Paranormal Investigations with Ulrich Baer
Ulrich Baer’s new book Midwestern Infinity Doctrine, out from Apocalypse Party, might fuck you up. A revelatory cosmic kick from punk Chicago, with breakneck quantum leaps and time collapses. Dense, grief-ridden, but also loving: maybe you didn’t think a book could hold this much, but turns out MID is a portal.
Writes Vi Khi Nao, “Here the linear lives within the subliminal sequencing of itself, breaking out a kind of disco of sorrow, hypervigilant texts that hope to dance into bijections by abandoning itself to lexical chance. Here the abyss of Baer’s prosaic, cryogenic world does not thaw, but hyperventilates from insularity and significant enigma.”
I chatted through the virtual ether with Baer about the midwest, aliens, dreams, and time.
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Noa Micaela Fields: How did Midwestern Infinity Doctrine begin as a project?
Ulrich Baer: It began because I emailed a friend of mine and asked them if they had ever had the experience of being in multiple places in time simultaneously, and they asked me to elaborate on that sensation. And then they said that I should write a project about it.
NMF: If you had to summarize it, how would you describe your “midwestern infinity doctrine” as a thesis?
UB: I have been continually trying to summarize Midwestern Infinity Doctrine. The work lives on in my own attempts to understand what that work is for me personally as it’s continuously redefined. But if I had to give a doctrine for what it’s about, there’s like two dimensions that are interlocked.
On one dimension is what we could conceive of as the political real. So in that dimension I am trying to talk about conspiracy theories, social paranoia, alienation from desire, toxic masculinity and how that relates to those things. So like, depictions of violence in masculinity and violence perpetuated through toxic masculinity — where does it come from? how does it relate to alienated desire? and how do we disrupt what is perceived as the linear flow of time? It’s partially to make a new space, like an anomalous or autonomous space for — thinking about [Michel] Foucault too, some sort of like heterotopic space — for time to exist in a different way, so that people who don’t relate to time in the way that it’s presented to us by capitalism have a space to perceive time how they experience it.
So that’s the top dimension. The bottom dimension, underlying that is a comment on literature and feeling trapped by literature, and wanting to create some kind of writing that does something else or that escapes the expectations of literature and trying to figure out if the literary project itself can be a transgressive act or is more like a trap.
NMF: I’m curious about where the Midwest specifically enters into that. Or maybe more broadly, what the Midwest means for you?
UB: One of the important aspects of this work is thinking about infinity. I am not a mathematician or physicist, and so I probably have a poor mathematical conception of infinity, but I do know that there are multiple infinities. And there’s different proofs for that, but there are uncountable sets that show that there’s more than one infinity.
When I think about the Midwest, I think of this optical illusion of endlessness — because the Midwest is so flat, that you can see for miles in any direction. Like Lake Michigan: Lake Michigan seems like a massive ocean-like presence, because it’s so flattened and endless looking. That sort of horizon of perspective draws you to the idea of infinity as something that I think you experience in the Midwest because of the landscape.
But I also have a lot of nostalgia about Chicago because it’s a place that I love. Because I feel like it’s an incubation chamber for weirdness, in a very warm way. But also post-industrial America? That is the Midwest — like these decaying, rusting cities, super Walmarts, just stereotypical American culture that is sold to you in terms of ideologies and American narratives.
NMF: Sure, a place becomes more than a place. It’s like a vacuum sucking in all these ideological underpinnings. Let’s talk about those dreams! How do dreams play out in MID?
UB: I mean, the Midwest is sort of a dreamy space. Chicago, for example, has a veneer of nostalgia and sentimentality. Have you felt that? Like the personality of Chicago, how it’s spread all over the architecture and the neighborhoods, and this idea of what it means for a place to be Midwestern in the United States. So it’s sort of like a dream space of this nation that we partake in producing and reproducing together, because of course Chicago doesn’t exist — it’s occupied land. The United States doesn’t exist. The Midwest kind of exists, it’s kind of in the Midwest of the country, but relative to what?
NMF: In your book, you write about becoming a “paranormal investigator to save you from the human parameters.” Can you tell me about what it means to be a paranormal investigator?
