Touching With The Eye, Seeing With The Hand: Erasure As Reading Experience

Touching with the eye, seeing with the hand: erasure as reading experience Kenyon Review Blog
9/22/12 10:13 PM
Touching with the eye, seeing with the hand: erasure as reading experience
AND R EW D AVI D K I NG S EPT EMB ER 1 2, 201 2 COMMENT S 0
The term erasure, when used to describe a poetic technique, might be a kind of misnomer. To erase something is to rub out or remove it, according to the Oxford American Dictionary; to destroy it, to render its presence void. But contemporary works of erasure fulfill these definitional duties only in part. Though they do efface the material of an ostensibly whole text that chronologically preceded them, they also depend on it for their existence: without it, there could be no possibility of the erasure in the first place. Erasures foremost imperative is that the authoror the executor, if we dont want to equate authorship of an original work with the creation of an erasuredeconstruct the material of the text to expose, discover, or alter, but the acts reliance on construction is also clear. This yin-yang relationship between what we might call the received materials (or source text, the text with which the erasurist starts) and the excavated text (the resultant product of the activity of erasure, the leftover text) becomes even more troublesome to navigate when the notion that received materials are solely constructions and erasures solely deconstructions breaks down. But this interpretive decay is, besides being troublesome, also wholly a consequence of the practice of erasure itself. The work of erasure vindicates revision; it calls attention to the flimsiness with which meanings are roped to words, or sentences; it asks readers to reevaluate not just the content of the first authors work, if there can be a content, but to pose serious questions about authorial intention as well. Were meanings that were forcefully excavated from a received text latent in that text all along? Does the presence of another author, another human, mean that responsibility for meaning shifts to them alone? It might, of course, be shared between the twobut if so, how? Although these questions dont offer easy answers, they are neither futile nor useless; the best works of erasure, while hardly offering solutions, facilitate some hypothetical responses that vindicate the decision to spend time toying with them. It should be worth noting that the OADs definition of erase puts rub out before remove; this hierarchy of description emphasizes the penultimate physical confrontationthe rubbing out that happens with the pink bit of rubber at the end of a pencil, or with a brush or knifeover the removal. In other words, the removal isnt instantaneous, but dependent on that confrontation. We can zap any bit of text into cyber-infinity with one stroke of the DELETE key, but this might be an instance more of obliteration than of confrontation; theres little to no evidence on the page, electronic or printed, that the word in question ever existed. This act, as the keys title suggests, is one of deletion and not erasure, per se. Erasure is something other than an act of simply getting rid of something, of demolishing its existence. There might be no faith in obliterations ability to remove the history of a thing in addition to the thing itself, but the connotations of the term imply something more permanent than erasure. Obliteration may, of course, try to un-write history and fail; it may leave remnants. But in an important sense this goal is alien to the act of erasure. If anything, erasure may re-write history for the purposes of conjecture, or to retrieve other possible histories from the account of its source text. But it may just as well engineer the new from the old, or pit the old against the new. Whats necessary for the latter examples to realize themselves is the existence, in some sense, of the source text in the finished work of erasure. There may be a present-day tradition of erasure which finds the material of the source text uninteresting, but it seems that for the majority of contemporary works, it is precisely the existence of this source texts which charges the erasure with potential and multiplicity. Questions like What does the erasure do to the source text; how does this change our understanding of it? and How might the authorial intentions of the first author and the erasurist play off of each other, or interact? become comprehensible. They may be speculative, but this speculation is an ingrained part of our fascination with watching the ways in which history might change. It might not be fair to trace motifs or themes in an erased work back to the work of the original author, or to say that they are latentbut erasure validates forays into this sort of scholarly no-mans-land where hard-and-fast conclusions cannot be drawn but which, nonetheless, entice one to draw them. A consideration of several modern examples of erasure should shed light on the dichotomous relationship erasures have with their source texts: they choose to vaunt it at the very moment they also redact it (though the term redact is a loaded term with reference to alternative poetics,
