Alefa Desenata

 

 Once, so long ago it seems but wasn’t, I was explaining to a young first-grader what our goal was going to be: she looked at me and smiled and even though the ‘curriculum’ called for stating the goal every day and even though this girl who had been behind two grades was now ahead two grades in six months (yes, a four-grade jump, according to the authorities) only because she loved for us to read together and had a ball and it was all just a game, she said, so sweetly and genuinely, ‘what’s a goal?’

A goal, I struggled, is what you set to achieve, a point, a result, a –

What is a goal.

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Or:

What is the point of all this.

If no objects, then what.

In order to be a true unfolding, can it have a name.

(Not really sure. Then this – maybe. Probably not: three answers, in parentheses, to the preceding questions.)

And keep going: write this: to be a true, real, unfolding, it can’t be a – “thing”.

Then, why is there an “an” before it.

(If it’s not a thing, what the hell is it.)

Not a thing, then an idea, an enlivening, an embodiment, a becoming.

Not an art-project, but an art-ing. An action-ing: of engagements, interactions, creations.

Erect a structure, fashion a context, usher in the universe: within it unfolds all.

Not a philosophy, not a vision, not a work, not.

(Not negation either.)

 

Celebration.

*

An evolving field of operations, multiple realms of participation and intervention, universes of provocation and transformation.

Although: is it proper, here, to write full sentences. To put the correct punctuation. A question mark. Periods. Express it all, expose it all, in finitude. In certainty. Or –

Try again:

… an evolving field of operations – … multiple realms of participation – … and intervention – … universes of provocation and transformation – …

 

(and, long ago again, did I not suggest to a group of teenagers to go ahead and create new punctuation marks, to create a whole new universe, of relating, to the world… and to oneself… and to others… to create a different rhythm, literally, of being… to be, in writing, more accurate, more true, to the vast arena of uncertainties and curiosities, flows and debits, totalities and fragments, pauses and surges, speeds and intensities, finalities – and openings –

and so: try again?

Or, leave the parentheses open – as one should…)

*

…manifest through theatres of unfoldings: performative interactions, dramatic and physical assemblages, scriptoral inventions –… aphorisms and journals and narratives –… along with the design of frameworks, systems, and non-systems of being, becoming and relating.

Why not: put periods and close and carry on, in certainty. Repeat even, with certainty: evolving field of operations, multiple realms of participation, universes of provocation…

Playful and poetic, these creations unfurl through different modalities and are composed of both ephemeral components as well as lasting constructs and products. They fashion forms of inquiry and knowledge acquisition, manners of relating to oneself, others and the world.

The, what to call them, dappies, dippies, projects… no, stay with alefa, alefa for aesthetic and literary and educational and philosophical adventures, but also: the beginning of things, the first letter of my native tongue in plural: the beginnings: the creations: the launchings of new alphabets of being… yes, the alefa introduce newly designed concepts and visions within their unfolding. At times discreetly discounting, at others aggressively undermining, and always in critical engagement with existing categories, conceptual frameworks, and paradigms, they aspire to fashion new understandings and apprehensions of reality, new relationships to reality, lo, an actual new reality…

As such, they are not (cannot be!) divided by known field (i.e. performance, education), by design type (program, industrial, technological), by quiddity (object, concept, idea), by duration or other time-centric elements (from eternal to ephemeral), by participatory parameters (individual vs. communal creation) because they are constantly intertwining these various networks into new, and nameless (in terms of species), entities.

Practically and concretely, there are no absolute beginnings or ends for any of the alefa. There is no absolute duration. Although some may continue to unfold, others might cease at any time. There are no fundamental attachments to any chronological parameters, although decisions are constantly made as to closures, pauses, and stoppages, new launchings, relaunchings and rejuvenations. Each of the evolving project/adventures is named and allowed to organically grow.

So: what is a goal. Still not sure, but this is a good place to function, to manoeuver, to form and transform: through coherent and innovative manners of rethinking and rearranging the materials, elements and parameters of various forms and fields, and making manifest operations wrought unto the various components of actions and creations, fashion endless and endlessly evolving alefa: a particular species of work, play, and engagement.

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I didn’t first conceive it, chat about it, let it be borne, even, experiment, create. It actually just, just – happened? No, not even: it actually, it all, actually, just, unfolded.

Awareness of how it should all occur, because, it is after the –

Baby (my own), birth (mine), is unplanned: beyond: all things.

How to talk about it: how to talk: it.

There isn’t, first, I, then, breathing-I, then living-I, then linguistically-designed-I, there is: air, I-with-lungs-and-I-with-breath-and-I-living: I, an unfolding.

(Does this make sense)

Does it begin, does it end.

Unfoldings: fragments, gathered one day for an Unfoldings Organum – maybe.

(Don’t you have to figure it out, figure it all out now, just like all the other writings and texts – a vision of the whole – or, a vision of the fragments, that then unfold. No: just: plunge into the uncertainty, into curiosity – uncertain when all ends, uncertain why it all began.)

Some might say: organically it all unfolds. Trees, plants, all around us the things, the entities, the lives that grow: untainted, unperturbed – or, actually yes, perturbed. This too, an organ that grows, in multiple directions, with various intensities, different energies and many goals.

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Fragments, of this and other worlds.

Fragments of the end of writings, the end of fragments, the end of art, the end of performance, the end of it all – it all, it all, it all, multiplied by infinity: this too, has been written down somewhere before.

What do you do – to an unfolding. How does it come to be, exist: do you make it – allow it – fashion it – spurn it – or:

Maybe you make yourself disappear – or:

Or maybe you make yourself disappear – and it:

Or, maybe, you pull back

*

An uncategorizable transformative flow that brings textual unfurlings, transaptations, applied philosophical projects and performative gatherings unto the same platform, with each of these enlivenings in their own way growing into different directions. Okay. But…

But: where do they fit: in the scheme of ‘my’ oeuvre… Where do they fit, in the scheme of the idea of an oeuvre.

