BOOK AS DANCE

Book as dance -- NOT an object but a time-art.  This is a concept I’ve been pursuing for a while.  Bless Dave Lull, “the cross-pollinating librarian,” for sending me this quote this morning, just as I was about to embark on the rough seas of explanation.  The quote is from  http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/31_books_in_31_days_mark_athitakis_on_ander_monsons_vanishing_point/  (I don’t have anything against book critics per se -- just the idea that I have to agree with them.  In this case, we have a happy coincidence.)

“Truth is so unstable for Monson, in fact, that Vanishing Point is not only not a memoir but not a book as well––or, rather, not just a printed, permanent one. Monson’s website, www.otherelectricities.com, is an essential part of the experience of reading the book: Footnoted words are expanded upon online, to move the book beyond its status as an artifact and to reflect “flux, motion, synapses connecting and reconnecting and thinking exploding everywhere.” Even so, the old-fashioned text explodes in its own way. In “Exteriority” he pushes the text to the very edge of the page, removing the margins to show just how much they frame stories on paper. “Solipsism”––the essay that opens with those two pages of “Me”s––sprays out into sidebars, footnotes, and marginal digressions, the better to expose the performative act of writing.”

A book is not necessarily an artifact.  A PRINTED book is exactly that, whether a medieval Bible chained to a pulpit or a yellowed and flaking pulp paperback lost in a garaged box of debris.  AS ARTIFACT, a book has a lot to say.  I’ve often noted that Blackfeet will save a book, not on a shelf, but deep in a trunk, to protect it.  Bob Scriver used to keep his Masonic book wrapped in a silk scarf in his underwear drawer.  He never read it.  When I moved it aside to make room for clean underwear, he was very upset.  A codex as juju -- the magic of the form and not the content.

It has become fashionable to say, following the lead that may have started with the atom and the cell and now characterized by the algorithm and the genome, that a book is information.  It certainly is, if you are looking at the marks we translate into meaning.  It might be in another way, if you value facts above all else and are reading to find out “truth” -- which would explain why some people are so intent on knowing the “real facts.”  And it’s true that one of the shared characteristics of print on paper and electronically produced print is information -- the same words in the same order.  Audible books, read aloud from a printed page, are just another kind of information about the same immutable composition.

NOT “flux, motion, synapses connecting and reconnecting and thinking exploding everywhere.”  Though that happens if the composition evokes what it ought.

At the moment I’m creating a book that has no name yet.  It happens that my co-writer, Tim Barrus, writes poetry constantly.  If he could, he would rather dance but since his disintegrating bones prevent that, he dances his fingers through the music of thought, producing strong images.  Last summer he and one of his boys were diagnosed with AIDS dementia.  The HIV virus was in both their brains.  The boy, Tristan, who had been battered and compromised so much in his short but vivid life, died rather quickly after Tim took him apart from the others (to shield them as much as Tristan) to a sequestered and elemental shore where the two of them, plus their dogs, sat in blankets sipping cups of scotch while the sun went down.  In a while, Tristan didn’t know Tim’s name, but he recognized and craved the smell and feel of him right to the end.

As the days went by, Tim posted what he wrote and I downloaded each post.  When I read through them, I saw that it was an extraordinary record.  Not a memoir, not a novel, not even a poetry anthology, but shifting consciousness against -- this time -- the music of the sea which has always meant the mystery of life and death.  He added photos and videos, not possible in a codex, but this material could easily become that kind of “book,” so that’s what I’m doing.

As for himself, the virus in his brain is an inconvenience and means he’s a little different every day, but he makes his own “book” -- an art book in which he writes directly, draws, paints, leaves prints, folds in objects -- all things one can do to books between covers.  Tim is a very hands-on person.  Lucky for Tristan that much of his life has been using that characteristic in the physical care of children: feeding, washing, diapering, cradling.  He faced the facts of the situation by fly-fishing in streams that fed the ocean.  

With my temperament and education, I’m more interested in what one might call mental fly-fishing:  teasing the idea up out of the depths in something like devotion, reflection, attention.  My model is from preaching: that the sermon is something created by the interaction between preacher and listener, the thought-construct of one person reaching out to evoke thought-constructs in the listeners.  When I was circuit-riding, I used to preach each sermon four times in four towns and since the groups were small, I was in steady and individual eye-contact with each person.  Though each was clearly reacting in a unique way, in the best of times we were all caught up in the electricity of ideas, very much like the best of love-making, if you can accept the latter not being physical.  Can’t it be “virtual?”  (I accept the double meaning.)

I’m merely arranging Tim’s words, adding a few of my own, editing for clarity, in a way that is only possible after years of working together.  Last night Tim edited a post of mine about Djordji on our vlog called “Orpheus in the Catacombs” orpheus in the catacombs  http://orpheus-catacombs.tumblr.com which is meant to pique your interest in a manuscript about the just-past trajectory of the art school for boys at risk formerly called “Cinematheque Films” and now sequestered as “The Studio” to protect the boys.  

Tim has NEVER edited anything by me until now: he added information about Djordji that I didn’t have.  I welcome it.  Djordji wears a helmet because he pounds his head on walls when he’s frustrated.  There is no helmet to protect from AIDS dementia.  It does help to have the brain cells of sixty years of interaction with the world.  Tim is volcanic, artesian --  both fire and water coming from somewhere underground.

