BOTH / AND: LIMINALITY BEYOND MEATTIME

A CONVERSATION WITH {MYSELF}

[In a reflexive turn for the reconversations series, OS Founder and Creative director Elæ [Moss] (Lynne DeSilva-Johnson) responds to the classic OS collaborators Q&A that appears in the back of every OS book, which they composed the questions for many years ago, in relationship to the publication of Sweet and Low: Indefinite Singular, released explicitly as an “artist’s book” through Elæ’s imprint “The Trouble With Bartleby,” present in every publication’s DOC U MENT page as the origin seed for the larger experimental project performing “publishing” as the Operating System.

Greetings! Thank you for talking to us about your process today!
Can you introduce yourself, in a way that you would choose?

Recently I’ve been using a bio that says that I’m a “cluster of cells attempting to person,” and that feels pretty right on. I go by the name Elæ, and my given name is Lynne Marie DeSilva-Johnson. There’s actually a Catherine in there too. But I’m actively working in a space where the idea of a name is clearly troubled by a refusal to suggest I inhabit this word entirely, or that it encompasses “me” or my experience. I have a similar relationship to gender: a liminal, fluid continuum of possibility. Both/and. The name Elæ came from my investigation into nonbinary pronouns in romance languages, but I also love it because the glyph, like the use of they/them, requires a certain effort, an adaptive willingness to address and work alongside. It’s only really entirely itself visually, and when you know what the word/glyph looks like, you know this when you hear it. And most aren’t sure how to pronounce it. I’ve written, about this, that I want to be uncomfortable in your mouth.

Why are you a poet/writer/artist?

Oof, it’s funny, I wrote this question and I rail against it immediately, but the railing is anticipated. Saying, “I’m not this” is as valid and expected, almost a more expected, response. It’s almost a taunt. Right: so, I’d say, I will use the words “poet” or “writer” or “artist” when these terms gain me purchase into dialogues, spaces, resources, etc., that are inaccessible otherwise. So much of my work actually in part addresses the ways in which I think these terms, this naming, is reductive and harmful. But I think what wants to be asked here is “why do you make things”? and if that’s the question I would say this: I make things because I believe that I, and other people, need continuous re/orientation in order to survive and adapt and work against institutional programming. Marking, archiving, observing, analyzing, imagining, questioning, working through, and then the physical process of developing and honing material / tool skills are essential to personing, what my cells are working to figure out. Sharing these makings with others perhaps inspires their personing, and then in dialogue we person / evolve together. Even when we only have our own self as audience, possibility and shift is planted simply in reflecting experience, perception, difference, speculation back at ourselves — especially when freedoms, selves, narratives are controlled, repressed, or otherwise dangerous to express.

When did you decide you were a poet/writer/artist (and/or: do you feel comfortable calling yourself a poet/writer/artist, what other titles or affiliations do you prefer/feel are more accurate)?

I think I became comfortable using these terms pretty much exactly at the same time that I realized I didn’t think they really held the capital that we’re taught that they do, and about the same time that I realized I didn’t need anyone else to grant me permission to do so. In terms of being an “artist,” or “writer,” who knows if I even am, or if any of us are more than all of us are, at least instinctively before it’s broken out of us. I am lucky to have had a lot of exposure to creative making and lives growing up in New York City (I slept in Brooklyn but was raised by the East Village in the 1980’s) and have had a lot of time to read and develop a relationship to materials. But I am mostly driven by questions, which is the best description of my medium / practice that I can give. It’s an investigative, documentary drive, and within that a speculative drive. And I think I’ve always been that way, and done that. Truly I’ve always thought that’s how we all are, and somehow I held on to the wonder. It’s perhaps in part attributable to being a neurodiversity thing, but again…naming and how it reduces.

What’s a “poet” (or “writer” or “artist”) anyway? What do you see as your cultural and social role (in the literary / artistic / creative community and beyond)?

I love how Joseph Beuys talks about art as evolutionary necessity / possibility, in Public Dialogue, 1974…

Here my idea is to declare that art is the only possibility for evolution, the only possibility to change the situation in the world. But then you have to enlarge the idea of art to include the whole creativity. And if you do that, it follows logically that every living being is an artist — an artist in the sense that he can develop his own capacity.

