I'm Wearing A Paper Mask of My Own Face As I Type This Up For All of You

Ventrakl is both a haunting book and a book that is itself haunted. Georg Trakl obviously looms over every bit of the work here, but Trakl’s own ghosts—his family and life, his hallucinations—also complicate the spook landscape here.

The most moving aspect of the entire work was the honesty I perceived to be on display from the constructor of this text, Christian Hawkey. I say ‘constructor’ because I’m not sure what role one might say Hawkey had in this book, moving through modes of being a translator both in actual translating and in engaging with the struggles of translation itself, but also an investigator, a curator of impressions about Trakl. Hawkey ponders photographs and biographical moments from Trakl’s life in what to my mind was at all times a deeply personal, occasionally chilling pursuit, seemingly looking for a particular something (a hole to fill) or an overarching takeaway from these searches and ruminations that doesn’t ever quite come.

It’d be easy to rattle on about how this book ‘raises so many questions’ about the nature of translation and appropriation, and it certainly does, but really I don’t think Hawkey was overly concerned with such questions; his preface to the book nods to all these questions and does seem interested in them to a point, but my deeper feeling was that this a book more at work with a more abstract obsession, an obsession along the lines of the ‘conversation’ that takes place between poet and reader in any book of poetry, translated or not. Hawkey clearly and repeatedly emphasizes this kind of connection—we know that it is something powerful in this connection that has subsequently produced this very book.

Hawkey wasn’t merely interested in the above-mentioned questions or in some strictly intellectual play as this book began and grew; churning at the core of this book like a reactor is something I took to be more emotional to Hawkey as the curation and production continued. This is why I find the numerous modes of translation and erasure spelled out by Hawkey to be intriguing and even amusing at times, but really their nature, at least occasionally arbitrary, is the means and not the end here.

What I was left with was a feeling that I had caught at least a touch of Hawkey’s haunted pursuit, felt the bits of quiet anxiety and melancholy that permeate the entire text. I didn’t ever think I quite knew what was being looked for or what was needing to be resolved, but I felt myself hoping it would come, and it’s there I think the resolution is in the swelling of that sad tension outside of oneself, returning to the same feeling at least of connection that also seems vital to the work here. If the book isn’t concerned at its deepest levels with translation and appropriation I think it’s because those seem moot pressures—fidelity isn’t important here, and there’s no appropriation if everything is felt to be shared.

The biggest weakness I felt in the text was the explicit nature of that sharing, of the ‘conversations’ between Hawkey and Trakl becoming a semi-literal reality in several italicized snippets of talking, ‘interviewing’ as the two sat in a room together. These exchanges were occasionally amusing or unsettling, but more often than not they just seemed a bit too easy, made the rich nuances of the entire project too simplistic and direct; they never did anything the rest of the book wasn’t already doing in a more powerful way. I also thought they occasionally seemed to rob Hawkey of his stature in the book, seemingly putting him in the role of the dense student who is always baffled by the genius of the teacher; while I don’t question that this is perhaps a genuine sentiment at times, it just struck me as an unsatisfying role for Hawkey who I always thought was on much more equal, insightful footing than he was perhaps comfortable giving himself credit for.

In conversations about this book I’ve read elsewhere, it has been suggested that these sections are unsatisfying because the silent presence of Trakl that throughout the book suddenly becomes literal—here sits the figure of Trakl, and the secondary figure of Hawkey is unable to really push him into voice in a way that seems to do any work for the text as a whole. This Trakl seems flat and contrived compared to whatever Trakl we perceive in the rest of the poems and photographs, his lingering gaze and tensions dissipating—if this was a novel we might say this faux-puppet Trakl is made of cardboard. Are these exchanges born out of some unimaginative sense of obligatory homage? If we think of the Zizek, is Hawkey acting through some sense of politeness, but failing in tact?

Joyelle has provided a rhizome in the question of holes, so I suppose a little water on it is due. Bearing this simple notion in mind we see holes everywhere—Hawkey’s violent erasure technique of taking a shotgun to Trakl’s poetry. On page 35, ‘But the more I look at that space between his lips the more it seems to widen, spread—shadowed and dark, ink-dark, warped.” Hawkey has saddled an obsession with this hole in particular in his attempts to invoke Trakl’s voice through his own via the contrivance of this book. In the section ‘Traces’ as well as basically everywhere in the book we get holes in everyone’s bodies, the invention of the machinegun and its absolute brilliance in achieving this. Trakl’s sister’s party-adjoined suicide, a hole to the head (an extra one, anyway). Wikipedia will tell you that after nursing hordes of hole-filled soldiers Trakl was traumatized and tried to add this precise kind of hole to his own head, though he failed the first time around. Eventually he opens a much smaller one, big enough for cocaine and is successful. The result of the eye-holes and all they take in. The hole-as-aperture, all the ominous photographs the book stops to obsess over. The hole of Hawkey’s Trakl obsession; the hole that every obsession is attempting to fill. “…a history of holes and what we put inside them, lose inside them” (19).