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which I will explain in a future post). One of the most prominent works of modern American erasure is Ronald Johnsons Radi Os, which was first published in 1977 and again in 2006 by Flood Editions. To create Radi Os, Johnson took his pen to a copy of The Poetical Works of John Milton from 1892. (The same year, interestingly enough, that William Hurrell Mallocks A Humument Document was publishedthe text that Tom Phillips chose to serve as the foundation for his own work of not-quite-erasure, A Humument.) The way Erik Anderson, writing for the Denver Quarterly, described Johnsons decision to adopt Milton types Radi Os as a consequent of a particular type of influence. The day after listening to Lucas Fosss Baroque Variationsa work that tunnels through pieces by various composers, in which Groups of instruments play . . . but keep submerging into inaudibility, leaving holes in the original musicRonald Johnson walked into a Seattle bookshop, he writes, before going on to make the obvious comparison of Johnson to Phillips. The two artists dont just differ in subject matter; Johnson chose Milton and Phillips chose Mallock, but the resultant artworks reside at opposite ends of the same spectrum. Whereas Phillips chooses to push down Mallocks text by placing paint over it, or by altering it in some way that leaves choice groups of words available for semantic connection, Johnson turns whole swaths of Miltons theological poem into invisible placeholders. To appropriate Fosss description of his own Baroque Variations: Handles notes are always present but often inaudible. In Johnsons work, Miltons words are likewise always present but can only be seen by what forces they exert on the visible words that surround them; akin to the astronomical concept of dark matter, they are found apophatically, only by the determined positions of the inked words that they cannot be. Their existence is not a ghost-like one, for in traditional imaginings the ghost is an entity that at least bears some resemblance to a past form it once had. Johnsonand other erasurists like Janet Holmes, who authored The Ms of M Y Kin (The manuscript of my kin is one reading) using The Poems of Emily Dickinson doesnt leave the skeleton or an image of the skeleton. He leaves nothing but its memory, and this only vaguely. If the text is a body, these erasures dont perform surgery. They gore; they pull out veins and cartilage and tissue and organs and leave them on the operating table of the page. What results is an object capable of being encountered many ways, but always anew, always refreshed. Though its text confesses its dependence on a pre-existent work either by declaring this at the outset, as do Johnson and Holmes, it also asks, paradoxically, to be seen as a full departure from this lineage and from notions of hybridity. It asks to be seen as a wholly new object despite the very impossibility of such newness, which is one consequence of its aesthetic. But there are two points of view in particular Id like to explore with regard to whats left of the source, i.e. its remains: a non-semantic appreciation of these elements in juxtaposition and spatial situation, and another approach that takes into account new semantic stringsstring of sense or meaningthat are afforded either by a) the fact that some materials are erased and others arent, or b) a palpable authorial intention that seems to want to make new sentences or phrases out of the material the source text provides, though these phrases might contain meanings foreign to those of the source text. Johnson himself moves between both of these modes. Some leftover words in Radi Os seem isolated only for the purpose of aesthetic isolation, or for some oblique, atmospheric relevance to the project at large. But others seem to make sentences, or to at least hint toward sentences. It could be that were called to both examine the leftover, excavated text as a new thing but also as a ruin, if such a thing as a new ruin isnt an oxymoron. If an erasure was looked at in this way, itd be easier to make sense of a refusal to erase words that abide by the syntax of standard English. But despite the age and canonicity (could Johnson have chosen a more canonical text if hed tried?) of Paradise Lost, which one might say makes any work based off it just such a ruin by definition, Id argue that Johnsons work in Radi Os takes on a dual purposethat its handling of Miltons textual material in one interested in both aesthetic showmanship (the result of disassembling language and removing words from the syntactic structures that cushion them) as well as the creation of new meaning (a very strategic type of aesthetic showmanship thats also interested in connecting words and phrases into understandable sentences). In other words, Radi Os is both construction and destruction; it is both a display of words pulled back into objecthood and those objects exalted anew, called forth into a heretofore unseen semantic sequence. To get some idea of how Johnson uses erasure to move through Milton, it might be best to look at some selections of his (again were faced with the question of whether or not Radi Os is Miltons or Johnsons, or if it belongs to both) text. A few notes beforehand, though: either due to Johnsons aesthetic preference or to the constraints of erasureor perhaps both variablesRadi Os, which encompasses the first four books of Paradise