Questions without marks: that space of uncertainty, that field of action and fabulation without a name: that is maybe where the unfoldings fit: a place, a space of their own becoming (like any artwork then, it seems…)

Somewhere between design and art – and even, ‘literature’. How old though, how painfully cliché even, as of now, this ‘in-between-ness’: amphibian, here-and-there, imaginary homelands… No, beyond all of these now resides another: another reality, another un- : a field of theoretical treatises in fragments, along with their chronicles: in a range of ‘disciplines’, one might say: all given their due in the divisions, all erased as disconnected practices, assembled in a network of elaborations, discussions, divisions, destructions.

Where applied philosophy itself is an unfolding. But the Unfoldings too, are part of the Alefa, formerly known as the Dappas (the Design of Applied Philosophical Projects and Adventures!), formerly known more affectionately as the Dappies. Tourniquet, eternal swing from one to the other: a pendulum that they form, the Alefa and the Unfoldings: why not: why is something one thing and not another: they shift and change, not quite the chameleon, but, something like it: a constant swing between. A constant subjugation of one by the other. I can go on forever saying this, or the others, are not projects – but who would listen, who would want to. They are, and are not, projects – simultaneously!

(Then what are they, the wonderings go, the whispers go, or maybe even not so polite: the collective refrain: what the hell are they: well, they are what they are, a new thing: themselves:

Alefa. Unfoldings.)

(I even wonder, after the conception of the Unfolding as a genuine from of thinking and fashioning reality, will I ever even think in terms of Opus, or oeuvre, not within the Unfolding.)

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Not very sure then, at any point, what the divisions are.

Not sure if there should be bullet-points in this text.

Not sure if it’s a list that’s needed, points, dots, quotes, paragraphs.

What occurs within. What happens. The kinds of stuff that it becomes.

Comment and critique of contemporary relationships between lived experience and aesthetic constraints.

Necessity of not knowing when and how and why something begins and ends – or whether that all occurs.

An interrogative, but peaceful (not an annoying delusional-subversive aggression) and gracious and purposeful reworking of concepts and frameworks and foundations and boundaries of fields and disciplines and categories.

Fashioning of modes of becoming, of traversing life (is this corny, mystical…), of awareness of the manners in which one is confounded, bound, by the parameters set, by the language, by the design of all those who had us in their grasps.

Different forms of participation, of definition and of reconfiguration, of life, practice, of theory itself even, and of the selves that are hurled within them. Without any absolutist manner of proceeding.

Uncertainty about its nature (what it is), and its directions (where it goes) and the intensities and the personhoods that inhabit it; that give it ‘corps’, a body.

Allows, welcomes, integrates the unexpected, the quizzical, the crazy that provokes, that makes it quiver, that challenges even its very structure.

Integrates others’ practices – and then it all becomes an unfolding within the organum.

Necessity of feeling oneself as part of a an overall Unfolding: connected to the wind, to the sky, to the trees, to the ants and worms and the giraffes and the rhinos too, and the clouds, and the sea and the river and all that flows, all that flows…

(Maybe I’m doing the wrong thing by ‘thinking about’ the Alefa. By writing the intro text to the Alefa. Theorizing the Alefa. Maybe this, itself, is wrong. Maybe, and so:

Enough.)

(For now…)

 

The alefa reframe and redefine educational situations, modes of interaction, learning frameworks and the very terms of the fields in which they are engaged. For example, ‘education’ is rethought and reframed into a paradigm where relational dynamics, forms of inquiry, knowledge acquisition, skills development, learning parameters are approached and channeled in various new ways. Named engagements (i.e. ‘professional development’) are rethought, reformulated, transformed in their actual unfurling, and ultimately reconceived and renamed (even if the ‘old’ name is used within wider social circles until that time where the ‘new’ name takes hold). They describe logistics-specific performative interactions, and usher in new concepts and new endeavors. They constitute a form of cultural design, with concepts, objects and experiences. Ephemeral events. Solid constructs. Experience design, in effect, applied philosophical design. And they shy away, perpetually, from an absolute definition of what they are, and how they are to be conceived and spoken about. They are fluid, transforming and transformative, unfolding. they are, unfoldings — the noun. And maybe the better way to grasp them, is to read the prolegomena. And then participate, or initiate, or intervene, or, all together. Or.

 

 

 

There’s Dax.

Dax’s mom, actually.

I’m telling this story to a group visiting from Europe, in front of Andy’s Soup Cans.

We’ve already gone over how Andy really thought about, or rather, maybe didn’t ‘think about’ but… brought forth the very problematic of the status of the image to bear on the idea of what constitutes art. We’ve touched on multiplication and dissemination, how artists after the 50’s and for sure in the 60’s could not ignore the acceleration of the dissemination of the images, not to mention the systems and supports where these images are disseminated. Television, advertising, posters, brochures. All this stuff, I have babbled on (ehem, lectured) brought forth an extended reflection, a reflective practice on the very nature of the image, and thus artwork, and thus the artist. We’ve alo already touched on the notion of the factory, the artist as a machine, the expectations of the audience, the proliferation of museums and the changing landscape of the consumption of art. I’ve even told my European group how Andy, at some point, among many other things he’s said that have fortunately or unfortunately seeped into popular culture and our linguo, at some point intimated that the museums of tomorrow, that is, for us, today, were going to be like supermarkets. Everyone had even kind of giggled and I’d added: although you might not see it at this point (it was late afternoon), it’s not really untrue. It gets much worse than in museums sometimes in here. That, had gotten a real good and loud laugh…

I’d set them up the whole time though, for the story of Dax. And so I started on Dax.

Dax’s mom, that is.

I tell them that I’d like to share a really funny anecdote that is quite revealing, not only about what we’re talking about, but in terms of everything that has happened in culture, art, museums, and more… And a perfect ending not only to the talk about Andy and the Soup Cans, but our overall lecture, our world, our culture, our, clear the throat, selves…

And I tell them the story, the anecdote, with Dax’s mom, starring Dax himself…

So: it was several months back when on the sixth floor galleries, as I was walking back from another lecture, I heard this woman calling me from behind, and I’m not sure who it is even after she says her name and then says, I came to your family program a couple of weeks ago, here, a few weeks ago… She notices I’m still smiling and pleasant but also with that look of a person not recognizing the person who is speaking to them.