In thinking about this question I can’t help but refer to a work that’s been circling my mind for decades, which I frequently quote, and open this book with words from: Diane DiPrima’s rant, wherein the “war against the imagination” is reiterated as “the only war that matters,” practical, something people “die every day for the lack of” — those who choose to play the role of “artist” or “writer” (and many who do but don’t label themselves as such) have a massive responsibility / possibility of facilitating and amplifying access, and creating / activating tools for re/orientation and reprogramming via the senses →body →mind of a public both contemporaneous and future.

Talk about the process or instinct to move these poems (or your work in general) as independent entities into a body of work. How and why did this happen? Have you had this intention for a while? What encouraged and/or confounded this (or a book, in general) coming together? Was it a struggle?

Structure is my friend, and I work well on a project basis, or towards a discrete goal. This book began as a chapbook project I put together for a call, from work I had been developing primarily for and then in performance in a period of time when I was very ill. It had been a while since I had done a book project and, as a publisher / advocate of the book / publication as a tool for pedagogy and building one’s practice I realized it was time for me to make one. The chapbook was then accepted in a slightly longer form by a Canadian publisher, but there wasn’t a publishing agreement I could feel ok about, and there wouldn’t be US distribution. The limited edition model is entirely anti everything I’ve built with the OS and everything I teach and work towards in Open Source / Open Access modelling, so ultimately this was a bad fit. Then, I expanded it for a second acceptance at Lark Books, who had expressed interest in publishing a project of mine. But then, the press closed, a few months before the book was set to come out. This last version represents some changes made later in retrospect, now dealing with a work that is quite old. In order to insist upon the work being representative of me as practitioner and facilitator, it was important that it not only be a “collection,” of “poems,” but include other types of hybrid works, as well as some somatic / mindfulness materials.

Did you envision this collection as a collection or understand your process as writing or making specifically around a theme while the poems themselves were being written / the work was being made? How or how not?

The poems in the original chap definitely were all developed around illness and the body, and my experience navigating and thinking through not only precarity but bioprecarity, which I explain in the text at the end. However, I was working across a number of projects and individual pieces around and just after this time, and it felt right to me to cross-weave these other strands of my work / practice. I didn’t think of the pieces as part of a cohesive whole as they were being made, but I certainly was aware of their linkages.

It bears noting, vis-a-vis the “struggle” question above, that the process of working with these two other presses (whose enthusiasm was also very positive for me, at one point, in each case) had whiplash upon the situations falling apart that was, twice, exhausting, destabilizing, and caused a deep disappointment in me which continues to have aftershocks. As someone who has chosen to dedicate so much time to amplifying the work of others in the community, putting out a book and taking time to even put one together was a long time coming and is a tender spot: I am a prolific maker, with tons of work I’d be happy to publish, but I’m only learning to prioritize that work being shown, published, and seen; however I was often feeling invisible, or rather, lost / rendered undifferentiated from the organization I ran and efforts for others. People will regularly approach me after my own readings asking how they get published with the OS. People I’ve known for years, despite me posting my own work and events regularly, will say, “oh, you (write/are an artist, etc)? I thought you were just an editor” which is definitely a deep groan-moment for me.

So, in a way, my choice not only to make the book initially but then to design and re-conceive of it and recognize that I needed to take a stand about systems of value and against gatekeeping in literature (so different in the artist’s book) is part of the process too. It’s not as much ‘as the poems were written’ but a continuous process of realizing and re-conceiving the book as a work, and what it could mean and be and demonstrate / celebrate / fight agains.

What formal structures or other constrictive practices (if any) do you use in the creation of your work? Have certain teachers or instructive environments, or readings/writings/work of other creative people informed the way you work/write?

Formal structures, constraints, and chance operations have become increasingly important to me conceptually, and in the way I think and engage in my creative practice, as well as how I teach (do in order to see in order to do). What this often means though is that I will determine the infrastructure and terms of a project, and follow it either to an end point or until pre-considered completion. I absolutely do use and encourage others to use constraint, found elements, counts, and other formal infrastructure, but often I feel like I am now inhabiting these practices, processing automatically and sometimes getting nothing “done” but experiencing and perceiving informed by these hacks.

