“Fuck it.”
I think “Nico Said Excrement Filters Through the Brain. I’s a Kit” is one of the most commendably composed poems in literature. It begins, “Fuck it.” That is the first line in its entirety: there’s only two words composed of a total of two syllables. Yet this sentence says myriad. “Fuck” means “disregard,” “dismiss,” “never mind,” “inconsequential.” “It” means “society” “rules” “pre-existing conditions” “circumscriptions” “restrictions.” Basically, Reines is telling her audience that anything goes. It’s reminds me of Artaud’s full spectacle. The comforting and secure boundaries of stage and audience are being demolished. Rather, we’re getting attacked from all four sides. There will be violations – transgressions. Respect for boundaries and limits cut off exploration, and Reines, like Artaud, wants to launch a thorough investigation.
She walks into somebody’s home. This somebody doesn’t have a name. It could be the ex-boyfriend of Coeur de Lion or Vice President Biden’s house in Delaware. What do positions and stations matter to Reines? I don’t think they do. The poem is in a state of upheaval. What should be private becomes public. There’s a reason why we keep our medication behind cabinets, are food in fridges, and clothes in drawers, and it’s because they all have to do with the body. Medicine and edibles enter our bodies, and clothes go on them. The body is sacred. It’s why you’re not supposed to hit people, murder them, or become a professional pornography star. The body is a private sphere. But not to Reines. It’s like she’s on an excavating mission. The body becomes a material like any other – silk, cotton, plaid. The house turns into a store that’s having a huge blow-out closing sale: everything’s available including the shelves and cash register.
So what’s Reines looking for? She claims she’s “here to work.” But I don’t believe her. I just think she wants to cause trouble and show off her warlord abilities. When the Nazis invaded Poland, Greece, parts of Russia, half of France, &c, obviously they installed their own governments and introduced their own laws. They treated those countries’ lands like they were their own. Reines employs the same sensibility. You’re not supposed to masturbate on other people’s pillows: you’re supposed to have sex with yourself on your own pillows. If the pillow doesn’t belong to then you shouldn’t self-fornicate on it. But I don’t think that trope applies to Reines. I think she thinks everything belongs to her. Elsewhere in the book she states, “I have to become everything” (20). The inexorable desire to morph into all objects and subjects is seen in the form of “Nico.” There are five stanzas in the poem. The action takes place in the second and fourth. These are prose blocks. There’s no endstops or enjambs, but they’re all clustered together. The reader can’t rest. He has to “GO GO.” Does it matter that he might not want to see Reines taking a poop? Not in the least. The reader gets swept away by the force of Reines caplocks exhortations. They're like slaps that lead all the way to the end where you learn that what has just taken place isn’t an event that just violated hundreds of American laws, because “malediction” is absent: Reines can’t be poisoned. Is she trying to say that there’s something pure about not heeding limits and accepted modes of behavior? Is there genuineness – truth -- in destructing demarcations? I think so. I think we need to be constantly pushing everything: testing its value. If something has an actual worth to it, then no matter how far you take it won’t fall apart. This is what I want to do with poetry. Ensure that each word can stand on its own no matter how many blows it takes. Reines can obviously manage just fine for herself. But as for 21st-century society, with its thoughtless structure and dull deceptions, well, as Reines shows, that’s not hard to demolish at all.
Freud:
In Gender and Victorian Literature we received a mini lecture on Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia.” The daughter’s mother dies. She feels abandoned and angry: she begins to lose her ego, her sense of self. So she becomes another person: her mother. This way she can be as hostile as she wants to herself (her mother) and still not run the risk of losing herself (her mother). It’s the power of incorporation. When you become something, when you take something on, then you can get to decide how that something acts. We see this in Reines graphic description of the disembodiment of cows. By recapitulating the cow’s treatment, Reines is, in a sense, becoming its torturer. After all, Reines is the author, and the author has authority. This is Reines’s collection of poems, not society’s. It’s because of Reines – a female poet – that we’re learning about how cows’ rectums are explored, not because of some hypothetical male, patriarchal figure.
