Jim Leftwich
SUBJECTIVE ASEMIC POSTULATES, PART 2
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Asemic writing did not evolve from handwriting, it emerged from typewriting, and more specifically from typing on a keyboard for a computer screen.
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Asemic writing developed from typography, not from calligraphy.
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Asemic writing is derived from the manipulation of letter arrangements in words, phrases and sentences.
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Asemic writing did not come into being as a result of emptying the mind and imitating the processes of nature. It came into being as a result of activating the mind and analyzing the processes of writing.
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We can read things that are not written. We can be frustrated in our attempts to read things that are not written. But we gain nothing and learn nothing by choosing to call things that are not written asemic writing. We look at the sand on a beach, or the bark on a tree, or the ripples in a stream, and we can if we wish say that we are reading what we are looking at, or that we are unable to read what we are looking at, even though in some ways it reminds us of writing, but it does not become writing if we take a photograph of it, it only becomes a photograph, and it does not become writing if we make a rubbing or an imprint, it only becomes a rubbing or an imprint.
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Asemic writing began as a kind of experimental textual poetry, not as visual poetry or visual writing. It was in a sense a byproduct of the processes of recombination, permutation, improvisation, and iteration.
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Asemic writing has as one of its immediate antecedents my experiment of rewriting a John M. Bennett poem while thinking about Stephen Smale's horseshoe map and the concept of topological mixing. Words and letters that begin far apart will eventually be close together, and words and letters that begin close together will eventually be far apart. The variations are at least in theory endless. (cf., Am Horseshoe, John M. Bennett & Jim Leftwich, Luna Bisonte Prods, 1996) I took this kind of procedural experimentation and added to it a subjective, processual stage of associational improvisation. One source text could provide the initial conditions, so to speak, for the generation of a long series of derivative texts. The kinds of texts produced via these procedures and processes seemed at least potentially destined for asemia. The crucial aspect of this critical concept was (and is) its existence as potential, not as actuality. Therefore, then and now: no such thing as asemic writing, only a kind of unattainable goal posited as a source of energy for our ongoing textual mutations.
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My first explorations of quasi-calligraphic faux writing came the morning after a particularly intense experience of taking what Terence McKenna called a "heroic dose" of psilocybin mushrooms. I had experienced a complete annihilation of the self, and not one of merging harmoniously with the universe, rather one of being ripped apart, as if in a ritual sparagmos. The next morning I was sitting in my car and I started for the first time to write lines of illegible fake writing. It felt as if I was being guided to do this, as a kind of healing for the night before. When I sent some of these pages to John Bennett for LAFT (in 1997) he called them spirit writings. I had no argument with that name. In 1998, Tim Gaze published a book of them with that title. My contribution to the recent Anthology of Asemic Handwriting (2013) is taken from that book, in response to a request from Tim.
07.06.2015