It bears noting that I don’t come from a creative writing background or any particularly formal training. I always wrote across various forms but by the end of college, I’d only ever taken one creative writing workshop, in HS. I had, however, worked in and for dramaturgy / writing for stage, as well found a lot of pleasure in scholarly writing across disciplines, and then using the forms and concepts from social science in my interdisciplinary practice. So the instructive environments for me were often those where I was taught to see, look, and hear, to use my senses critically, as well as to engage in research design, and then so too the stage and music: sound, cadence, and rhythmic structures, through many years of studying and performing across musical idioms and in particular jazz has had enormous influence on what now appears as my “written” work. But I’ll often also say that text just happens to be one of my materials, and often one I can use when my resources are most meagre, and my body most challenged.

That said, when I later decided I wanted to explore what the “lit” world was even about, I began taking classes at the Poetry Project, and it was truly erica kaufman who broke down and put back together my concept of what it meant to be “inspired” vs. seeing as legitimate a practice that requires (indeed, demands) organization / strategy / administration. Talking to someone (erica) whose own practice was predicated on rigor and operation re-wired frustrations I had long been dealing with around some imposter mythology I was still carrying from the “muse” and “inspiration” type narratives we’re so frequently fed; I think up until that point I shamed my project/process oriented inclinations, hoping I’d some day switch channels into a more romanticized “flashes of brilliance” sort of framework, which I think I was convinced was more pure or valid were it to happen apart from whatever projects or assignments I created for myself, rather than feeling excited about the flashes that were more adaptive or responsive to these sorts of frameworks I might design. Becoming aware of language and a sort of curatorial shift in validation towards Socially Engaged Art and/or what is now known as Social Practice art has been equally useful for helping me validate work that for many years in my early adult life I had little positive reinforcement around and was carrying a lot of trauma around leaving behind.

Work I’ve done with my students both in the classroom at Pratt as well as in workshop settings around constrictive practices and chance operations has been incredibly productive for me, it turns out, as have somatic techniques from across a range of disciplines; embodiment and physicalized engagement has been continuously central in my work for many years now.

Were I to begin listing the number of people or things that I could or should reference that have or continue to influence me, this book would never come out. It helps, though, that every day these shift, and also that I can with confidence say that the smallest things inspire and influence, as well as high-culture and/or scholarly/pedagogical sources. I’d be remiss here not to mention Buckminster Fuller, whose approach and theories continue to inspire, as well as Ursula K. LeGuin, and to that end many others who since my earliest memories have encouraged me to live and spend psychic time in a speculative space, rather than the linguistically / perceptually delimited frame we’re often confined to in meattime.

Speaking of monikers, what does your title represent? How was it generated? Talk about the way you titled the book, and how your process of naming (individual pieces, sections, etc) influences you and/or colors your work specifically.

Funny, I don’t entirely remember where Sweet and Low came from, though I can say confidently that the work emerged from a time in which I needed to rewrite my relationship to my body, and then to time and space and other bodies, in response. This brought me to some of my lowest points, but also to some of my sweetest, as I began to offer a sort of solace and care to parts of myself desperately in need of kindness.

In Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, Ellen Samuels writes that “crip time is time travel,” bending the clock to the wont of the body outside an ableist framework of expectation. In works like this, in the years I (re-)acquainted myself with a new body with new needs, I found a permission, even a celebration, in what could be learned in these spaces which could be liberatory and sweeter than imagined. The “crip emotional intelligence,” as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha terms it, in Care Work, that I came to know in myself and in others I connected with through our bodies other-maps, provided new dictionaries for almost everything I knew and saw in myself and others. An experience, indeed, both Sweet and Low.

In this book’s evolution, from an initial call prompt to an offer at publication at a small Canadian press (with no US distribution and no paperwork; I pulled it) to an offer of publication with a press I loved (which then closed a few months before release), I began to rework certain parts of it, until it felt sometimes like a golem, franken-book, unrecognizable, and yet something I still felt dedicated to releasing like a satellite. In this time, as I also released AFAB pronouns entirely and moved to an expansive liminal naming for myself, it felt right to allow this title to evolve, too: indefinite singular refers not only to the work’s incessant lack of fixity but to my own. This phrase describes pronouns whose subjects cannot be pinned down: one, anyone, everyone, no one, someone, anybody, everybody, nobody, somebody, another, the other, either, neither, each, little, less, much, both, few, fewer, many, others, several, all, any, more, most, none, some, and so on. This book and I… are indefinite. I’m less sure on the singular, but we’ll count this body as a [1], for the sake of the game.

