Ambient Stylistics

Tan Lin

[novel]

This is a [poem] about boredom and its relation to things we know are repeated. A poem should act in a similar way. It should be very repetitive. It should be on the outside not the inside of itself. It should never attach itself to anything, or anyone who is alive, especially the speaker who rightly speaking constitutes the end of the poem. In this way, it should create something that looks like it has been “sent away for.” Richard Prince said that. This is a poem about boredom and its relation to the things that we know are not repeated. It should not describe but only skim (biographical) material we already knew. It should exist on the edge of something that is no longer funny. In this way, it should create the meaningless passing of time, like disco music. A poem should have died just before we got to it. Like the best and most meticulous scholarship, the poem should be as inert and dully transparent as possible. T. S. Eliot said that. This is a poem about boredom and its relation to the things that were not said. A poem is what it is not. It should merely involve the passing of its own temporal constraints. In this way, it can repudiate all emotions except mechanical or chemical ones. After all, the emotions in us are usually dead (and can only be revived by chemicals), and the only emotions that we really could be said to have are the ones we already had.

It is no accident that Reagan’s presidency, the disco era, and Warhol peaked at around the same historical moment. Nor is it an accident that the category for Best Disco Recording only lasted one year and that Gloria Gaynor’s great disco hit and Grammy winner was titled “I Will Survive.” A poem, like a disco hit, is designed to be immediately forgettable and some of the best presidents of recent memory were elected in the ’70s when Quaaludes were extremely popular. We live in an age when we are constantly told lies, made the subject of jokes, seduced by fluff and hyped with misinformation. Poetry should no longer represent the representation of knowledge, it should represent the dissemination of misinformation and lies. It should aspire to ever more bureaucratic forms of data transmission and delivery. It is well known that Reagan frequently failed to remember what he had said in press conferences or briefings of the day before, that he often failed to recognize his own cabinet members as he passed them in the corridors of the White House, and that even Nancy was crushed when he failed to comfort her after she told him she had breast cancer. No one ever really knew Ronald Reagan, not Nancy, not the seventy-seven individuals he saved in his career as a lifeguard, and not even his own children—who have written that on numerous occasions he failed to recognize them. A great poem functions in a similar way. It cannot be remembered, it can only be filled with something that is unknown or no longer contains. The ’70s are over but the cars and music of the ’70s, especially the pony cars and the mini-muscle cars like the Pontiac Firebird, Mercury Cougar, Dodge Charger and Olds Toronado with its flip-up headlamps linger, as if in drag, at the Classic Car lot located in Bel Air … Everything that is beautiful waits to be forgotten completely by what it is not. A poem, like the ’70s, is just another way of inducing a series of unforgivable likenesses. Warhol said of his art that “if you don’t think about it, it’s right.” Listening to a poem or novel or newspaper should be like that; it should be camouflaged into the large shapes and the patterns of words that surround us and evoke the most diffuse and unrecognizable moods that a culture produces. Philosophy, like poetry and television, can resemble these moods. Poetry ought to be as easy as painting by numbers. It should turn us into those emotions and feelings we could not experience in our own body. All poetry goes out in drag.

No one should remember a poem or a novel, especially the person who wrote it. Heidegger was right; one is never without a mood. The poem openly aspires to a state of linguistic camouflage. Ronald Reagan is a doppelgänger, and Edmund Morris has created a doppelgänger. He has made Ronald Reagan into something that fitfully resembles biography or background Muzak. It is, of course, clear that Morris detests Ronald Reagan the bore that resembles the planet Jupiter with its dense core and absence of oxygen. But Morris also thinks Reagan was a great president. Of course, Reagan made himself into a pattern that no one could see; he transformed acting into politics and outtakes into campaign speeches. He blended into everything because his ignorance was everywhere and extended to everything, especially his “untruisms” about domestic policy. After giving a speech in Orlando on March 8, 1983 about “the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil, the historian Henry Steele Commager remarked that it “was the worst presidential speech in American history.”