Lost, contains few periods. It unfolds, rather, as a series of run-on sentences that drift freely from one page to another, either riddled with absences or chock-full of the presence of the left-behind page. In either case, the capital O of the title is there consistently: a form with something at its center, be it emptiness or content. But because these two are so closely conjoined, it is difficult to determine where a semantic thought is beginning. In excerpting the text, I encountered this difficulty frequently. Id find a few words that seemed to make more linear sense by moving backwards through the passage, but then I found myself moving backwards more and more; this continual reversal of progress seemed never to end. Though the text resists the sort of excerption that easily encapsulates main points (if there are main points to be encapsulated in Radi Os), I eventually had to decide to close off, via such excerption, readings that could quite possibly be just as valid as the ones I put forth here. This is only prompted by a need for brevity, and by the idea that an examination of a moment in the text will yield valid insights about it as a whole, or at least about its methodology. Another note: the passages in Milton that I quote for examination are culled from Project Gutenbergs version of Paradise Lost, which was released as an EBook in 1991. I do not know exactly how this version differs from the version with which Johnson worked, or if there were post-erasure (or posthumous) edits made to Johnsons text. Perhaps Johnson himself changed the words when composing Radi Os
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for the printed page once he had completed it in his copy of Milton. But in some places commas, stylizations, colons, and dashes appear where they do not in the source text. There are also some disputable spaces between lines. I have reproduced Johnsons text as it appears in the electronic edition that the Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company published in 2000. Im not sure if this is a wholly accurate transcription of the text of the 1977 edition from Sand Dollar Press in Berkeley (the fact that it flattens Miltons invisible text by left-justifying the visible words makes me wonder), or how it compares to the more recent Flood Editions version; these are questions for further investigation, and of mostly bibliographic interest. Those qualms aside, what follows is passage in which Johnson stretches the semantic connectionseither apparent or possible onesbetween leftover words to the point where these connections seem, to me, to break down. This passage seems to be a segment of text that would be a good candidate for an argument about the aesthetic showmanship that I mentioned earlier; linear meanings, while certainly possible, are made oblique so that the decimated artifice of Paradise Lost can stand and be seen on its own once Johnsons hand has been pulled back. First, lets look at the passage from Book III before Johnson erases it: Of all things made, and judgest onely right. Or shall the Adversarie thus obtain His end, and frustrate thine, shall he fulfill His malice, and thy goodness bring to naught, Or proud return though to his heavier doom, Yet with revenge accomplisht and to Hell Draw after him the whole Race of mankind, By him corrupted? or wilt thou thy self Abolish thy Creation, and unmake, For him, what for thy glorie thou hast made? So should thy goodness and thy greatness both Be questiond and blaspheamd without defence. To whom the great Creatour thus replyd. O Son, in whom my Soul hath chief delight, Son of my bosom, Son who art alone My word, my wisdom, and effectual might, All hast thou spokn as my thoughts are, all As my Eternal purpose hath decreed: Man shall not quite be lost, but savd who will, Yet not of will in him, but grace in me Freely voutsaft; once more I will renew His lapsed powers, though forfeit and enthralld By sin to foul exorbitant desires To put forward a very simplistic reading of this passage, let me first reference The Argument that Milton prefaces Book III with. God sitting on his Throne sees Satan flying towards this world, then newly created; shews him to the Son who sat at his right hand; foretells the success of Satan in perverting mankind it begins. There is unease in heaven, and this passage sits at a hinge in the dialogue between God the Father and Christ the Son; the latter asks God if he will thy self /Abolish thy Creation, and thereby rescind mans existence and freedom at the threat of forthcoming perversion. Gods answer is extensive, and quoted only briefly here, but does give access to some of the characters thoughts about salvation and human agency: Man shall not quite be lost, but savd who will, though this will is enabled and renewed by divine grace. Theres much more to be said about this passage, of course, but I want to transition back to Johnson and his erasure to highlight how such a theologically central moment fares under Johnsons pen. Reproduced here is what Johnson makes of this heated, heavenly discussion: Of all things made, and judgest onely right. Or shall the Adversarie thus obtain His end, and frustrate thine, shall he fulfill His malice, and thy goodness bring to naught, Or proud return though to his heavier doom, Yet with revenge accomplisht and to Hell
