ASEMIA / Gaze, Leftwich, Tournay, Maneri, Diarra. 2003 (anabasis . xtant)
ASEMIA, anabasis/xtant, 2003
Jim Leftwich
singing the flat opaque. each letter a thicket of vines distinctly our moan and squeak, copse into which the rabbit flops grinning from ear to ear, wrung through a wavy grid. ornament is the oldest tradition of every surface. an ornament in isolation, or in any context other than its own, is a glyph, primordial aura around the priority of speech, and prior to that the embryonic phonemes of the hunt, vocables of sex and harvest. the letters entered through the eyes as birds’ feet and broken trees and their birds built nests in the forks of the tongue. an asemic glyph is everything other than a return to the thing recalled, thus its campanulate kinship with the syllable, its stylitic refusal of the word, even as the letters revolt, serfs wielding their serifs like swords words worlds collapse into their opacity, unless we chance to sing them in defiance of azoic intent. asemia is not silence, nor is it any sort of absence, it is a song imploded everted, imbricate membrance. our words belong to our discarded calendars, to a childhood of astrology earlier than eleusis, or to the murder of kennedy and planes flying into towers. we want our words to transmute into glyphs, easier to thread a camel through the last straw in a haystack, then to transmute these glyphs back into words. glyphs live in the future, gandharvas across a bardo, we coax glimpsed sound from memory of things to come. in its purest form, a syllable is a vowel. much the same can be said for the singularity of a glyph. in the company of words glyphs cloak themselves in surface, and hide their songs like vowels inside a sentence. they gaze out at the reader like mute ornamental gargoyles. we read around them, shy and tedious, like the broken image of an elf. pixies among their pylons juggle our refuse and cavort for the surveillance cameras. they build pueblos of basalt at the base of the brain. dreams sweat feathery purr of missiles. polyphonic medulla sex in the gaps of signs.
10.27.03
_______________________
Jim Leftwich
singing the flat opaque. each letter a thicket of vines distinctly our moan and squeak, copse into which the rabbit flops grinning from ear to ear, wrung through a wavy grid. ornament is the oldest tradition of every surface. an ornament in isolation, or in any context other than its own, is a glyph, primordial aura around the priority of speech, and prior to that the embryonic phonemes of the hunt, vocables of sex and harvest. the letters entered through the eyes as birds’ feet and broken trees and their birds built nests in the forks of the tongue. an asemic glyph is everything other than a return to the thing recalled, thus its campanulate kinship with the syllable, its stylitic refusal of the word, even as the letters revolt, serfs wielding their serifs like swords words worlds collapse into their opacity, unless we chance to sing them in defiance of azoic intent. asemia is not silence, nor is it any sort of absence, it is a song imploded everted, imbricate membrance. our words belong to our discarded calendars, to a childhood of astrology earlier than eleusis, or to the murder of kennedy and planes flying into towers. we want our words to transmute into glyphs, easier to thread a camel through the last straw in a haystack, then to transmute these glyphs back into words. glyphs live in the future, gandharvas across a bardo, we coax glimpsed sound from memory of things to come. in its purest form, a syllable is a vowel. much the same can be said for the singularity of a glyph. in the company of words glyphs cloak themselves in surface, and hide their songs like vowels inside a sentence. they gaze out at the reader like mute ornamental gargoyles. we read around them, shy and tedious, like the broken image of an elf. pixies among their pylons juggle our refuse and cavort for the surveillance cameras. they build pueblos of basalt at the base of the brain. dreams sweat feathery purr of missiles. polyphonic medulla sex in the gaps of signs.
10.27.03
_______________________
posted by jim leftwich at 9:23 AM
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