Everything that has a subject should be detested; everything that erases its subject should be loved. The great Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama thought that photography could not capture what really mattered and thus worked to deface his medium with scratches, out-of-focus shots and blinding flares from unknown flash sources. He liked to shoot outlaws, prostitutes, TV personalities, gangsters and stray dogs. He was always running away from the photographs he was about to take, and he was frequently punched by his subjects. This is why poetry is superior and at the same time more realistic than any photograph (except really uninteresting ones), where the scent of something detestable begins to emerge at the point when the shutter is snapped and the chemical process begins. A poem does not secure or even require such violence for itself; the greatest poems simply contain what doesn’t matter as it happens on the surface of the poem. To have a photograph is not interesting; to have a photograph of a photograph is, and this is what a poem does better than any photograph can. Only such relaxing enclosures of image within image or word within word allow the emptiness of all human feelings to surrender themselves without obvious grotesqueries and thus make the present a place to have a cigarette. All biographies, like all poems, are best when they fail to suggest anything about their subjects at all. A good poem is very boring. A great poem is more boring than the act of reading itself.

A [poem] or whatever you’re doing (in a way) creates something that stops you from doing it. It is by now clear that what is not here is reading, but an illustrated lecture or slide show. The best reading is a reading that makes itself redundant, in other words, a reading that is canned. Let us now return to the classics. Almost everyone has read T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Eliot and Stein are the most redundant and thus the most easy writers in the canon, with the possible exception of Tennyson and more recently the serial novels perfected by Jacqueline Susann, who is also read redundantly over and over. Some writers never have to be read anymore because what they say cannot be recognized at all anymore except as something in the background of what we were thinking about while reading the paper or eating. One reads, as everybody knows, to forget not to remember and that is what reading large tracts of the newspaper and Gertrude Stein are like. They are all the same. I can remember nothing, especially the little connecting words like and and to and from that make the newspaper so pleasing.

The canon is an idealistic maze and should ideally prefigure a range of meaningless mood musics, from elevator Muzak to New Age music, to ambient sound construction by Brian Eno, Soundlab and others, to endless TV soap operas and, most of all, to mid- to late-’70s disco with its emphasis on monotonous rhythms, its superficiality, and its blatantly unsubtle sexual innuendoes. The best way to listen to prerecorded voices and background music is to listen carelessly and accidentally, as if one were reading a poem by John Ashbery, T.S. Eliot or Charles Bernstein. Rod McKuen makes you care, unfortunately, and the last thing one wants to do while reading a poem is to care. Reading is too selfish for that. That is why the most boring and long-winded writings encourage a kind of effortless non-understanding, a language in which reading itself seems perfectly (I say this in a positive way) redundant. One needn’t read through great novels anymore like one did in the nineteenth century with Balzac or now with someone like Tom Wolfe whose works are basically dull repetitions (realism) that function like a nineteenth-century version of the Nynex Yellow Pages or Page Six of the New York Post. They work to destroy that thing known as chance and probability and they replace it with that thing known as humor. Humor like that, especially in outmoded forms such as the novel, is always terrifyingly obvious because it tries to include everything. Unlike the over-deterministic novelistic exercises of Wolfe, the truly great works of the twentieth century are works that should remain unread, and Gertrude Stein is the most important writer of the twentieth century who ought to remain completely unread. One need read only a sentence and sometimes only a word to imagine the rest. I have never read more than two sentences of The Making of Americans at a time (they put me to sleep or make me want to eat something like pizza or hot dogs), and in that way I have read the book many, many times. I have, in a sense, never been able to put the book down and I hope that in the future I will continue to never put it down until the day that I die or stop eating. In other long-interlude disco-oriented works there are increasing possibilities for loss of recognition, that patterning of sounds we all speak to each other and upon which a host of social conventions depends. It is not an accident that disco has strong gay undercurrents and that the four-on-the-floor disco beat is totally canned and compared to the blue-jeaned rock n’ roll—unauthentic, mechanical and machine-based. Turntables replace the live voice. The dance floor replaces the stage concert pit. Two discs on two turntables, spinning simultaneously, replace the long-haired rock star. Synthesizers and drum machines replace the realistic. Disposability, superficiality and ephemerality rule. Except for Donna Summer and a few others, most disco performers never became stars. Poetry should be like that. It should not be permanent, it should be very impermanent. It should aspire to the interminably pure moment of an interlude.

