Hello odradeks,
This week we have contributions by two poets, Wystan Loope’s ‘Beetle Jar’, an obsessive sort of poem about voyeurism, and Emil Kristév’s brilliantly cryptic ‘Translucent’ and ‘Capitiliad’ - two lyrics on winter daylight, and, apparently, the Communist Manifesto. Both contributions are interested in an aesthetics of difficulty - in holding something back from the reader, or working around some kernel of unintelligibility.
I have always been interested in difficulty: difficult people, books, art, events, cities, relationships, and therefore I’ve included here some half-hearted notes on the subject, which might at least begin a discussion around such an interesting aesthetic issue.
If anyone would like to respond, improve, or simply send some thoughts we’d love to hear from you: odradek.submissions@gmail.com
Lastly, we have an a call for submissions for next week’s newsletter: we are specifically looking for dream journals or writings on dreams. Please see the end of the issue for more details.
As always, thank you for reading ODRADEK! - we appreciate all the support we get. If you enjoy or find our work interesting, please do share it around.
Lots of love,
Noah Swann
PS: We do try to preserve the text formatting of poems - I’m not sure how well this translates over email or Substack, some browsers may distort how character indent, line wraps, and fonts appear.
⟡ ⟡ ⟡
Literally ‘not easy’ - dis- ficile.
Some definitions of ‘Easy’:
‘Tranquil, lacking complexity, requiring no great labour or effort’. And, coming from Old French aisie ‘comfortable, at ease, rich, well-off’.
Quite quickly we can see that to be against these things, in other words difficult, is to make a problem for the status quo in some way. Difficulty would then be: agitating, complex, requiring labour and effort, uncomfortable, not-at ease, poor and badly-off. The Difficult is, therefore, that which irritates the economy of the usual. The Difficult disrupts, even if only momentarily, the benefactors of that economy. Whether it is language or capital, difficulty is the zone where the flows of an economy do not extend completely. Where the flow of a lake must give way to the counter-flow of a desert. Inhospitable regions of language whose inhabitants have adapted and evolved in strange amphibious ways to survive.
Generally speaking, difficulty is seen in art, as something negative and to be avoided. Especially if it cannot be accounted for by some oeuvre: Difficulty in minor literature is dismissed as juvenile, frivolous, pompous or obtuse. But even the most pretentious affectation, even the most ludicrous stylisation, the most unnatural mannerism—. It’s this naivety that hides, this unready, untimely soul that is all the more charming and endearing for, despite its failures and timidity, its dream to be seen as something grand. Early and late style are usually where difficulty is found because it’s here that mastery, craft, professionalism is thwarted: Difficulty is all about failure.
This seems to me to relate to Heidegger’s idea that Being makes itself manifest only in states of dis-equilibrium - in something as apparently frivolous and fleeting as a bad mood. So then, doesn’t distempering the usual economy of language also bring out the it-ness, the thing-ness of language, make its failures apparent and bring out a sudden new awareness of the vast ocean of inarticulation that stretches out beneath it, uncanny and dreadful.
Maybe Difficulty is not an aesthetic triumph over meaning rather than a desire for different kinds of meaning, fractions of meaning. Silence is a speech-act, not without meaning, but with infinite possible values.Difficulty tends towards this asymptote of silence. Its a kind of pebble in the mouth, circumnavigating a lack, this hard pith, die Quelle.
It's not that the language puts on an affectation of style, but that the language is sometimes sucked into a concentration for some reason. Because of some vision, or glimpse of the world, some clairvoyance or madness. Some catastrophic event has forced language into an exceptional mass, which has caused it to behave differently. Difficulty is the visible image of this gravitational collapse of meaning; a m( )ing in which—ean—outh—other—could all take place. Poetry becomes the glowing ring that signifies the black hole at its centre:
It’s not that there is no meaning, but that half-meanings are lighter, swifter. Half-meanings communicate on different frequencies. Deleuze and Guattari say that “holes are not the absence of particles but particles traveling faster than the speed of light.” The light cannot reach us.