Can a book put a hole in itself? In a sort of concrete way I would say no, at least it only can when it has failed; intentional holes aren’t really at all, they’re the trick of an illusionist (we hope a skilled one), a few mirrors and angles when a hole is wanted as an opening, as something to fall into or as a portal to bring something out of.

And so many questions out of a book like this—questions might be holes too, awaiting an answer (a filler / filling). What label, if forced, to we give to Hawkey? Author? Translator? Blasphemer? Are these poems his or Trakl’s? If we imagine we might debate the ownership of each one (there would be grounds for this, I think) what of the whole book; to whom does it belong? If we agree on a notion of collaboration, in what ratio? What do we feel about the final poem of the book, the only one that appears as we might expect a translated poem to be arranged?

Are we troubled by the lacking confidence that seems to plague certain elements of the book or do we think they’re honest? Even if they’re honest are they compelling? Do we owe it to ourselves to take put a shotgun blast to each book once we’ve read it? Is Hawkey obligated to contextualize his ‘translations’ with five pages of prefacing? Would we feel better if Hawkey took that paper face off in his author photo and just stood up in the text for himself? If I find the text on page 143 to be so pat and lazy that it actively works to undercut a little of the book’s velocity, might I just tear it out and forget it was ever there on subsequent readings?

If the book can’t put holes in itself should I help it along?

"There is a vast network, an ocean of possibilities... Do you have a couple of bucks I could borrow? "

The trouble with rhizomes’ points of entry is that there are so many of them. And the trouble with metaphor is the impossibility of its identical reproduction in another medium. Meta- reproduces and refers to itself ad infinitum, reducing into an abstraction that, in its extensiveness, cannot be thoroughly mapped through a single panoramic gaze. If everything were trees, three-dimensional, maybe then we could grasp a concept and contain it, turn it over, and make tracings that aren’t anemic for their being closed. But it isn’t. Everything is flat, units of meaning are not discrete, everything is contingent, and nothing is proscribed. Better representative of the uncontainable force of desire, in nature, is not the arboreal--not a traceable, terminal branching--but the entangled root-mass of the RHIZOME. It is according to this structure, or anti-structure (a structure that is not pre-determinable, one not constrained by locate-able cause and effect, one able to incorporate unnamable multiplicities and the limitless accretion of all their attendant laws) that Deleuze and Guattari argue we ought to think about in considering the Book, in its relation to the World, as well as about linguistics, politics--in short, everything that experiences/directs planar movements between desires/drives within territories (spatial, and of bodies). There are no binaries, no easy dichotomies that entrench ideology by covering and re-covering the same classical ground. There is only the Rhizome. (Except that D&G have effectively set up a new dialectic in that very move to disestablish them all.)

The ambitiousness of this metaphor lies in the troublesome tension between vehicle and tenor.

I want desperately to be able to discern, to trace, the template of the Rhizome from botany to G&D’s philosophy. But in appropriating the Rhizome, the apparatus itself discurses in rhizomatic fashion; replication isn’t possible. The metaphor adds a porousness, a means of entry, not a crystallizing reduction.

Laura Dern’s character(s) in Inland Empire—Nikki and Sue—slips into rabbit holes of other dimensions, traverses the simultaneity of all potentialities. She is Artaud’s Actress, a body without organs, registering multiple elevations of the psycho- and the somatic, on the perpetual threshold of immanence—but never arriving at transcendence—which, according to G&D, would effectively kill the Rhizome, by marking an end, closing the system. The stratification of texts/stories in IE (Axxon N, the longest-running radio-play in history, the polish-gypsy folk tale as the basis for the original screenplay, never finished, reconstituted as the remake) reconstitute themselves like the orchid and the bee: “interlink[ing] and form[ing] relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further” (10).

This endless (be)coming. These lines of flight. Do they imply a conscious agency?

What does asexual reproduction have to do with all this?

another pertinent song

Also, Walking the Cow

Extra: The Girl Monster Afterward

Hello fellow students. As I was coming home from school I thought of something that I didn’t think of during class. And because AR is so important to me, and because this is still technically my blog post, I will publish my thoughts.

