Installation number two of an old dream journal I found:

No date (2005?)
Hospital.
3 patients had a strange disease that required a purple mixture/compound to be spread on their backs.
It could only be spread with the tongue.
It felt like community service felt.
The compound was bright purple.
I was also preparing to go to St. Joseph's college in Europe somewhere.
Hospital patient was a girl my age.
After the treatment, we placed her evenly upon the body of another patient.

No date (2005?)
A group of people find themselves together for an unknown reason — felt like Clue! — they figure out that something is not right with Time. I was the ringleader.

No date (2005?)
In a grassy courtyard. Spring day. Talking about post-doctoral work with unidentified woman. Very sunny. I could feel the weather, and I was talking about it, too.

No date (2006?)
I had a real-time conversation with my mother about money. Very intense. No fun. Then, completely unrelated, I dreamt of a group of late-20s people who lived by the sea in bland apartments. They all knew each other and it was very much like a movie or a t.v. drama.

No date (2006?)
3 dismembered heads in a cooler. Large apt. The heads came from a grizzly accident. Military-like principal. James McMenamin is V.P. Christian, Val, Blythe.

No date (2006?)
Story about the battle for the compass of time. 2 primitive societies  and 2 animal societies wage war. The evil guys won. Flash forward: The evil has become mythologized within a city. Magic factions will fight once more for freedom.

Packing and preparing to move, I found an old dream journal. Here are its contents (installment 1):

July 12, 1995
Something about a girl who I met in a hotel. Sat on my bed and I distinctly remember being in my room and then going to my door and opening to see snow falling. I thought it was odd because it was July. Phone rang, it was my mom telling me to go to sleep.

July 25, 1995
I dreamt that I was at school and in PPD [gym]. There was a huge gladiator competition. I won by hurting everyone to a point where they couldn't compete anymore.

July 27, 1995
Anthony and I battled the forces of evil. Little girl possessed by devil needed to be destroyed.

January 2, 2005
Sci-Fi Dream.
I was a warrior, almost like Jedi.
There were two opposing factions.
I trained
I spied
evil troops took over territory

January 4, 2005
Movie script
the dream was the movie itself
3 characters, Latino
2 adolescent boys and 1 girl
German family
Latinos are indentured servants.
Main image: pool of water, from left
bodies flow on, water gets suctioned out the right side,
bodies flush through the right side,
Also felt like theatre

No date [2005?]
Derrida teaching a class
sort of communicates telepathically
Deanna Martin was in class
sat around conference table
nobody really understood anything
no lights on in classroom
but lots of light through windows
Homework assignment I forgot to do

No date [2005?]
Went to China
met Linq in a hybrid train station/airport
Two stories were merged together.
One was Linq, a friend, and myself hanging out catching up,
the other was like a high school dance

No date [2005?]
horse raising
it was time for the races
needed to get a 
large photograph printed 
so I went to a Kinkos-like place. The sales
people were rude idiots
and kept me from leaving by asking stupider and stupider questions
Left eventually to meet up with Christian
and his mom. We were going for Margaritas 
Somehow my bedroom was located... [ink ran out]

No date [2005?]
Some kind of explosion
in a big city forces people onto underground
trains. The trains contain several hundred
evacuees. While underground a disease
rips through world's pop
leaving nobody alive

No date [2005?]
I meet Linq. He is very tired.
His fingers have grown thin.
He has a walkman/recording device
that he wears strapped to his arm;
this makes him happy. We arrive in 
a city that is all deception
People are [undecipherable word] medicine
to sleep.
Unclear what we were doing there.

No date [2005?]
A woman, slightly deranged in that 
Glass Menagerie kind of way
was the mother of two crab
children that out of embarrassment
and concern for them she hid on a beach.
They were crabs,
but big. I was terrified of them and ran away.
There was an office setting.
​I think it's anxiety about teaching.

(Scroll down to Part I, or click here to download all my posts on Jay Wright)

Whereas the last post focused on Wright’s overcoming of the dissociative spatial paradigms found in Modernist poetry—a paradigm that bifurcates the performance experience and/or encounter into performers, on the one hand, and observers, on the other hand—this post will deal with the synesthetic events scattered throughout Wright’s poetry. These events require a spatial reading since the unification of different sensing apparatuses amounts to a synthesis of an individual’s being in the (poem) world. Wright, for example, allocates sound to color and sight to skin in order, I would argue, to help us all learn to read what he calls the “coherent grammar” of our surroundings. 
 