Only by so doing, can poetry stage its own inversion to talk via the larynx of others, and the most interesting larynx today is modelled after television and to late-night talk shows whose primary medium is the canned sound of two voices talking (that person sitting in the room trying to find a cigarette) about what they were saying. On Sunday, for example, after dinner, I take as is my habit a long walk in my flower garden (mainly perennials which recur from year to year depending on the preceding winter). Beneath an azalea, I recognize a buttercup (yellow cup, sprigs of white and green in the surround) but then I realize that my recognition, a form of repeating, of the buttercup in my head was the wrong repetition. I am now repeating what is not a member of the species ranunculus bubosa. The act of classifying a sound is momentarily lost in this particularly noisy act, before I realize I am looking at a weed which has a name I don’t know but which I now recognize. Of course, the picture transmission is “instantaneous.” What is a televised sound I recognized when I saw the weed is the same sort of sound one recognized, i.e., repeated, while reading. It is something which I have heard myself again. Sounds in TV and soap operas and Gertrude Stein are simple and untelevised, but buttercups are not, or rather the sound of a buttercup is not. Or rather a single sound or phoneme is simple but the sound of a buttercup is certainly not when it is broadcast by the eyes into the far reaches of a brain. All talk is nothing but a form of latent imagery and noise dispersion. All speech should be televised for maximum effect. All talk is nothing but a form of latent imagery and noise dispersion. All speech should be televised for maximum effect. All talk should aspire to the impermanent repeatability of a disco beat. Only in such a way does a word flower in the brain. Repetition is like spelling something out sound by sound, a linear process of random meaningful bursts working out its opposite: a pure soundfield in which all signals are mixed, a state that is the opposite of meaning or stability. This state we sometimes call flirtation, and it is closely related to the idea of lying. This field of lies goes by any number of names, the tradition, the making of the making, etc., etc. All lying comes down to sounds, and all sounds ultimately revert to noises and everybody who has ever spoken a word knows that till the day he or she dies. A great poem, like Ronald Reagan, lies without knowing it. Lies are the most mechanical forms of speech known to man and his noises.

In a perfect world all sentences, even the ones we write to our loved ones, the mailman or our interoffice memos, would have that overall sameness, that sense of an average background, a fluid structure in spite of the surface disturbances and the immediate incomprehension. The best sentences should lose information at a relatively constant rate. There should be no ecstatic moments of recognition. The writing should take a long time to complete and induce a mode of slow (because repeated, hence nontemporal) transmission and (simultaneously) a high rate of error. It is no longer important to connect one thing to another with language or meaning but merely to create more errors so that in the transmission it is unclear if errors are controlling the speed or vice versa.

Writing is inanimate. For this reason there should always be photographs to accompany it, whether or not they belong to the text or not, whether they make it true or just reinforce the lies inherent in any work of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry.

Writing produces a dead letter in the eardrum or the buttercup, whereas speech is living and breathing within a present that is refused, thus not seen. It is dead to all who refuse. Speech is not written language that is spoken. Speech is a flood which pours through strict rules of syntax and contains no words. It is frequently aleatoric. Written language on the other hand is usually highly structured, premeditated and processed formally by a reader in the absence of the writer.

What is love an excuse for? Like writing, it usually is an excuse for saying something that didn’t need or mean to be said. Today I was reading a story about Greta Garbo, and especially those mysterious thirty-two cards and telegrams that were finally unsealed at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia this past weekend. What is writing a love letter but an excuse for NOT loving someone? That is why Greta Garbo is so beautiful in these letters where she never professes love for her interlocutor (it could be anyone) and why anyone who reads the letters enhances the piquant privacy of its container and creates that feeling known as error. Love is the greatest mistake that can be directed at someone else beside oneself. It is also the greatest kind of error that may take place in nonwritten form. That is why one falls in love so easily, and why one loves Greta Garbo so much as one reads these nonlove letters. Because one does. Everyone loves a mistake. It is not surprising that very few love letters are written today (there are too many cell phones) and why almost anything today can be mistaken for love: a rock star, a restaurant, someone else’s one bedroom apartment with a fireplace and a couch, a Prada suit, a novel by Philip Roth. One should never know what one falls in love with. The minute one recognizes a lover it is already over. That is why so many marriages end in divorce and why so many photographs resemble unmade sitcoms and why so many novels are so readable. Tom Wolfe knows this. As T.S. Eliot remarked, minor novels are so pleasing because they are so minor. It is too bad they got transformed into something they could not be.