When Adrienne Rich, Andrea Dworkin, &c, spoke out against the dehumanizing effects of pornography they were enacting the antithesis of Reines. These radical feminists were demonstrating a LACK of power, bellicosity, imagination. They had no idea how to transform pornography to their benefit, so they said, “Hey, stop it right now.” But Reines doesn’t need to resort to safe, distant rhetoric. If she doesn’t like the way something is – the way Nazis didn’t like the way Europe was – then she’ll invade it, author it, and make it hers. By discoursing about cows and incorporating pornography fragments – “he spit on my asshole” (4) – Reines is bringing everything under her domain. She’s NOT a victim, but an imperialist bringing everything into her body – her country. She’s the aggressor: she’s the conqueror. When she boasts of her oral sex talents, she knows that the penis is in her mouth: she’s in charge of its welfare – she controls what happens to it. Passivity and powerlessness aren't a part of her composition.
Monster:
Obviously, someone as ruthless as this isn’t fit for the 21st-century world where you have to smile at people, ask them how they’re doing, and wait in line patiently to buy a candy bar. Reines is aware of this. That’s why she wants to be “self-contained” (96). She’ll eat her own shit, drink her own throw up, and lick her own pussy. She won’t need anybody: she’ll be completely autonomous. But this is democracy: it’s Obama’s Earth. We’re not supposed to be bleeding in sinks and breaking into people’s houses; we’re supposed to be our brother’s keeper, our sister’s keeper, and employ “civilized rhetoric.” So Reines wants to go away from all these limitations. She’s like Victor Frankenstein’s monster. He has to stay away from society and keep to the woods and wilderness because he’s too wild and untamed to interact with the pragmatic civilians. But she’s even more monstrous than Victor’s monster. The monster at least wants some company. He asks Victor to create him a female companion. But Reines doesn’t want a spouse. She’s a hard, exacting, forceful medium. She has no equal. Nothing can get to her. The world bounces off her. She’s too multitudinous for anyone. She’s pure.
Pictures of Notable Fearless Explorers:
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ReplyDeleteIn response to The Cow, Carina and I will be posting a collaborative text & video. After few attempts at articulating the thoughts about The Cow in straightforward manner, we gradually grew frustrated, that there is this something about The Cow that (at least)we just could not bring out through expository text. As Seth puts it, The Cow is a "full spectacle"; Physicality of cows being torn apart, prepared& physicality of women and their "raw cunt" are staged, served. After discussing what we could do to do justice to The Cow, we decided to make a spectacle as our response, using our body--our mouth, our stomach-- as the media.
ReplyDeleteAfter the spectacle, we wrote a collaborative text, taking turns in building the body of text; our thoughts strangely merging together into a stomach machine digesting the text of The Cow, our thoughts, making it into gooey substance.
Enjoy.
(our collaborative work is posted below this blog post in case you haven't noticed)
ReplyDeleteTo me, The Cow is exhausting and beautiful. This is a book that can’t be read straight through--it makes me feel too claustrophobic and induces too much of a sense of hypochondria (as Seth notes, Reines “can’t be poisoned”—but she is also, he notes, a “forceful medium”; in engaging with the text, I am sucked in and susceptible). It’s as though my disgust/revulsion sensors have been de-activated—as would be the case, maybe, in experiencing a kind of emergency.
ReplyDeleteThis isn’t a panic, exactly; it’s more like a simultaneous acuteness and aloofness (if that makes sense?). The book, as spectacle and object, has a density (“too dense to make a room for me in it”—and yet, the “I” emerges first in “FONT”: “He said, now I’m going to shit/ Into your hand. Another voice appeared. You don’t know me but I know you”—“I” is borne of this transmission (and orchestrates this)/ emergency as the hole is a kind of crowding as well as a space for the deficit Bataille advocates?)—but the book also has a kind of flatness (the bluntedness of the forces of production?). Emergency, a kind of catastrophic and yet repeated (or continuous?) force, is, for Reines, a kind of destructive presence. In “I LOVE MY EMERGENCY,” the collapse of the buildings incorporates “us” into the textual architecture/rubble, the spectacle)—and yet, the blotter is “rude,” a violation, because of its lack of details (depth?)—it’s an “insufficient” report, a surface of art rather than a kind of public record.
