Only by looking can it obtain its existence, i.e., via silent reading. It forbids vocal performance and desires an existence beyond speech. As it veers away from dependence on verbal performance for its being, its whole existence can only be sensed through the visual channel. We would. by habit. impose a subphonetic echo. on the repeating sequence. Yet, that repetition reminds us as if by command, as it flits from the verbal to the nominal to the adjectival, or from the discursive to the graphemic, that its proper world is the forbidden reentry of speech. From its exploitation of pictorial layout and type, or its avoidance of syntax and the metronomic line, it reconquers every phonovocalic temptation, and calms all verbalization into the final triumph of a formal and material auto-inscription. As a manifesto of visual prosody, official or unofficial, it reestablishes the frontier that divides the prosodic world between the glottographic and nonglottographic, and breaks open our worldview of the horizon for a poetic practice beyond speech-centered metronomy.
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Eugen Gomringer, 1953, "Wind": diagrammatic, nonlinear, kinetic, multimodal; iconicity at the limits of iconicity |
Up until now, current practice did not yet break the hold of the metrico-lyrical Voice nor of the assumed but mysterious grand order of Syntax, despite the avalanche of visual, bibliographic, materialist, digital, and ergonomic dimensions of modern 20th to 21st century prosody. More currently, Gomringer's pivotal piece reminded me of "postliterate" texts such as the late Peter Ganick's and his contemporaries, whose underrated works evoke for me Abstract art's post-figural moment in terms of historical turns in artistic paradigms where the fundamentals and primes of a koinē aisthēsis are once more interrogated and shaken. These artists' output straddles the prosodic worlds inherited from dadaism, concretism, proceduralism, ''language'' poetics, vispo, conceptualism, and asemic writing. Elsewhere, however, writing still labors under the twilight of prosodic idols. It continues in the void where human language is confronted with the absence of absolute grounds, proceeding either unreflexively and ahistorically, or propping itself up erringly, like an amnesiac dreaming faintly of utopian grammars, ideal languages, and isomorphic cartographies. Stubborn archaic idols brandishing the promised land of some indescribable objective solace never cease to haunt its centers and margins.
*The blank space activates the dialectic between the visible scripts and the unfilled surface of the page. It allows us to imagine the reversal of the visible scripts into their invisible counterpart. What is readable becomes, in turn, transparent, that is, unreadable, absent yet present, present yet absent. Surrounding the blank space in the center as if to assure its captivity as an insubstantial void to the gaze, the legible glyphs ironically become contaminated by it, themselves imperceptibly becoming what they seem to have tried containing. By an abrupt expansion and Gestalt inversion, we realize at once that the empty space is not a mere center subordinate to the self-evident presence of visible fonts: it forms part of the whole page whose whiteness now surrounds the legible space of writing.
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