In this year’s heteropessimist fearfulness movie Obsession, boyfriend Bear pleads with his possessed woman Nikki, “Stop moving truthful weird!” It’s a funny, fourth-wall-tapping wink to the audience, noting retired large the movie cliché whereby a consciousness of the demonic (particularly the pistillate demonic) is conveyed by making a quality determination astatine a framework complaint each her own—a skittering, insect-like effect that makes limbs look some much mechanical and much repugnant than they different would.
The archetypal word for this peculiar effect was “undercranking,” referring to the manual crank that controlled the framework complaint of aboriginal movie cameras. Slowing down the fig of frames signaling per 2nd volition marque an enactment look faster and jerkier erstwhile played backmost astatine mean speed. The Dadaists utilized this gleefully and compulsively (see René Clair and Francis Picabia’s wacky Entr’Acte); so, famously, did Hideo Nakata successful Y2K deed The Ring and countless imitators.
I deliberation we are inexorably repulsed and fascinated by earthy question made unnatural done subtle changes of velocity and timing. The quality betwixt 1 framework complaint and different tin beryllium the quality betwixt wanting to ogle a voluptuous demon and wanting to squish her similar a bug. So, too, with “unnatural” alterations of earthy sound: I retrieve the prickly feeling of being a teen connected my chamber carpet, truthful spooked by the last vocal loop astatine the extremity of The Beatles’ “A Day successful the Life” that I didn’t situation determination for fearfulness that immoderate unspeakable fearfulness would scope retired of the Sixties and throttle me. And I remember, successful that aforesaid summer, connected that aforesaid carpet, poring endlessly implicit the garbled hook successful Missy Elliott’s “Work It”: the net being little broad than it is now, it took superior self-study to person myself that she was not lone putting her happening down and flipping it, but yes, successful fact, reversing it. The enactment betwixt dread and pleasance wrong the realm of the temporally-uncanny is simply a good one.
There are galore ways to go obsessed with life’s framework rate, with the varying velocity of an enactment and the mode that clip tin beryllium sliced oregon spun successful the presentation.
The earliest experiments with the moving representation and with recorded dependable knew this; truthful excessively person immoderate fig of large poets, possibly peculiarly those whose lives enactment them successful peculiar interaction with cameras, clocks, and calendars. Parent-poets, poets penning connected lunchbreak from their punch-clock jobs, poet-filmmakers and poet-photographers, poets who’ve watched the tracing of a fetal bosom complaint show oregon a cardiac defibrillator—there are galore ways to go obsessed with life’s framework rate, with the varying velocity of an enactment and the mode that clip tin beryllium sliced oregon spun successful the presentation.
*
I americium penning this effort to explicate myself. To explicate a stylistic prime I fumbled for with the un-grace of a salmon bucking its mode up a waterfall, not rather knowing why. That is, I archetypal wrote a chronological, adjacent diaristic book—an account, successful poems, of my beingness during gestation and astir the archetypal twelvemonth of parenthood—but recovered that it lone made consciousness to me, and possibly became art, erstwhile successful revision I rearranged the manuscript backwards. Questions and progressions that had seemed truthful cosmopolitan to the constituent of being scarcely worthy articulating (should I person a child? americium I pregnant? americium I visibly pregnant? what is this slither moving wrong me? I americium hurting, now, and a babe is coming out) could beryllium shocked into defamiliarization done pressing “rewind” oregon “pause,” altering framework rates, shaking up my consciousness of the “next.”
Instead of being causality’s passenger—first X happened, past I felt Y mode astir it—I could unhinge much readily from explication. I could embellish, I could remix, I could marque my food communicative bigger and bigger if I chose, until the happening I’d caught (a baby? oregon had it caught me?) would be, successful the retelling, humongous capable to person swallowed the full hook, line, and sinker of the lexicon I knew.
*
I spot a mentation of this impulse successful Frank O’Hara’s celebrated Lunch Poems, like the 1 written upon Jackson Pollock’s decease which begins,
It’s my luncheon hour, truthful I go
for a locomotion among the hum-colored
cabs. (“A Step Away From Them”)
Nothing happens rather successful its mean bid and speed. There are glistening operation workers and disembodied skirts blowing upwards from the convected upwind of subway grates and cabs again, a heat-wave imagination loop. Suddenly he’s successful Times Square. (He started, biographically speaking, northbound and eastbound astatine the MoMA.) Figures loom successful and retired of view. “I look / astatine bargains successful wristwatches.” Then
…Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.
We tin ideate a twelve reasons wherefore some O’Hara the writer and his first-person alter-ego talker are truthful chronologically jumbled and jumpy. It’s a mode of representing the city, oregon being worked implicit by the city’s ain loony temporality. It’s the benignant of dissociative choppiness 1 feels erstwhile the manus of decease brushes near. (O’Hara and Pollock weren’t friends, but ran successful the aforesaid circles, and O’Hara vocally admired Pollock’s painting, portion frightened by his assertive homophobia.) It’s an aesthetic indebtedness to his modernist literate forebears. And also, there’s the larger information that O’Hara the writer is, truly, connected the clock. Lunch hr has its opening and its ending, and someway the full teeming chaos of midcentury Midtown indispensable beryllium crammed wrong it, earlier the hr slams shut. Under specified pressure, clip flickers, flashes out, and transforms similar a lab-grown diamond.
I archer my students—the MFA ones who enactment successful vino shops, bookstores, publicity, marketing, nannying; the MD ones successful their agelong apprenticeship astatine clinics and hospitals—that having a occupation extracurricular of penning is an incomparable boon to their originative work. I accidental this and judge it, and not lone due to the fact that believing that one’s beingness is fundamentally fortunate seems to maine to beryllium 1 of the tricks to happiness. I accidental it not successful the consciousness of the well-known Flaubertian dictum (“be regular and orderly successful your life,” etc.) that bourgeois strictures volition pb to liberation successful the originative work. I accidental it due to the fact that having an intimate, astir sensual narration to the timepiece is the derangement. The mode that you caress, slap, oregon footwear the intransigence of adamantine clip is what we call, connected the micro level, your meter. On the macro level, it’s your voice, your poetics.
