Two Reviews



Harry Polkinhorn






        KARL KEMPTON's The Light We Are 

Karl Kempton's The Light We Are is a love sequence woven together from
the various neoplatonic dectrines of love as philosophically discussed
by Cardinal Bembo in Castiglione's The Courtier.  Love of woman becomes
love of God, who is light in the world.  References to traditions of
meditation, magic, mystery, and dreaming enable the first-person narrator
to address himself to a feminine other paralleling Dante's attitudes
towards Beatrice in The Divine Comedy.  Kempton's deceptively simple
lyrics are structured upon an implicit identification of the poetic/
creative process with love itself.  As words flow through consciousness,
the narrator's love emerges from darkness into the light of grace and
communion.  Oriental minimal forms blend with the main line of the
Western love lyric as brought forward by Shakespeare, Campion, Herrick,
and Lovelace; the brevity of the short line, elegant compression of poetic
energies, a dialogic relationship of awareness with the standard topoi of
nature imagery all contribute to save the lyric from the sentimentality
it so often suffers in the hands of the vulgar confessionalists so popular
today. The Light We Are celebrates the joyous mystery of love, the
anti-discursive radicality by which it creates a world and meaning, in
the rich terminologies of both east and west, one more false dichotomy
transcended in love and art. "Three in the morning/ I walk between cloud
bursts/ holding you in my thoughts/ love pours from my heart/ to merge
with the onstellations/ burning through cold clarity/ I move up the rise/
to four shooting stars/ and that moment/ in your arms/ in my heart/ an
unidentified bouquet/ of white flowers bloomed". 

_____ 


The Flood, by Stephen-Paul Martin (Port Charlotte, Florida:
Runaway Spoon Press, 1992) 

In The Flood, Stephen-Paul Martin uses humor and sarcasm
to weave together his text made up of the themes and motifs of
language, political corruption, sexuality, religion, and cosmic
renewal. What is unusual about these traditional concerns is
Martin's use of the graphic potential of the Smith-Corona 2500
electric typewriter with which he wrote/designed The Flood. 
Each page is graphically unique in terms of the layout of the text
and imagery; some of the implications of Martin's "style" I would
like to explore in what follows.  I used the word "text" in its
etymological sense. "Text" derives from "Medieval Latin textus,
(Scriptural) text, from Latin, literary composition, 'woven thing,'
from the past participle of texere, to weave" (The American
Heritage Dictionary, 1970). The warp and woof of the loom are
paralleled by the mechanical fashion in which the typewriter lays
down marks on a sheet, constrained to lines and columns (Martin
varies this through some cutting and pasting).  Thus, we can begin
to appreciate some of the subtleties of Martin's use of Scripture in
the Noah story. At the heart of the author's concerns here is the
relationship of language, specifically the written representation of
speech, to the construction of meaning as a social act involving
power relationships.  His choice of Scripture as the type of such a
process is the perfect, traditional foundation for radical
experimentation with the type-writer as technological-modern
mediator of meaning, which historically embeds the metaphysical
dimension of The Flood, keeping it from floating away in the
pointless debris of postmodernism.

No doubt this very historical thrust, to be seen in those passages
which attack the President, will simultaneously delight and confuse
readers. What I am contending is that these passages can only be
theoretically grasped if one has a thoroughly traditional
understanding of the role of language in ancient and Medieval
Western European culture.  Martin thus conflates the two main
strands: the Kabbalistic notion that language and the world
interpenetrate in a continuum of signification, such that whoever
controls language controls the very fabric of nature; and the later
Christian sublimation of this through what we would understand as
a process of metaphorization (God spoke the world into existence,
logos, fiat lux, etc.) in the Christian move to consolidate power
through defining selected beliefs and practices as "superstition,"
the chief result of which for our purposes here is that language
becomes a device of representation. Thus the former view ipso
facto becomes superstition from the viewpoint of the latter.

Martin's preoccupation with meaning both transcendent and
immanent is of course not as baldly presented as the above account
might lead one to believe; it couldn't be and still maintain
effectiveness as art. On the contrary, Martin's typographic
experimentation achieves several goals: it preserves visual-graphic
surprise; it underscores chance as a compositional technique that
has its analogue in a view of the world as alogical yet not at all
therefore meaningless; and it fragments linear discourse with its
basis in argumentation. A structural analysis of The Flood must
acknowledge these featurtes of the typographic presentation, which
otherwise would seem negatively arbitrary, a goal of much art but
not of Martin's. 

Perhaps one of the most noticeable features of The Flood is
its fragmentary quality, which is emphasized by having typed words
wrap around from line to line with no word spacing to ease reading. 
The reader is forced to deal with words and lines almost on an
individual level; just as a passage begins to develop, we are abruptly
ripped out of fictional time/space and dumped elsewhere.  Scenes
on the Ark alternate with those in the White House (the latter
thereby posited as a kind of ark floating upon the chaos of
contemporary American culture).  At times one text seems to
physically disappear underneath another, Martin using chunks of
language as if they were real-world elements to be collaged
together creating the illusion of three-dimensional space in the
manner of the visual arts.  Since The Flood is primarily a
word document and about the social and psychological processes of
decoding/encoding significations, resorting to techniques of the
visual arts serves to complexify the work's primary drives,
underscoring the reader/viewer's role in the establishment of
meaning.  As has been often repeated, the fragmentation of
discourse in the modern period starting in the mid-nineteenth
century parallels the evacuation of presence from the world under
the impacts of industrialization. 

This fragmentation is evident in all the greatest works of the
period (The Cantos, The Waste Land, Dadaist collages, Tzara's
sound poetry, Schwitters' entire opus both visual and verbal,
Schoenberg, Beckett, Benjamin, Adorno, etc.) At the same time,
the ancient unity of visual and verbal modes of expression is
suggested as a critique of their separation under capitalism. 
Fragmentariness is strategically countered with the temptations of
an implicit, possible narrative unity where things makes sense. As
with Paul Zelevansky's "Crossroads" trilogy, The Flood uses
parody to locate itself in a tradition of narrative fiction through
its distorting engagements with character, plot, and time--the tra-
ditional unities of fiction. The narrator, as in all such works, in
his distrust of the blandishments of speech, turns to other (visual)
resources for the fixing of meaning; how does one narrate graphic
design? In this connection, it is easy to understand why the
authorities in the ancient world simultaneously feared visual
representation (the taboo on graven images) and moved quickly to
monopolize writing by keeping the masses illiterate, this latter
situation still with us today. Martin refers to this control scheme
over and over throughout The Flood; his preoccupation becomes the
locus of energy that powers the work, which otherwise would degenerate
into sheer visual jouissance.  That Martin's work raises these and many
other questions with wit and a piercing critical sensibility places
The Flood among the most demanding and rewarding works of contemporary
verbal-visual art. 


 





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