UB: Paranormal investigator for me is a useful way of conceptualizing the fact of being a poet. So it’s this sense of investigating the zones that exceed the normal or the accepted as empirically or ontologically given. So, existing in and putting a stethoscope to these fringe realms outside of what is accepted social reality.
For me personally, I feel that writing poetry is like being a person on the beach with a metal detector. Paranormal investigation is a similar thing — like if you imagine someone investigating a haunted house and moving through the rooms, knocking on walls listening for ghosts. It’s not that different from the way Jack Spicer conceives of it, I think when he talks about his poetry as coming from martian voices on the radio. It doesn’t matter if he believes in the martians or not, it’s that he believes in the idea of receptivity to something that exceeds what he knows.
NMF: Hm. I’m interested in what you said about the writer’s receptive role, and in particular, I’m curious about the way your writing is maybe receptive to time’s multiplicities? How do you receive time in your writing practice?
UB: I’m glad you asked that question because I would love to assert right now that Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is a failed project because I failed to understand how to discursively reproduce nonlinear time. It’s built so thoroughly into the trappings of prose fiction especially to experience things in accordance to a linear conception of time that I still don’t even understand how to break that.
In terms of how I would ideally ideologically conceive of time? In this work I’m resistant to positivism. Any conception of linear time seems to depend upon a positivism like that things are building upon each other, and usually that is premised in a Christian conception of time or a capitalist conception of time, where everything is working towards some good end. In this book I wanted to disrupt that idea and argue that things aren’t moving towards some good end. And in many ways, things are just trapped in like an ongoingness where they’re not progressing at all.
NMF: IDK, when I was reading your book, I didn’t get a sense of linear time. I guess I’m pushing back a little bit on this idea of your book being a failed project. I mean, I acknowledge failure can be a goal, like in Bhanu Kapil’s project [Ban en Banlieue]. I totally respect if failure is part of how you want to frame your project, but I also think that there is something that you are articulating that feels anti-positivist and offers a different way of orienting to time and poetry that feels vastly original and mind-boggling.
UB: That is the most flattering thing you could say that you felt that my book did reproduce a nonlinear time. Yeah, that is exactly what I wanted to do. Bhanu Kapil is so exemplary in terms of thinking about this beautiful carving of fragmentarity not really coalescing into some monumental project or a project of like a “major language” (in the Deleuzian sense) but like creating the minor works that are the actually significant works because they transgress those expectations.
NMF: Who are your interlocutors that you bring your discursive universe?
UB: So maybe the most important interlocutor that I bring into it is Alvin Lucier because of his album I Am Sitting In A Room, which is an album where, because he has a stutter, he is trying to perfect the tone of his voice by recording himself saying this whole speech, and then playing it in the room and then recording it again, until his voice is lost in the resonant frequency of the room. For me, I think of that as a sort of creative praxis of the zone of art existing in this almost impossible space between the idiosyncratic stutter of the individual voice, and the universal — or supposedly universal — space of the overall artistic practice and its given expectations. And so it’s that interference zone when you’re moving between being Alvin Lucier’s unique stuttering voice to being just the resonant frequency of the room, and in my opinion that’s like a really good allegory for their process of making art.
And then there’s [Julia] Kristeva, the “Queen of Space” — so one thing that’s happening in the book is that it’s also a space opera. [Laughter] I’m like a cosmonaut, and I’m continually addressing this figure of Kristeva who’s like this matriarchal, but then this matrixial space, like a generative space — thinking about literature thinking about building universes. As a cosmonaut, I’m constantly refining her and trying to deliver some sort of message to her, which continuously fails.
NMF: Among these semiotics and messages, perhaps: “alien hand prints.” You write,
“There’s a parenthesis for what’s inside me. if you fillspace, it’s an infinity
symbol.” I’m glowing with the alien hand prints fanning across my chest, patteddown from a fire. Who sets it, renews?
Can you tell me about these alien hand prints?
UB: Oh, yeah, alien hand prints. This is about interpersonal violence. And it is about the experience of having a UFO visitation. This is something that I’ve researched a lot and that I’m working on a project right now about and planning to do more with in the future.