Anyway, most of the unsealed letters were sent by Garbo in the ’30s to Mercedes de Acosta, a playwright, screen writer, suffragist and poet whom Garbo met one evening in Constantinople in the late ’20s. Garbo admired the bracelet Acosta was wearing and Acosta promptly gave it to her. They met again and this time Garbo gave Acosta a flower. The two traveled to Silver Lake in Wyoming or Wisconsin where they spent “six enchanted weeks in the sun” which was probably closer to three and a half weeks. And so it went until the late ’30s when they met, apparently after a long hiatus, in Sweden. Garbo wrote, after their parting, “I was a wreck after she went, and I told her she must not write me. We had a sad farewell.” In the ’40s Garbo showed up at Acosta’s door saying, “I have no one to look after me.” But Garbo refused to give Acosta her phone number and Mercedes was unable to make anything more than a brief visit.

I believe that reading about moments like these, not writing about them, especially years afterward, is what creates that thing known as love. That is why there is so little love in Proust where everything is happening in the present tense of memory and why reading old love letters (sealed from memory and history) as opposed to writing new ones is the best way to fall in love. Like great television re-runs, a love letter will render you utterly passive and silent, especially if it is written to someone you hardly know. Language is a mistake and that is why more mistakes happen with total strangers than with acquaintances. No one ever really falls in love with anyone they know. To fall in love with someone that one knows is to fall in love with someone that one already fell in love with a long time ago. The truly great lovers, like Greta Garbo, were capable of falling in love while saying nothing at all. Of course, Garbo liked to confuse people. She called herself a boy in public and she was fond of wearing trousers. “I have been smoking since I was a small boy,” she used to say, or “I am a lonely man circling the earth.” No one knows if Acosta and Garbo ever had an affair or if they were lovers, though Acosta with her jet-black hair and aristocratic Spanish Catholic parents, and tendency to wear black trousers, claimed to have had affairs with Marlene Dietrich, Eva Le Gallienne and Isadora Duncan. Poetry, like love, is filled with obvious mistakes.

It is always impossible but highly desirable to imagine something twice. Let’s say, like Alice falling through the looking glass, that you find yourself in a world reversed perfectly. Pavlov found it almost impossible to get a dog to salivate when touched on the left side as opposed to the right side, and similar experiments with rats, goldfish, turtles, monkeys and children have borne this out. Children learning to write, as opposed to read, have considerably more difficulty discerning b from d and p from q than they do in discriminating b from p and d and q. Like an animal or a child learning to write, you would not be able to tell the world was reversed—unless there were humanly made objects and symbols, and in particular signage and alphabetic systems. But unlike the humanly made world, the natural world, especially an unfamiliar landscape, can easily be reversed without your knowing it.

This is a lie

It is Tuesday in the Mirror World and in the World of this Writing it is also Tuesday and if you live in the mirror world, taking a shower, finding the cold tap, operating a screw gun, driving a car and writing a note are difficult right now. Now you say now you use your right hand to shoo away a fly on your left elbow without even thinking. And now, pictures when remembered, are frequently remembered with the wrong left-right orientation, suggesting that memory traces are themselves duplicated in the brain in mirror-image form. After watching the movie Rushmore, such perfect symmetry, which leads to imperfections in the real-life world, is not at all uncommon in literature, which as we all know is made up of a series of elaborately coded lies that are not being told to anyone in particular, but exist as ciphers within a written text. It would be nice if after all we no longer thought, essentially, about objects, or felt a need to have thoughts about something, and thus were finally able to abandon the idea of thought itself as a language that was comprehensible in relation to its objects. Then it might be possible to give up the idea of speaking while thinking or talking about something. It would be much more pleasing to talk about the reverse of what we were talking about and to feel the opposite of what we were feeling. To think about nothing and say nothing at the same time. Anyone can feel love (or pain), especially when the person (overhears someone) in love feels nothing at all. Only in overhearing could one ever be said to feel anything like love at all. Yesterday I went to the movies to see Rushmore by myself. I had a very good time.