Dax’s mom, she says finally, Dax, you remember Dax?

Dax, yes, I holler, Dax, sure, four year-old Dax! Dax’s mom, how are you?

Fine fine, she says, a little more comforted that I remember her son and by extension, herself. I’m glad I saw you. I want to tell you something really funny. You’ll be real proud of Dax.

I’m thinking, wow, what could this be, even though I don’t really want to stay or listen or, maybe, it’ll be true, and besides, I don’t have a choice, I’ll listen, let’s…

And so she tells of how the other day, “we were in the supermarket, and we’re minding our business, kind of going through the aisles, nothing weird or special, and then I notice Dax transfixed by some woman picking up items from the shelves. I see him all looking at her and I’m wondering why he’s so fixated,” she says, “and then I see him run to her.”

“You know what was happening,” she asks.

“No,” I say, “what.”

Well, she says, it turns out that Dax ran to this woman who was taking Campbell’s soup cans from the shelf and he started screaming, yelling at her insistently, he said to her, “No, you can’t touch those, you can’t touch those. Those are the Soup Cans, those are Andy’s soup cans, you can’t touch those!”

She pauses. Isn’t that funny, she asks.

That’s too much, I say, really, that’s great.

I thought you’d enjoy it, she says.

So then I pause and then tell my group that I told Dax’s mom it was good seeing her and that we then parted but then I pause again and say, this is what I wanted to leave you with. That the story Dax’s mom told me that day wasn’t just so cute and funny, which it was, but it was much more, much much more. That in fact, linking it to all that we’ve talked about up to now, and thinking back to what I just told you about Andy and his comment on museums becoming supermarkets… Andy, I say, was wrong (once again), Andy was wrong: it wasn’t that museums were going to be like supermarkets, or that museums are like supermarkets, it’s more that supermarkets were going to be the art museums! It’s that the supermarket has turned into the art museum! Today, the tomorrow of yesterday!

So… Imagine, I carry on while everyone has a wide smile and is truly getting, I think, my very, ehem subtle point, about the place of art and culture and the erasure of borders between the various ailes and spaces: think, I’m almost preaching to them now, of the meaning of art, the meaning of exhibitions. Think, I go on preaching-wise, of the nature and meaning of art, of our experiences. It’s a hilarious story yes, but also a great and revealing one. A revealing one and a troubling one and a despairing one and a… well, I finish, I’ll let you ponder it all, and let you mull over and imagine – all that it reveals… It’s the supermarket, that has turned into the museum, and not the other way around…

A big applause from the crowd and one of the men even offered to take me out buy me ‘ein Bier!’

But I have to refuse. Thanks, I say, but I can’t accept that. I have things to do after all, chores and work ahead. Thank you I say again, it was a pleasure, but I have to get going. I have places to go, things to do. I wave and smile and walk away. Work and things to do, I whisper to myself, in the museum… and then some shopping, grocery shopping to do, in the other… the other museum…

 That’s an easy one to figure out.

The programs in the galleries and the schools and the afterschool joints around the city all give them different names. Even I myself did that: gave the various programs different names, that is. Meet the Met, Closer Look, Gallery Chat. Those were the existing ones. Stuff I came up with: Wider Angles, Double Exposures, MoMA Outdoors. Whatever. Point is: design, create, implement, lead and perform: you do it under the existing aegis – or else there would be no way to actually do anything – unless you actually invented and installed the whole thing. In truth, to me, each is a questival, and together, they form the Questivals: a grand compendium of involvement in various forms of art, engagement at various levels, to various degrees, with changing levels of interest and intensity: where a transdisciplinary approach, through discussion and creations, across the world geographically and temporally, allows the acquisition of knowledge and skills, both general, and in focused arenas (literacy, say, or drawing).

Components:

Kids are a necessity. Adults can be there too. Their presence is, or can be, plenty fruitful – even though sometimes it’s hard to reign them in. (As in: during a program, a question is posed; parent subsequently leans over to three year-old and whispers: cubism, tell him cubism.) But the kids – age-range: 1-18 – are a necessity.

Questivals aren’t about having the answers. It’s about exploration and the discovery of the process of creation, the process of perception, the meaning and relevance of activities, and ultimately, yep, life.

So, component: you got the kids, you got the parents, and you got stuff you explore: in the galleries of the museums, it’s works, labeled generously, art. In the afterschool settings of my earlier days in the hood, it might be walking out and checking out the folks and interviewing them and then getting back in and watching a film and then something else.

Questivals are about a tone:

Good morning everyone! How’s everyone doing? Glad to hear it! – that’s for the kids.

Yo yo everybody, watta watta – teens then. (No cliché, true)

It’s about setting up the program and bringing in connections between works, mediums, endeavors, fields.

It’s about conceptual illustration, thinking, illumination, insight, through various memorable and personable modalities.

 

An example: the sculptural collage: I would, before a program, assemble a bunch of different things, anything, straws, cups, images, newspapers, mags, whatever, put them up on a table, and then organize several groups looking at this non-sensical object from multiple vantage points – wherever they were sitting. Exercise would have them describe the actual objects – a great practice for their literacy skills – and then we have fun talking about how everyone actually saw different things based on a number of different factors: the scale of the objects, how something was hiding something else etc… Point was: literacy skills, fun, and some forays into perspective and even Cubism.

Then… then, on one of these occasions, a five year old got up and said: what you see depends on where you sit.

What you see, he said, depends on where you sit!

