Mysticism, whether atheistic or otherwise, has always welcomed a spectrum of experiences valued primarily for their absurdity and futility. The experience of asemic writing, whether one is attempting to write it or attempting to read it, is fundamentally a mystical experience. It is The Face That Is No Face, the Via Negativa.
Let’s say I make a sequence of tangled squiggles, with baggy loops here, jagged-edged bulges there, poncruated with curatorial punctuation marks in the form of randomly tilted ascenders and descenders, moving suggestively from left to right on the foundation of an imaginary baseline. It looks like writing, but we can’t read it, says the entry at Wikipedia. It must be asemic writing, says a contextualized leap of faith.
What if it is, in theory and in practice, experientially, a kind of quasi-calligraphic drawing?
This is not the Via Negativa. It is direct experience of the mystery. Direct Experience of The Mystery. There is no wrong reading, judged and condemned by official authorities on the matter. There are no Official Authorities on the matter. And there is no range of acceptable interpretations of the experience, no spectrum of permitted discourse about the acceptable interpretations.
There is no attempt at reading, not of any variety, and therefore there is no writing, of any variety, asemic or otherwise.
Asemic writing, in its absolute failure to exist, can function in our lives as a kind of pagan spiritual discipline, one designed to give us greater access to the experience of experience.
Archivi categoria: kritik
‘āāā. azioni off kulchur’, 1969
Sandro Ricaldone
āāā
azioni off kulchur
1969
TOOL editoria clan destina
āāā. azioni off kulchur è una rivista milanese co-fondata e co-diretta da Ugo Carrega, pubblicata a Milano. L’altro membro fondatore e redattore dagli Stati Uniti è stato Mario Diacono. Liliana Landi ne ha curato l’impaginazione.
La rivista Includeva ritagli di testi, opere e foto di interventi di artisti che sperimentavano poesia visuale in ambito italiano e internazionale. Stampata in ciclostile, in fogli sciolti non rilegati.
Consta di tre numeri, pubblicati tra il febbraio e il giugno 1969.
Redazione: Ugo Carrega e Mario Diacono.
Testi di Ugo Carrega., Mario Diacono, Jean-Claude Moineau.
Opere e interventi di Ugo Carrega, Mario Diacono, Rolando Mignani, Emilio Villa, Edgardo Vigo, Jean-Claude Moineau, Joel Rabinovitz, J.F. Dillon, T. Shohachiro, Vincenzo Accame, Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Hamilton Finlay e M. Allan, Davanzo and Gunzberg, A. Dias, H. Clavin, Giose Rimanelli et alii.
[r] _ chi eredita cosa, da balestrini?
Di tanto in tanto si sente un autore o l’altro, anche il più assertivo e melodizzante, rivendicare un qualche filo filiazione lineage affinità e insomma legame con l’opera di Nanni Balestrini. In alcuni casi, si tratta di autrici o autori di qualche testo très sucré, testi confessionali e magari perfino neometrici, se non neomelodici; e questo legame allora suona più come speranza e desiderio che come fatto agganciabile solidamente a testi reali. Nondimeno, fa il suo bravo effetto, il nome di Balestrini, e cattura quei cinque minuti di ascolto che talvolta nel circolo mediale sono sufficienti a far passare per decente una pagina così così.
Un diverso versante di scrittura, e di ricerca letteraria, per come si intende in relazione ad alcune precise generazioni, da circa vent’anni, consiste nell’elaborare testi operando — come dire — al buio e nel buio del linguaggio (non della cognizione della storia), facendo sì che il materiale si moduli su una effettiva disarticolazione dello stesso inconscio. Da una posizione del gliommero inconscio (da cui il soggetto, non l’io, sfila parole) esterno al perimetro fisico del parlante stesso. L’inconscio è infine, e in particolare, collocato in un motore di ricerca, in un ascolto casuale di conversazioni (“eavesdropping”, in inglese), in un elenco senza alcuno strato o scarto connotativo, in un cumulo di pagine niente affatto letterarie. Eccetera.
E si parla così, anche, di googlism: collocabile nella linea dell’operazione di Tape Mark, certo, ma con la diversa plasticità implicita nel contesto digitale, globale/immediato. Cosa che di fatto non significa estrarre parole dal cappello dadaista, né ritagliare frasi da un giornale: tuttavia finché alcuni continueranno a credere che non c’è soluzione di continuità fra Novecento e oggi, saranno misinterpretate sia le linee di continuità che quelle di discontinuità delle scritture di ricerca attuali rispetto alle sperimentazioni della seconda metà del secolo scorso.
La dislocazione quindi dell’attività di scrittura da un inconscio personale a un inconscio nemmeno più macchinico ma (eventualmente) digitale, e la conseguente vera e propria ricollocazione del soggetto in un altrove esterno (e storicamente marcato) rispetto allo stesso corpo scrivente costituiscono uno scatto di differenza e insieme un dialogo stretto con il Tape Mark di Balestrini.
Altro che La Poesia.