When thinking about what to call the gesture of invitation tucked within the synesthetic realm of Wright’s poetry, an invitation that provides an opportunity to read the entire world all at once and, ultimately, to know what love is, I return time and again to the magic circle. Let’s briefly visit the world of Christopher Marlowe and Dr. Faustus where he famously writes:
 
Within this circle is Jehovah’s name
Forward and backward anagrammatized,
Th’abbreviated names of holy saints,
Figures of every adjunct to the heavens,
And characters of signs and evening stars,
By which the spirits are enforced to rise.
Then fear not, Faustus, be resolute
And try the utmost magic can perform. (1.3.8-15)
 
Offering a user-friendly history of the magic circle, Jon Kaneko-James reminds us that the magic circle served two purposes. First, it protected the magician from whatever he or she conjured. The space within the circle offered sanctuary from the demons without. Second, the circle produced a field of energy and functioned as a conductive space, “the magical words and symbols filter[ed] specific kinds of mystical power into the circle to be used by the magician.” In fact, the second attribute of the magic circle leads us to question whether or not the inner space within the circles’ arcs are indeed safe or whether, instead, the energy conducted to the magician from the signs and symbols inscribed around the circle actually empowered the magician to stop whatever force attempted to assail him/her.
 
Without attempting to resolve that dispute here, I would suggest that both are true. The space of the inner circle is an ancient form of critical distance, something that allows the magician to be, simultaneously, near and far to the action transpiring in the scene. At the same time, the space within the circle, buttressed and enhanced by magical symbols gathered around it, transmits powers to the magician. Transposing this formula to Wright and his poetry, I propose that we think of his poetic equations—as he calls them in Music’s Mask and Measure—as the symbols that form the magic circle around Wright and produce the powerful critical distance necessary for conjuring into being a reading of the world’s coherent grammar, a reading that leads to a necessary naming.
 
Look at this excerpt from Equation 2 (which I’ve reproduced here in such a way as to mimic the page layout of the book itself):
 
The red roof tiles                                        The oriole has established
slip into the morning fog.                           an evasive coherence,
There is a red silence                                     infinite, exact,
               all around us.                                with its place, there where
It will take years to learn                             the day seems set to honor
this coherent grammar.                                the bird's expressive deceit

In the stanza on the left, Wright’s equation rewires the sensorium of things surrounding us such that the redness of the present but muted visual tile-field enacts an audible silence, not dissimilar (in my mind) to the sound of the Summer Sun at its zenith. From within the circle of his poetry, Wright enters into the rewired scene and, perhaps because it is foreign and new, declares that it will take years to learn the coherent grammar of what surrounds him. His poetry, in other words, doesn’t reveal everything at all once. His poetry, instead, offers a glimpse and a bodily sense of all that hides behind daily appearances. This “coherent grammar” amounts to the order of the world presented by and present within each individual thing. I find it interesting that an etymological definition of grammar traces the word back to the late 14th-century: “‘Latin grammar, rules of Latin,’ from Old French gramaire ‘grammar; learning,’ especially Latin and philology, also ‘(magic) incantation, spells, mumbo-jumbo.’” It will take years to learn these rules, to attune ourselves to the incantations of things that sound like mumbo-jumbo upon first encounter but soon, once appraised with care, speak clearly of hidden (occult) truths.
 
While it will take Wright years to attune himself to this grammar—not to mention you, me, humans generally—it takes no time for the oriole who, being of this grammar, speaks it fluently. The “oriole has established an evasive coherence.” Either its being-in-the-world requires evasiveness, or its apparent evasiveness actually masks the coherence of the grammar. I’m not sure which it is – maybe both. But I do know that the oriole’s participation in the world’s grammar comes not only from its song, which, note, Wright doesn’t mention here, but also from its correspondence with world’s colors, sounds, and other senses. Wright conjures the bird “there where the day seems set to honor the bird’s expressive deceit,” which to me means there, in front of the setting sun, whose evening coloration mimics the oriole’s orange, that is, the bird’s expressive outwardness that, despite its seeming ostentation, serves to camouflage it and keep it safe. Oriole, setting sun, red roof tiles :: (silent) song bird, thronging light and distant heat, red silence all around us. The continuum of color, sound, and silence, indeed the continuum of music’s mask and measure, indexes Wright’s brief foray into the world normally hidden by inattentive business.
 
He lingers on another bird—to be precise, the Carolina wren—before revealing the aim of this conjuration, this poetical work:
 
Love is ancient
evidence, an instrument
constrained, jealous of its
utility,
in awe of its own death;
every name embraces it.
 
The purpose behind Wright’s poetry is the desire to conjure love. Love: perhaps another way of saying “this coherent grammar.” Every name embraces it, he says. Is poetry not the daring attempt to name that which either cannot be named or that which wishes to remain unnamable? Each name bracketed, deduced, possibly discerned from within life’s belligerent symphony brings love closer to the caller, the poet. The purpose of all this magic is to call love close, and the space produced by the poem is that which provides the means for embracing love. The word-equations summon; the space of the magic circle conducts the orchestra into the embrace.  