O truest of maxims O O. O enlightened child of five O. Bravo, O O! Amazing. His parents were agog. Everyone was, like, oooo. And then, of course, we talked about perspective, angles, tradition and innovation in painting, but also: the media, news, life and knowledge. We then got up and for fun, we did the freeze frame: a person freezes, and people examine that person from multiple angles, distances, and try to think about the decisions they would have to undertake if they were to make a portrait of that person. Concept illustration to the maxz…

Yo yo, someone said, that was whack. And he meant it well!

The questivals, are without end… 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Short Chronicle of the First Bassadiga of New York

(Put together from fragments offered by the audience)

Make it moving, strange, funny, provocative, unnerving, funky, unsettling. The type of event you’re glad you went to and, dare one say, ten years, twenty years, thirty years from now, you can say you were part of. An avant-gardish type of event, if we allow for a moment that even if the ‘avant-garde’ is, well, on hiatus, avant-gard-ish gatherings are not – or maybe, a new avant-garde is always on the horizon. The first ever Bassadiga: call it: ‘The American in Paris is an Iranian in New York’.

The occasion: it’s the Persian new year (celebrated on the first day of spring), so let’s make it a medley of various texts. The Persian new year at the Janos Gat gallery on Madison Avenue in New York (in our calendar year 2007). No big celebration. No grand party, but subdued, almost sad, nostalgic, letting seep a bit of despair. Again, a medley: passages from the entire oeuvre: all the passages, on this day, at this hour, would deal with the ways, the multilingual ways the author has confronted the Iran thematic, and the panoply of issues relating to this life: cultural rupture, linguistic extravagance, formal innovation: from the use of Persian in the writings to Iranian ‘characters’ within the works to an impressionistic history of the Iranian revolution.

Not quite a play, not quite theatre, not even a performance, a… well, bassadiga. Hold an image that looks like a version of a younger self in front of the face (a ‘pancarte’ of sorts), begin the reading and immediately place the notion of identity and narrative construction within the parameters of the reading performance. Funny too, is how to make it all begin: with a lightness that only reinforces much of the seriousness and the poeticness of the texts – a first passage that ends with what is no doubt a grand peeving provocation of all Iranians (from the current residents of the country to the exiled and expatriate communities all over the world to the American children of their parents) — from the Tractatuus Philosophika-Poeticuus…

“I: was the one newborn in the margins: dangling on tears their screams the fate of us, far away from doom, but here the most wicked gloom I’ve seen…

I am the one now in the darkened cities and alleys where the ravaged ones walk hollering to the heavens unforgiving: I am the one whose portrait of glass is painted on the sidewalks of bazaars and the atrium of unreal Halls:

I am the child of the wallclimbers and flagbearers and chanters and rhymers and postercarrieres and fistraisers and killers and the killed…

 I… am the child of the revolution!”

Agnes Berecz, one of the organizers of the event, does the introducing. And we tell of the special circumstances that had provoked this first-ever bassadiga. What the hell is a ‘bassadiga’ anyway? Here is a quick description: “A bassadiga is a short interventionist interlude with minimal props and readings meant to present to participants (through delicate cajoling and seducing of said audience) inroads into artistic and/or literary innovations and alternatives. The bassadiga consists of a brief mini-lecture and performative readings (and is open to the expansion of its own boundaries).”

Because there are nor resources and there is no time. Because one must incite and enlighten and do it in playful manners and in provocative manners and in ways that bring lightness, joy, reflection. Because people want to gather and listen and feel. Because they want to grow and gather and get together and go on. Because there can be one all the time. Because it is always enough, it’s enough, of the tales told and the choking and the same. Because it’s always possible, since so minimal, and because it’s part of a tradition of street theatre and communal gatherings and doingwith what you have. Because it’s necessary. Because it, truly, is enough. Because when you want to scream and tell and go, and must, but also know there is no real consequence, no winning, no result, the condition, of us, us all, just too, well, too impossible to overcome. The cry of expression, because of the need, and the joy/despair but profoundly affecting act, yet without ultimate change, or anything else. The cry: enough already! To what? To particular situations, but really, to it all: it all it all it all, multiplied by infinity. Bassadiga. Because? Because. 

That means: there can be many more, many more bassadigas: everywhere and always, many more…

Next up: a rollicky fragment from the “insidiously hilarious and very discomforting Drive-by Cannibalism in the Baroque Tradition”: read, with much passion and verve, a passage towards the end of the book where one particular character of Iranian heritage – a fellow by the name of Rey Irani – has basically won (‘stolen’ is the word) an American suburban revolution, consolidated power, and now is having his inner visions of grandeur, triumph and parades down suburban streets. Launched into the passionate and absurd visions of the grotesque character, and hand soon, after, to the audience, the same image that had appeared on the earlier pancarte, without the solid support, prompting nervous smiles and anxious moments from folks who surely were wondering what was in store:

“O O, O O, O O, O Great Emperor Rey, you time has come, do not be fooled by lonely loserish naysayers, put them in their place, where they belong, where they deserve to be, you are the new leader of this revolution, teal it, what the heck, revolutions are made to be stolen, like everything else. March on and don’t give a hoot about nothin’, it’ll all be yours, although you’re still wondering how it all kind of just fell in your lap! You’re due buddy, your peoples are due, look at it that way…”

As the reading continues, they audience finds out organically enough, as the reading crescendo clearly indicates that the audience now is to hold aloft the images as the shouts of the delusional Irani’s inner voice thunders in turn:

“Go Rey go.

Come now peoples let’s all chant: a one, a two, and:

Go – Rey!

Go – Rey!

Go – Rey!”