My belief is that a body is a codex, a way of accessing experience and even offering it to another as if holding out a hand in an invitation to dance, something that changes constantly, always meaningful even if not intentionally.  This kind of writing is not a “book” but it is possible in a “blog.”

I CAN KNOW, BUT YOU CAN'T

Perhaps the most maddening thing about banning, censoring, making things secret, is that it is always about privilege: I can know, but you can’t. You can’t handle the truth. Adult to child version: this is for your own good. (You don’t need to know about sex.) The powerful, the elite, the wealthy, the educated, the military, and the underworld all say, “This is information I can have but you cannot.” Therefore, those who tell, who spy, who remember and cannot be suppressed, are always dangerous and resisted. This is a world based on gaming and secrecy is the advantage in games, esp. military games.

There’s been talk lately about whether Obama is one of the secret-keepers, in spite of assuring us that he would enforce transparency in government. (That he would disclose everything in spite of a hostile and gaming organization of opponents trying to put him out of power.) What’s MORE worrisome is the idea that what he knows is so devastatingly pessimistic -- that things are so far worse than we ever could have imagined -- that he is keeping the secrets to protect us from despairing madness or desperate revolution. I’ve been reading about family secrets in Mark C. Taylor’s “Field Notes from Elsewhere,,” mainly his slow realization that there were several suicides by hanging in a family already plagued with depression. It was considered too suggestive for the descendants to know, especially since there were no obvious reasons for such a final act. Too many questions to burden the young with the facts. Therefore, no inquiry into mitigation.

Secrecy is interpreted as the only safe way to avoid intervention from authorities. Secret groups form all the time, sometimes secret by default because no one cares anyway, but maybe because of fear of punishment, dispersal, raids. Which is worse? How do we tell the terrorists from the simply neglected?

We have the idea that if we just knew enough, we could handle anything. If we knew the mechanism of tragedy (let’s say soldier suicides) we could unravel them. But identifying the causes is only the first step. What we really don’t want to know is what we’ll have to do to stop the wars that make soldiers suicidal. It would be better to leave the necessity and price of peace in some dim and dubious cloud. For one thing, a lot of military-based economy would have to be shut down. Shifting the money from war to resettlement of refugees would be so chaotic that corruption would run wild. Here on the rez the council has just about figured out how to handle oil leases properly when along come international corporations very sophisticated about wind farms. Who knows how to read a wind farm contract?

Suppose a person is adopted, which was a family secret, and at last discovers the facts. More questions are raised than can be resolved. Where, when, why, who? How does that change one’s relationships? What does divulging the secret do to other people’s lives? What will it do to inheritance? What about getting caught up in political issues about adoption by people outside one’s original genetic group? Weigh that against resolving some inner dissonance that always raised questions.

Catastrophic and inexplicable events leave us hungry to know more. Every exposé is followed by an exposé of the exposé, the hoax that was behind the public hoax, the self-delusion that was behind the hoax-accusers -- that they knew the truth when, in fact, no one knows the real truth because reality is so complex and shifty that it is simply unknowable except in bits, sound bites, screen grabs. So Woodward tells us that HE knows the truth about Obama. And Jimmy Carter tells us HE knows the truth about Ted Kennedy. To be “in the know” is to be important, smarter than others, well-connected. That idea sells newspaper.

The idea that people will buy or read dirty books for the titillation of it is only part of the story. Another big part is that the upper classes read transgressive stuff -- why shouldn’t I? And there sits “Ulysses,” unread. The “upper” classes sometimes read things that only make sense if a person has a specialized (meaning focused) education that is normally acquired only at great cost. Can YOU read Derrida? How about Paul Ricoeur? They aren’t about sex -- they are about rewriting the world. That can be far more obscene and upsetting.

Only the wealthy in time can sit around trying to decide what a perfect world would be like. Most people are simply trying to survive. The censorship of their lives is never having enough time to read, let alone think. An intellectual life is one of the greatest luxuries but it is so hard for an ordinary person to “see,” that there is a strong prejudice against it. In rural Montana a person who has time to read is often considered a slacker. They could have been doing something constructive like mending fence.

I say, “When I have money, I buy books.” But what I really mean is “when I have money, I buy time during which to read books.” After all, there are libraries. If you have a computer, there are libraries in it. I don’t have time to wash the dishes because I’m composing an essay. (If I can compose in my head while I wash dishes, so much the better.) The beauty of audible books mean one can read while washing the dishes or driving the car. (It’s a little risky to compose essays while driving -- more distracting than texting, so it’s lucky I live in a place with long straight highways little traveled.)

Evading censorship, reading banned books, can be a waste of time because there is so much else to explore. But if the highest virtue of reading and writing means following Ariadne’s thread (truth) wherever it might lead, no matter the consequences, then hiding truth becomes evil. And yet the truth-seeker has a responsibility not to be mistaken, not to dig out trivia and valorize it as significant simply because it was hidden, and to help deal with the consequences of revelations. Because they change the world. The ultimate game is not winning, but constructing the rules for the greater good rather than merely supporting the elite. Reading is not the only way to learn things.