Contamination is implicit in containment (or inverse containment—if Reines is interested in an excavation, which churns up the materials of her body and thus creates a kind of monstrous screen [broadcasting?]—in “LODGE,” mystery serves as a mobilizing/excavating force; she writes, “I like a blood drive, and to feel the tube warming up with blood; to watch it fill the plastic pouch. Health. A packet of my inestimable substance. I think about what cannot be contained in this world. A box of night? Compounds: Human. Boxcar”) (100). Privacy is something of an impossibility in the mash-up accumulation of the text, the enveloping spectacle. In “Item,” the apartment in Washington Heights teems (or bloats? cramps?) with consumption, binges, excrement, holes that allow for the emergence of “stupendous” bugs—the physical space of the place is crumbling, while the people living there are depicted/created with their claims of claustrophobia, hypochondria, terror. The mention of the mother’s interest in Creutzfeldt-Jacob, “the brainwashing disease associated with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy that fills the brain with holes” creates a kind of contusion, perhaps. And just as the disease is a kind of destructive accretion, I feel threatened as a reader by the transmission of this fascination (the animation which occurs in the book emits psychical bi-products?) (the cow is pumped full of antibiotics to make it capable of becoming fat, “TENDER”—bruised, delivered). These (perhaps seemingly) disparate parts bleed into one another in the course of the poem; the text process of meaning-making is made unproductive by the contamination of this mash-up and yet, the art is necessarily dependent on this strangely dense buoyancy.
For the second week in a row our readings have completely overwhelmed and unnerved me. (Way to go Joyelle! Artaud would be proud.) I guess it would be safe to say that violence is a thread that can unite the two works. But I think there is an inherent difference in the character and tone of it.
ReplyDeleteIt felt that Zurita spoke of the brutality of existence as a witness. I’m paraphrasing what he said in the poetry reading last week, but didn’t he say it would have been most beautiful if his book never had to be written. This gives the exposition of violence a purpose, or at least the necessity of voice. And this voice didn’t seek to echo the violence, merely tell of it. For me, Reines use of violence is almost like meeting fire with fire. As Seth pointed out there is the violence, as deconstruction, which is more to what I Artaud, seemed to advocate.
The thing I think Zurita and Reines both address is the problem of the oppressed. Structurally and symbolically, I see The Cow as a really striking analogy of the history of women in terms of commoditization and invisibility. Fuck me so I can keep disappearing (p.28) I feel a sense of powerlessness that only knows the power that has been created to control. The only power available is the power of violence/sex and words… all seem to have no meaning other than to deconstruct----deconstruction for deconstruction----destroy to destroy----no where to no where to no where---- there is a circle, an animal that shits within and around it. There are hands of an oppressor. Is it she as she masturbates on someone else’s pillow? Is the act of masturbation somehow dictated by another? Is the oppressor our tongue, our pens, our words, our bodies, and so on and so on?
Reines appears to go so far as deconstruct our humanity by taking us to the level of cows or would the deconstruction make everyone invisible? Does being a cow or being invisible change anything? COULD THERE BE A NIPPLE IN THE DAY// Something to flow out of//A knowing that could make us. That could save us.(p.28)
The themes that I found interesting in The Cow were the reflections on the act of writing itself. It felt that Reines understood that in using language she is replicating the history of oppression, and in some way language is the oppressor.
Do you know one of the first thing a colonizer does when it colonizes? Takes away the language. And it is not for just practical non-rebellion purposes. When you are assimilated into a language you are assimilated into a cultural perspective. So even when you use disturbing or socially unacceptable language you are still operating in the framework of the power structure who created the words. Wombs herald the words of their forebears. Have no baby. Where does//war go to (p. 98)
It’s like the entire framework of words, be they violent or otherwise are just replicating the world of oppression. Hence the hopelessness, overwhelmed and nauseated reaction I have to the book. Leaving you with this: All this I AM is bad writing. (p. 98)
Last semester we read the essay/statement “Sucking” by Ariana Reines in Action Yes as part of our preparation for writing our own poetic statements. This semester, reading The Cow itself, her statements come drifting back into my mind and take hold (taint, if taint could have positive connotations) and refuse to leave me as I read through the work. So, in light of this, my comment this time revolves around Reines’s comment that “THE COW is the first book of The Koran” (see: http://www.actionyes.org/issue6/reines/reines-sucking.html).