What does this book DO (as much as what it says or contains)?

Oh, I love(d) (writing this) question (and giving it to people)! In its contents, it refuses to be bowed by formal convention, it explores modalities of scholarship and somatic / embodied possibility, it prays and enumerates and decries and gives witness to. But it also, I hope, says NO GATEKEEPERS and encourages you to fly that banner high. It is a critical kicking to the curb, for me, of whatever remnant of waiting for the validation of others was still worming its way into my gray matter. Rome is burning, there’s no time for that insidious venom. BYE FELICIA.

What would be the best possible outcome for this book? What might it do in the world, and how will its presence as an object facilitate your creative role in your community and beyond? What are your hopes for this book, and for your practice?

I would like to see others, working with text, especially those who already have well respected books, publishing their own works on their own presses or independently, as artists do artist’s books. I hope this inspires others to release granting others’ permission to devalue them or their work. I believe book objects can serve as talisman and scrying stone into a potential future, carrying our words and work into worlds and minds beyond our own in ways beyond our imagining. These small seedlings have infinite possibilities I cannot possibly predict, but it is the planting I’m excited about, both for growth I experience and for that I may never know of, in others’ universes.

Let’s talk a little bit about the role of poetics and creative community in social and political activism, so present in our daily lives as we face the often sobering, sometimes dangerous realities of the Capitalocene. How does your process, practice, or work otherwise interface with these conditions?

I began this book with RANT, I began this interview with RANT, and here I go again, I’m thinking about RANT. But it’s because again I want to return to the danger of a life devoid of questions, in which curiosity has been discouraged, in which disembodiment and disconnection from the natural world can often become a matter of survival within a hyperreal human framework that threatens to overwrite all other programs.

My practice, and the practice I hope to encourage in my students (no matter their discipline) is that of the question, is that of assessing and seeking to address the grave and wondrous conditions of our time, our species, and the vastness within which we are an infinitessimally minute speck. There is a great deal of awe in my work, I hope, and I also hope to convey how much I know I don’t know, and know I know I don’t know. It seeks to find the thin bridge where an informed lover of language with a scholarly bent writes loving and somehow well-received invitations to roundtable dialogues about fear and possibility and trauma with kin and strangers, all the while honoring non-human allies.

I fear, at least in the US, that our institutions (and classrooms, part and parcel of) are largely lost to us as spaces that are connecting with the large portion of the population. But I believe that creative output, in simultaneously stimulating mind and sensory body, perhaps is the most unifying human experience / product, and thereby what falls under the umbrella of the ‘arts,’ may be best positioned to be the space of learning in this time of backlash and recovery from institutional atrophy. It’s also where we’re seeing the work of healing, scientific inquiry / citizen science, human-AI exploration, and countless other inquiries happening in spaces that aren’t confined by the strangulation of institutional regulation.

Back to Beuys, then, here we evolve? All of us, artists, all of us with the purple crayon. We desperately need it. I hope to call for action by way of doing / making / asking, with humility and true desire for others to take up the mantle alongside, with no masters.

ONWARD, indeed.

ELÆ [Lynne DeSilva-Johnson] is a cell cluster attempting to person — aka, a multimodal creative practitioner, curator, cultural scholar and educator. Their work employs text, installation, sound design, performance, digital tech and speculative theory in addressing the somatic, ontological intersections between persons, forms of language, and systems, as well as the study of resilient, open source strategies for ecological and social change. Features include Protagony at The Exponential Festival, How to Human: Resistance Protocols as part of Performing Knowledge at the Segal Center, the Speculative Resilience Radical Practice Library & Lab for the Anarchist Bookfair, Dixon Place’s HOT! Festival, and a field lab installation for Ars Electronica / STWST. Publications include Vestiges, Big Echo, Matters of Feminist Practice, The Transgender Narratives Anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, and many more. Solo text projects include Ground, Blood Altas, Overview Effect, Sweet and Low: Indefinite Singular, the collaborative Boddy Oddy Oddy, an ekphrastic project with painter Georgia Elrod, and The Precarity Bodyhacking Work-Book and Guide, with Cory Tamler and Storm Budwig. Hats: Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, Founder/Creative Director of The Operating System / Liminal Lab, Communications Manager for More Art, and lead R&D for the Brooklyn node of the Mycelium Network Society. A door via IG: @thetroublewithbartleby