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 tag: scrittura asemica
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.
two asemic pieces / differx. 2022
(CC) 2022 differx
[now in the Utsanga collection]
irma blank in mostra a milano @ ica, fino al 22 luglio
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.
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.
notes_220626_144254 / miron tee. 2022
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rarità narcisistiche @ vendita compulsiva, studio campo boario, roma, sabato 25, h. 16
Piccole o meno piccole e non scontate rarità o feticci giovenaliani, ritrovati oggi, saranno messi impudicamente in vendita in occasione dell’iniziativa di vendita compulsiva, con banchetti di libri di poesia-poesia e scritture di ricerca, materiali assertivi e non, opere grafiche e riviste, postpoesia, traduzioni e liriche, anche di altri editori & venditori, allo Studio Campo Boario, sabato 25 giugno a partire dalle ore 16 circa. Lo Studio è in viale del Campo Boario 4a (il cancello verde).
Accorrete numerosi.
Saranno inoltre presenti libri delle edizioni del Verri, di IkonaLíber, e molti altri ancora, in parte non esaustiva visibili qui: https://slowforward.net/2022/06/22/alcuni-libri-che-troverete-studio-campo-boario-sabato-25-dalle-ore-16-circa/
Giovenale/differx recherà seco, inoltre, sempre in vendita, fogli asemici di piccole dimensioni, micro-opere, cartoline.
senza titolo / enzo patti. 1990
.
irma blank @ ica (milano): fino al 22 luglio
da “Il giornale dell’arte”,
https://www.ilgiornaledellarte.com/articoli/calligrafie-mancine-di-irma-blank-all-ica-di-milano/139442.html
Calligrafie mancine di Irma Blank all’ICA di Milano
La sua ricerca asemantica nei territori della scrittura: una calligrafia visiva inventata, libera da ogni obbligo comunicativo e affondata nell’ interiorità
[…] Irma Blank ha sempre condotto la sua ricerca nei territori della scrittura: una scrittura asemantica, però, una calligrafia visiva inventata, libera da ogni obbligo comunicativo e affondata nella propria interiorità, di cui diventa una sensibile trascrizione.
La mostra «Blank», curata da Johana Carrier e Joana P. R. Neves, alla Fondazione ICA (via Orobia 26, Milano) dal 9 giugno al 22 luglio, è frutto della collaborazione tra varie istituzioni internazionali e la stessa Fondazione ICA. La scelta curatoriale è stata di soffermarsi qui soprattutto (ma non solo) sugli ultimi vent’anni di ricerca di questa indomita artista che dal 2017, non potendo più usare la mano destra, ha imparato a servirsi della sinistra e ha dato il via prima alla serie «Gehen. Second Life» (2017-2019) fondata su linee orizzontali e poi al nuovo ciclo «Ways» (2020-2021), esposto qui per la prima volta come il libro realizzato a mano «My Way» (2020).
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