ReplyDeleteSomeone more patient and loving than me ought to take the time to compare them line by line, side by side, and observe any and all correlations (there are more than you’d expect), but I’ll settle here for drawing out some of my thoughts on the way The Cow interacts with (and reacts violently to) the book of the Koran on a broader level. Of course, there is a lot to be said about the way the text of the Koran works its way into Reines’s work, both in terms of quotes and in terms of modifications and imitations of Koranic verse (early poems in the work, such as “BOOK FORGIVE EVERYTHING” and “FONT” come to mind for their use of short declarative statements and the disembodied voices I associate with religious writings); however, what interests me most is the transformation that occurs here: if The Cow IS the first book of the Koran, how are the two documents so wildly different. How is one, regarded as the true Word of God, pure and righteous, morally “flawless”, somehow also The Cow, resplendent with cock sucking and mutilation?
The central passage here, and the one from which Reines quotes is “And when Musa said to his people: Surely Allah commands you that you should sacrifice a cow; they said: Do you ridicule us? He said: I seek the protection of Allah from being one of the ignorant.” To sacrifice a cow—to blindly follow the Word of God—is put forth as the only way to avoid ignorance; death and violence are a requirement for understanding the world and one’s place in it. A sacrifice (a slit throat, a dismemberment, a ritual) must be made in order for one to exist above ridicule or failure. If you get blood on yours hands, you too will understand the will of God.
ReplyDeleteThis is the Koran. The Cow. Reines’s work seems to me to push this point further than it pushes all others: that violence, the grotesque, cruelty and disgust are so inherent in our human existences that they are demanded not only by God but simply by our living—we cannot even pretend to go through life with the chaotic breaking of tungsten lamps (30), the rendering of animal mortalities (66), rectal explorations, extrusion, fucking, hate, so much that she hears (or says, or both) “The best way is the hardest” (16). The world of The Cow is the Old Testament violence that never left us, the need for animal parts to be liquefied, experimented upon, used, abused. Carina and Jiyoon need their steaks. Reines needs to fuck today or she will die (18), just as much as she needs to “become everything” (20). “the world is real,” she writes, and just like figures of the Koran, desperately shedding the blood of innocents to stave off their own ignorance and ridicule, we slaughter (DESTROY) endlessly to full ourselves, a continuous process of eating and excreting products of revolting processes in their own right.
And more importantly: “A cow is a name for a heavy woman of a woman with sloe eyes. Cow is a common epithet for a slow woman or clumsy woman…a woman whose features possess a disturbing combination of ugliness and sensuality” and “One who is ridiculous…An impassive onlooker”(31).
ReplyDeleteThe Koran is the Word of God only in Arabic. In English, we are free to re-write it like this:
“And when Musa said to his people: Surely Allah commands you that you should sacrifice a woman; they said: Do you ridicule us? He said: I seek the protection of Allah from being one of the ignorant.
“They said: Call on your Lord for our sake to make it plain to us what she is. Musa said: He says, Surely she is a woman neither advanced in age nor too young, of middle age between that and this; do therefore what you are commanded.
“They said: Call on your Lord for our sake to make it plain to us what her color is. Musa said: He says, Surely she is a yellow woman; her color is intensely yellow, giving delight to the beholders.
“They said: Call on your Lord for our sake to make it plain to us what she is, for surely to us the women are all alike, and if Allah please we shall surely be guided aright.
“Musa said: He says, Surely she is a woman not made submissive that she should plough the land, nor does she irrigate the tilth; sound, without a blemish in her. They said: Now you have brought the truth; so they sacrificed her, though they had not the mind to do it.”
She is a middle-aged woman with beautiful yellowed skin, unblemished by hard trials, and she is just like every other woman, so they sacrificed her.
If you read on, you’ll also find that they beat corpses with her butchered parts to bring the corpses back to life.