Go Rey! Go Rey! Quite the spectacle, with the full force of satire and an effective illustration of the absurdities reigning in the political spheres, the gallery’s audience all in mock parade-form raising fist-like and with gusto the picture of the youngish author as the chant repeatedly went up: Go Rey, Go Rey, Go Rey…

Quick segueway, without intermission, to a segment from the Tractatuus dealing with life after the bombs…

“After the bombs, tongues tied, tongues now mine, I smashed the idols and the idol-makers, I sang the hymn of vagabonds and saluted thesilence of wanderers: happily in ecstasy, while I dashed and chanced into the allerys on the dunes, after the bombs,

And with the night and with daws, with the flints of the moon and lamps all, tongues tamed, tongues in ruin, how to go on…”

and then…

Then comes what folks do call, happily, the “most stunning moment”: right after “tongues in ruin”, Amanda Beattie suddenly starts reading in French in a normal, hushed tone, while walking about and through the audience, holding in one hand the reading material and in another, in front of her face, the now famed pancarte with the sketch of the author plastered upon. No sooner has she begun that Mariela Perez-Batista begins doing the same, reading this time, again in a normal speaking voice, in English, weaving through the audience and walking up real close to the faces and the ears and the eyes of the gallery-goers and then away. Wait ten seconds and go: join them in this strange and unnerving dance, this readance, in Farsi. There we are, thirty seconds in: three readers, three voices, three languages circulating in the gallery, a cacophony and a musical at once, unsettling and strangely comforting: all texts from the multilingual L’opera minora. (The texts are not translations of each other but interweaving fragments from the book.) Proceed to go very close to the audience, to the faces, looking straight into their (our!) eyes, reading and moving on. The whole ritual lasts perhaps three minutes but three revealing, or perhaps revelatory, minutes. Suddenly, one’s relationship to language is made utterly transparent, a bevy of philosophical and perceptual problematics coming immediately to the fore that one may never even have known existed. The readers, in their approaches and departures, are at one moment intimate sharers of tales, at the next anonymous wanderers reciting from an unknown dictionary. Every parameter of the reading and listening experience is placed on fragile ground: from the distance of the reader’s mouth to one’s ears and eyes, to the tones and timbers of their voices, the nature of their gazes, the expressions on their faces, not to mention the fact that the various languages would have various meanings,  and not,  based on the listener’s experience and life situation. One even anticipates, desires, fears, each reader’s next move, becoming in turn an unexpectant yet passive actor on a very strange stage! Language transcended. The author of these texts showing all of the anxiousness and the fragmentation at the core of his experience and his work, all communicated emphatically, in an inescapable way. The author crucified in a sense, his mind in nakedness visible, unbearable and moving at once. An unsettling episode that nevertheless becomes a beautiful and transformative experience, in a humorous and yet moving tableau. The episode ends like so: I, alone, raise my voice (literally, metaphorically), in the very native tongue I use no more for literary expression:  reading alone, softly, in Persian,

Sedaye mara mishenavi?… To sedaye mara mishenavi?…

A few moments more of this fragment, this same fragment, and then

“Can you hear me,” its translation, “can you hear me….”

The rest: dedicate it to a discussion of the title of the event, a digression on why I wish no more to refer to my work, as, well, ‘work’, but as my ‘stuff’ (to give all the glory back to the poor overused sememe ‘stuff’ and a better image of what the process and products actually aspire to: the poetics, the aesthetics, the politics) and a last fragment from Sil & anses:

Ainsi s’élance la nouvelle ère, l’an Un… Le spectacle. Le nouveau spectacle. Tous se rendent voir le poète sur son tabouret, à table avec ses feuilles et sa plume et son encrier. La gloire, enfin! La victoire! Triomphe final – et éternel! Le poète composant, écrivant: spectacle de la place publique! Tous les matins, l’on s’y rendra, tous les matins, on y assistera! Enfin! La justice pour tous! Liberté inégalée! Le poète écrivant dans la place publique! Le poète plus que poète nouveau créateur de mondes, créateur d’univers… Le voilà maintenant qui prend sa plume! Le voilà qui plonge sa plume dans l’encrier! Le voilà qui approche la plume encrée de la feuille blanche! Le voilà qui… Ah non – non! Il reconsidère, secoue la tête, fronce ses sourcils… Repose la plume… Désespoir? Pas encore… La foule patiente… Tranquillement… Sereinement… On a le temps, après tout, on a le temps…Quel spectacle! Le plus chéri, le plus inoubliable de toute l’histoire de l’humanité, de toute l’histoire de tous les êtres vivants de tous les temps, mais aussi, de tout hors-temps, puisque le temps et l’histoire, eux aussi sont abolis avec l’avènement de ce grand événement! Ce chant! Ce silence! Du clown sans cirque! Du mystique sans dieu! Destructeur des odes, des prières, des sonnets, des rubaï, de la trace même, puisqu’il composerait et abandonnerait au vent, ses œuvres! Le répondeur suprême! Et sa réponse magistrale, à tous les poètes de tous les temps! Dépassement ultime et final! Dépassement de son œuvre, inclue! Jusqu’à son propre assassinat (et pas suicide)! Il le fallait, et à ce moment! D’où l’écroulement à venir, l’écroulement psycho-sexuello-mystico-littéraire de Dépassement Absolu en Matière de Littérature. Tout aboli: les discours, les événements, les rituels: toute prophétie, toute prière, toute poétique même, oui, et toute plénitude et tout fragment: puisqu’il ne demeurait que ce spectacle, ce rituel, ce discours – cette prière, si des prières il en faut: tel tout chant du muezzin et tout glas, ce cri de rassemblement au silence. Ce chant, ce silence: Et un autre Silence/l’An Un s’élance/l’An Un s’élance/O Sil et Anses!

