The word as a thought experiment

1.

“Reading” here should be read and heard with quotation marks.

We can imagine that this text is made up of “absolute consonants” unfolding in their metaplasmic “materiality.” You can say it’s in the tradition of Zaum, but without the mystical fantasy of a more pristine or poetic language.

An attempt, then, at the wordless word, not because there is something like a “poetic” or absolute realm beyond words that words can’t express. Quite the contrary. On the page, there are only words, and because of this—because words have no built-in body or meaning that they were born with, words are both unreadable and unpronounceable.

What we have are only the simulated material variations of the unpronounceable word whose very form is unknown. These should be set against the simulated material variations of the pronounceable word that we “use” with ease everyday. 

Many writers presume knowing what a word “is.” I start with the simulated assumption—in the manner of a Thought Experiment—that I don’t know what a “word” is. This is not because against or beside the unknown word there exists an unknown world beyond words. I cannot speak for the Unknown, nor for the Known. 

I cannot, with arrogance, pretend to speak in their behalf, nor in behalf of Reality, the Infinite, or the Poetic. I don’t even speak in behalf of Language, or in behalf of Words whose form, shape, or meaning I don’t presume to know, much less master.

Hence, an introduction, for better or for worse, to the domain of “Asemic writing.”

2.

The battle against uncertainty is part of the human struggle against the void. For uncertainty is a species of the void, this negative space that blocks all advance, all movement forward.

To walk in the void is to accept the absence of being. Each moment is a battle field, an enigma which never relents.

Each moment is a search of the word, every step, a hazardous world. We say “renewal” to make it sound better and easier to take it up again.

Often we stumble into platitudes because they arrive ready-made, easy to employ and to deploy.

This errant language that dares to touch the lips, this word without home.

Those who dream have not yet found the country of speech.

Speech is a marriage contract signed in the field of the unknown. Outside the place where glides the I where many voices, stranger to one another, meet, hoping for the birth of recognition.

At the edge of things, the unknown in its atomic brilliance, islands of misrecognition, or contract of linguistic exile, to err in the beauty of speech, the moment of extreme forgetting.

Speech is the country of wandering. To speak is to resume the trajectory of a lost voice, of an exiled language without earth.