*
da https://mgiovenale.medium.com/chi-eredita-cosa-da-balestrini-56addfef1b0, 19 apr. 2021
images for sounds: giuseppe garrera parla delle copertine di dischi di bruno munari e luigi ghirri
Giuseppe Garrera parla delle copertine di dischi di Bruno Munari e Luigi Ghirri. La mostra IMAGES FOR SOUNDS: Artist Covers for Music Records è a cura di Vittoria Bonifati.
Regia e Montaggio di Michele Ferrari. VILLA LONTANA, Roma
Giuseppe Garrera talks about the record covers designed by Bruno Munari and Luigi Ghirri. The exhibition IMAGES FOR SOUNDS: Artist Covers for Music Records is curated by Vittoria Bonifati.
Camera operator and editing Michele Ferrari. VILLA LONTANA, Rome
carmelo bene e lydia mancinelli intervistati da pasquale guadagnolo (per il “riccardo iii”), 1978
antonio devicienti: “il cotone”, di mg, recensito in dialogo con testi di gustav sjöberg
un energicissimo grazie ad Antonio Devicienti per questa lettura de Il cotone (Zacinto/Biblion, 2021), con riferimenti pertinenti e puntuali all’opera di un amico e studioso che mi è carissimo: Gustav Sjöberg.
asemic writing and pareidolia / jim leftwich. 2022
For practitioners and theorists of asemic writing, the perceptual deviation known as pareidolia is an acquired taste and a developed skill. We train ourselves to see alphabetical shapes where there are none, and then we celebrate our inability to read them. This phenomenon could occupy an entire chapter in the Magickal Absurdities Training Manual: The Ecstasy of Asemic Reading.
Personal Perception Management (PPM) is but one of a great many Existential Self-Help (ESH) methods reinsinuated transmutably in The Training Manual. It is known colloquially among The Asemic AntiMasters as PPMESH — Personal Perception Mesh. The tradition, or parade of asemic saints, involved in transmigrating this alchemy of perception from prehistory into the present, includes William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson, Aldous Huxley, Diane di Prima and Jim Morrison. Cleanse the doors of perception to Illuminate the arrangement of the senses.
Or the arrangement of the world(s) by the senses.
Let’s say I make a sequence of tangled squiggles…
I sound them aloud, slowly singing their shapes…
Through the processes of transcription, transliteration, and apophenia, I arrive at a deliberate mishearing of a segment from a song sung by Jim Morrison:
meatza pocca hero, Esau funk, awe yeh
The world is a poem. Some of us know that. Know it whether we want to or not. The world snuck up on us when we were young, and planted the cosmic poem-seed at the base of our tender brains.
Asemic writing works as a kind of pagan missionary for The Poem.
Asemic writing is a mutagen.
Pareidolia is one of its tools, one of its schools, a side effect, mutual aid, elective affinities, the ace of hearts up its sleeve, one foot on the other side of the grave still kicking at the pricks, reinsinuated and impoxximate.
We see what we want to see. No. That’s not right. Read what Thou Wilt. We see what we need to see. Some realities are more real than others. Asemic writing is useful, as a kind of anti-linguistic self-medication for the perpetually seeking psyche. Pareidolia is a method of ongoing research. It allows us to discover, investigate and explore provisional realities. The worlds of pareidolia are experientially real, and as such are causal agents — in our thinking, and in our actions as they emerge from that thinking.
As an entanglement with the processes of pareidolia, asemic writing functions for the perennially seeking psyche as a way of practicing reality.
is asemic writing true? / jim leftwich. 2022
The most important and interesting characteristic of asemic writing is its absolute resistance to interpretation.
The value of asemic writing lies in its semantic emptiness, and relies on the genuine frustration experienced during a failed attempt at interpretation, meaning-building, the collaborative construction of meanings.
Success in reading asemic writing implies an inauthenticity, either of the writing and it’s author, or of the reading and its perpetrator.
Authentic asemic writing denies all access to success.
The complete and utter, total failure of an attempted reading is the only acceptable measure of success for any particular instance of asemic writing.
So, to iterate — and reiterate:
1. asemic writing lies?
2. asemic writing re-lies?
3. asemic writing imp-lies?
Please refer to your copy of The Magickal Absurdities Training Manual for answers and/or elucidations.
Asemic writing has a dirty secret, hidden, as usual, in plain sight: it is all a pack of lies, and always has been.
Asemic writing is not a dispensary for recreational truths.
Asemic writing is not a dispensary for medicinal truths.
Asemic writing does not participate in the language game of dispensing truths.
We have a choice where the existential ground of asemic writing is concerned: either we admit it’s non-existence, and celebrate it for not existing, or we lie to ourselves and each other about it’s existence, and through the persistence of our collective effort, bring it — lie it — into being, no matter how provisional, damaged, and ephemeral that being may be.
Today, in the summer of 2022, there is no denying the fact that a great many things in our world are identified by one variety or another of the term asemic writing.
That in itself is good.