The cow is a woman—the female figure, clearly and irrefutably a “she” brought forth struggling to the mount to serve as repentance for the worshippers of the calf, who once revered her golden color and grace but now turn on her with knives in hand at the dropping of a vole word, assfirst from the mouth of Moses (from the mouth of Allah headfirst, maybe). The cow is the symbol of reproduction, of fertility not only in crops but in the wellness of the people, the continued chain of our own existences, the existence of our society with its alternatives to incineration and its desperate fucking and refining. The cow is also called GO. The cow is the future, the motion of one worship from the past brought intact into the future, the birth of children from those on their way to death. She is part of the original sin and carries in her stomachs the fruit from the tree of knowledge. She is a woman. She is probably Ariana Reines. Tie her down. Maim her. Kill her to be not-ignorant. Eat the fruit leaking out from inside her.
ReplyDelete“At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world” (35). The Koran is supposed to be the irrefutable statements of the merciful god Allah. Let The Cow be the irrefutable statements of the cow who was sacrificed, whose leg beat the wrongfully slain back into life, who was harassed into death, filling her own meat with cortisol. There can be no arguing that here, at least, she has a voice.
So no, I don’t think, for all her quoting the Koran, that Reines’s The Cow IS that first book of the Koran. It is maybe what the angel was afraid to say, or had no mind to say, or what was said on that day and left unrecorded as too foul, too desperate, too far outside the realm of the righteousness of God to make it into the good book. It was the cry of the sacrificed cow right before they slit her throat, the way she eyed them as they approached, the will of the hands which moved to pull out her organs though they “had no mind to do it.” It is the musings of that cow (which here means woman, which here means GO) between the verses, eructating, desperate to share her “sea of love” in the dark (a place). The Cow is the book of the Koran no one ever got to read.
“Do you then believe in a part of the Book and disbelieve in the other?”
(PS: I wish someone would comment on the act of writing as it is depicted in the The Cow as it relates to the “divine” writing of the Koran—I’m late on my post again [always] but that also seems like an interesting topic to me...)
Put (overly) simply, I love the scattershot nature here, the absolute messiness of this book. I might say ‘disorganized’ but there’s too much implication there I’m not necessarily ready to level at Reines, I’d assume by how many people I know personally outside of this workshop that worship this book that I should give Reines the benefit of the doubt, so I will, and even if I don’t, who cares? Tidy books have their own kind of force and it’s not intrinsically admirable or deplorable (like excess) so I’m not interested in any of those kinds of values. My point is that despite several very clear thematic threads running through these poems, as Jen notes for (arguably) many reasons, the book seems to not demand a linear reading, or even a complete reading (if I only read 10 random poems or the entire book, something is lost but is ‘the book’ lost on me? I could argue no). I enjoyed this effect; the cow all butchered and spread out, now in the stomach of a thousand whining children via McDonalds—I’m on board. I can appreciate the confidence of that, or as Seth put it the warlord-like pillaging of her own textual landscape; not that such is that daring, though, no one is policing it, she’s pillaging her own village so to speak, but that shouldn’t take away from the beautiful carnage (yes yes, spectacle spectacle, what isn’t?).
ReplyDeleteThat all in mind, I’ve really been intrigued by thinking the poems of the book (as others have) as textual bodies. I felt like I could hear not only certain kinds of rhythms / ‘heartbeats’ to the various pieces, but that there were disparate but present varieties and forms all over the book, as if the many pieces collectively constituted a crowd of bodies, each with detailed characteristics.
Inspired by the notion of creative response to the book (could I say enough how energized and fascinated I’ve been lately by using ekphrasis as a context to reading?) I’ve done some erasures of some of the poems from The Cow, wondering maybe if they just hadn’t been put through the slice of the slaughterhouse enough? I don’t know, but I wanted to do my own bits of sculpting to these bodies, so I’ll share a couple…
EU APPROVED
ReplyDeleteTHE SYSTEM EFFECTIVELY AND RELIABLY ADDRESSES CARCASSES
To address a carcass is poetry.
perfect for animal size
THE 7000 POUND CONTROLLER
WASTESCHOOLS
this is real poetry because it is passed through me
HABEAS CORPUS
Light poured out of
the older.
Maybe writing is vestigial,
suffering intellection.
She stayed gaunt in her animal
safekeeping.
Her foundering vantage,
her scented life jacket.
AFTERWARD
Does a resemblance mean the world rhymes too much.
Maybe I spell it like a family against your will.