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Draw after him the whole Race of mankind, By him corrupted? or wilt thou thy self Abolish thy creation, and unmake, For him, what for thy glorie thou hast made? So should thy goodness and thy greatness both Be questiond and blaspheamd without defence. To whom the great Creatour thus replied: O Son, in whom my Soul hath chief delight, Son of my bosom, Son who art alone My word, my wisdom, and effectual might, All hast thou spokn as my thoughts are, all As my Eternal purpose hath decreed: Man shall not quite be lost, but savd who will, Yet not of will in him, but grace in me Freely voutsaft; once more I will renew His lapsed powers, though forfeit and enthralld By sin to foul exorbitant desires: Under Johnsons guidance, the passage is instead reduced to some of its key composites (though it would be unfair to say that a reduction is always what happens in an erasure): creation, things made, a dialogue of question and reply, an exploration of the word as a way the self makes its will and desires apparent, what it is to be a question. Also interesting is Johnsons choice to retain the colons and dashes (though Im not sure what edition of Paradise Lost, or editorial insertion, resulted in their presence), as if emphasizing this call-and-response without actually engaging in it. So far, though, Ive only considered these composites as they might be understood independently of each other, because I think this reading honors the experience of encountering the words on the page; aspects of punctuation and traditional textual structure all appear, at first glance, to have been damaged, altered, or removed. But this is an impressionistic reading, one dealing in just such first glances, and it doesnt quite acknowledge the continuity of Johnsons work (the fact that, though it is constituted of leftover words, it still seems to insist on moving through them at the behest of a conventional approach: up-to-down, left-to-right) or the presupposed continuity of its source text. So one might also hazard a different reading, one that sees Johnsons apparent reliance of this up-to-down, left-to-right method. One could even cite Johnsons preservation of the spatial structure of Paradise Losts skeleton as evidence of his desire to keep those conventional behaviors welded to the text. This latter argument opens an aperture into the possibility of an overlap between destruction of the text into its material components or the reassembly of those components into meaningful semantic chains: not even the skeleton of Miltons text is there, but rather the memory of that skeleton. All that can be said to be there, in terms of whats left, are the individual words and phrases; though its true that their placement is determined by the framework of Paradise Lost, that framework isnt allowed to coexist in the finished version of the text. What remain are freefloating, untethered bits of potential meaning in a sea of white space. In other passages, like the one that follows, Johnson uses erasure to confuse the grammatical comprehension of particular words; notice how Is, the third person singular present of be, is transformed into an italicized, proper noun: To whose bright image nightly by the Moon SIDONIAN Virgins paid their Vows and Songs, In SION also not unsung, where stood Her Temple on th offensive Mountain, built By that uxorious King, whose heart, though large, Beguild by fair Idolatresses, fell To Idols foul. THAMMUZ came next behind, Whose annual wound in LEBANON allurd The SYRIAN Damsels to lament his fate In amorous dittyes all a Summers day, While smooth ADONIS from his native Rock Ran purple to the Sea, supposd with blood Of THAMMUZ yearly wounded: the Love-tale Infected SIONS daughters with like heat, Whose wanton passions in the sacred Porch
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EZEKIEL saw, when by the Vision led His eye survayd the dark Idolatries Of alienated JUDAH. Next came one Who mournd in earnest, when the Captive Ark Maimd his brute Image, head and hands lopt off In his own Temple, on the grunsel edge, Where he fell flat, and shamd his Worshipers: DAGON his Name, Sea Monster, upward Man And downward Fish: yet had his Temple high Reard in AZOTUS, dreaded through the Coast Of PALESTINE, in GATH and ASCALON, And ACCARON and GAZAs frontier bounds. Him followd RIMMON, whose delightful Seat Was fair DAMASCUS, on the fertil Banks Of ABBANA and PHARPHAR, lucid streams. He also against the house of God was bold: A Leper once he lost and gaind a King, AHAZ his sottish Conquerour, whom he drew Gods Altar to disparage and displace For one of SYRIAN mode, whereon to burn His odious offrings, and adore the Gods Whom he had vanquisht. After these appeard A crew who under Names of old Renown, OSIRIS, IsIS, ORUS and their Train Another contemporary work of erasure that follows in Johnsons footsteps with regard to procedure and presentation is Holmess aforementioned The Ms of M Y Kin . In her Note on the Text, Holmes mentions that the poems are erased from Emily Dickinsons poems of 1861 and 1862, the first years of the United States Civil War, and that the poems are each titled by the year in which they were composed, its sequential number, and by their Franklin numbers (the numerical designations the poems received