Or, Lines Written on My Being Engrossed in the Communist Manifesto
⟡ ⟡ ⟡
1666 pills’ parliament with its structure of coddled crinkled nylon, I get about, my laddo, Here’s to—, here’s a Fighting of beggars, a pastiche of Venetian ceruse. —and the woman, Gogiga Gagagigo & ouer-al enker grene. Hoot! Hoot! Bombard - the applications for the Chinese cookie, the situation within a dry mouth and the shocked shins, this horde, that troupe, our monumental affairs, there goes the coin, the coin What an orifice! O my salami pantheon my wading father’s fleecing, my throbbing appendage my once-removed cousin’s fobbing- off !! Do not, do not dare to stare the geste in the fit...
⟡ ⟡ ⟡
1. The Riverman’s confession A mirror divided the light, distributed the morning in small, fractured rectangles. Shuttered lines, a broken architecture that lay along my pebbled thigh. With the slow precision of cathedrals (High Gothic and French) my mind oozed across its dark lake searching in the currents for unnamed insects I could touch and tadpole beneath the quiet leaves of the lotus flower. Here, I came (quite unexpectedly) across an image of you waving in the water like river-weed: a memory — a keyhole, through which I saw you brushing lamp light from your hair riverward across the wooded lake I wondered brittle things that morning, I admit. 2. Stringing beads Before photography you were an actor, then a writer, a painter, a jewelry maker making cheap brooches in the morning. The sunlight arriving like architecture through the shutters while you worked threading beads, and semi-precious stones and counterfeits, your ankhs and evil eyes, all beetle-jarred in plastic compartments; your Coptic crosses, copied from copies. A long chain of diluted meaning to get here: this simulacra, this vague spiritualism neatly stored in this Jewlery Making Kit For Adults. Well, so what? I still string this image on image of you, don’t I? cross-legged and dressed in your keyhole silk, staring at your reflection (the door ajar) brushing gold into your hair. O O Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eyne. (The door: a jar) But why should I hide these amphibian habits? Why not my slime? why not my webbed hands and webbed feet? 3. Bless thee, Bottom! … Thou art translated. In memory’s dark strands, I imagined darker threads of history winding through your Syrian hair while you brushed it out like a scarf Say something about the moon then say something about your hair O, how it was like something of the moon speaking itself into there like a fruit over a lake: this is the prologue — the disturbance of a wrist willowed over beetle-black minnows moving in their hundreds smooth tiny and tightly muscled flash through glistened rings widening of rippled shadows—stones knock together and shudder in their cloaks of water I thought of you—chinked and played by one of my Mechanicals. Watched Permit from the Latin mittere ‘to send’ Should I have announced myself sent you cherry greetings asked for your permission to milk your image may I take your photo? may I stumble on the intimacies of trees? or raid the unread hieroglyphics? Isn’t all light even lamplight even MOONSHINE copied, like your old rings, and sent through the iris along a string of optic nerve, aren’t we all guilty then of translation? The frustration of trying to see the light behind the light: shoulder-blades through the wheat-fields of water. • Is frustration what I felt looking on a replica of Byzantine jewels made in China, or scarab beetle in oxidized copper? Everything I attach to those beads of yours is wrapped in complex versions of myself— Goblin-self and tiger-self things I’m frightened of. I see my face spread out in multitudes Reflected in the amber carapaces of beads —Haha! they seem to laugh at me, like millions of little frogs they hood me with this donkey-mask. The truth is that I have so much mythologised this mirror moment—this speculary session— it’s long been torn from the you; my appointment is with another whose Coca Cola hair is heavy with the smell of burnt proteas. You see, I am ashamed to say I have diluted you, I have remade, remoulded you small as an insect — see how you fit inside my beetle-jar! — then I pictured and pixeled you your image turned . Again (you lack a spider's mouth) Until I felt, I feel now, not you, no , but a shadow history that grows with every repetition. 4. He ripped the golden brooches What of the world we miss in this eclipse what we so quickly call sight we call sense call motion? What lies between the frame to frame, between the skin. What of comb what of weaving water humming stone through fingers did I miss? what did I miss by sending you this cathedral of dung-beetles. What is unpermitted is unsent is gift (n. poison) but given is received and redeemed – bought back and paid for not forgiven. You did for- give me, and I still to turn and re- turn to that point and pour quick word-like beads over my eyes or into the porches of my ears O O, to feel blind cold beetles on my face running from my bird-faced hand feðer a feather; a pen, just birdshit O or ink down my neck just birdhand again O, and blunt with feeling fingers I fumbled the cool face of the page before your strange mirror-dogs could shriek. bead-black the water swallowed me in its architecture the guano covered rocks.