I was going to write “meaning”.
This liberty and I am tired,
go on, this ceaseless squabble,
just rhyme.
What most interested me about The Cow was the idea of holes. Holes in the body or orifices if you will – holes in the brain caused by prions, holes that leak or vacuum, holes within the systems of the body – intestines, stomach, etc. holes as natural and/or unnatural – as uncanny and creepy – at sites of contamination and/or decay. “the emergency takes place / it’s a hole. Nobody knows how they got there” (p.3). I was thinking about holes in the body as an emergency because they are unnatural and invite infection, disease, contamination and/or decay – they allow things in the body making the body unsterile, when perhaps sterile is what we should be – or sterile might be the natural state of things, however, the body is unnatural because of its holes. When I was reading I kind of felt like all bodies – needed to be without holes – rather – that holes were unnatural things because they allow for infections to enter the body, and because they are also sites of infection – and infection is unnatural. Then near the end of the book I was thinking along the lines of something a little more generative – what if the hand is a hole through which writing is spewed? Instead of saying that it’s coming from your brain, mouth, where the language is coming from – but rather from the physical act of doing it – the physical motion in your hand that types or writes? Along those lines I felt like the book moved more towards regeneration at the end versus the middle that I felt was steeped in decay and death a lot of the time.
ReplyDeleteAnd in thinking about death – and regeneration – how does ingesting The Cow and the cow effect us? It’s strange for us to ingest The Cow as its text and ingestion through the eyes is different than ingestion through the mouth (holes again). And both of them leave us with a sort of infection or infestation – The Cow – is collaged – at least a little bit – as per the credits at the back of the book – and it is also so sensory it is almost as if we were in the field, the slaughterhouse, inside our own inside out bodies, and inside the body – the stomach of the cow. I’m thinking that Reines takes us in the poem where ingestion through the mouth does not necessarily take us. She takes us in through a different hole(s) and makes us ingest the death of the cow through a synesthetic experience – the words that go through our eyes to our brains, and the detailed descriptions of the bodies of cows, slaughter, etc. whereas the experience through the mouth is a more sensual – purely sensory experience that has less to do with thing intellectual (I think)and more to do with the innate, unconscious, subconscious, “unthinking” parts of the body. By “unthinking” I am thinking more along the lines of biological processes which we do not consciously control, like stomach acid, the fact that we breathe and our hearts beat, the movement of our intestines, digestion, etc.
And was especially thinking of page 83 where she talks about “infecting” the air with the sound of the cow – “If her flesh can be ruined because of how maurauded she feels can the air / be ruined if she cries out inside it / who if I cried out CREAM O LAND / who if I cried out / who if I fried would hear me etc …what happens to an air that carries the screams of what is under / slaughter.” And I related this to what I was thinking about the landscape in Song for his Disappeared Love – how the landscape could get infected with fear and the fear is eaten – therefore in the same way could the fear of the cow be in the meat and then be transferred to us? I feel like this kind of hysterical infection exists – and that even the idea of the this kind of infection is infectious. And that this sound too is released from a hole – the mouth – and how that hole is a site of infection but is also a way of spreading infection vocally.
ReplyDeleteOverall I really enjoyed reading The Cow this time – I had tried to read it before unsuccessfully but this time I came at it from a very different perspective, especially after reading http://www.actionyes.org/issue6/reines/reines-sucking.html
For one of Johannes’ classes. When I first started reading The Cow I immediately rejected it and felt like all the poems were the same – granted I only read maybe 4 of them before I gave up – but after reading this (I haven’t read it since I read it for class) I felt more open to The Cow and wanted to read it again so was glad to have a chance to read it again. I was wondering if reading “Sucking” influenced your readings of The Cow and if so, how?
A sacrifice (a slit throat, a dismemberment, a ritual) must be made in order for one to exist above ridicule or failure. If you get blood on yours hands, you too will understand the will of God.
