Mantissa: A Poetic Essay on Retraction, Memory and Language
by Isabel Lederman
Author's Note: My artistic concerns constantly question what is a book, how does one read, and how does one retain information. Examining how language can be viewed under the same practice as visual or tactile engagements, my work is a meditation on poetry by being a practice that locates thought as art by means of integrating language, time and memory into various ways of reading. Though language is never transparent, my work investigates how poetry can approximate consciousness by evoking the disappearance and re-emergence of memory. My poetry tends to shift through genres using realistic, suggestive and technical language by being poems about the act of thinking. Text not only slips in and out of narrative, but also the genre shifts from a portrait to a landscape. Mantissa: a Poetic Essay on Retraction, Memory and Language is a détournement piece that takes language from John Fowles’ novel Mantissa. Every day I tore a page out of the book and eliminated text by cutting it out to reform language into a new linear narrative. The new narrative questions how memory works as well as its own relationship to language as it searches for words through the discrepancies of recall.
I. Solitude appeared and presided.
Swollen at its center was endless silence. Don’t remember. Conscious peripheral shadows of boundless space began to swim purposeless in the mind, exist entirely forgotten. Perceive a falling man trying to reach anything. Disorientation is still tacitly accusing flustered situations in nothing like overdue bills, past follies of breath. Tell me, tell me, suppose you know that memory works temporarily. A routine matter as if to confirm refusal for condition. Remember nothing. Exhibiting memory loss may be an unconscious desire to fondle indignation. Sardonic amusement, unfamiliar erotic recalcitrance of crypto-amnesia. Forgive me, I couldn’t remember, this demonstration of suggestive synecdoches of tremulous little borings absentmindedly caressed a possibility blurred, more and more certain for what blurred. Try to imagine how this might end, on second thought, consider one’s future position over a sea of vapor looking--I feel defenceless and over-attached to the verbalization of feeling.
II. The word signifies memory
especially in April.
Towering rage festooned with splintered shocks of horror as language realizes it was just an idea. I was a victim of a general description. I’ve forgotten now some minimal recognition. I am not a book. I am an amphissa mad expression side-tracked bent teaspoon. Is that all that happened? Of course it was all that happened. In any case blame your supremely real presence in the world that the structuralist and deconstructivists regard as ancient theme. I’m telling you this I know nothing of the body or that it somehow contrives time to be both unforgiving and dreamed. Imagine a limit of sense conquered by refusal to visualize ideas as fact. I ask you to appreciate external form, to have a serious conversation, and keep your hands to yourself. Remember nothing’s real until it is open to misinterpretation and like a poet’s afternoon off we lost all sense of time. Who would I be without Erato, caught dead in dialogue as chaste as a go-go dancer? Tell me that subtend viable sociological functions show we actually think and break rules. I exist, I exist, you exist, to exist is to make up your mind in a kind of apostrophic and prosopopoeic reality. Try to talk like a dictionary, embody a pair of ever-open legs for four thousand years. I sell inspiration on the never-never, how rewarding language can be. Abstract, to occupy a function that escapes the impossible boredom of it being travestied. Forgive me, it was simply an idea. A kind of surrealistic preamble, like a reversal of normal narrative development. I’m technically nothing but a heavy chin, a squint, bad breath… in the end, perhaps to the very end, it wasn’t intended. I can’t help wonder whether poetry is enough. Assume we speak outside the illusions of text. Colorless, oblique, tentative dialogue, in which you forget rather I’d forgotten the relevance. I didn’t realize it was just your mind wasting an occasional hour, exchanging priorities, assembling stories where there is no connection between author and text. The fortuitous illusions that write their own books through various superficial masks. The point is you’re not very reliable anymore having found time. Alas it disappears as a buoyant tread freezes. Even the worst philosophies have circumstances. I do need to change again and again. Come on, come on, come on.
III.
It is difficult to prove the existence
of things apprehensible to the senses accustomed to a way of thinking.
The mind that has not first passed
through the senses is certain to
understand sounds or scents…
Reflectively licking the traditional cool severity of expression. Retransmogrified knowing, don’t recognize a moment. The effect is instantaneous with no appearance at all. I’ve been meaning to speak about it in every single crevice. It’s not possible to ask amnesia if it has left a marked feeling of the usual pathology, unresolved trauma, quasi-regressive activities. The vehemence sneering scepticism general clinical picture of that illusion. You’ve forgotten the taste of something, as a wet drip, always invisible, metaphorically disappears again. These somewhat phrases lack the gasp for insatiable bodies, ghostly faces, transparent starving sacrosanct, only broken fragments of the implacable emptiness. Inside a mind can only see and never feel.
IV.
Deux yeux n’ont qu’a parler,
that’s the secret of it.
Describe definite possibilities. How sick one gets of writing text without words. I’d forgotten how strange silence is. You know what I’m trying to say. The rest a brilliant idea, something to conveniently disappear. One doesn’t sit down in a restaurant without having a look at the menu first and plan narrative alternatives. I can’t even remember my memory. Tell me what you are thinking. I’m wondering if you’ve read a single line of anything written. I realize that the thing is only a metaphor, a symbol for conjunctions that make words, experience like someone else’s skin. Once in a while you don’t understand. Complain too much, as one’s eternal quasi-spiritual quest for something tactile. There must be a point. Any instance of how average twentieth-century type vinegar-tongued liberated egos are what their bodies betrayed. The attraction is linguistic. Any dialogue, impossible. How strange the spine seems to remember a long-lost summer’s afternoon. My mind, semi-human scuttling oblivious infinite haze, floating over a sea of vapor in that aestho-autogamous bliss of having the last word.