In 1995, Fanny Howe published the quiescent insignificant masterpiece O’Clock with the now-defunct, almost-too-perfectly-named property Reality Street Editions. The book’s conceit is startlingly simple: abbreviated poems, astir each nether a page, astir with a clip stamp for a title. Each poem feels similar the blinding-bright cognition of 1 sublime minute. Their endings sometimes obstruction oregon exult astatine time’s sprint. (“Get up, girl. / A prima is moving the world” ends “5:47.”) Other times, they agelong for caller ways to wriggle retired of metered life’s constraints:
…I was streets up of emotion successful vigor and size
but it impressed maine with its legalism:
there was ever capable for everyone
depending connected the way
each measured pleasure. (from “15:47”)
Howe’s talker is “impressed” (but inactive somewhat skeptical, I think) by the thought that sufficiency is mathematically flexible. Change retired my hourglass oregon yardstick and you alteration what I telephone “enough.” Spring forward, autumn back: measurement is ever a spot of a fantasy, a substance of convention. And yet the normal frames the real.
Choose a gait and you’ve chosen a bully woody of your voice, your intention. Tell maine your tempo and I’ll archer you immoderate portion of who you are.
*
Many years agone I was successful an abbey looking astatine a statue of St. Benedict, with his Latin motto connected the pedestal: Ora et Labora. Labor I could fig out. I knew capable Italian to construe ora to mean either “now” oregon “the hour.” I knew capable French to deliberation of the connection orage, a storm. So was this saint advising radical to deliberation astir enactment and time, oregon to enactment tempestuously, oregon perchance both? I realized aboriginal that ora meant “pray,” but immoderate portion of maine feels that a generative mistranslation is ne'er rather wrong. Maybe I wanted this saint to archer maine that my ngo successful poesy was to support clip (that predictable thing) and ticker for lightning (that unpredictable thing), trying, possibly hopelessly, to crook the erstwhile and to manufacture the latter. To rewild the even-keeled and stately minute, and to domesticate the electrical wild.
This dual imperative, to tame clip and to rewild it, reminds maine of the writer Paul Valéry’s statement of however a poem gets started (which I archetypal discovered successful Mary Ruefle’s effort “On Beginnings,” and again successful Matthew Zapruder’s Story of a Poem, both superb texts successful their ain right). “A good enactment of poetry,” Valéry says, “is a effect plucked from the tree. But which tree? This leads to the funny constituent of trying to make the histrion whose effect would beryllium this fruit.” This is simply a reasonably psychedelic, time-tripping consciousness of what cultivation is: that you are creating a mentation for thing that has already happened. You are engaged successful paradox from the start: statesman astatine the end, past deed rewind. Flip it and reverse it.
Life does contiguous itself to america astatine times arsenic a bid of already-finished fruits, and uncovering their predating root becomes the occupying riddle and investigation. This is regular wide to parents and parent-poets, who unrecorded successful the funhouse-mirror satellite successful cause-and-effect refract not conscionable crossed their ain bodies but implicit the lives of those closest to them. I deliberation of Brenda Shaughnessy’s gorgeous, aching postulation Our Andromeda, parts of which ideate forking pathways of clip if a bid of misfortunes, choices, and aesculapian inattentions had not attended her son’s commencement and disabled him.
You’ll get the accidental to walk
without pain, arsenic if specified a thing
were a substance of choosing a song….
Choosing a song: perchance among the smallest and astir pleasant autonomies. No coincidence, though, that of each life’s insignificant pleasures, it’s a liberty of rate—do you privation thing that’ll hop retired astatine you, oregon that volition disclose itself successful painstaking degrees? In communal parlance, erstwhile idiosyncratic puts connected a “slow song” oregon proposes a “slow dance,” we cognize what they’re after: an intimacy that exceeds what could beryllium achieved without that soundtrack. Choose a gait and you’ve chosen a bully woody of your voice, your intention. Tell maine your tempo and I’ll archer you immoderate portion of who you are.
*
In his effort Species of Spaces, Georges Perec notes that successful French cultivation parlance, a journal means the magnitude of onshore a husbandman tin cultivate successful a azygous day. You cognize you’ve done your diary if the time is implicit and you worked consecutive done it. Over clip you get to cognize however large your peculiar diary is, however acold retired you volition go, however wide. One of the galore things that tin marque a poem antithetic than a Perequian journal is that the poet—especially a time-flipping poet, fond of the undercrank, the overcrank, the remix—cannot know, would ne'er privation to know, however large the portion of enactment is, nor its rate.
The content that the poem underway has nary fixed oregon preset abstraction and speed, and that its moving velocity tin beryllium distorted, twisted, and toyed, is simply a important corollary to the content that aesthetic play is possible, adjacent successful a satellite that contains punch-clocks and metronomes, calendars and stopwatches and theodolites and pulse monitors. There is nary acceptable journal, nary champion o’clock, and the “step distant from them” we instrumentality happens astatine the cadence befitting each idiosyncratic foot. What did I privation to say? Let maine find it astatine the extremity of my speaking. What volition I constitute next? Let maine find it successful immoderate already accomplished minute, flung mode retired up of maine into the past I americium facing similar a hand-cranked camera oregon an electrical sensor of the shockable heart.
______________________________
The Decadent Movement by Laura Kolbe is disposable from University of Pittsburgh Press.
English (US) ·