israel, whose specialty
is to have the capability of directing annihilating warheads
to where the existence of a single atomic bomb is unproven,
though fear wants to provide the proof,
I say what must be said.


Why, however, was I silent until now?
Because I thought my ancestry,
afflicted by a never-to-be-overcome stain,
requires that this fact never be spoken as truth
about the land of Israel to which I am bound
and want to remain bound.


Why say only now,
aged and with my last ink:
The atomic power of Israel endangers
world peace, delicate in any case?
Because what could be too late as early as tomorrow
must be said;
also because we — as Germans burdened enough—
could be contributors to a crime
that can be foreseen, with the consequence that our complicity
could be overcome by none of
the usual excuses.


Admittedly: I remain silent no longer
because I have had enough of the hypocrisy 
of the West; in addition, one might hope 
that many might free themselves from silence,
challenging those responsible for the predictable danger
to renounce violence and
also to require
that unhindered and permanent oversight
of the Israeli atomic potential
and of the Iranian atomic facilities
by an international court
be allowed by the rulers of both countries.


Only thus can all find succor, the Israelis and Palestinians,
and even more, all people who live densely packed together 
as enemies in these 
regions occupied by insanity
and in the end we too.


[SEE MICHAEL ROLOFF'S COMMENTS FOR LINKS TO THE ONGOING CONTROVERSY, INCLUDING ISRAEL'S ANNOUNCEMENT THAT GRASS IS NOW A PERSONA NON GRATA]


. . . a response today (20 April) from poet Alex Caldiero:

What must be said after Gunter Grass’ What Must Be Said

You say what must be said with such

delicacy and consideration for the inevitable

feelings of those who would rather not hear

what you have to say, and who would prefer

to gag you even as you hesitate and carefully

craft your words so that they should not offend

which makes them that much  more offensive,

an inevitable outcome, bigger that language

almost, if it were not for words themselves

by nature divested of any invested meanings

but one: what ever must be said must not be

said in any way that would put the situation

into question, that is, what must be said must

not be said at all, and so I would turn it into

a question thus: What must be said? and

How must it be said? And I would ask that

of the only one who could possible answer:

Oh Israel! Tell us! What words must we use

to override any misunderstandings? Tell

us, how should we word or describe and allay

any kind of disapproval which you may

feel by words only superficially couched in

criticism, but which are cripples on rough

terrain. – Have we said it yet? And How will

we know that we have said it? There, getting

close, too close for comfort, so we must be

saying it right now. The submarine, oh

Israel! You know the one? The one for

your self-defense, that which no one

should deny you, self-defense, which

is indefensible for any one to question

your right to it, it’s just that…that…and

this much must be said, but cannot be

said, even by far better writers than

I, who am using the English language,

Or, to be more exact, the American

Language, which is so quick to hide

and fog the glass of clear conscience

in past decades of indiscretions,

language at the service of politically

constructed thoughtfeelings never

to sound out its liberty bell with

clapper in hand of some one or

other and Whitman himself would

have been tongue tied in the

middle of his rhap-sody, and

which should I hope otherwise

for any of us who even dare to

think what must be said and

must leave it unsaid, even

at the risk of seeming

to betray conscience

and good sense

and ideals

that

have

no

bal

ls

no

guts

best

kept

cast

rate

d &

at

pe

ac

e

at

least

this

much

said.

A POEM OF TITLES: ALEX CALDIERO

I have often thought that a simple list of titles of the books my friend Alex has written, in the order, for the most part, of accident, would make a good poem. Here's testing that hypothesis:

COW

BIOTEXTS


TOY BLOOD


IN TONGUES

VARIOUS ATMOSPHERES

THE MAP OF THE WINDS


LUCRETIUS AND THE WIND


IT RAINS EVEN ON WHO'S WET

SELECTED EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF THE GREEN LANTERN

A STORIA DI MASTRU VASTIANU AROUZZU / THE STORY OF MASTER VASTIANU AROUZZU

SEVEN BOOKS OF LOVE

BOOK IN FIVE SETS

5 FIVE POEMS

POEMS 98

POEMS 99

CORRIGENDA

FOR THE HOUSE

X-ING THE CALENDAR

OUR PRIVATE WORDINGS

AFTER THE TREE HAD FALLEN

THE LAUGHTER THAT WIL WAKE US ALL

SONNU A CULURI / DREAM IN COLOR

NOT DREAMING NOT DREAMED

IMPOSSIBLE INSTRUMENT

WITH VOICE MIXED

OR, BOOK O' LIGHTS

ILLEGIBLE TATTOOS

WAY AFTER BASHO

ISLANDER

A PART

I AM NOT ONLY*

*only Bruce Conner did not say this.

POETRY IS WANTED HERE

FROM STONE TO STAR

HISTORIES

RESPONSES

SOME LOVE

PINOCCHIO POEMS

BODY/DREAMS/ORGANS

ANXIETIES & CHEMISTRIES

PHILOSOPHERS STONED

SONOSUONU

THE FOOD THAT FITS THE HUNGER

LIKE WATER

EATING BREAD

SPHOTA PROBE

ARSE

POET

ICUS

and finally, for now, with the option of adding new titles as I find them, etc.

Book Reviews

Michael's heroic summary of a wide variety of reviews of Peter's "The Great Fall" has me thinking about book reviews in general.


I read book reviews in The New York Review of Books, in the New York Times, in The New Yorker, in The Bloomsbury Review, in new Los Angeles Book Review, in literary blogs like Begleitschreiben, and so on.


