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ALL HUMAN ACTS and all human creations constitute a single drama, and in this sense we are all saved or lost together. Our
life is essentially universal. - Maurice Merleau-Ponty, (MP), An Unpublished Text.
***
People are not alone and abandoned in an empty universe, but are linked by countless threads with the past and the future;
as each person lives his life he forges a bond with the whole world, indeed with the whole history of mankind.... But the
hope that each separate life and every human action has intrinsic meaning makes the responsibility of the individual for the
overall course of human life incalculably greater. -- Andrey Tarkovsky (AT), Sculpting in Time.
***
The poet in the 21st century lives in an age of stark contradictions, as we all know. Poetry has become more and more
public, and more poetry is being published now than at any other time in history. Yet the arena of public poetry, and of publishing,
like most aspects of our lives, is slowly being governed by certain sets of ideas that "define" what poetry is;
in other words, while we continue to talk about freedom of creation and making it new, this freedom is confined within restrictions
dictated by dominant histories, cultures, and the market. Literature, like everything in our life, is something to be bought
and sold. It is a clearly defined object, and anyone who does not produce this object in the acceptable form cannot be part
of the "discourse." Therefore, while poetry theoretically reaches more people than it previously could, it also
creates a more severe division between poet and the dominant society. It becomes more and more the condition of the poet to
feel, as never before, a sense of alienation -- from the standards and ideas of society, and the relentless materialism society
exults in -- of being alone in a spiritual vacuum, of being "out of key among the cosmic harmonies."
***
Every life reaches a crisis point that compels a spiritual re-examination, not necessarily a religious conversion but
often simply a deeper look inwards, and every generation and every age reaches a similar collective spiritual crisis. Since
the twentieth century, the century of the great wars, we have been aware that we had been building up to this crisis. It is
the sense of apocalypse, often dismissed as simply some kind of millenarian paranoia; yet more and more the signs of our self-destruction
are becoming clear: we are a race seemingly intent on destroying ourselves. It is against this backdrop that a poet must summon
the courage to speak up. It is no longer possible to consider oneself separate from the fate of the entire world. And this
is where the dilemma of contemporary poetry lies: because the world that needs to be addressed lives with barriers and boundaries,
some imposed by the intrinsic nature of language, some by political and economic regulations, and others by the spiritual
emptiness we have created for ourselves.
***
All communication of mental meanings is language, communication in words being only a particular case of human language
and of the justice, poetry, or whatever underlying it or founded on it. -- Walter Benjamin (WB), On Language as Such and on
the Language of Man.
***
As my life and experiences make clearer to me my relationship with the world and the language with which I try to interpret
it and relate to it, I am convinced that there are borders imposed by language, that is, by communication in words. Second
guessing, nuance, ambiguity, irony, misinterpretation, lost in translation, glitch, double entendre, accidentally deleted:
how many phrases have we come up with to indicate the fact that words are the most unreliable of communications, that in between
telling and understanding anything can go wrong?
***
I would like to be able to sum up everything I know, remember, feel, desire, hope, and fear, with words. I know this is
impossible. Therefore I choose poetry. Poetry as an act of defiance against the incommunicability of being.
***
What strikes me further, on reading these poems, is the realization of how ingenuous was the expansiveness with which
I wrote them: it was as if I were writing for someone who could only love me a great deal. I understand now why I have been
the object of so much suspicion and hatred. -- Pier Paolo Pasolini
***
We live in a world governed by ideas which other people have evolved, and we either have to conform to the standards of
these ideas or else alienate ourselves from them and contradict them -- a position which becomes more and more hopeless. --
AT
***
Another contradiction: Although the poet uses language to create his work, the language of words, unlike music, dance,
and the visual arts, is the medium most resistant to demolishing borders. It is also the most racially charged. This is especially
true in a multicultural society like the United States, where "ethnicity" keeps coming up in any discussion of a
work by a non-white writer. One must be genetically native to the language in order to deserve the use of that language; any
variance from this genetic birthright, and the keepers of dominant standards and ideas become condescendingly amused, baffled,
upset, or hostile: you are an immigrant in the language, and as an immigrant you can only be given limited rights.