by editor Ralph Franklin). This adherence to linearity, at least in terms of arrangement, is something to note, as is Holmess statement that the project was owed to the invitation of its epigraph, from Dickinsons #184: If it had no pencil, / Would it try mine. The potential connotations of using non-erased text to preface a collection of erased text from that same author are multiple, but moreover they suggest a sort of authorization, a permissibility. The epigraphs placement at the head of the collection becomes more and more prominent as a narrative, however fractured or polyphonic, emerges from Holmess project. Issues of theological, political, metaphysical, and pragmatic concern are all considered, as they are in Radi Os, but they form a more concrete whole in The Ms of M Y Kin as opposed to a merely continuous one; Holmess choice to leave words like impeach in the text forces it to echo present-day discourse in an even more anachronistic way that Johnson. Were left with the still-bitter taste of Iraq and Afghanistan in our mouths even as we knowingly wade through the wreckageif erasure is wreckage and not construction, which Im not convinced it isof a poet writing during the beginning of the civil war that could have, had not many events resolved differently, ended the United States as it had existed until then. Holmess project achieves other differences from Radi Os as well, despite its affinity with that texts preservation of the placement of the words on the page (the skeletons of Dickinsons poems are honored by preserving the spatial placement of the leftover text). Holmes calls forth an eerie, aural resurrection of Dickinsons poetic voice and sensibilities through her erasure, which might not seem like a feat until one reads Johnson and observes the utter tonal difference between him and Milton. Below, Holmess commitment to linear semantic senseas opposed to the action of leaving words and phrases isolated for the purpose of aesthetic alienation or renewed strangenessis made clear in her erasure of four poems Dickinson wrote in sequence in 1862, #307 through #310: A solemn thing it was I said A woman white to be And wear if God should count me fit Her blameless mystery A hallowed thing to drop a life Into the purple well
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Too plummetless that it return Eternity until I pondered how the bliss would look And would it feel as big When I could take it in my hand As hovering seen through fog And then the size of this small life The Sages call it small Swelled like Horizons in my vest And I sneered softly small! I breathed enough to take the Trick And now, removed from Air I simulate the Breath, so well That One, to be quite sure The Lungs are stirless must descend Among the Cunning Cells And touch the Pantomine Himself, How numb, the Bellows feels!
Kill your Balm and its Odors bless you [page break]Bare your Jessamine to the storm And she will fling her maddest perfume Haply your Summer night to Charm Stab the Bird that built in your bosom Oh, could you catch her last Refrain Bubble! forgive Some better Bubble! Carol for Him when I am gone! Heaven is what I cannot reach! The Apple on the Tree Provided it do hopeless hang That Heaven is to Me!
The Color, on the Cruising Cloud The interdicted Land Behind the Hill the House behind There Paradise is found! Her teasing Purples Afternoons The credulous decoy Enamored of the Conjuror That spurned us Yesterday!
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There are questions of historical import to ask here, namely: what are the implications of scissoring through one of the most ostensibly American American poets to both reiterate and edit the political and moral narrative (or fable) of the United States ongoing past? Its not a question I can answer, but one I can begin to explore by looking at the ways Holmes handles Dickinsons poems. Theres something markedly Dickinsonian about the tone of God should / drop a life / Into / plummetless / bliss and Holmess allowance, or preservation, of her hallmark dashes into the erased manuscript; perhaps its a product of the same part-rebellious, part-inquisitive voice that wrote Much madness is divinest Sense / To a discerning Eye, but the question of Holmess influence also arises. Her elision is finely-grained; the line Heaven is to Me! originally appears as That Heaven is to Me!, leaving an exclamation mark suspended midair. There is, nonetheless, the kinship that the collections title evokes at play here, an ahistorical trust in Dickinsons poems to communicate and bind hundreds of years after the fact. The ambiguous paths of kinship pull me in opposite ways at once, wrote Susan Howe of Dickinson in My Emily Dickinson , a work whose title conveys immediately conveys its goal of reclamationstealing back Dickinson from the patriarchal literary establishment that wanted to place her biography before her poetry. Whether or not Holmess erasure is necessary or not to the larger project of keeping Dickinson in conversation with todays troubles, or rescuing her from critical tyranny, is irrelevant; the point is that such was possible, that the sensibility of a present-day writer could be drawn into an affinity with a foundational poet of the modern tradition so intense it resulted in an exchange that took place not in their