To conduct the research for this book, I visited the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago: one of the most important UFO research organizations, which was run by this ultimately disgraced astrophysicist Dr. Hynek, who because of his relationship to UFOs became a persona non grata in his field. And so now, all of their records — which are first person accounts from people who have seen or have been visited by aliens etc. — are just housed in this person’s basement. And when I interviewed the person who’s responsible for the archive now, he said that the vast majority of the people that he was interviewing or who wanted to make a report wanted to remain anonymous, because they had so much shame about this experience of seeing something that exceeds the space of the socially given real.
That is one of the major themes of the book. Because we live in an incredibly gaslit society where the real is very much calibrated by authoritative forces. Like gender violence or even just the experience of alternative genders. These are things that we are gaslit about individually and locally, as well as more globally. So I was using this idea of “alien hand prints” — people who’ve been visited by aliens, people who experienced that or feel that they’ve experienced that — to think about the hand prints that are left on people who experienced violence. That violence leaves a hand print that may be visible to you or that may be pertinent to your life that may stay with you until you die, that other people may attempt to convince you does not exist, could not exist.
NMF: For me the violence of gender as this orienting (or disorienting?) force or bottomless gravity field hooks up with your description of how “space is haunted.” And it makes me wonder, where in the hauntology of violent space-time can you sort of just be in a non-threatening way?
UB: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the primary tensions of the work, that inter-relationality is what prevents that being, and also accommodates or creates the possibility for that being. And so it’s so difficult to find those interrelational or interpersonal spaces where one can just be themselves, or become themselves, as a changing singular selfhood in relationship with the selves around you.
In this work I mostly focus on relationships that fail to accommodate that space or, like, are incredibly antagonistic to that space, but I have a few moments where I bring in those holding spaces, like people in your life who radiate that sense of safety that allows one to finally come to a sort of resting place, briefly.
NMF: Absolutely. Do you think that Midwest Infinity Doctrine in some ways a love poem?
UB: Yeah, I mean this book is in many ways inspired by the aftermath of an abusive relationship in which I was in love with the antagonist! And that is a space that I also wanted to create in my literary work, because that space is so fucking stereotyped and codified in all of these very ridiculous and reductive ways that says you’re a bad subject if you fall in love with someone who hurts you; you become a good subject, if you leave them. And so this book is all about how you can leave and your life is still fucked up; you can stay and experience real meaningful happiness with them, even if it’s ephemeral. It’s just so much more complex than that. But what I think is a shared experience is the way that I felt frustrated by the fact that I wanted to love this person and their orientation was so anti-relational and destructive and violent and underscored by things like toxic masculinity and paranoia that I couldn’t, even though I desperately wanted to. And, as a result, they were able to inflict an incredible amount of damage onto me which I still live with.
But it’s definitely a love poem to the Midwest. It’s a love poem to friendships, relationships, queer friendships. It’s a love poem to science, which I think is also ambivalent.
But also, for me personally, this work was really terrifying, because in this book, I accidentally predicted my mother’s death a few months before it happened. Which, I don’t want to sound ridiculous but I think that when you write, you’re open to intuition and perception, like you’re especially open and receptive. And so it makes sense to me actually that in this book, I was able to pick that up. But I guess I’m grateful for that because it also means that in some ways this work allowed me to start processing my mother’s death before it occurred, you know? And if we’re thinking about mobius strip time, my mother is like alive and dead simultaneously; she’s gonna die again, she’s already died in the past, and she’s alive in the future and dead in the past; and the same thing will happen to all of us. And yeah, I like the idea of being able to experience that relationship in this less linear way.
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Ulrich Baer received his MFA from Brown University in 2017. He was born in GA and grew up beneath southern power plants. He has a poetry chapbook with Magic Helicopter Press (Holodeck One, 2017), a science fiction chapbook with Essay Press (At One End, 2020), and a full-length with Apocalypse Party (Midwestern Infinity Doctrine, 2021). He has been included in journals such as FENCE, Prelude, Pinwheel, Baest, The Tiny, and Bone Bouquet. He loves horses.