***
In the American publishing industry, language opens racial biases. I write in English, but my being, what I remember and
write about, is Filipino. Nobody is interested in the Philippines. In the industry, the Philippines is a non-entity; it does
not exist. Or it exists only in so far as what I have to say affirms what they want to imagine about my country: a bizarre
and unfortunate island (and it is not even just an island!), a scab on the otherwise flawless skin of Asia, a banana republic
of seventy-eight million colonial cavemen. Because my personal imagination runs counter to the American imagination, what
I have to say cannot be said. What I have said has never been said. In this sense I am actually free to say what I want to
say, since no one will listen to me. This is what I call, for the poet, true liberation.
***
The publishing industry, with its bureaucracy of agents, readers, editors, market analysts, book store chains, publicists,
lawyers, and accountants, all of whom have some hand, directly or indirectly, in the final outcome of a book, has totally
demolished the idea of authorship.
***
It seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty -- that is, the use of words.
It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level
out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness,
extinguishing the spark that shoots from the collision of words and new circumstances. -- Italo Calvino (IC), Six Memos for
the Next Millennium.
***
There are self-existent factors which preclude the artist's making himself dependent upon audiences or anyone else: if
he does, then his own problems, inner conflict and pain will immediately be distorted by accents that do not belong to him.
For the most intricate, burdensome, punishing aspect of the artist's work lies strictly in the domain of ethics: what is demanded
of him is total honesty and sincerity towards himself. And that means being honest and responsible towards his audience. --
AT
***
The reality of a poet living in contemporary society involves, unfortunately, constantly submitting himself to the judgment
of a small elite of industry people, many of whom may not even be inspired by the music, history, art and poetry that inspire
the poet, and whose only purpose, to put it a little unkindly, is to sustain the very industry that feeds them. I often wonder
how many of these people, because they have been trained and conditioned to think only in certain terms, understand the work
that artists do and the aesthetics and faith that compel them to create. In any case I believe they constitute a kind of barrier
that insulates author from audience. I am thus inclined to praise the work of small presses, but more especially the inevitability
of more widespread self-publication in the future, the democratization of publishing, which new technology makes increasingly
possible: to demolish the authoritarianism of the industry and the institutions that support it, which I regret to say includes
even the academe on one hand and the "spoken word" scene on the other, two poles that have contributed to creating
a kind of herd mentality in poetry, a common, generic, "acceptable" set of voices. There is a tendency among poets
in the academe and spoken word scene to mimic one another, particularly in diction and delivery; read any journal or go to
any performance and you'll see how everything is the same. This, however, is not necessarily a bad thing: If anything, it
is an indication that we have reached the same crisis that made a poet like Rimbaud inevitable and necessary, a poet who would
deviate and speak only for himself, not just TO an audience, and certainly not TO A MARKET, and in so doing perhaps speak
for us all.
***
The artist's inspiration comes into being somewhere in the deepest recesses of his "I". It cannot be dictated
by external, "business" considerations. It is bound to be related to his psyche, and his conscience; it springs
from the totality of his world-view. If it is anything less, then it is doomed from the outset to be artistically void and
sterile. It is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not be an artist: merely a sort
of executor of other people's ideas. -- AT
***
Unlike communication in words, communication in film and video, because of the sensuous immediacy of the medium, is not
bound by the same limits: in fact borders are welcome, exotic, unthreatening -- even despite subtitles, which seem to underscore
a more intriguing aspect to the cinematic image: they emphasize the fact that we are in the presence of a different world,
but one that is equally real because it is more or less a faithful mirror of what we perceive -- an affirmation of our own
immediate reality.
***
I wanted to extend the process of writing a poem, which normally takes me about an hour, to several hours or days. I also
wanted to extend the act of writing beyond the page, or the computer screen, to involve my entire environment, and my entire
body in it, to write myself upon the world, as it were, or to write the world upon me. The process involved walking around
New York City shooting images of words at random, which I did in two days. I had no text in mind, only the intention to collect
as many words as possible, to provide myself with enough of an image-vocabulary to write a short poem. I then logged every
word I shot, and discovered, to my surprise, that I had shot words close enough in sequence to create lines, without having
been aware of it. I tried to use almost all the words I had shot. The result was a 5-minute video called Front Towards Enemy
(the title was itself a shot of graffiti on a temporary wall at a construction site in Chelsea).