ReplyDeletere: Amanda's post -- I'm actually really interested in the act of writing in The Cow as a sort of anachronistically divine thing. I think I remember reading or hearing in an interview with Reines that The Cow was written over a very short period of time (3 weeks or something like that, I think) -- a sort of manic period of divine inspiration. You talk about the disembodied voice of religious texts that seems to permeate this one, and I think it's true. Writing is revered but it also requires flesh, sacrifice, ridiculousness -- to access it you have to speak in tongues and understand them, wound your hands (stigmata) to make a hole through which the writing can pour out and at the same time make an artifact of your body that will always bear the mark of having been wounded for the divine (poetry). it's also a kind of immaculate conception. what if "if I don't fuck today I'll die" means "if I don't write today I'll die" ? what if the interaction with the divine, the muse, Poetry, is a kind of fucking, the body interacting with the metaphysical, the becoming a medium, a fucked madonna, who labors and bears the child of the divine -- the text. the cow. the sacred object that cannot be killed but will eventually be sacrificed.
The BODY of the COW, and its stand-ins, stand in as facets of existence and nonexistence coded through a matrix of time-cum- excrement. Or a regurgitation of such. COW is TIME. Bodies are ticking. Shit is cyclical. Digestively & otherwise.
ReplyDeleteBodies are a glaring absence through which time is understood. The book’s tracing of temporality is in the shape of a body, rather than as a linear phenom subject to laws of causality. In “Milk Debt,” the body of the speaker exists as the universe itself & a hole simultaneously. The day is smoky and ethereal, “a fume.” An un-contemporaneous article of clothing is the moon hanging seductively over the scene: a portal. (DVD SIMPSONS = PORTAL when in 1991 a pink shirt wearing Homer is institutionalized while 2011 Homer doing same might be post-Metrosexual everyman). Time then is wrapping around itself. Reines states: “It is not easy to be honest because it is impossible to be complete./ /The end.” Gesture is impossible in “the smoke of days.”
Poems themselves are bodies are cows are time. They are massacred. “A fond morning gets to know ourselves (8).” Grammatical fences between time and bodies are torn down. Everything but the poem disavows emobodiment: “Every line leans over like heavy lilies...wanting to get dirty and die (8).” As the book progresses: “Cannot have a “the world” but can have millions of guts through which the maize and antibiotics of “a world” are forced to pass (16).” Time/existence/being are processed and shat out. As we enter the body of the cow in the book’s middle: “I want a world to live in and I am vomiting cause there is no world (42).” We are in the midst of the Cow’s absense, our own bodily absence. (“Even if you don’t believe it, the event....is stranded somewhere inside of the real, being itself (78).”)
& the body that is an absence obsesses over enacting its dualities. In “Seconds” the eternal chicken vs. egg question is transformed to milk vs. suck. Here then the cyclical natures of eating and shitting and bodilyness are brought to bear, implanted with questions of organics vs. artificial, natural vs. manmade.
“There was an absence there, but one so constant it became familiar. I did not want to drink it.” – Renee Gladman, “Proportion Surviving” Juice
he only way me and The Cow could have a conversation is if I let it interview me. So, here are 7 questions it asked at random:
ReplyDelete1. Omigod more semen. Religion has a golden sound. (69)
2. Clean the language. Clean it. (15)
3. I wish I was a man I said; he said I wish I was a wish. (104)
4. I licked my way up your back bowed low. (27)
5. I don't care. My gut is sour. Leaning into the bowl of air under him. (70)
6. Nobody fucking understands. (18)
7. What difference does it make how a thing dies. (81)
___
1. Dear Cow: Semen is as golden as religion. Either you buy it or you don't. Both are a tinkering in the bottom of a box.
2. Dear Cow: I'd clean it and I'd shove it in your third stomach and hope that does the trick. And string you upside down and stand underneath and swallow the clean mess as it gushes down.
3. Dear Cow: I wish that I wished I was a Cow. I wish for your meaty redness underneath my meaty beige. I wished we'd meet in the slaughterhouse.
4. Dear Cow: Please don't do that again. I couldn't breathe bent down that way.
5. Dear Cow: My gut is full of lilies and missing of cows. His is a cosmic open space black holed above me. Underneath you he's full of air because he isn't really there. He's just your pillow and you're wriggling like you did when you first learned how.
6. Dear Cow: No, they don't. You ever been to grad school?
7. Dear Cow: The difference is that when I know you were slaughtered like you were I know we're the same in a sea of millions and that we're all as tasty and saturated as the next.