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Mark Mendoza Signs of an Intruder Reading 'Contrivances' by John Wilkinson |
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John Wilkinson: Contrivances (Salt
Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. |
him weeping with his contrivances below
the bedclothes [i]
John Wilkinson's recent book comprises four sections: 'Saccades', 'Signs of an Intruder' (previously published by Parataxis Editions in 2001), 'The Still-Piercing Air', and 'Case in Point'. At 180 pages, this book presents a formidable world where the relationships between force and significance are performed for their contrivances, prior to a home-base [semantic] security manufactured for a captive audience. The poems recreate something like the primal ludic event of holding and letting go, permitted by the poem as a transitional object. Readers may miss the variety of forms and clear meditative passages on offer in other Wilkinson titles, but here the poems' shapes directly inform their consistent punch and incisions. They do not contain as much as thaw-out meanings through the volition of staging their artifice. This prompted a freshmen student to comment to me, following a recent Wilkinson reading, that he experienced "a barrage of meanings I can't take in."
Searching contextual clues in the dense impactive effects of these poems, we are left baffled, bemused, looking askance at the "still-piercing air"; leaving the nipple-like safety of our standard-issue rubber armbands — this is no passing resemblance to the experience of a subject realizing itself entrenched by the conditions of internalized policy. Why expect a helping hand, or public health endorsed by State 'welfare', when our mental ecology is currently set to relay and consign information from bad to worse. It is precisely because our time has and will continue to come to be subject to the service economy that poetry must challenge hurried moves from restricted to general models of exchange.
Wilkinson's book achieves the hard task of being distinctly difficult in content and form whilst reaching a peculiar clarity through the use of manifold tones and registers, sometimes within the same poem. For instance, in the shift of attention from page 18 to 19, we witness a change from the obduracy of "If do table-work & strip/ the mattering pathways/ strangle that they wrap self-curing" to the expository detail of "So send a set of duplicates by courier & meet the damage./ Mr Sanjay too, but smiling . . ." Later, when we flip the page from "Swags of cloud// smelling of jacaranda flowers, cartoon a god/ short of breath, make swell [. . .]" we are suddenly "In the rainy car-/park with the wind-/screen wipers going" (pp.135-36). [ii] This is poetry that can become necessarily, rather than willfully or reluctantly, rebarbative. And while Contrivances lacks the twisted narrative glints of a work like The Speaking Twins, it is still suggestive of the most intimate human relations (and not merely through relationships of l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e).
The long section 'Saccades', built around a base structure of seven-line stanzas, is a brilliant invocation of the bureaucratic break-ups between interpersonal relationships. The strength of its three 'Run' sections, with a concluding 'Pause', comes in the creation of an impersonal surface which, as the opening poem suggests, "hold[s] back but slopes/ damaged for the thought of it" ('First Run', C: 3), avoiding the mirror-games of psychiatry and anti-psychiatry alike. Poised at the starting-point of the poem, the 'light' of attention "no more seeps// its automatic crop. By shortfall only though it cottons on/ egg-ridden like a moist pad/ chewed following precedent, in double twist wound tight:/ what could be more hurtful/ than this event foreshortened?" The method is outlined: we shall understand through lack of understanding, by attraction and distraction, thought premeditated by the wounds of loss and the abbreviation of lives by wider mechanisms. [iii] As the section of poems later appends:
Frail flesh a personal ramp be if though sun blots the sun
stuffed in bracket cheeks bracket
will by degrees hollow out a change in orientation, cheek
eclipsed for heavy plugs
Enough exactly, that heart may feel. One side or its other
cruciated, beats out time:
the hand dangles freely to be gloved now & held to point.('Third Run', C: 48)
"Frail flesh" and "will", through labour of one kind or another, are bracketed as "a personal ramp" into the liquid economy "plug[ged]" as "Enough exactly", which "will by degrees hollow out a change" in autonomous motivation or the restraining "orientation" we receive in order to commence work. Syntactically, where does the grammatical excess of "be if though" leave us but into a labyrinthine spiral of increasing deprivation, both in terms of legitimate rewards and the 'real' time stockpiled by reading? As though to highlight the singular fact of derangement in relation to desire, the schizoid-like 'voice' in Wilkinson's work, eerily assured at times, does not recognize — let alone valourize — one man-made reality over another. One flux of signs is a reference point (a resonant node) almost like any other, and multiple references permit distance and clarity through exchange. How can "sun" blot "the sun"? — unless one is the real, everyday heliosphere, and the other a "sun": either a heliotrope (Rupert Murdoch's Sun newspaper's ink blots, for example), or the Heraclitean and empiricist's sun. Are we directed to a side — position or faction — of sun or "heavy" heart? Why the inclusion of "its other/ cruciated" that "beats out [defeats?] time"? The phenomenal flesh hangs limp to be "gloved" ('governed') under the effects of unanswered predicaments, pointing us to the dialectic of normative and descriptive modes.