by Isabel Lederman
Author's Note: My artistic concerns constantly question what is a book, how does one read, and how does one retain information. Examining how language can be viewed under the same practice as visual or tactile engagements, my work is a meditation on poetry by being a practice that locates thought as art by means of integrating language, time and memory into various ways of reading. Though language is never transparent, my work investigates how poetry can approximate consciousness by evoking the disappearance and re-emergence of memory. My poetry tends to shift through genres using realistic, suggestive and technical language by being poems about the act of thinking. Text not only slips in and out of narrative, but also the genre shifts from a portrait to a landscape. Mantissa: a Poetic Essay on Retraction, Memory and Language is a détournement piece that takes language from John Fowles’ novel Mantissa. Every day I tore a page out of the book and eliminated text by cutting it out to reform language into a new linear narrative. The new narrative questions how memory works as well as its own relationship to language as it searches for words through the discrepancies of recall.
I. Solitude appeared and presided.
Swollen at its center was endless silence. Don’t remember. Conscious peripheral shadows of boundless space began to swim purposeless in the mind, exist entirely forgotten. Perceive a falling man trying to reach anything. Disorientation is still tacitly accusing flustered situations in nothing like overdue bills, past follies of breath. Tell me, tell me, suppose you know that memory works temporarily. A routine matter as if to confirm refusal for condition. Remember nothing. Exhibiting memory loss may be an unconscious desire to fondle indignation. Sardonic amusement, unfamiliar erotic recalcitrance of crypto-amnesia. Forgive me, I couldn’t remember, this demonstration of suggestive synecdoches of tremulous little borings absentmindedly caressed a possibility blurred, more and more certain for what blurred. Try to imagine how this might end, on second thought, consider one’s future position over a sea of vapor looking--I feel defenceless and over-attached to the verbalization of feeling.
II. The word signifies memory
especially in April.
Towering rage festooned with splintered shocks of horror as language realizes it was just an idea. I was a victim of a general description. I’ve forgotten now some minimal recognition. I am not a book. I am an amphissa mad expression side-tracked bent teaspoon. Is that all that happened? Of course it was all that happened. In any case blame your supremely real presence in the world that the structuralist and deconstructivists regard as ancient theme. I’m telling you this I know nothing of the body or that it somehow contrives time to be both unforgiving and dreamed. Imagine a limit of sense conquered by refusal to visualize ideas as fact. I ask you to appreciate external form, to have a serious conversation, and keep your hands to yourself. Remember nothing’s real until it is open to misinterpretation and like a poet’s afternoon off we lost all sense of time. Who would I be without Erato, caught dead in dialogue as chaste as a go-go dancer? Tell me that subtend viable sociological functions show we actually think and break rules. I exist, I exist, you exist, to exist is to make up your mind in a kind of apostrophic and prosopopoeic reality. Try to talk like a dictionary, embody a pair of ever-open legs for four thousand years. I sell inspiration on the never-never, how rewarding language can be. Abstract, to occupy a function that escapes the impossible boredom of it being travestied. Forgive me, it was simply an idea. A kind of surrealistic preamble, like a reversal of normal narrative development. I’m technically nothing but a heavy chin, a squint, bad breath… in the end, perhaps to the very end, it wasn’t intended. I can’t help wonder whether poetry is enough. Assume we speak outside the illusions of text. Colorless, oblique, tentative dialogue, in which you forget rather I’d forgotten the relevance. I didn’t realize it was just your mind wasting an occasional hour, exchanging priorities, assembling stories where there is no connection between author and text. The fortuitous illusions that write their own books through various superficial masks. The point is you’re not very reliable anymore having found time. Alas it disappears as a buoyant tread freezes. Even the worst philosophies have circumstances. I do need to change again and again. Come on, come on, come on.
III.
It is difficult to prove the existence
of things apprehensible to the senses accustomed to a way of thinking.
The mind that has not first passed
through the senses is certain to
understand sounds or scents…
Reflectively licking the traditional cool severity of expression. Retransmogrified knowing, don’t recognize a moment. The effect is instantaneous with no appearance at all. I’ve been meaning to speak about it in every single crevice. It’s not possible to ask amnesia if it has left a marked feeling of the usual pathology, unresolved trauma, quasi-regressive activities. The vehemence sneering scepticism general clinical picture of that illusion. You’ve forgotten the taste of something, as a wet drip, always invisible, metaphorically disappears again. These somewhat phrases lack the gasp for insatiable bodies, ghostly faces, transparent starving sacrosanct, only broken fragments of the implacable emptiness. Inside a mind can only see and never feel.
IV.
Deux yeux n’ont qu’a parler,
that’s the secret of it.
Describe definite possibilities. How sick one gets of writing text without words. I’d forgotten how strange silence is. You know what I’m trying to say. The rest a brilliant idea, something to conveniently disappear. One doesn’t sit down in a restaurant without having a look at the menu first and plan narrative alternatives. I can’t even remember my memory. Tell me what you are thinking. I’m wondering if you’ve read a single line of anything written. I realize that the thing is only a metaphor, a symbol for conjunctions that make words, experience like someone else’s skin. Once in a while you don’t understand. Complain too much, as one’s eternal quasi-spiritual quest for something tactile. There must be a point. Any instance of how average twentieth-century type vinegar-tongued liberated egos are what their bodies betrayed. The attraction is linguistic. Any dialogue, impossible. How strange the spine seems to remember a long-lost summer’s afternoon. My mind, semi-human scuttling oblivious infinite haze, floating over a sea of vapor in that aestho-autogamous bliss of having the last word.