Ingenuousness

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

To introduce ingenuousness into the mix, here's Canadian poet bill bissett:



Madison Clell's Cuckoo



is not simply a first-person account by a survivor. It's an art project--Cuckoo began as an irregularly published serialized autobio comic several years ago. I was struck when I first came upon the comic by two things:



Clell's radical use of the page layout, and the extraordinary energy of her brush-line. But Cuckoo is survival literature: Clell has lived with Disassociative Identity Disorder, or DID. Simply put, a child exposed to repeated brutal behavior develops, as a "coping skill," the ability to create an "other"--either child or even an adult--to take the abuse (or the memory of same). The second manifestation creates a third one out of his/her own need for self-preservation, and so on.

Clell's "multiples" are as thoroughly imagined as any fictional character--the difference between Clell and a novelist is that Clell lived through them before writing them.



One of Clell's multiples, Rabella, is Italian, even speaks Italian (or some version thereof) ... one of the most interesting chapters in Cuckoo details Clell and her boyfriend attempting to learn Italian so they can "speak with" Rabella.



Austrian poet Ernst Herbeck spent most of his adult life in Marie Guggening, an asylum for people with mental disorders. In 1960, Leo Navratil, the chief psychologist there, gave Herbeck a 3x5 card and a word and asked him to write a poem using the word as a theme. Navratil was so impressed with the resulting poem, he brought in Herbeck for more than a thousand such sessions over the next thirty years, during which time Herbeck became one of Germany's most famous and well-loved experimental poets. I [Gary] will read you a couple poems of his that I've translated:



Ingenuousness is not, of course, merely a by-product of mental aberration.

Before he came to the conclusion that the mass media were insidious agents of the Anti-Christ, Marshall McLuhan wrote that “our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem[s] to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness.” This blissful electronic Utopianism, in which the spiritual form of information becomes a kind of sparkling honey-liquid spreading through the consciousnesses of all people everywhere, uniting them in an ecstasy of communication, is nowhere better articulated than in the song Asia no Junshin – Naïve Asia – sung by the girl duo Puffy Amiyumi, who have recently made a successful foray onto American television.



Puffy is the brainchild of the brilliant producer, Tamio Okuda, a devoted student of Western pop music who cleverly stole and tweaked Beatles licks in Puffy’s first hit single, Circuit no Musume (or Circuit Daughter). Asia no Junshin, which could well be the theme song of this entire talk, sounds, according to Gary, more like Cheap Trick. It’s an extraordinary achievement – in such a brief song (lyrics by Yosui Inoue) – to skip around the globe, picking up just enough place names and exotic nouns to convey global interconnectedness: Peking, Berlin, Dublin, Liberia, Iran, Afghan, Balalaika, arirang, gamelan, lasagna, pandas, and so on. (read English lyrics – explain one pun: ki ni natte – to get to like … even have a crush on – also -- irony of the “open door” and “outflow” from the long closed archipelago).

We’d like the ingenuous vision of this song serve as our finale. We experience the works we have discussed in this presentation not so much as objects of analysis (as interesting as they are in that capacity) but as stimuli for our own wide-eyed joyous enthusiasm. Its very ingenuousness echoes our own wond’rous apprehension of the lustrous world of the Autré. So … without further ado … Puffy, singing "Asia no Junshin."