Archivi tag: scrittura asemica

asemic writing as a kind of poetry / jim leftwich. 2022

Jim Leftwich

Asemic Writing Is A Kind Of Poetry
Summer 2022 / Utah

If, at times (if not, in fact, all the time), it must seem as if I have no idea what asemic writing is, I can only defend myself through an appeal to my experience of the theory and the practice: asemic writing came into my life as a continuation and an extension of my practice as a poet.

I wrote textual poetry for a little over twenty years before I started making visual poems. After making visual poems for a few years, I started making what was originally called spirit writing (by John M. Bennett, in his capacity as the editor of Lost and Found Times, a magazine of experimental poetry and related matters).

That was in 1997. The following year, Tim Gaze published a small chapbook of my quasi-calligraphic scribblings entitled Spirit Writing. Maybe I didn’t know what I was doing at the time (the theory and history came later), but I had no reason to think of this new development in my work as anything other than poetry.

These days, and maybe for the past fifteen years or so, it seems that very few theorists or practitioners think of asemic writing as a kind of poetry.

Asemic writing, as a kind of poetry, is all but limitless in its potential. We should take the same sort of approach to it’s study. For example: I have been told that asemic writing is all about linguistics. I have no doubt that the study of linguistics, and the application of that study to an engagement with asemic writing, will add substantially to our understanding of the subject. But, as with all other varieties of poetry, linguistics is only one among very many approaches to the study of asemic writing.

I am never interested in having the last word on any of these matters. Maybe I am interested in having the next word — and then, in having had some of the recent words. The conversation around asemic writing is ongoing and, like all conversations around all varieties of poetry, it seems to have no necessary or inevitable end. I am interested in expanding the spectrum of acceptable discourse concerning the subject of asemic writing. I hope my writings on the subject will function as invitations to others to participate in this process.

asemic writing and the tragedy of the absurd / jim leftwich. 2022

Jim Leftwich

Asemic Writing and The Tragedy of the Absurd
Summer 2022 / Utah

When I say absurd, I don’t mean quirky.
I don’t think absurdity is a variety of comedy.
Finding comedic relief in inconsequential weirdness does not qualify as an experience of the absurd.

Certain styles of comedy monetize a surrealist juxtaposition of clangorous items and/or ideas to elicit Spasms of Guffaw from a naptive audience. As such, they serve a purpose: to disguise the osmotic suffering of those immersed in the petroleus ooze of The Capitalist Ongoing.

The absurd does not organize itself in order to acclimate our minds around any of the currently available varieties of unbearable realities.

The absurd is: a variety of that which is incomprehensible within the human universe.

A mystery is: that which is uplifting because it is experienced as being incomprehensible within the human universe. We celebrate an encounter with mystery.

The absurd is experientially devastating, annihilating, a psychological sparagmos. We may, after a fashion, celebrate the fact that we experienced it and lived to tell the tale.

Asemic writing is capable of embodying, and conveying, the tragedy of the absurd. But only for the those who want that, who want that kind of thing. For those who do not want that kind of thing, asemic writing is also fully capable of being abstract art school dorm room wallpaper and glamping picnic tablecloth design. I know, I am not being very nice, I’m sorry. Did you by chance see Sun Ra and The Arkestra 40 or 50 years ago? They had The Look. Sparkling robes down to the floor, Egyptian Spaceman Hats 3-feet high. Marching around the stage, chanting, gesturing with their instruments towards the ceiling. I saw them with a few hundred other people in 1982 and not a soul was laughing. We’re they absurd? Absolutely. Sublime? Yes.

The Tragedy of the Absurd is experienced as a Magickal Absurdity. Asemic writing is capable of existing along that spectrum of experiences. I learned that in the late 1990’s as part of my introduction to the idea and the execution of asemic writing. I have never been able to want anything else from it.

‘asemica’: diffusione ad oggi

<Asemica> è stata archiviata presso la Bayerische Staatsbibliothek di Monaco, una delle più importanti biblioteche d’Europa.

<Asemica> è un aperiodico dedicato alla scrittura e all’arte asemantica in veste di assembling magazine. Nel primo numero il testo critico “Verso la scrittura asemica” di Cecilia Bello Minciacchi e opere di Francesco Aprile, Julien Blaine, Antonino Bove, Cristiano Caggiula, Giuseppe Calandriello, Federico Federici, Giovanni Fontana, Marco Giovenale, Lamberto Pignotti e William Xerra.

<Asemica> è archiviato anche presso Mart – Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, FONDAZIONE BONOTTO di Colceresa, Vicenza, Biblioteca della Collezione Maramotti di Reggio Emilia, Fondazione Berardelli di Brescia e Biblioteca d’Arte del Castello Sforzesco di Milano.

https://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/title/BV048321946

via negativa and asemic writing / jim leftwich. 2022


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.

asemic writing and the absurd / jim leftwich. 2022

To the extent that The Absurd is a characteristic, or even at times a category of the historical avant garde, it can be asserted that asemic writing functions as a continuation of the theory and practice of the avant gardes (plural, at least since the end of WWII) in the form of a self-actualizing multitude of willful absurdities.

If the absurd is the incongruous, as Albert Camus asserted in The Myth of Sisyphus, then the simultaneous presence of the written and the unreadable is a classic example of absurdity, in its most uncontestable, experiential form.

Whereas absurdity under normal conditions requires a clash of juxtaposed items or ideas, asemic writing only requires itself, as a self-contained absurdity.

A self-contained absurdity is a Magickal Absurdity. It offers itself as a reality, of a type that should not exist. It troubles the stability of the psyche, as if for a fleeting moment there is no distinction between Sisyphus and Icarus, as if both are merely variations on the theme of Tantalus.

Desire, as often as not frustrated, thwarted, derailed, detoured, imbricate and futilitarian, anachronistic, impoxximate, inverted — invertebrate — involuntary, and/or joylessly reinsinuated,

stands,

sits,

lies

at the unsettled center of all considerations concerning the function of absurdity in everyday life.

In the case of asemic writing, we desire for that which is certainly not asemic to nonetheless function in our everyday lives as if it clearly is asemic and nothing else.

Absurdity is a very particular and peculiar variety of desire.

We want the world to be not only other than what it is — we want it to be precisely that which it can never be.

That variety of desire is precisely the allure of asemic writing. It is the distilled quintessence of its magickal absurdity.

That is not only why, but how, the practice of asemic writing reinvents itself, over and over, across centuries and cultures, one generation after another into the present.