While such commentaries may prove child's play, one cannot ignore the ability of these poems to point interpretations towards the very infrastructure of our [in]capacity for independent integration, a direction that prompts social investment without irreversible fixation. The act of reading becomes a singular exercise of faculties normally blunted by the misrecognition we experience when "the dull brain retards/ about a trophy it persists with." (C: 18) The 'characteristic' poem found in Contrivances enacts a lattice-work of dilemma becoming at once broken and dissolute through articles of faith across registers of "likenesses hung out to dry hope to emulate" ('Internal Audit', C: 32); effigies against the sunlight of monogrammatic explications, requiring the reader to com-plicate the dense poetic weave without expecting a single thread to commence a complete unfolding of the yarn. The absolute, achieved through attaining (consuming) a common object, must be avoided, as much the false hope of mere willing: "Fragile: what you want is best/ avoided & in avoidance shines whole intent." ('Case in Point', C: 133) Rather, the sly auto-hermeneutics of the poems place the reader amidst an assembly of horizons; the now largely vacant agora beyond the thoroughfare, a short distance within the city walls, where discoursing voices mingle with moonlight, machinery, stray dogs and fetish objects; the space once meant for turrets showing desert through the smog. The polis can be rebuilt over-here, upon a bomb- or Holocaust site "but horizons// set tombstones to belief or bellied/ canvases were vent-plural/ floodlit click-clack: God's message to an over-//ride shed, shit billet..." ('Case in Point', C: 134) Sentences refuse to stay in or tow the line, preferring the dangerous ground of non-propositional assertion, able to suggest the philosophic language of essence and appearance, without necessarily leading the reader by foot or mouth to authoritative statements.
One of the 'Line' poems that occur before the 'Trail' poems in 'The Still-Piercing Air' seems to address its reader's predicaments directly, concluding: "Take the noviciate. How shall their life's/ cover freckle new scope varlet/ hold, repeat, for the same/ index pokes down the appealing tips/ safely queued. This atypical/ movement hits like a harbour wave." (C: 113) The "new scope varlet hold" answering "for the same/ index", "safely queued" at its points, may not be capable of the same concentration of power as the "atypical movement" practiced by the individual noviciate's "life's/ cover". A fine example of shrewd use of line breaks, rarely mentioned with regard to Wilkinson's work, the reader is faced with the dilemma of choosing "life's cover" as the value of a filed insurance claim, or the scarcely more optimistic sense of a person using the "cover" of a predictable life in order to find pleasure elsewhere. Providing more context to this stanza would hardly help matters, since the poet provides familiar signposts of values in unfamiliar places — echoes of the UN intervention in Bosnia ring throughout Contrivances — rather than upholds moral codes, and even the "conviction" of the poem's title is undermined by the contrived sense of 'The Line of Conviction'. Then again, if the "varlet" were the "intruder" referred to by one of the other sections in the book, where, if at all, are we meant to read off heroic or ethical motifs from such complicated lines? The transference of negativity in a poem promises a momentary escape in the mirage of an event-horizon made by the poem; made all the more precious by the sudden return of thêta waves of bitter conscience. This may be the only hope we allow ourselves now that liberation, for the Left, has become the tired-old new, more right, brighter-than-ever Third Way, the rotten carrot on the same deo-stick dangled by a billion unsuspecting puppet hands "held to point" at sunny riches "stuffed in bracket cheeks".
More than any other Wilkinson book, Contrivances substantiates the blur between opacity and transparency in the production of [critical] [iv] space. The poems exemplify a writing that resists resistance in its clinical sense, initiating meaning that is conjunctive as well as accumulative: thoughts gaining significance from other thoughts that prefigure or follow-on-from these thoughts, tracing referents that fail to appear on further inspection, like symbolic "weapons of mass destruction", which can hardly be said to disappoint by their absence. Whether incomprehension is an actual condition or not, the Wilkinson poem seems to work with frustration in order to resist anything but the most provisional solitary understanding; demanding the reader find their own form of competence equal to and beyond that of the secret services employed by the poem in order to secure its deceptive protection of passage.
The poems propose a language that will enter rather than entitle, inhabit rather than inhibit contexts, requiring readers to reflect on their own substitutions, displacements and compensations in the process. A transient bond is created between poet (analyst/mother) and reader (patient/child). In a 'better situation', the experience should be of a merging (and emergence) that establishes a relationship without the need for projective or introjective identifications mechanisms. It is only from this initial mode of being that the reader can then proceed to activate the poem's content, creatively, relatively autonomous to both poet and poem. This requires the poet to force a separation between the reader and what is read, to encourage the reader to destruct the poem on their own time, using a full measure of attention to the poem's contents in a new relationship based on cross-identification (a properly subjective experience of 'real-time' that neither fixates on a particular unit nor wholly absorbs the poem's meanings). The poem might therefore pass from being (conceiving), through doing (perceiving), to playing (using).