Pure repetition involves recognition of previous sounds in the shortest of attention spans: the span between two words. Unfortunately, the voice occasionally flutters or expresses random ambient sound-bursts (nonrepetitive patterns). Even now as I speak, the human voice is strangely inhuman and mechanical, plagued by poor transmission, errors and mechanical repetition. The interest in the aural pleasures of nonsense and repetition coincide with the deeply unsettling manipulations of voice and identity when transmitted “at a distance,” through a field. The most interesting things written aspire to the condition not of music—which has recognizable harmonic and melodic threads—but of the code, the meaning embedded in a language field as undistinguishable sounds, the lost beat of disco which obliterates the singer’s voice. Language is forever temporal, subject to change, cancellation, decay, a failure to specify anything in the here and now. Repetition is a good way to remember something very fast. That is why it is much nicer to lie to others than to oneself. Lying is a highly regulated, i.e., a highly rehearsed form of being in uncertainty vis-a-vis what one was not remembering or not forgetting. It might be said to resemble the human system of breathing, which is also a kind of sonic rehearsal for death. A lie is always located in the death of the message. Yes, I am lying to you. No I am not lying to you.

Poetry should not be written to be written, it should be written to be listened to it should not be written to be remembered or absorbed it should be written to be forgotten.

You are repeating yourself (interview)

In any system, I repeat myself, I believe it is possible to turn the repetition inherent in oral forms (speech) on its head. Let me tell you a story that might not be true. I went to hear the rock band Chicago last night at the Greek Theater in Hollywood, which is an outdoor theater set against a backdrop of hills and aging palm trees. The audience was mainly fortysomething hipsters and studio execs with big hair, lots of gold chains and Porsches. People were singing and standing up a lot, telling those around them to get up and sing. As I stood up, it suddenly occurred to me that these were once hippies but now they were hippies preserved in some form of twilight, evergreen light that had descended the L.A. air over the outdoor amphitheater. People were standing up and looking back at the people behind them as if they were the audience. No one was smoking pot or anything else. The air was clear as a television screen. Everyone in the audience was white, even the Asians and the blacks. The only people who weren’t white were the ticket takers and the bouncers and one kid from some high school in L.A. who was asked to come onto the stage and play with the band for one number. And that is how my memory of going to high school in Athens, Ohio in the mid-seventies came back to me, and remembering stories about deer blinds, or harvesting pot planted at the local public golf course, and what I was called in gym class, Ho Chi LIN.

Those who study information flow know that repetition in real life situations and in spoken language is generally used to secure meaning, to make sure one is not misunderstood. Repetition lessens the possibilities for error. Hearing Chicago again, it was impossible not to remember the massive inertia of “Saturday in the park, thought it was the Fourth of July,” and it was impossible not to remember being back in those long, carpeted corridors of my high school, and the cafeteria tables where everyone was shouting next to their food and the plastic trays. I believe that repetition is more thoroughly embedded in speech than in writing, which is too bad really, for the memories that are inside me feel like they are about to be formed but would rather not. Of course, as my high school teacher Mr. Lalich, who later went on to become a city council member, reminded us in American History and Economics, the trade-off lies in the realm of the temporal. The more repetition there is, the greater delay in the rate of message transmission. But rehearsal is also key to absorption, i.e., in short- and long-term memory, and oral forms thus work to do two things: reduce ambiguity in the message and promote retention. Certain kinds of psychotropic drugs (LSD), novels and poems, and Mr. Lalich’s lectures on inverted forms of economic efficiency rarely transpired in the long term, they re-enacted the processes of memory at the short-term and synaptic level, which is to say, before memory has attached itself to the sound field. Repetition, especially in the things one reads, is opposed to the class of words known as antonyms, which is to say language’s repeating tendencies, its tendencies to be synonymous and simultaneous rather than different. And this violates the idea of meaning which is grounded in differentiation. But, of course, if everything is or appears the same, then language takes on the qualities of a cipher or code where differences are perceived to exist but are disguised. Disco music, the phone book, Gertrude Stein’s books, and TV talk shows function like this. To read is to forget the meaning of reading. For this reason, the best literature is often written in times of war where puns themselves suggest the origins of language in a consciousness that cannot use language to make any distinctions between language and thought, speaker and world, signal and noise, sound and word. I left the Chicago concert filled with memories and very depressed. I never knew about Vietnam or the war protest movement except secondhand and so all my memories of those events were memories of things I had already seen on TV. The best TV and the best works of literature do not engender memories, they get rid of them. The best cure for memory is a really good poem or maybe a novel.