Read a paragraph in French, long enough to make the audience aware of the rhythms and musicality, cutting short just in time before the non-French speaking part of the audience becomes annoyed. The English version lasts, incredibly enough, through the coming of spring, and yes, the actual Persian new year!  – An event that truly was not planned! Uncannily enough, the passage is about nothing other than a new year of a new era ushered in by a poet: a poet who is applauded and lauded in a public square (yeah, right!) a prophet of sorts, but a prophet who rejects all prophets and prophecies, all rituals and ceremonies and who announces that “from this day forth, Year One has begun. And tomorrow too will be the first day of Year One… The final overcoming. Overcoming of his own body of work even, and the assassination (and not suicide) of his self. It had to be: at this moment even. All abolished: discourses and events and rituals: all prophecies and prayers, and even poetics, all plenitude and all fragments: for there was left only this spectacle, this ritual, this prayer if one must have them: this canto, this silence…”

Spending the Persian new year on Madison Avenue in New York in the gallery of Mr. Gat (a Hungarian), in the presence of a small enthusiastic crowd where an Iranian and his two fellow performers read in French and English and Persian: the kind of subdued thrill that is difficult to share and explain. And back to the sadness: the peculiar  aura of absence and isolation suggested and permeated though the limited props (the one prop, in fact: the image of a young version, either plastered unto a cardboard or not) and the minimalist ‘Haft-Seen’ get-up: for those not in the know: seven things, usually the same classical elements, starting with the letter ‘sin’ (not the vice), make up the tabletop of a Persian new year. Here, there are just a few, minimalist and a poor man’s version, more significant in a way…

Make it: joyful too, so that a definite happiness is derived from what one senses is a sincere attempt at fashioning a world, at challenging perceived ideas and conceptual frameworks, at building a sense of possibilities and, dare one say it, genuine freedom, for individuals as well as collectivities. More than all that though, make it so that one comes out of the evening refreshed, inspired and ready to go on (much of the crowd did go to a lounge afterward, a mini ‘After-Bassa’), and carry on. The first bassadiga in the history of humanity has gone quite well thank you! All of what one could have hoped for, and more important than anything else perhaps: It was Fun!

 

 

 

 

The rooftop roars are coming up and I’m on the roof.

Of the gallery that is, checking out the space, checking out the logistical considerations.

How did you come up with that name anyway, one of the ladies working in the offices says, I like it.

Thanks, I answer, it was, you know (how did I come up with it, I’m thinking), it was a combination… I was thinking of a cool place to have an event, and so I thought why not the roof…

That’s cool, she says, I’m looking forward to it.

Thanks, I say, so am I, I think…

*

She laughs and goes back into the office and I walk around the perimeters. The garden on the roof is actually very inviting and cozy. Enough room for folks to sit. Enough room for folks to hang and listen and be enraptured…

So you’ll have food and drinks and, I ask the coordinator of events and the director of the gallery.

We’ll take care of it she says.

So you don’t need any type of help or anyone else coming before to…

We’ve done many things like this before, she says, perhaps a lot more patient than she needs to be with yours truly, although she’s also realizing that I’m trying to be very helpful, and full of grace…

Great then, so we’ll be here what, half an hour before or…

It’s up to you, she says, we’ll have everything set up, it’ll all be set up and ready…

All right then, I repeat, this is a great space by the way, really great space… and then: can I just take another look at the…

Sure, she says.

And I take another look at the interior space and: so in case of rain maybe…

We’ll set up inside too, in case it rains or in case there’s anything wrong.

Perfect. Thanks again, you guys are great…

*

The rooftop roars are coming and I’m waiting for the bus to get here and ride it for five minutes or so. Why don’t I just walk, I think… But the longer I stay, the longer I should stay. Meaning, the longer I stay, the more the chance that the bus gets here. Something like that. Laws. And I’ve been waiting, so I keep waiting…

I must be one of the first people there and I say hello to the fellow behind the glass at the front. I’m here for the event, I say. Sign here, he says. I sign. Can I put this up, I ask. He peeks from behind the glass. What is it, he asks. It’s a flyer about the event, I say. Sure he says. Thanks, I say.

I put up some flyers and then ask him if he could direct people upstairs in case they’re not sure where to go or how to get there. ’Course, he says. Thanks again, I say.

Elevator up and it opens unto the floor. No one there yet, except for some of the residents.

Hey, you’re having an event tonight here?

Yes yes, please stay…

You guys gonna be reading in Spanish too?

Spanish? We could we could.

That’s great man, real great.

Yeah! So make sure you stick around!

He says that he actually lives here so it shouldn’t be much of a problem and so, don’t worry, he’ll stick around.

Great, I say, and he moves away, hobbling on one leg…

 

Cool, I think, to have a reading on the roof of a residential building. People can just go from their apartments unto the roof and listen. I’m already thinking of another type of event: Roomful Readings: where residents from a given apartment complex all open their doors and multiple readings are going on simultaneously and the listeners can actually move on from one room of one apartment to another room of the same apartment or to other rooms of other apartments. Good idea this, I ponder even though the first Rooftop Roars hasn’t even occurred yet…

(Inside the rooms, we could only read books that had been banned at one point or another, including my own! Cool, this… We’ll get to it one of these days…)

*

I try my best to be the impresario of the Rooftop Roars. I welcome everyone. I thank everyone for coming out. It’s great to be out here, I say. It’s also great to be out here with interesting writers and… I emphasize the fact that writers forever have been chased and …

I read the official script and motto of the Roars, but not before telling everyone how the name got stuck but that frankly, don’t have the abbreviated version. ‘We thought about it,’ I explain we thought, the RooRo’s, RooRi, the … But we’re kind of going with The Roars…

First reader is Patricia Eakins. I give her a worthy intro and Patricia goes on. Nice presence she has about her, and since she’s the first ever reader of the Rooftop Roars, she’s also realizing that it can get kind of loud with the occasional plane flying over, and the occasional fire-truck rushing through the streets, not to mention the other sirens and shouts and screams that come from all parts. She projects well and she’s got a strong voice, so all is a’right…

“The breath of the dead rich man has risen to join with the breaths of the poor,”  she reads from her story, ‘Death in My Country’, “to mingle with the smoke of their burnt bodies. But his breath is fat and lazy. And when the other dead sing like silent birds, trilling the name of Jesus, the rich man’s voice hits neither the high notes nor the low notes, but only the easy ones in the middle. And when the other breaths float up above the sky to sit at His Father’s side with Jesus, the fat rich breaths fall back on the earth. Sometimes you see where they have fallen, little wet grease spots in the dust.