My earlier posts on temporality in Jay Wright’s poetry were, in a sense, practice for this particular post, which is all about space. After re-reading those earlier posts, I can say confidently that I still believe all of my (granted, hesitant) claims. I am, however, interested now in something different, something I’m calling “The Magic Circle,” which appears to me in Wright’s poetic language. This “Magic Circle” demarcates a space of conjuration that has two principle effects. First, the circle sidesteps the paradigm of diassociationism that shapes so much of the visual encounter in Modernist and Post-Modernist literature (more on this in a moment). Second, the circle facilitates truly stunning synesthetic events through which the usually divided sensorial apparatuses (eyes/sight, ears/hearing, skin/touch, etc.) merge in order to produce a “reading” of what Wright calls the “coherent grammar” of the world (and more on this, too, further down). The circle created through Wright’s poetry makes me think of sorcery and witchcraft such as that running rampant in Medieval Europe and conspicuously present in the works of, for example, Christopher Marlowe (particularly Faustus). I have for many years studied the episteme of Medieval Europe that Michel Foucault refers to in The Order of Things as the similitude oriented system of knowledge. In Wright’s poetry I sense an attempt to recuperate—if that’s even the right verb—this episteme’s worldview, perhaps because he values the vibrant interconnectedness of world systems at work then/there.
 
In The Theatre of Truth, William Egginton assesses what he sees as the paradigmatic mode of spectatorship shaping the Modern world. He calls this paradigm “disassociationism,” which allows (i.e., makes it possible for) individuals to create a clear, binary distinction between spectator and performer. This mode of viewing arises in tandem with seventeenth-century aesthetic creations—including, primarily, theatre—and quickly ascends to the realm of habit where it remains out of reach of critique or self-reflection. As Egginton sees it, once an individual identifies herself as a spectator she will subtract herself from the scene of the performance and begin to order to aesthetic event in terms of “on stage” and “off stage.” One’s off stage presence does not necessarily entail a passive mode of consumption, though it does frequently acquiesce to the “truth” of the world being constructed on stage. “The point to grasp,” Egginton continues, “is that once entire populations became fluent in assuming and projecting this division in order to function correctly as theatre spectators, that fluency became a generalized spatial structure for conceptualizing the world as a whole” (14). He transitions from these comments into a conversation about Descartes’ creation of “a thinking substance that looks out onto the world of extended substances” (14), and then he dedicates the rest of his pages to a discussion of how baroque aesthetic offerings refute this binary distinction (by privileging, for example and a la Deleuze, a folding of interiority and exteriority instead of the smooth division of “on stage” and “off stage” or interior (subjectivity) / exterior (objectivity)).
 
I could quibble with Egginton on a number of points, but, in general, I think he’s making an important claim; namely, that Modernity orders itself around a highly theatrical mode of viewing that distinguishes between spectators and performers (never to be merged) and requires a notion of subjectivity as a properly internal domain. In this discussion, I’d like to transition quickly (if not artlessly) to the tendency for Modern and even Post-Modern poetry to capitulate all too quickly to this disassociationism. Consider, briefly (if that’s possible) the opening stanza of Eliot’s The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock:
 
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.[1]
 
With the opening line, Eliot offers an invitation for me, the would-be spectator, to leave my position as passive reader in order to enter the scene of evening “spread out against the sky” and, through the embodied act of visitation, participate in the poem-world as a performer. While Eliot would like to activate me as the reader, his invitation is in fact conditioned by as assumed definition of my pre-poem state as interiorized subject preparing to consume the poetic fare as a spectator would imbibe a stage performance from the darkened auditorium. Eliot activates me but simultaneously relies upon the disassociationism that outfits me for such an invitation, thereby lending it credence and, in a sense, preserving its authority.
 
I could identify a similar capitulation in Wright:
 
Here begins the revelation of a kiosk,
beside the road: the white eggs
nestled there in straw
turn blue in amber light.
Make of that what you will,
               Say, what you desire […] (Absence 1)
 
Is Wright not setting up the traditional scene where I, reader, am welcomed into a scene outside of myself, perhaps the scene prepared by Wright’s poetic body as it prepares its “colonization” of the road that stretches out beyond the roadside kiosk? Yes and no. Yes, insofar as I, the reader, have stumbled into this scene and might very well assume that “I” am the individual to whom Wright beckons with the phrase, “Make of that what you will.” At the same time, no, because, it turns out, “I” am not necessarily welcomed here. If there is an “I” in this poem, it belongs more properly to Wright himself, and it belongs to him only insofar as he is going to demonstrate to himself that the “I” is neither a certain nor stable marker. As such, he, the poet, is going to demonstrate to himself the difficulty of attempting to demonstrate something when the act of demonstration relies on a seemingly stable “I” to pull it off. To hint at this identity crisis, Wright transitions to Spanish by the end of page 1: “Somos ese quimérico museo de formas / inconstantes.”
 