separate works but in the arena of the latter poets poems themselves. This, then, is whats most remarkable about both Johnson and Holmes: though their projects both update their specific source texts and uncover new semantic and aesthetic layers within them, they also trace very explicitly two possible ways present consciousnesses can converse, debate, and even fight with past ones. The text of Paradise Lost or of Dickinsons untitled series is not a record of speech but an ongoing act of speech, a living one that will inevitably confront the hand of the erasurista figure who is not very different, at the end of the day, from the scholar who excerpts Milton in order to scrutinize him or the poet who writes down a few inexorable lines from Dickinson in her notebook. More than any of these other figures, however, the erasurist resembles the reader: there is something about any erasure, whether or not it honors the shapes of the pages from which it is derived, that mimics the sensory experience of encountering those source texts themselves. Though most conventional books incorporate apparatuses to direct readingthe up-to-down, left-to-right system that I mentioned beforeit shouldnt be too radical a thesis to claim that this is hardly how books, or pages, are first approached by most readers. Even while reading linearly, its impossible for me to voluntarily control what will first catch my attention, what will appear visually vivid versus banal, what will nag me in my peripheral to turn toward it. And so, due to the inability of my perceptual capacities to match those conventional apparatuses one-for-one, when I read I will myself be acting out a sort of erasure. This is only one of the many sequential erasures that will follow, however. When Im done reading the page, or the text, Ill put it down, and parts of that text will disappear from my memory while others will stay; this is a second form of erasure that will also take place in my mind and because of my minds inabilitywould such an ability even be comprehensible?to be the very text that it processes. Because of these limitations I can never truly hope to come across a text the way a computer would, with the sort of unilateral democracy that demands every letter be treated equally. (But, at the same time, perhaps we should be thankful for this: computers have yet to produce eloquent dissertations on Milton, and we might doubt their motives if they did.) Dan Beachy-Quick, in a review of Flood Editionss recent reprinting of Radi Os for the Boston Review, captured this idea about reading processes: The world comes partial. An honest reader sees only what she sees, hears only what she hears, and does not claim an attention that encompasses all. No such attention exists. This seems redundant, but it is fundamental: I can only read the book I can read. I do this work as myself. Any other claim inflates the creative act of reading into broad criticism, into generalities, into universals. And as Ronald Johnsons spiritual ancestor William Blake so fervently believed, generalities are for blockheads. Genius recognizes itself in particulars. A text that is not too Explicit, Blake wrote, is the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes [sic] the faculties to actin other words, obscurity is a virtue precisely because it demands intellectual labor before it yields its fruit, a resistance which ensures that the meanings contained in a text wouldnt fall into rote emptiness at the hands of accessibility. Though theres also the risk that one might never find the key to unlock the pertinent door (that obscurity will actually prevent the obtainment of what it values), we see the particularities of just this sort of intellectual labor made plain in the works of Ronald Johnson and Janet Holmes. Its the sort of understanding of literary experience that could lead to whole philosophies of language and literaturean aim that Stanley Fish, in his seminal article Interpreting the Variorum, took up. Fish captures some important ideas about the experience of reading when he declares that the act of interpretation writes the text, and consequently that there is nothing independent or prior about texts, though criticism undertakes to present itself as mining empirical truths from them. Im not sure that I can agree wholly with this approach as a model for an epistemology of literary criticism, but its certainly an interesting approach to describing its phenomenology. These are much thornier questions about the shape of consciousness that literature is prepared to explore, perhaps, but not answerif a singular answer is even obtainable or even desirable. Lyn Hejinian, writing about Gertrude Stein in her essay Two Stein Talks from The Language of Inquiry, straightforwardly entertains the ideas about perception and consciousness that might underwrite Stein or a reading of her work; cubisms influence is surely there, as is William James and his construction of consciousness through the repeated motif of waterthe