Poetry, like drugs, should not be difficult, it should be easy. Poetry should not be interesting, it should hold out the potential to be very insipid. Boring is the least of what most people have always realized, evidenced by the large numbers of Americans who have never read a poem. Poetry should not be morally uplifting, it should inspire a deep sense of relax. Poetry need not say anything important or humanly meaningful, it should merely evoke a mood. That mood resembles the sound of a sunset. Jack Spicer understood that all unsaid words are painful to listen to. They are better to look at. That is why Jack Spicer is a beautiful poet.

I compose and you compose. The little and the like. The most refreshing language would be written by an exercise bike or a fancy treadmill filled with electronic devices that measure one’s alpha waves, pulse, heartbeat, respiration rate, CO₂ output, etc. It would be a machine that had not been given a ten-minute course in Zen or Salsa dancing but had its own multitrack recorder. The multimedia loudspeaker intones, the internet site and the homepage repeats. “I return to psychedelia.” The great poems of the late ’90s and the early 21st century will be written not to the jaded forms of serial or twelve-tone productions, not the remnants of Stockhausen and Webern, but the music of electronica and circuitry and electrical processing that first came of age in the ’70s. Tricky is the King. The Orb is a Prince. Hendrix’s single-hand feedback is reincarnated as the flat ambiance of Stereolab. All poetry is the sound of an optical illusion on a mirror ball. What is the most beautiful sound in the world? The sound of an image dying, the sound of a television commercial one ignores like a reflection like a highway divider, the sound of fucking on a couch while MTV plays on the TV set. The poem aspires to a trans-historical, trans-ethnic revival. It admits of a kind of enlightened multicultural ambiance.

The other day I went to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena to look for some George Nelson coconut chairs, with two girls who had just graduated from college and had come to L.A. to make movies, and they were telling me about how ecstasy is great because it makes falling in love completely irrelevant because you are in a state where you don’t need to fall in love. For this reason it’s better to take ecstasy with someone else. That is basically what poetry is like. The best poem doesn’t try to make anything beautiful or watery or dark or light. It is Saturday night around 7 P.M. California time. I see a strange yellow and red cloud that resembles one of those diagrammatic drawings for the rotary engine that were introduced in the ’70s by Mazda. The cloud moves quickly upward and downward like a jellyfish whose body resembles the effects of a massive plunger. Three days later I read about a NORAD experiment involving a Minuteman with a dummy nuclear warhead. It was launched off the California coast that Saturday night. It was destroyed by a heat-seeking missile that was launched from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands forty minutes later.