And I write book reviews, reviews of jazz performances, and reviews of exhibitions of art.


It is a demanding art form, reviewing.


As a literary critic, I'm also a practitioner of a scholarly form of the art.


And as a writer of personal essay, I engage in a third kind of writing that often involves books and music and art.


It's difficult for me to keep the genres apart. The kind of writing about books and art I most enjoy is personal, is critical (in the sense of making sense of the work the way a good scholar would), and is respectful of the writer's work, even when not liking a work, because it pays good, close, informed attention.


Paying informed attention is arduous. A review I've written over the last six months involved rereading 10 of the author's books and then trying to weave something meaningful out of the strands of the work I found most interesting. Here's the beginning of the essay that will appear in the fall 2011 issue of the Bloomsbury Review:

Brian Evenson’s Dark Property

. . . we see through a glass, darkly . . .    First Corinthians 13:12

I watch eagerly for new books and stories by Brian Evenson. He’s got a wicked sense of humor, on display recently in the stories “Bon Scott: The Choir Years” and “Niue.” Imagine the awkwardness that ensues after AC/DC singer Bon Scott is found singing surreptitiously with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, or the comic possibilities in a story named after a tiny Pacific island nation that opens with this question: “And how is it that the brooding Johnny Hellspider, long having restricted his posts to two-word comments such as “You rock!” or “Satan lives!”, has suddenly become so loquacious?”

Evenson’s quickly expanding body of work has a darker side as well. When “The Brotherhood of Mutilation” arrived in the mail, for instance, the chapbook lay on my shelf unread. It requires a certain resolve and a reasonably stable state of mind to read Evenson’s more unsettling texts; and something about the title and the cover illustration destabilized my resolve.




The essay continues through horror and delight, investigating language and truth in work that surprises at every turn, surprises and disquiets, tortures and heals, excoriates and, somehow, is deeply satisfying.


So, is what I've written, is what I write, about the work itself or about my responses to the work? Perhaps I bring the same eye to each reading. Consider this final sentence of my review of Bowden's and Briggs' and Kelly's book "Dreamland" (published in the Bloomsbury Review and republished in an earlier post here):

 As a final note, as a resigned yet resolute response to a book that questions many of my certainties and unsettles my very being, I’ll add my translation of another stanza by Rilke, this time from the eighth of the Duino Elegies: “We order it. It falls apart. We order it again. And fall apart ourselves.”


This could well have been part of the Evenson essay. And another review of a Charles Bowden book, Inferno, published in Catalyst, considers the same questions of truth and language I considered in the Evenson piece:

“Supposing truth to be a woman – ” Nietzsche wrote at the beginning of  Beyond Good and Evil; “what did philosophers, at least the dogmatic ones, know about women? Weren’t the ghastly seriousness and the awkward thrusting with which they have always approached truth unimaginative and unseemly tools to win, of all things, a woman?”

            inferno, Charles Bowden’s new book (with striking black-and-white photos by Michael Berman, and with an exquisite design that values print as it does image) knows all about truth being a woman. The book’s sometimes hallucinatory, often contradictory, and always white-hot prose is a supple and sensuous organ of seduction.

            The woman in question is a patch of Arizona desert, and this woman too has had relations with William Jefferson Clinton, who, as one of his last acts as President, in response to lobbying by Bowden and others, established the Sonoran Desert National Monument. 

In Tongues, Alex Caldiero

Perhaps it's not only that I have a limited set of tools with which to examine a book, but that I am drawn to books and art that explore a set of themes I'm especially interested in. The long series of posts about Peter's new book are investigations of those same themes of language and truth. As is a review I wrote for Catalyst about a set of paintings by Alex Caldiero called "In Tongues."


[Except for the "Dark Property" essay, which hasn't yet been published, all these reviews and others can be found here: http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/]

Beautiful - Schön - Dialectic

Thinking, still, about the word "schön" and about my sense that Peter wouldn't use the word the way I tend to use it.

It would shock me, for instance, if the actor in "Der Grosse Fall" looked at the church or the pissoir (they serve similar functions for him) and said "schön."

His admiration is rather for forms adequate to thought or forms that destroy thought and lead to running amok.

Michael writes that the word "schön" appears in this book. He's right. But the three times it appears also make my point, I think:

p. 64: "Den Marktwert her, bitte schön!" Out with the market value, please!

p. 74: "Was sie von sich sehen ließen, war nämlich nicht schön." What they revealed of themselves was, namely, not pretty.

p. 77: ". . . und wie sie sich dann bewegten, das war einfach nicht schön." And how they moved then, that was simply not pretty.

This implied beauty is almost like negative theology. You don't say what God is because that would limit God. You say only what God isn't.

Peter's not interested in Platonic beauty or in God. He is, however, interested in sneaking up obliquely on beauty and truth dialectically ("I am a dialectical writer," he claims), which means that before he reaches what he's approaching he swerves away with questions or with the claim that what is to be found is only absence (see the previous discussion) or with a "joke" (the Witz that in German is both funny and sharply rational).

My friend Alex Caldiero has a performance piece called "This Is Not It" that gets at this way of wrestling with truth and beauty and justice. Alex begins by saying "this is not it," repeats the statement, repeats it again and again, shifting rhythms and dynamics until the statement is so full of noise and swing that it becomes inarticulate, sounds that are so intimately tied to the body that all abstract meaning disappears until the sounds jerk back, suddenly, into the words "this is not it."