***
While I was creating this video, I was in a state of suspension, of "inspiration," similar to the state I find
myself in when I write a poem. I was more keenly aware of the world around me. While I was editing on my computer, the words
seemed to throw themselves at me. Something had taken over, and stayed with me for two weeks, the time it took to edit the
video.
***
What is a poem? That which aspires to the silence of understanding. I long for the day when I will have no more need of
words.
***
What I say is absolutely right. I am an oracle. I understand things, and since I can't explain except with pagan words,
I would rather say nothing. -- Rimbaud
***
From the writer and the philosopher, we want opinions and advice. We will not allow them to hold the world suspended.
We want them to take a stand; they cannot waive the responsibilities of men who speak. Only the painter is entitled to look
at everything without being obliged to appraise what he sees. -- MP
***
Nothing is permanent, not even these images. What transpires in the act of shooting is my memory. The viewer sees something
else -- effected in part by my manipulation of my "vocabulary."
***
Everything that was ours, even if it was because of the mere circumstance of coexistence or shared vision, because it
was ours, becomes us.... Everything that happens in the place where we live happens within us. Everything that stops in what
we see stops within us. Everything that was, if we saw it when it existed, was taken from us when it left. -- Fernando Pessoa,
The Book of Disquiet.
***
The present is terrifying because it is irreversible. -- Jean Luc Goddard (JLG), Alphaville.
***
Every poem is the result of a fortuitous accident. Every image is an accident of seeing. I couldn't do anything similar
to my first video poem again, because after the first poem, I am now aware of the subconscious element of it. Anything after
that will be set-up, artificial, uninspiring. In the same way every poem is a new beginning; the poet learns a new vocabulary
all over again; he is a stranger once more in the world.
***
The frame reestablishes the world, tries to define it by limiting it, because the world itself is without limits and therefore
cannot be defined.
***
The perceived thing itself is paradoxical; it exists only in so far as someone can perceive it. -- MP
***
I am the instrument through which the poem is dictated. I am responsible for mastering the skills with which to "capture"
this poem, meaning language, technique, etc. But the poem itself comes from a source that even now, at my age, I have not
been able to pinpoint. Therefore it is very tempting to think of it in a mystical sense. Since the poem is given, and not
entirely produced by my own mind or my own body, and since it is given rarely, and only to a few people, since nothing else
fills me spiritually, since it is my salvation, I must accept it with humility and gratitude.
***
I can "blur" my words by using computer-generated voices, and distorting those voices is similar to the distortion
of comprehension I want viewers to feel when they watch my video-poems and miss words or even entire lines. Some people get
upset by this; some feel compelled to fill in the missing spaces, and therefore become complicit in the act of writing the
poem.
***
The voice of "Bruce," a computer-generated voice, takes my own voice out of me, exteriorizes it; I do not recognize
my words, sometimes they astonish me, but with "Bruce," I am no longer invested in my own language. I hear the words
as words, not as anything emanating from me.
***
There is only one thing that bothers me about this process: the fact that I and machine have become one organism, each
relying on the other to give him meaning.
***
People often ask me to define what a videopoem or a film poem is; apparently they cannot begin to appreciate anything
unless it is first defined for them, which would enable them to pigeonhole me in some category, which in turn would enable
them to understand me, in their own terms. You can't imagine how frustrating it is to deal with these people. But here, finally,
is a "definition" I've found and am happy with. It's by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in the Appendix to the New Reader (1970)
that accompanies his Selected Poems:
"I made all these films [The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Hawks and Sparrows, Oedipus Rex, Teorema, Porcile,
Medea] 'as a poet.' It's not necessary here to analyze the equivalences between 'poetic feeling' aroused by certain sequences
in my films and a similar one aroused by certain parts of my books of poetry. The attempt to define such an equivalence has
never been made except very generally, when referring to subject matter. But I think one can't deny that a certain way of
feeling something occurs in the same identical way when one is faced with some of my lines or some of my shots."