Someday all the Jesuses on earth, the ones on crosses in houses and churches, the ones on rosaries in pockets, all those wooden Jesuses will rise to join the real one whose body and breath are living in death. All the crosses will suddenly be empty. So we will burn them, burn the rags He had been wearing at His loins. And the smoke will rise with the smoke of our poor dead. The ashes we will place on our tongues as bread, and in this way we will be fed.

(P. Eakins, Death in My Country, in Reading Patricia Eakins, Presses Universitaires d’Orleans, France 2002)

*

Councilman Martinez makes a surprise visit. He comes in the middle and Ofelia is happy to see that so many people are actually there. Councilman Martinez’ office gives money for community programs and well, this is a community event! Ofelia introduces him and he speaks for a minute or two. Seems like a decent enough fellow the councilman. Will be happy to know that we’re reading from the poeta himself, Pedro Mir…

Ofelia, actually is reading from Pedro Mir now in Spanish after Patricia’s forceful rendition of Mir in Spanish. During the Roars, each writer is to read from their own text, and the texts of a ‘banished’ writer – however one were to define ‘banished’. Patricia had chosen the Dominican poet Mir, who had been exiled for a while, and now Ofelia is reading, in Spanish (I’d brought the book, knowing this could happen!)

Ofelia is very powerful. She’s completely feeling it, for real. Deeply and powerfully and with passion and emotion. He was from my hometown, she says in her introduction, he was from my hometown. I hope the guy who asked me earlier if we’re reading in Spanish is out there, I’m thinking, but I don’t see him. Where the hell did he go, I utter to no one in particular, but he’s not there, not there to hear Pedro Mir:

“Y un día,

En medio del asombro mas grande de la historia,

Pasando a traves de muros y murallas

La risa y la Victoria,

Encendiendo candiles de jubilo en los ojos

Y en los tuneles y en los escombros

¡oh, Walt Whitman de barba nuestra y definitiva!

Nosotros para nosotros, sobre nosotros

Y delante de nosotros…”

 

And we go on…

 

“¡oh, Walt Whitman de barba levantada!

Aquí estamos sin barba,

Sin brazos, sin oído,

Sin fuerzas en los labios,

Mirados de rojo,

Rojos y perseguidos,

Llenos de pupilas

Que a traves de las isles se dilatan,

Llenos de coraje, de nudos de soberbia

Que a traves de los pueblos se desatan,

Con tu signo y tu idioma de Walt Whitman

Aqui estamos

En pie

Para justificarte,

¡continuo compañero de Manhattan…”

(Pedro Mir, from “Contracanto a Walt Whitman”, Edicion Premio Nacional de Literatura, Ediciones Fundacion Corripio, Inc, Santo Domingo, 2005)

Ofelia even struggles holding the book, so much passion and energy that she has. She even mentions that she doesn’t have her glasses! That she can’t see well. That she apologizes! Don’t know what you would do if you did have your glasses I say after she’s finished!

 

Rodrigo Toscano is up next. Reads from Mahmmod Darwish. Rodrigo’s a cool guy I recently met and his writing is very ambiguous and obscure, in my opinion. Difficult even, but that’s what I liked about it and why I thought he would be an interesting reader. Puzzling and demanding attention. Challenging.

First, he reads from Darwish. I never asked him why he wanted to read from Darwish, but he did. At a point in a Darwish poem when he mentions “clouds”, he points to the clouds. Describing clouds is not a talent I was given, he says, but he does quite well. What I’m thinking is: how cool to read about the clouds and listen about the clouds while sitting under them and looking up at them and watching them pas by. This Rooftop Roars is definitely a good idea! (And when he mentions ‘Respect for the Lord”, he points his finger to the heavens, once again visible.)

“A small

American Town

Large mall

horniness

 

a poetry subscene’s

objects

 

laid bare

 

–a shoplifting spree

 

deep inside you

 

…”

This from his own In-Formational Forum Rousers—Arcing (Satire No. 4)

“Steeple top barely visible—

Santo Catzo

In the holding pen—

A rather gruff bloke

Of about 80 (going on 20)”

 

Midway through Rodrigo’s reading, there are more airplanes and lots of noise. Someone yells ‘louder’, but RT had already started to go louder. His movements also are quite interesting. And more: there’s something really strangely cool about the airplane noise drowning out the reading. The voice becomes part of the overall fabric of the many tonalities at play; the reading itself becomes part of the overall fabric of events: another platform on which reality unfolds. We, all, become imbued within the overall unfolding of the world. Not separate, not isolated, not taking refuge, but within, and with.

And then from

Fourteen Superimposed Pockets of Formally Unified Subjectivity as Mass-Aggregate Social Subject, or, Politesse Politique, or, Monologue of the “free Radical”

 

“5.

doubtless, will remain the same (I can’t know really—you’re right, but)—it’s an ill-fitting robe this thing of Conscious Response…if you don’t mind, I’ll—

 

6.

…there…

 

7.

oh, this funny undergarment here, it’s

 

8.

Human Nature!

 

9.

un chien

mange un autre chien

(raaar)”

 

Ambiguous, fragmented and suspended – maybe very realistic, after all… All of these I’ve cited from his book Platform (Berkeley, Atelos, 2003)

Break for food. Surprisingly, there is a lot of it, and it’s good. People take advantage though hand some even leave. Long break. Getting wine. I have a dolor de cabeza, someone says to me, nosotros los dominicanos decimos: ‘Lo que no mata engorda.’ Yo sé’, I say, ‘mi esposa es dominicana.’

Mónica de la Torre is next. After several readings, she goes into something very unusual and provocative called Imperfect Utterances, where the different accents and pronunciations of two simple words (the most fundamental ones?) radically change the meaning of the utterances:

 

Imperfect Utterances

 

 

no no, sino…

 

no no, sino sí

 

no sí, sino…

 

no sí, sino no

 

si no sí, no

 

si no sí, nono

 

si sí, no

 

si no, sí

 

sino, no

 

¿sí, no?

 

¿no, sí?

 

si nono, no

 

si nono, sí

 

si no nono, sí

 

si no nono, no

 

¿nono, no?

 

¿nono, sí?