Wright undoes himself in successive moves through Reading Absence. “I sit in error, or so would I stand.” Neither sitting nor standing, but somehow both (and neither); neither indicative nor conditional tense, but somehow both (or neither). Wright slips in and out of himself only to discover that he himself is nothing that great, nothing so great as to merit more attention than a bowl of green chile, the bluest flower of Zapopan, a goshawk’s exhilarated cry (7). He chooses to slip in this way so as to teach himself how “to release the sunlight / and to allow a magnetic dissonance / in a bird voice that enters the ear” (9).  In other words, he’s working hard to reveal the extent to which he is—at most and at least—a constitutive member of world of matter and energy.
 
As he teaches himself, he occasionally slips back into the disassociationism that, by habit, shapes our assessment of ourselves in the world. He identifies this moments in the text with parenthesis. Recall Adorno’s caution against the reliance on the parenthesis, which, he says, serves only to imprison certain material within the flow of narrative. As it to signify the subjective-philosophical prison created by disassociationism, Wright uses parenthesis to stabilize fleeting theatrical scenes that interrupt his poem-lesson from time to time. The first usage appears on page 12: “The lights reveal the epitome of a wash, with yucca elata sitting sternly in place. A small man, wearing a white guayabera and white cotton trousers, swerves in an irresolute light.” Notice how the poetic stanza gives way to prose at this point. The reliance on the typical on stage/off stage visual configuration somehow commandeers the poem.
 
The poem manages to break free of the scene, but a second interruption occurs at page 41, again marked by parenthesis and prose: “Two small boats, each with a solitary figure standing erect within it, progress through a rapidly flowing basin. The figures gradually reveal themselves to be women […]” These women characters eventually speak (lines in the drama): “Do you known that she is pursuing you?” says one woman. “But I am pursuing her” replies the other. An entire scene plays out over two pages and eventually comes to a rest with these lines: “The women stand in the boats, and raise their arms in supplication. Their mouths open and shut; no words come.)” As soon as it ends, Wright returns to Spanish and signals the difficulty of returning to the poem with a backslash: “/mi corazón e un ofrenda y mis lágrimas / son piedras rituals.”
 
From this point, the poem really picks up steam. Wright’s slip manages to teach himself a lot (or so it seems) and my position as reader becomes one marked by uncertainty: should I be watching this? Am I watching anything, or is the poem inviting me to lose myself along with Wright, to suffer a particular loss of self that will reveal my entanglement in the Everything? There comes a moment when I (Will, actually I, as much as I can be I) find myself hoping for another interruption of prose, a moment to catch my breath. One finally comes, but something is different this time. The parenthesis-prison is still there, but this time an altogether different play erupts. Now, three matadores appear, marked as M1, M2, and M3 I the script, thus hinting at the possibility that Wright may have conjured a single matador split in 3.
 
Every House Has a Door is currently investigating what this is all about. If I can assist in the problem solving (or maybe it’s a matter of posing the problem correctly?), then I will do so by offering this thought: the 3 matadores enact a drawing of a magic circle within the poem so as to protect it from the interruption of disassociationism. That is to say, as Doctor Faustus and other magicians like him would draw a circle on the ground from which to call upon the spirits of the world to appear and make manifest their knowledge, so too do the matadores draw their arena around them thereby protecting them from the harm of spectator/performer binaries and allowing for the possibility that some spirits will come in for a closer look.
 
Spiraling motions abound in the matador scene:

M2 spins in a farol
The three figures write the circle “geographically” by naming points on the globe that encircle them: Sevilla, Lima, Madrid, Caracas, Puebla, Salamanca, Barcelona…
The series of passes, which amount to a series of semi-circular movements
 
Spells punctuate the matadores’ movements, italicized to indicate some kind of communication between Wright and the three figures:

I do not hear the clock
at the far end of the room,
nor the bell that brought me
to this seat
 
But now, somehow, the spells in tandem with the matadores’ movements work to re-position Wright within the world of matter or energy:

I am suddenly
a gossamer thread,
lifted from within,
sheared from this moment,
a process given substance
by a trinity
who will not speak to me.
 
Most fascinating to me: Wright provides no parenthesis with which to close this matador ritual. Once the matadores inscribe the magic circle within the poem, the poem itself is sucked into the scene and can forget any attempt to go back to its former state of autonomous poem because, perhaps, the poem realizes that no state ever existed.  
 
[Pause…the next installation will look to Music’s Mask and Measure to pursue the synesthesia made possible through conjuration within the magic circle]
 
 
 
 
 


[1] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/173476