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droplets composing the macro stream of consciousness. But although Hejinian lends credence to a conceptualization of consciousness as continuous, she also speaks to her own experience of it dissolving into obtuse shards, partitioning into puddles: I myself dont always experience consciousness as a stream, she writes. Instead it often does appear broken up, discontinuoussometimes radically, abruptly, and disconcertingly so. But what are the consequences of this factif thats what we take it to be, after all? Im not sure Im willing to go as far as Fish does when he says that there are no things that exist in a text to be empirically discovered. But Im also not sure how we can escape the kaleidoscopic nature of the reading experience itself, and all its varying characteristics: it is linear (we at least try to read, mostly, in a manner that obeys the sequence of words on the page), it is chronological (our attempt to obey this sequence means that we experience words in a particular temporal order), and it is haphazard (because we fail at trying to obey these orders). But it is ultimately, due to all of these factors, idiosyncratic. I can only read the book I can read, Beachy-Quick writes of Radi Os. One might say that Radi Os itself was an experiment in making clear the inescapable ownershipand hence responsibilityone imparts whenever one reads (and thereby, Fish reminds us, writes or at least tries to make sense of) a given text and assembles some meaning from it, or more accurately for it. Dirk Stratton, in his monograph on Ronald Johnson for Boise State Universitys Western Writers Series, cites Guy Davenports 1981 book The Geography of the Imagination to describe Johnsons pataphysical objectives: he sought, as Thoreau and even Blake before him, to make clear the intricate and subtle lines of force wherein man can discern the order of his relation to the natural world, and to make the invisible visible to the imagination. Or to make the imagination visible to itself, as Stratton implies when he claims that all the words in Radi Os are Miltons; the white space is Johnsons, his record of his interaction with the text. Strattons setup of this binary is intriguing to me because Im tempted to agree with it immediatelybut is the claim that the words are owned by Milton and the white space by Johnson really tenable? No; both authors are involved in a constant, even posthumous, perpetuation of the cycle of borrowing and encountering. And there is as much physical as there is semantic material to be borrowed. Johnsons prior work with concrete poetry and visual interpretation makes itself plain when he says, about Radi Os, that he wanted it also to be a Blakeian [sic] illustrated work, one where each page is a kind of stanza, but it also is meant to have a wiry visual strength and tension; the project would accomplish more than rewrite the story, though he did also accomplish this. (BEAM 28 of ARK, the great serial project of his life, contains the line, TO GO INTO THE WORDS TO EXPAND THEM, further evidencing Johnsons awareness of the materiality of language pre- Radi Os.) Radi Os, taken in toto, is at once a narrative, a deconstruction of that narrative, and a record of the conscious, visual interaction with the material text of Paradise Lost. Like Holmess work with Dickinson, which superimposes new and vibrant visual associations over the stony faade of the canon, Johnsons work leaves according material and semantic records; it weds two consciousnesses across oceans and across centuries. Both authors name the text that they erase, making a radical refusal to cover the tracks of their process. Both works are generative; Laura Wetherington has also applied erasure to Dickinson, and poet Michael Koshkins Parad e R ain is an erasure of Paradise Regained. More than anything, though, both Johnsons and Holmess works are openings. Radi, the first half of Johnsons title, suggests radii, rays, rods, beams, [and] spokes, according to Stratton; Os suggests the circles from which these radii emanate. (I would add that the resultant word radios suggests broadcast, and a plural broadcast at thatmany speakers speaking, though with a more positive connotation than Francis Ponges 1946 description of the radio as the buzzing,!beaming little second garbage bin!) And Holmes traces the ways in which contemporary history cant help but infest the texts and testimonies that preceded it. Fittingly, these erasures are records of consciousnesss dissolution while at the same time it becomes solvent again, moving between ruin and creation to leave testimony to each while authoring new testimonies themselves. And this cycle, if properly construed, will continue ad infinitum as long as there are writers and readers to read them; these works of erasure will themselves be subjected to the ballpoints black line. But even before then, they will be subjected to pairs of eyeswhich, as Beachy-Quick reminds, can only see what it is that they see. From this, the self makes and is made. I, the lever (eye), Johnson writes in ARK. And again, in the dedication of Radi Os: It is the book Blake gave me his eyes wide open through my hand.
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Touching With The Eye, Seeing With The Hand: Erasure As Reading Experience

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Touching With The Eye, Seeing With The Hand: Erasure As Reading Experience

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Touching with the eye, seeing with the hand: erasure as reading experience Kenyon Review Blog

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