 

no no no, sino nono

 

no sí no, sino sino

 

sino

  

I even joke to myself (and her later, although I’m not sure it’s a joke), that it would be a fun to translate. (And emblematic within the theory of translation, and its impossibility).

She’s got the English versions though, and it goes something like this:

 

not no, but… / not no, but yes /  not yes, but… / not yes, but no / if yes isn’t the case, then no / if yes isn’t the case, then the ninth / if yes is the case, then no / if no is the case,  then yes / if it’s yes, then no / if it’s no, then yes / fate, no / indeed, no? / no, or indeed? / if the ninth, then no / if the ninth, then yes / if it’s not the ninth, then yes / if it’s not the ninth, then no / the ninth, no? / the ninth, indeed? / not two nos, but the ninth / not yes and no, but fate / fate

 

My turn finally but it’s getting dark but I still I start outside. I tell everyone a bit about about Hedayat. Guy’s become sort of Iran’s national writer, a pretty preposterous category, which also made me hesitant. But he was also pretty depressed and went into exile and killed himself. He merited being in the bunch.

(Still made me think that even within our event, meant to bring back and celebrate writers who had been banished, the canon sort of rules. How to go beyond the canon? The question… )

 

We go inside after my reading of Hedayat. It’s too dark and I can barely see. Chairs set up inside and it’s not bad at all. Cozy now, lots of folks have left. Perhaps appropriate that we end with some cannibals. Of the Drive-by sort.

 

‘Ostrich in a Cadillac! Ostrich in a Cadillac!’

The call like a cuckoo’s metronomic exactitude (a tic and a toc, a tic, a toc) spews from the inner reaches of our curmudgeonly cuckold’s throat. Like a cock’s dawnish cue rises from deep within as he stands proudly and alone upon a raised patch of dirt (O how solitary he seems, so nostalgically ‘treeest’ – French for sad) – and crows! Like a crocodile’s (the swamp, the muddied waters surrounding his imaginary hovel), tears stream down his cumbersome visage. Like a… Well, it would serve the reader enough to learn that the crooning does get somewhere, what with the coup de grace given by the swerving before him of a car, seemingly out of nowhere. Certain about the seemingly? I am – although it appeared as if, literally from some dreamland or daze, it had stumbled upon the confines of the tale.”

Pause and skip. Tell them a bit about the book and then again…

‘There! There!’ thunders again the man, pointing to the bottom of the hill, ‘an ostrich in a Cadillac!’

  The lanky guy looks down. He still hasn’t said a word, but there, indeed, no doubt, none whatsoever, he spots the rear end of a white Cadillac, at the bottom of the hill, its front end hidden by the thick foliage of a tree it seemed to a)have been deliberately parked under (but how, O how! – and why, O why! – if that indeed were the case), b)have skidded to by accident.

  He turns his head back to the crooner, no sooner has stopped half-way and like a brooder turned around again, that he checks out the improbable event, then turns again, uttering, thinkingly:

  ‘An ostrich? Are you sure?’

  Staccato, the query. With gusto and gumption, yet not aggressive. Surprised yet without sentiment. Curious, yet uncaring – at the same time. Wondering, and somehow… oblivious.

  ‘Yes, yes!’ the hero says urgently, ‘there is an ostrich in that Cadillac. An ostrich I tell you, in the Cadillac!’

  Pause of the driver. Quick glance down, quick glance back. He wants to say, well what the hell is an ostrich doing down in that Cady and what in the hey are you doing up here yelling if you know it, but he says: ‘But… the whole ostrich? I mean, shouldn’t it be just the head, isn’t that what ostriches…’ but he trails off, uncertain and muted, beset, basically, by further doubts. (Not his fault, that’s how we’re taught: Not his fault/that’s how we’re taught/not to doubt/just to shout/that’s our lot/do your part/or be shot/not necessarily/just metaphorically/either/ – sings hiphopishly, spokenwordishly, with bent fingers distorted extended fragmented momented, in all directions on hands gesturing with contortions on arms flowing in gyrations, the narrator in the midst of the tale…)

  The guard is frustrated: the nerve of this fellow! ‘What do you mean,’ blathers he, ‘I’m not believed! I’m offended! Of course the whole damn ostrich is in there, if I’m telling you!’

  O vagaries of chance!  O despicable cruelties perpetrated by the weary, the wicked, the demonically devious among us! O senseless tragedies spun from group dynamics! O irresolvable dilemmas of humanhood! Shall the laws governing the fragile fabric of our firmament rear once more their ugly heads? Shall we bear witness to another in the gory annals of power-grabbing, power-sharing, subsequent betrayals, assassinations, coups, overthrows, civil wars, consolidations of powers, new laws and games and names and the labeling of somebody as something undesirable? (Maybe.) Reader, are you willing? Shall you avail yourself? Or have I given away too much already?”

 

Long evening, fun and weird. Dark out now but we’re all in.

In this first (and who knows, perhaps only) instantiation of the Roars, a number of writers were invited to read both from their own work, and from the work of at least one other writer who had in some way been ‘banned’ or ‘banished’. A main idea was to keep alive the spirit of contestation and risk-taking inherent in innovative literary enterprises, to bring to audiences the works and voices of those who, so often working in and through silence, were not silenced by the most powerful and cruel of machines. Without meaning to be too over-the-top or corny, the Roars point to how there is a real dimension where in their own meticulous ways, a certain species of poets and writers combat grand powers and established ideas, and perhaps more importantly but less dramatically, challenge, with a sligh grin and a despaired yet wonderfully celebratory gaze, established narratives, inherited conceptual frameworks, outdated categories and paradigms. All so often in fabulously inventive and delirious ways.

We were delirious in our own way. A subdued delirium. A form of gathering comprised of readings, performances, and overall provocative exchanges. Ours really took place on a rooftop – although a metaphorical approximation of a rooftop or river is fine in the absence of real versions. An open structure of performative exchanges, in multiple sites, an unfolding – with bodies and breaths…