The poet-mother/reader-child relationship here resembles the mother/infant exchange described by D.W. Winnicot in Playing and Reality:
The mother's adaptation to the infant's needs, when good enough, gives the infant the illusion that there is an external reality that corresponds to the infant's own capacity to create. In other words, there is an overlap between what the mother supplies and what the child might conceive of. To the observer, the child perceives what the mother actually presents, but this is not the whole truth. The infant perceives the breast only in so far as a breast could be created just there and then. There is no interchange between the mother and the infant. Psychologically the infant takes from a breast that is part of the infant, and the mother gives milk to an infant that is part of herself. [v]
Similar to Olson's notion of "the suck of symbol" on "the nurse's tit/ that Dante says we suck our language from", [vi] the reader uses the poet's breast in order to replenish their supply of 'doing capabilities'. The reader perceives the poem only in so far as a poem could be created just there and then, as part of the same mind-body corporeality as they draw their language from (one of the more disputatious lines in Contrivances cautions "But there is no such thing as 'the' other"). The reader's personality, soon 'lost' in play, in the creation of a potential space ("not the whole truth"), is consistently brought short of reality-acceptance.However, there is a clear sense of overlap between our apprehensions of the word's forceful medium — the medium is the force — and the apprehension of an undetermined 'us' demonstrated by the medium. And thus a common experience is shared without the poem making claims on us for our acceptance of its message. This may help explain why, for Contrivances, Wilkinson favours constellations and serial forms for his thoughts, where quantitative and qualitative markers play out their grammatico-drama in the form of waves of interpenetrative discrete experiences freely associating with other experiences. This process can sometimes resemble 'yin/yang' eidetic states, whereby fleeting sequences of contrary or opposite image textures are accompanied by alternating mood affects. Not the Freudian primal scene but an emerging or motivic site of production. [vii] Not the pretension of an apolitical 'plumbing the depths' of the unconsciousness evident in many Surrealist endeavours, but investigative and critical autopoesis explicit in the logic of creative daydreaming. Negative capability, in a Marxist sense, is the sculpting of consciousness; posing the question of health, the question's health, against a much larger "case in point".
As Wilkinson's suitably ambivalent use of the language of recent multicultural heroics suggests — something he admits stems from a "prophylactic part-identification with the oppressed" [viii] — the poet and intellectual must learn to balance the call for 'more' space with a recognition that any appeal to anOther will rupture existing comfort zones and require 'letting the other be'. [ix] To this end, Wilkinson gives his own and the listeners' interpretative capacities some rest by resisting fixed epistemes of reference and exposing the direct nature of eye/ear control.
Here we reach a key possibility for poetry to interrupt the abstract human contrivance that is connected to the word 'culture', both in the discontents of civilized order and the creative act of a child's negotiation (/negation) of inner and outer by reaching out for its mother's mouth and touching teeth, or creating its first Lego edifice. By appearing simultaneously physical and mental, the poems recall a prological fusion of subject and object necessary to the creation of the outside world. That is, possible territories are invited into the reader's creative consciousness through the non-climatic play of near-hallucination (subjectivity) and the objective units and persuasions of the poem's language. The poet contrives the reading experience of being a stranger in a strange land, part of the linguistic migration of a suppressed multitude, as one of the many clusters of words relating to refugees in 'Case in Point' (selections of which were published, in Parataxis no.10, 2001, under the title 'Dew on the Knuckle, Due on the Nail') makes clear: "'Theirs' the hanging buckle/ secures, theirs the goatskin/ grain enhanced, a shawl shook for the count// cloud storage recapitulates, a whip of vapour/ dashing the high tip over,/ gave its stem clarity." (C: 135) The "buckle" of authoritarian operations "secures" "for the count" (profit) the artificial freedom of land that is 'theirs' perhaps through territories of language, the contrivance of "stem clarity," by designation alone.
The unforgiving conditions for poetic consciousness, ravaged by infantilism, give way to the tender event of the poem's 'unknowing' — where the name slides off from the proud flesh of the impacted word and the world is undone by a promise that cannot, will not be kept, as long as time temporal prohibits the presence of the identity of time. The will to recognize an object for its uniqueness is balanced by the real need for apprehension that an audience must share at the time of their engagement with the poem and the world.
[i] Wilkinson, Proud Flesh. Lodz & Liverpool: Equofinality & Delires, 1986: 47.
[ii] Such moments of 'realism’ in Wilkinson’s work suggest a coexistence with its objects, as though poetic language could replace and not merely deface reality.
[iii] In the published talk, 'Mouthing Off' (Quid 7b), Wilkinson "this full and empty point, this cynosure and repeated distraction". "If a poem has a point, for its author it’s often at the point of its greater opacity, since transparency returns the poem to décor, a recital of the known and familiar."
[iv] Poetry plays the part of a despecifying practice in a similar sense as David Carroll remarks on in the work of Foucault: "critical discourse is located not at the place(s) where a discourse most fully realises itself and closes itself off to other discourses, but rather in the gaps within every discourse where it is not itself but separated from itself, where it is threatened with its own disappearance." Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida. NY: Methuen, 1987: 69.
[v] Winnicott, Playing and Reality: 12.
[vi] Olson in Connecticut: Last Lectures: 3.
[vii] "The unconscious is not a theatre but a factory." Guattari, Chaosophy. N.Y.: Semiotext(e), 1995: 75.
[viii] 'Cadences'. Reality Studios, nos. 1-4 vol. 9 (1987): 158.
[ix] see Bauman, Community: 107-109.
Copyright © Mark Mendoza, 2004.