To Dutch Apricity
⟡ ⟡ ⟡
Phalanges contuse petroleum promontorial loosens sulfuric acid acidic Flood insofar as mud Upon some Führer-like will-o’-the-wisp sways aeolianising across Veins phosphorescent Anything else gray save for the charcoal hardly alabaster congeals Black onyx Globe that festers Pianoforte Dr. Pozzi libretto-operetta dirty thunders assault Gaily Faggots pearl. One more octave to retch, one more, could you clad that bloodshot moon In Rum profused in mahogany Axed Abbots rainbow one’s tor and reflection Moo! Had you ever any upholstery of skin vacuum tint of such huge pink; do let me know by whom you have refined the sun psalm, please, Transmigrate, permutate, Crystalline virgin dissolving I — — I ceruleanise void eunuchs Cursing dull eyes of prisms—golden sperm thymes seraphim; those are the ornaments of androgenous diphthong vowels. Might you know? Does it rattle? Impregnating Draughts of Shadows, afterwards, echoes... czar or lord-lieutenant, with the kingly stomach It Clatters. Shan’t thou sire Sweet myrrh? Man-Flesh off, peel off, off, chiaroscuro cellophane rough, Hymen, indeed. When were the Whispers Plastic Consummation Purpling there into penultimate rivers Turquoise may be turquoising Hermaphroditus, the half-created. The earth winds spice--- Lea, lea, lea: Wheezle do the oil-based Tinkerbells for to enumerate Crist’s lilies offal Goddamn Creation! - (cre - - ole) - co - - ral - Clays. Our God may bauble. “Thalatta! Thalatta! Azog!—Azog!—” Azure threads of thoughts, thoughts fucking budding Remembrances of ether: serene Culprit fever, things of Nameless vacancies—absences. Pentimento- Anaesthetised is the Blue Flame. Tutankhamun, O! catafalqueish cauldron! Cleopatra’s Hwatery milk is Spilt. 40 Swans of rebosomed Enlightenment.
‘DREAM JOURNAL’ OPEN CALL:
Do you dream, in the most literal sense? Have you ever awoken from a dream and felt compelled to write it down? Maybe it was so memorable that you recorded it even beyond the state of sleep? Perhaps, even, you record your dreams in a journal?
Or maybe you have written about dreams in a more general or theoretical sense?
If you have, we want to read them! Submit your dream journal writing for publication in an upcoming ODRADEK! newsletter.
Please feel free to comment/reply to this post or email your submission to odradek.submission@gmail.com under the subject heading ‘Dream journal submission’.
End.
Nice one guys, really enjoyed that. The most difficult novel I remember reading was The Whole of Life by Jurg Laederach (15 years ago) - as well as tense and POV changes, it was so obtuse and opaque, and I'm sure that was the point. Also the Oulipo N+7 machine is interesting in this context; purposely alienates language from meaning (ie makes difficult) which personally I often find very funny.
By the way, a dream cycle coming your way as soon as I can sort my notes
This was so well written, loved it as usual!