8TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 30 :: RYU ANDO on MARCEL DUCHAMP and YVES BONNEFOY
Welcome to the OS’s 8th Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 Series! This year, contributors far and wide were gathered by five incredible curators, who are also our 2019 Chapbook Poets — to learn more about this year’s amazing curators and their forthcoming chapbooks, please click here! You can also navigate to the series archive, of over 200 entries, here! This week’s curator is Ryu Ando, author of the forthcoming chapbook [零] A Phantom Zero.
I have no idea where it all comes from. Being a poet is a weird thing and being a self-styled speculative poet is even weirder. A rabbit hole within the rabbit hole. An exercise, perhaps, in willful obscurity. No matter. It certainly doesn’t run in the family. And I don’t even know why I write in the way I write it. English and Japanese are not exactly easily combined. The two cultures are often at extreme odds with each other. I’m a strange beast, a mutant fish with three eyes perhaps. I just write what I like. I write what punches me in the gut, breaks the heart, and opens the mind. That sweet spot of all three is what I strive for. Of course, I rarely find this except in brief glimpses in my own work — maybe a line or two here and there. I do see this everywhere else in others, though. There are probably any number of poets that I could focus on: H.D., Bashō, Issa, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Tanikawa Shuntaro, Miyazawa Kenji, Yeats, and many others. But one that speaks to me above all others is not known primarily for poetry: Marcel Duchamp.
Not surprisingly, I came to Duchamp through his art, specifically “The Bride Stripped Bare by her bachelors even”. I stumbled upon this piece in the Philadelphia Museum of Art more than 25 years ago. Words still fail to describe how it struck me. Maybe it was the fact that it was so large and so very ugly. Maybe because it was actually broken and deemed better that way, like modernist kintsugi. In any case, it was industrial, aged, dated, incomprehensible. But it sets the seeds for the speculative and the avant garde to grow in me. It was also the piece’s accompanying writings and drawings that fully opened my mind. There, in these scribblings and indecipherable schematics and notes and poetic anti-poems or un-poems collected like old papers in a shoe box was a whole backstory, a process, and a philosophy of …something (maybe?) … behind it all. It spoke to the gut, too. To the indescribable. Scribbles and drawings and a mysterious alchemy that hinted at more.
Take this page from the Green Box for instance:
Translated from French as:
Kind of milky way flesh color surrounding unevenly densely the 3 Pistons (i.e. there will be a transparent layer on the glass then the 3 Pistons then another layer of milky way) This flesh-like milky way to be used as a support for the inscription which is concerned with the cannon shots (at A) [The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, p. 37]
I can’t really make heads or tails of it. It’s almost meaningless, except for the dramatization of mingling human flesh with machinery. The early modernist preoccupation with technology influences my own preoccupations with how technology impacts us, be it in the older terms of cubism, vortices, imagism, or readymades, or in the newer terms of cyborgs, artificial intelligences, singularities, or other machine-human intermingling. In other words, as Duchamp writes:
“The Machine with 5 hearts, the pure / child of nickel and platinum”
A hundred years before our current online-dominated world, decades before digital, or cyberspace, or cyberpunk, or singularities, Duchamp is showing us the ways in which technology and machinery change us in body, in mind, in spirit, in the erotic, and in the impersonal relentlessness of automation. He teases us with truths and lies and thought experiments. He knew we’d crack our teeth on ceramic thrones. He knew we’d crick our necks and strain our eyes peering through the keyhole to see what’s up with that corpse. Same with his poetry. Try speculating on this, he says. And in the striving, you’ll probably find something else:
“make works which are not works of ‘art’” (Speculations).
For me, that spirit is summed up in the speculations about the purpose of the ancient Antikythera mechanism, found deep in the ocean (appearing in my upcoming OS release [零] A Phantom Zero):
***
In addition to Duchamp, I must also mention the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy. Similar to the way that Duchamp playfully exposes the ugly process of making art and constructing something meaningful out of increasingly industrialized matters, Bonnefoy reminds us that it is all fabrication. The arts, like in the parable the Grapes of Zeuxis, are nothing but lies told to get at some kind of truth. In his poem “Langham seen from Dedham” he writes:
Painter,
As soon as I knew you, I trusted you,
For even when you are dreaming, your eyes are open,
And should you risk your vision in images,
As one might plunge a hand into water, you always seize
The fruit of broken form and colour
And place it, real, among the things that are named.
Going back to the thought experiments of the speculative world: what if we painted those grapes so realistically, what would happen to us? Would we starve ourselves in admiration of their perfection? Would we smash open our heads, crack our teeth, bite our tongues on stones to eat them, just like those birds in the myth? Don’t we do that now with our iPhones when we post pictures of our food online? Aren’t we just pinning desire to a cloud? Salivating onto our screens like digital Pavlov’s dogs? What happens when our digital replica of the world, our mirrorworld, is as large and comprehensive as the real world? Will we forget how to tell the difference between the two?
All this leads to my first published poem “Season of the Ginzakura.” What if, on the day the bomb dropped, a new sakura was born, a new being forged and fused of metal and glass from heavy elements? What would happen? What would happen to us all? Perhaps this:
On the day you were born
The moon lit upon our pillows in the open air
And kept us awake with whispers and hints
And threatened to kill the stars with its madness
And sink the paper ships we set adrift
That is the power of the speculative. That is the power of the thought experiment. The ginzakura, the silver sakura, lives. It’s real. As far as I know.
Ryu | April 2019 Saitama, Japan / Los Angeles
[零] A Phantom Zero is an 8-part piece inspired by ‘the Drake Equation’.
Ryu Ando’s writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Pidgeonholes, Liquid Imagination, and other venues. His first book of poems, The Lost Gardens of the Hakudo Maru, is available from a…p press. Somewhere between L.A. and Saitama. This is where his characters exist and from where their voices carry. Lost and found. In Japan. In America. Sometimes both. Sometimes neither. Somewhere else entirely. https://ryuando.wordpress.com
