Jim Leftwich, 4 short texts from the summer of 2022

Jim Leftwich

The Optimism of the Unwilling

Summer 2022

Nevada

I was I was.

I was thinking. At least I think I was thinking.

Is it possible to think about the fact of 4.6 billion years? I don't think so.

So. Photographs. We have seen a few, maybe a few hundred thousand. We think we know how to think about photographs.

When are you reading this?

Are you reading it 4.6 billion years after it was written? No.

Are you reading it 4.6 million years after it was written? No.

Are you reading it four thousand and six hundred years after it was written? Maybe. Probably not. But at least I can imagine such a thing.

Are you reading it 460 years after it was written? Could be. I would like to think so.

Are you reading it 46 years after it was written? Sure! Why not? I know: megadroughts, 1000-year floods, heat domes, wildfires, resource wars, famines...  Another world is possible, and in it you could be reading this... If. If only.

Are you reading it four and a half years after it was written? Yes? Thank you. Where you are, it is January, 2027. I know it isn't much. But that's how..  one not much after another... there isn't any other way.

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As con pre re SUMES

Summer 2022

Nevada

Assume the weather the flame the feather assume no highways.

Consume the new the rest the time consume no highways.

Presume the nest the next the door presume no highways.

Resume the crest the thirst the name resume no highways.

Assume the sane whether bother assume no highways.

Consume the zest flew tether consume no highways.

Presume the sate the nerve the lather presume no highways.

Resume the boss the curse the seme resume no highways.

Presume the lather resume the seme the preseme the reseme sate no boss no salt asseme the highways are frilled with semic heroes never conseme the nerve of a curse.

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Unwriting

Summer 2022

Nevada

Here it comes again, like an avalanche, oceanic, rolling across the desert, every imaginary uprooted route at once, enough to make you think it has a mind of its own, language cannot be trusted to mind its own business, sit down and shut up, work independently without disturbing others.

The word "unwriting" arrived most recently in my mind's ear as a misreading of my first thing in the morning no glasses on handscrawled note about "the unwilling".

What, then, is this unwriting? Is it a rewriting of a misreading? Is it an acknowledgement of misreading as rewriting? Is it the revelation of a parallel text, a parallel universe, another world is possible, the ancient branes of string theory, asemic messages encoded in those astonishing photographs from the James Webb telescope? 

I think we know. Life is more than life. Language is more than language. Life is never life and life only. Life is beside itself with joy, beside itself with bewilderment, disbelief, semiosis, mitosis, osmosis, baskets of fish and loaves of bread, the news from far and near, some of which is true, the felt presence of experiential reality. 

You can't step in the same stream walking beside the lake, where the two creeks flow in from the mountains to the west, reading an old book of poems, remembering how it all got started in your tiny little life your tiny little world, what that small patch of the cosmos looked like 5 billion years ago, twice. 

That is another reason, if not several, for wandering wide-eyed in the wonder, while the species is surely dying of its own devices, and there is no humanly semiotic future to care for our writings or unwritings, singing, between the two deserts, having driven ourselves softly or brutally insane, such that the human experiment seems to have failed entirely, if we can say so in some sort of poem, what hypothesis exactly was the experiment meant to test?

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UNORMA: Universal Norms of Absurdity

Summer 2022

Nevada

Venn Diagrams glean presentiment where never the twains shall melt. Therein the Vesica Piscis, renumerable counterfactuals, munerates aeration of comeuppance, until the bittern fends.

First, it must be logical, the absurd must be predictable. To live out on the lawn / You must be honest.

Second: the absurd must be predictable; it must be a replica of itself. Do as I say to do, not as the duly unsaid, which is your duty. Unruly: an unmeasured quantity; the quality of being unmeasuring; a cup of what else, unfulfilled.

Third: the absurd is local. Lies about the absurd are global.

Fourth: go forth and multiple, multiply tables, The Plicate Cult of Mults, fables breathe froth before us -- you are complicated; try to contain your selves!

The absurd is polysemic, is nothing if not. But you (You!) must remember: this is not Your Uncle's Absurdity. You inherit what you invent.

Don't make me tell you the whole treacherous tale again.

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published/posted by Marco Giovenale at slowforward in august 2022

Jim Leftwich -- Desemantized Writing In The Journals Of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs -- Summer 2022

Desemantized Writing In The Journals Of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs

Jim Leftwich

Olympic Peninsula / Summer 2022

​Everything Lost

The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs, Revised Edition

​William S. Burroughs

​Edited by Geoffrey D. Smith, John M. Bennett, and Oliver Harris​

180 pp. 7 x 9

102 Facsimile pages

Paperback Pub Date: May 4, 2017

​from The Ohio State University Press website: 

​"​In late summer 1953, as he returned to Mexico City after a seven month expedition through the jungles of Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, William Burroughs began a notebook of final reflections on his four years in Latin America.​"​

​Indian Journals

by Allen Ginsberg

Publisher: Grove Press

Publish Date: 08/13/1996

Dimensions: 8.27" L, 5.50" W, 0.67" H

Originally published in 1970, Indian Journals collects Ginsberg’s writing from a 1962-63 stay in India.