I understand the question to mean something about sounds, rather than language. The revival of the ’60s and ’70s in the ’90s is the most fitting example of a kind of contemporary revision of the Arts and Crafts movement, which culminated in Colonial Revival products, especially with regard to things such as quilts and other decorative arts. How late we come to our realizations and our own monotonies. How often we switch ourselves off and realize that poetry no longer needs to be avant-garde, and less formal in its orientation. I can remember the lives of various schools. It can review home arts like quilt making, needle work, gardening, collecting of ephemera, etc. Repetition is crucial to all these endeavors. Poetry should aspire to the condition of continuous relaxation but without effort. It should be filled with typos. One studies and re-studies the ape and biological determinism as if it were a form of the Holocaust or a victim of the Hiroshima blast. This is the kind of history that most appeals to us. The least important thing one can say about craft is that it suggests an evolutionary downdraft toward greater levels of domesticity, homelife and infinite credit. It approaches the state of the ultimate home furnishings catalogue and unlimited personal spending. Poetry cannot survive in a homeless state. The poetry of exile is a dead end, the poetry of world weariness is an overwaxed palm leaf yanked from some Caribe Isle, as numerous poets have demonstrated. But, of course, it is bad manners to pronounce this at a dinner party populated by publishing people or Nobel Prize laureates and their hosts or in a poem, that the ideal poem is an extension of home entertaining, that its verbs are intertwined with the life of good manners and candlesticks. Not every decent poem is willing to please, but many are. All poems are healed by corruptions of the feelings.

What does it mean to stop reading a poem? It means that one is tired. Lynne Cox, the great American long-distance swimmer has a body comprised of 35 percent body fat (compared to most women who have 18–25 percent body fat), and it is that layer of fat that functions like a natural wet suit. People who have seen her swim say she appears to float or melt through the water; that it somehow becomes her element or she it. Rumor has it that East German swimmers inject gas into their colons to induce similar properties; her plump, large undulating mermaid-like hips have fiercely propelled her obliviously through all manner of things in her twenty-five years as a long-distance swimmer: oil slicks, jellyfish that swell the eyes and lips, sewage, dead dogs, walruses and sharks. Yet she swims without any shark cages, no layer of grease or wetsuits—only a swimsuit. It is her layer of fat that is most remarkable about her; it turns her into something, a human porpoise, and allows her to maintain an even internal body temperature despite external temperatures that would kill most humans after thirty minutes or induce severe hallucinations. When she began her swim across the Diomeded—which separates Alaska from Siberia—she had to step carefully into the Arctic Sea. Had she dived in head first, the water would have stopped her heart almost instantaneously. I believe all these things are merely simulations by our brain of what will happen next, outward manifestations of the things that are just going on in our heads, and these situations are almost always hypothetical ones that we model rapidly and instantaneously and without thinking about it at all. There is nothing here but the writing and least of all the residue that is not in the writing and can never be there if reading is to be done at a later moment, say in history, or later in the day before one calls up a friend and goes to see My Own Private Idaho at the local bargain cinema for $2. Thus a form of dittoing or mimeographing the forms of the earth results in a worthwhile purgation of the things we cannot stand, a means of increasing the levels of aural pollution or interference. All beautiful objects ought to be replaced by residues of the sort that are created by the interference of beauty in the abstract. All great things of beauty should be abstracted to their least common denominators. No thing shall be separated any other thing. No love for anyone shall be love for any one. No words shall be used to trace out some other thing. As Robert Smithson recognized, poems are the strata of their own composition, they are never still but move like a series of roving sundials or mirrors across a Yucatan landscape, a series of roving tombstones where the sky is buried in the earth. A poem is just a machine made of words. It merely reflects and then reflects on what happens to get in its way. I was reading the obit for James Velez, the young man who was “tormented by a baffling illness” and who died last Wednesday at the age of twenty-five from infections of his blood and spine. No one knew why James Velez thought a million bugs crawled across his skin. To bring himself comfort he scratched himself so vigorously that he broke his skin and created heavy scars across his body mutilating himself even though he possessed intelligence enough to recognize what he was doing. He spent most of his life in institutions where he received electric shock therapy but in 1994 a small social service agency, Job Path, allowed him to have his own apartment. In January of 1999 he remarked: “The happiest thing is to have a place that’s mine.” Nothing shall be hated decorated excoriated repudiated or remembered. Everything shall be copied and then recopied verbatim. I light a cigarette. I turn on the television while the stereo is on. I listen to the sound of a car and the music of DJ shadow. The end of summer is the end of the things I do not remember. There is no longer time for protestations in language. Poetry should not be performed, it should merely be listened to. The time for conscious experimentation and ego, which is its logical extension, should be replaced by unconscious repetition and listening. All poems should be rewritten over and over again and exist in as many versions as possible. No poem should ever