Contortion

[Panel from "Pasha Noise" by Brian Kim Stefans and Gary Sullivan.]

Stacy Doris’ Conference is a paroxysm of the imagination.


[Book cover of Conference.]

As an arabesque is the contortion of a straight line into bewitching intricacy, Conference is a contortion of the 12th century Sufi poet Farid-al-Din Attar’s poem, Conference of the Birds. In Attar’s poem, a group of birds led by a hoopoe set out on a pilgrimage to find their true king, and in doing so must pass through a number of valleys, one of which is the valley of love. Attar writes,

“To enter it one must be a flaming fire--what shall I say? A man must himself be fire. The face of the lover must be enflamed, burning and impetuous as fire…..In this valley, love is represented by fire, and reason by smoke. When love comes reason disappears. Reason cannot live with the folly of love; love has nothing to do with human reason.”



Think of the valley of love as Conference. Even before you read the first page, you can see in the list of characters that this is a book replete with the fiery love gas of impetuous unreason. That unreason dares to contemplate concepts never before seriously contemplated, such as drabness and candying. Events in the book occur as pulsings, like a cervix dilating and contracting.

... We or I are parts of incoherence, in an addition of organs, added on.

Flight is breath's temperature, adding organs. As I rise, breath separates my heart from its lungs, kidney from spine, self from friend, drab and [b]. Breath inflates my skull, sets it off from my brain. Inside, expands a desert. Roiling debris. If anguish comes from a loss of identity I'm carefree, since I've never been myself yet. Air alters around me, air and its problems, but if I'm inside. I'm part of air's becoming. I'm air's alteration. That's what I or we are. My false future is one in which I'd acquire your language and have none.

I'm any organ stretched into, pulled apart in flight. Fabricated in flight, a temperature, adjusting. Air breathes us. Go numb. And in breathing burns us. Feeds on ourselves, the molecules of others that we are at any time. Inhuman. Then: nothing mobile, nothing urgent, nothing cruel is to land, where land's void or nothing. From gliding, if I could, I'd see a city or a lake as a seed. In extension extinguished. I can't understand any expanse, except as some blind need, measureless ruler. Love is a form of drab where an order or center shapes [b]. There's magnitude then. Disordering the drab, only falsely, since love breathes in, breeds out and in, and so is drab. There's magnitude in its lack, a waft, a note from what my father sang, the feel of any vanishing. Turn out the light. Expansion is where I'd inhale in your or our language I can't speak. Where you and or others live in and among any acts. Any bird riddles (air) not in asking, but in forms of repetition. To repeat is to make and eventually to scar. A little girl wanting some ornament, a kiss or fish or a dress, hurts in asking, not in desire. Burning in asking, a girl burns. This is perhaps the fault of her language or expansion since endings are limited by words and, perhaps by extension, in all matters. Questions mark. Another in a distance wearing white is visibility. ...

Like Doris, Bollywood film director V. Shantaram



was possessed of a gorgeously paroxysmic imagination drenched with the imagery of Hindu mythology. Although his early films are social-melodrama in black and white, the films for which he is best known (and for which he was much criticized) are gaudy explosions of color and image, rife with transformations and zoomorphism (reverse anthropomorphism). Kids love them! Jal Bin Machli Nritya Bin Bijli, a 1971 film, stars Sandhya, the director’s third wife, as a woman who has recently been denied entry to a dance company. At the beginning, you’ll see the image of her dead mother reflected in a pool. Her dead mother had wanted to become a dancer, but her husband had forbidden her to dance, and forbade her daughter to dance as well.

For a rich man, a dancer wife or daughter would have been a disgrace. So she runs away to the dance company, having already forsaken her father. When the dance company director refuses to even give an audition to a rich girl, she performs this dance in the garden, thinking no one is watching. As you watch, please consider how she like the woman in the passage from Conference: “A little girl wanting some ornament, a kiss or a fish or a dress, hurts in asking, not in desire. Burning in asking, a girl burns.”



Adeena Karasick’s poetry’s form and subject is the contortion and paroxysm of language. Here’s how Adeena contextualizes her book, The Arugula Fugues:

Fugues (as in Aus den Fugen) to be out of joint. Disjointed. The Arugula Fugues: where meaning becomes unhinged. Is dislocated, disadjusted or discovers itself in an impossible system of disjunctive links.

“Unhinged” might also describe the pulsation of Stacy Doris’ love-gas language, and “dislocated” the modern goldfish puppet dance that Sandhya does in Jal Bin Machli. Adeena gets her language to contort and spasm on the page, certainly, but even more so in the mouth, where it trips over itself with the frothy frippery of dripping alliterative blisses and hissy fits and long sloppy kisses and astounding badass sonorous assonances. It’s like she’s playing a kind of linguistic twister, and not just that, but she does it while flaunting her outrageous otherness as Hebraic hedonist, Mae West reincarnated as Qaballa queen.

[Gary's note: Unable to find that video online, here is Adeena reading "Belles Lettres'" with film by poet and filmmaker Marianne Shaneen:]



Indian-American artist Chitra Ganesh has here taken pages from the Amar Chitra Katha series, India's full-color version of the Chick religious tract comic,



and cutting and pasting, and then redrawing when necessary in PhotoShop, has made an already surreal artifact much stranger.



The point of the original comics, of course, is educational, self-improving--and one might say the same thing of Chitra Ganesh's surrealist cut-up version.



The limited edition self-published comic book has the feeling of surrealism as the surrealists intended it:



a vaguely psychoanalytic window.