***
When I saw Nam June Paik's retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, I realized I was looking at the culmination of all
that had been technically possible in the 20th century. We live in an age equivalent to the invention of the Guttenberg press,
which changed the course of disseminated literature from oral to text. This is the era Rimbaud longed for, when poetry has
no choice but to address all the senses simultaneously.
***
In no other field do poetry and technology walk hand in hand the way that they do in the field of electronics. -- Michelangelo
Antonioni, Almost a Confession.
***
The effort of modern painting has been directed not so much toward choosing between line and color, or even between the
figuration of things and the creation of signs, as it has been toward multiplying the system of equivalances, toward severing
their adherence to the envelope of things. This effort might force us to create new materials or new means of expression,
but it could well be realized at times by the reexamination and reinvestment of those which existed already. -- MP
***
During a residency in Provence, I found myself in the company of people with whom I shared no common language (my French
being only rudimentary). I decided to create a video poem all of us could understand, in other words a poem using not words
but images. I "wrote" the poem in three parts, using shadows cast by the sea on a wall, a puddle of rain reflecting
a tree, and the sea shot through the frame of a window. One of the residents, however, was a blind poet. She could hear the
sounds of distant voices, the water, silence, but someone had to describe the images to her. The senses take what they can;
the mind (imagination, memory, fear, desire) creates what it wants to see.
***
She suggested we collaborate on a poem: she would write a line in French, and I would finish the line in English. I suggested
taking it a step further: I would respond in English, Tagalog, and images. The result is an 8-minute video I call Desire and
Nostalgia in Three or Four Languages. One part of the video shows her reading from braille. It is followed by my translation
of her text, electronically rendered by distorting the "Speak" function on my computer. I wanted to blur language
to such a point that not even the familiar would seem familiar, so that the "reader" would have to tread in an unsettling
territory in which he or she must rely on his or her own imaging of words. We fear what we cannot name.
***
Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, 109.
***
Libog: the Tagalog word for lust, but also equivalent to the French je ne sais quoi. Thus we say of something less than
extraordinary: kulang sa libog, lacking in lust.
***
Photography in verse. Edouard Fournier, 1864, quoted in WB, The Arcades Project.
***
Art: to be drawn to an object upon whom one invests an unsettling fascination. The prayer that leads to stigmata, the
infatuation that leads to obsession. The need to constantly praise creation, the dangerous yearning that wrecked the soul
of Poor Kit Smart.
***
For in my nature I quested for beauty, but God, God hath sent me to sea for pearls. -- Christopher Smart.
***
"In the future, only beauty will shock us."
***
Today there are only states of being -- all stories have become obsolete and clichéd, and have resolved themselves. All
that remains is time. -- Bela Tarr, notes on The Werckmeister Harmonies.
***
Interior language, exterior world. In the Philippines I wrote in English, the language that represented for me the interior,
distinct from my material reality. It enabled me to go within, into a secret realm, because there was no chance for my poems
to be read by too many people. It was also a language that filled me with contradictory emotions: while it expressed my innermost
thoughts and emotions, it was nonetheless a language to which I had no native claim, and it deprived me of the immediacy a
"native" language is supposed to give. It was a language that obliterated me, not only to myself but to the rest
of the world, and especially to the empire which imposed it upon me, where a non-native speaker, an immigrant in the language,
will always be inferior. But in the U.S., English has surfaced as my everyday language, not just the language of my poetry.
It brought me face to face with my interior world, the world I had previously articulated only in private, and brought it
up from its depths for everyone to see; it was a terrifying experience in the beginning, but it demolished another barrier
for me: the barrier I had imposed upon language to protect me from my own emotions and memories. When people ask me if I have
changed after years of living in America, I say yes: I have finally made my peace with the language.
***
There is a deep sense of the interior in America but it is expressed in terms of desolation. The interior is a place to
be afraid of. The homeless, mumbling on the street, unwashed, stinking of urine, are the most interior of its citizens.
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