The concept of asemic is generative and tolerant. Let’s frolic in its wonderland! With our first mind celebrating it’s ludic absurdity, and our second mind practicing the pleasures it offers in opportunities for critical thinking.
su ‘critica integrale’, un contributo di francesco muzzioli a “esiste la ricerca?”
l’intervento intero si può leggere qui: https://francescomuzzioli.com/2022/06/28/tre-accorgimenti-per-evitare-la-confusione/#more-2530
as ex. asemic expressionism, or abstract expressionist writing / jim leftwich. 2022
Once upon a time, long long ago (20 years), in a far far away place (Charlottesville, VA), I claimed to have identified a category of visual poetry called (perhaps only by me) Decorative Expressionism. It was busy, crowded, colorful and noisy. I liked it a lot — for several reasons, one of them being the fact that I was making quite a bit of it myself.
If anyone had asked me at the time (no one has ever asked me), I would have told them that Decorative Expressionism was the exact opposite of asemic writing.
Ah yes, time goes by and with a little “luck of the research and reading” (recollected and ruminated upon in tranquility) maybe we learn a thing or two. How does that old hit single go?
What I didn’t know then
What I don’t know now
.. some other stuff in there, I know… 45 years ago… anyway
I would have been wrong.
That was back in the early days of this current iteration of asemic writing, when some of us still thought the prefix ‘a-‘ meant “without; not having any.” Little did we know that the prefix ‘a-‘ was soon to take on the meaning of its opposite, “poly-“. “Without, not having any” semes came to mean “having many” semes. “Absolutely thwarting the production of meaning” became “open to the invention of all imaginable meanings.”
It was a transformative moment in the history of all things asemic.
When Jackson Pollock woke up in the morning, he already had a lit cigarette balanced on his lower lip. He visited his Jungian therapist every Tuesday at 2pm. They played chess, drank beer, went to Yankees games, and chased the stately, plump pigeons through Central Park.
You’re getting better, Jack, said the Jungian therapist. Getting better all the time.
Thank you, said Jackson Pollock.
Alchemy of the vowels, Tantric Sex Mandala, said the Jungian therapist.
I don’t believe in The Accident, said Jackson Pollock.
He walked down the crowded sidewalk past The Tavern to his studio.
He lit a cigarette, opened a beer, took off his shoes and socks.
He spent the rest of the evening working, late into the night, doing The Dance of the Collective Unconscious, In The Painting.
That’s pretty much how asemic writing is still made today.
So, the next time someone tells you myriad hymnal nightpoets, hurrier, nebula nebula, tell them you know all about asemic expressionism. Maybe they’re living in a book by Donald Barthelme. What do you know? Empathy is all about effort. Let there be no bullshit between Practitioners of The Craft and Sullen Art.
polyasemic thinking: a brief future / jim leftwich. 2022
One thing I particularly reinsinuate about the idea of asemic writing is its persistence. Once the idea gets inside a brain, it refuses to go away. It mutates and proliferates.
Once the asemic cat got out of the bag, it set off on a mission to conquer the world.
There is a kind of pareidolia prevalent among practitioners and theorists of asemic writing; we may not see the face of Jesus in a greasy frying pan, but we do see quasi-alphabetical shapes just about everywhere. It is hard not to be joyfully reinsinuated in the presence of such a life-affirming mutagenesis of ubiquitous formlessness.
No matter whether we experience it as pre-word or post-word (I could make a case for either, or both), once the virus of asemic writing invades and occupies the brain, it imposes the shape of its cultural desire on everything in its path.
Continua a leggereannotazione in occasione della presentazione di “deleuze, o dell’essere chiunque chiunque”, di vincenzo ostuni (2020)
Vincenzo Ostuni è — non solo per mia convinzione ma anche per studio e dimostrazione testuale da parte di più critici letterari, in particolare di Luigi Severi — forse l’unico autore contemporaneo che (in tempi post-novecenteschi e per certi aspetti post-poetici) riesce a tenere insieme le modalità della ricerca testuale più stretta, un forte letteralismo, un processo lessicalmente tellurico di interrogazione filosofica costante, e un progetto che lega tutto ciò offrendone i risultati sotto forma di vera e propria opera mondo. (E opera aperta, per le ragioni che si vedranno).
È infatti almeno a partire dall’uscita in volume di un primo segmento del suo progetto / macrotesto, il Faldone, ossia dal 2004, che appare evidente come Ostuni a questo lavori interminabilmente riprendendolo, variandolo, accrescendolo, disturbandone i confini e gli intrecci, sia ad intra che — proiettato in segmenti futuri — ad extra.
Se è vero che un ventaglio di argomenti ritornanti nel Faldone, per evidenza di contenuti, è da riassumere con termini quali incompiutezza dell’esperienza, incompletezza del linguaggio, e cumulo di nostre incertezze percettive, va poi súbito aggiunto che questo denso e centripeto nucleo tematico diventa anzi è di fondo, per statuto formale, il vortice centrifugo che di libro in libro, di aggiornamento in aggiornamento, sgretola la stessa compibilità dell’opera (determinandone l’apertura), insieme inchiodandola all’esperienza oggettiva (dunque estendendone non senza vertigine i confini al “mondo” stesso, tutto).
MG