​The Ginsberg poem moves​​ from a variety of traditional stanzaic verse, to desemantized handwriting, to textual visual poetry (page-as-field composition, as in the work of Charles Olson), and back to stanzaic verse. Here is a poet thinking, in formal structures about formal structures, and showing his decisions as they are made, as the decision-making shapes the poem. It should be taught by all teachers of poetry everywhere, at every level, as an example of how reading a poem participates intimately in the process of writing poetry.

One thing to note, explicitly, in the desemantized section of the poem, is its insistent refusal to succumb to the allure of beautiful penmanship. The desemantized handwriting is about the disintegration of the letterforms. The loss, perhaps intentional loss, of coherent semantic potential at the letteral and subletteral levels is harsh and ugly, similar in that respect to much theater of the absurd writing as it emerged from the damaged existential psyche in the years following WWII.

The desemantized handwriting in the Burroughs journal is precisely the failure of writing to keep up with thinking, and it is simultaneously the continuation of a writing beyond the point at which language can no longer keep up with thinking. It is a record of a human mind as it experiences the limits of its ability to understand and express just what it means -- what it is -- to be a human being in the world in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Once again, as in the Ginsberg poem, no concessions are made to the aesthetic expressivity of quasi-calligraphic drawing. The desemantized pages in Everything Lost are writing, the writing of writing's failure, the limits of language given to the reader as a disaster of experiential reality.

William Burroughs pages, from Everything Lost:

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​From an email exchange with Marco Giovenale:

Jim Leftwich

Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 6:38 AM

to Marco

The 3 pages of desemantized handwriting are part of a poem. The whole thing was handwritten in a notebook. The title of the poem is Saraswati's Birthday. Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, music, art, wisdom, and nature, represents the free flow of wisdom and consciousness. The section of the poem leading into the desemantized handwriting goes as follows:

Mustard plants & wheat ripening

Across the river from Ramnagar

by slow poled boat

on blue seeming water ----

Skeletal boatman turbaned

on head & loins

hollow armed

​​one anna received at the shore stall

under the umbrella, sleek lazy

Man-concessionaire acceptant

of the angry coin ----

Eee Eeee ---- Ee Ee Ee

At the end of the line of 'e's the improvised squiggles begin.

After 3 pages of desemantized handwriting, Ginsberg's poem emerges into 3 pages of visual poetry which ends in the image of a tightrope over a void (p. 164).

On p.165 he writes, again in verse:

a happy night of Saraswati's birthday

Goddess of learning

Queen of Sanskrit prosody

Music over the roof

[...]

Tonite the white mask face eyes now closed

to listen to the music with a

faint smile

of wonder at the Perfection

Bullshit singing

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​Desemantized writing exists within the complete potential of all writing systems as a necessary and inevitable outcome.

As the human species writes and continues to write it will from time to time arrive at the practice of desemantized writing.

Imagine if you will for a long moment or two the pursuit and/or practice of a nontheistic mysticism based in the nuanced alterations of consciousness experienced by the poet as he or she imperils the selfmultitude between their languages under pressure. The poet might pass through the eye of a camel into and through the Need for our universal minds within which reside the extremities of desemantized writing. We find this exact transgression of supraconscious nonspeculation in the journals of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.

The sentence refuses until it doesn't flex recuperated deployment of juxtaposed sequences (invisible fluidity building alluvial meaning-streams): when you walk in the same stream twice, walk with your feet. Bondo lingo nontomorrow in vitro. When writing hyperturborational declarative sentences like this one, I. You get the idea, no doubt, but not because I have given it to you.

I want to pause and think, looking at the speed of light, thinking as slowly as I can, I promise, sitting down, and I want you to want the same or similar for yourself. Reading takes its stand sitting down, fiercely zazen insurrectionist of the primal letterspirit the primordial spiritletters hesychasm tzerufe otiot hollowed beat thigh name, read it twice, cut it once.

From fact to facet.

Atomic fact to subatomic facet?

No. 

A facet is a fact.

Box of thinking.

Box of thoughts.

Box of memories.

Box of lacunae.

Box of misguided principles.

Box of misleading premises.

From facet to fact.

The cut-up method desemantizes writing, but only partially, provisionally, temporarily. "Resemantizes" is perhaps a more accurately secure plateau, but it is neither more efficient nor less confusing than "asemic".

What happens if we permit the cut-up method to produce a subletteral noisic poetry? We find ourselves one step deeper into the dark desemantized woods. Beneath the dimly lit signage of our dreaming desires...

Permutations in the service of desemantized writing display as their central exhibit the twin barriers of grammar and syntax. Bollards between the berms, thousand year floods, dust devils, landslides, wildfires, sandstorms, triple digit temperatures for nine days in a row, major roads closed in the Mojave Preserve, punctuated by parsecs and pulsars, photograph what you think, not what you see, write what you want to know.

Do what thou wilt.

What thou wilt do.

Thou wilt do what.

Wilt do what thou.

Wilt thou what do.

Do wilt thou what.

What do wilt thou.

Thou what do wilt.

TLPress Nevada 2022