They specifically pertain to Joyelle’s chart that Zurita is to Pinochet what AR is to…. Now Carina posited that what Pinochet becomes is the meat/social industry in AR’s sphere. While I do concur that AR is trapped in a system, I don’t think that system is the meat/human structure. Rather, I think AR is trapped in her own system. So Zurita is to Pinochet what Reines is to Reines. She is both the victim and the aggressor. The torturer and the tortured. She’s annexing lands: cock, people’s homes, and seamen. In Couer de Lion she writes, “But my smile was real when I swallowed your come.” There is a reason for her joy. It’s because she knows that that cum is hers. It’s a part of her empire. She’s expanding. But she’s also Pinochet. She’s the destructive dictator pillaging her own land. If the house is hers, then why is she making a mess of it? Shouldn’t she keep the pillows clean, the medicine cabinets tidy? No! When everything (and I mean everything) comes under your jurisdiction, when infinity becomes your limit, you need to ensure that you don’t become content, that you don’t cease exploring. This is why you need destruction. You need to take things a part, not because they need to be taken a part, but because, already supplied with infinity, you need some kind of action.

Schopenhauer says that the genius is always on the look out for new ideas, new modes of thought, in order to make his brain that much bigger. So AR is always searching for lands to march into, new territories to explore, in order to trick infinity. She shoves a glue gun up her thingy for the sole purpose of being able to momentarily estrange herself from her vagina, just so she can reacquaint herself without it; that is, being it under her empire again. This is the snare, or the fine print, that Carina talked about. But the restriction is NOT from an external source. No, she is pure. By pure, I mean no other element can get inside her. The cocks, the glue guns, the spit, the mart, the dog, are all misleading. These are not foreign things, but they belong to Reines. We know that she possess them, because they’re in her poems. They’re under her authority.

Zurita, contrariwise, I don’t think is pure. Yes, by writing about what happened to him, he is removing some of Pinochet’s authority. He’s saying that he has power as well – that he can employ his own rhetorical and forms. That he can recreate the experience without Pinochet’s consent. But the disobedience represents a difference between Zurita and Pinochet. Pinochet would not tolerate Zurita singing about disappeared loves and encouraging countries to revolt. He’d want those disappeared loves to stay that way – gone, vanished, no document (like a poetry book) to serve as evidence for what he’s done. So Zurita doesn’t have access to infinity. He’s not Pinochet. At the reading he said he wished he never had to write this collection of poems, which means something else – besides himself -- was acting on him. With Reines, nothing else can act on her, because her machine is everywhere. When she writes “my whole is just another whole in the world” in Coeur de Lion, she is disencumbering her “hole” – the apparatus that sucks in and can handle anything – from the restraints of an individual agent. She’s not one thing with one specific set of beliefs, values, &c, but an endless thing with unlimited possibilities.

Girl Monster: A Three-Part Essay

“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 21^st-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 21^st-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:

A cow.

Cow with disease.

The Cow.

(the slaughter house hue of red lighting. A girl hugs her knees. Cover her eyes with her knees. Recumbent.)

or how lipstick is a machine-made dick for the mouth to make a gash.

makeup is supposed to make a girl look Natural. red lips are proof that she is alive and ripe for fucking and functional as a machine for the production of human children.

luscious hindlegs dripping with. dripping with. drip. driph. It is necessary that sufficent amount of marbling is infused. To satisfy the meatlips and digestive machine that runs on sensuality. driph.

THE MAIN CARCASS RENDERING PROCESSES INCLUDE SIZE REDUCTION FOLLOWED BY COOKING AND SEPARATION OF FAT, WATER, AND PROTEIN MATERIALS USING TECHNIQUES SUCH AS SCREENING

appropriate to a television body I want to see inside of it so make a pageant of its machinery. it need not function it need only to move.

a body which cannot move which is tied up by it’s hind legs which is “hacked up and macerated” what does this mean that we can do it and we can like it. a steak is a substantial thing now inside of the machine of my body, it fuels me. I am a machine for the production of text sustained by a body I make more bodies which are screened and pressed into feed for more bodies and

SHE WAS A DISH I was a hole EMPTIED

Raw Cunt of

the BRANDED corpse

Please Beef. Please be Beef. Please Beef. Please be Beef. Please Beef. Please be Beef. Please

FINAL PRODUCTS WILL BE FREE OF PATHOGENIC BACTERIA AND UNPLEASANT ODORS

like a trash bag with a sanitizing patch that makes the trash smell like other than what it is. I want to empty all of the bodies out of my body but I can’t because I have a body. can I be in this text like I can be in my body? or stop consuming bodies maybe then there will not be poems either.

I become a carcass with soft eyelids inable to vomit violently. Rummage through the vaginalcorpse to find the rammedinfetus meat rotting thoroughly. Liquefy my fatty vagtongue liquefied languagefetus liquid my inability liquid drain my licks completely.

so a body

feeds on itself

which is a text

made of bodies

but there is

no substance

in a text

to sustain

a human

body.

Pinktongue sinks into the meatext. Massacreastication. Fleshy pink hood hangs over the emptied out eyehole and her eyelashes flutter.