the encounter

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Light, Ecstasy and the Encounter

Photograph by Renee Beaubien

The light was very strange in Winnipeg yesterday.

For reasons I haven’t determined yet, although forest fires are the likeliest culprits, the city was covered by a haze of smoke all day. This gave a very curious reddish tinge to the sunlight trying to slip through. This far into June, there’s a lot of sunlight in Winnipeg any given day. The sun’s rising around 5 a.m. and not going down until after 10 p.m.

As I walked to the grocery store and generally just took in the light streaming through the windows of the house, I kept thinking I gotta get a picture of this!

Around 3 in the afternoon the light came in the kitchen window and shone on the hardwood floor in a square I found too utterly fascinating colour-wise not to try to record. Forgetting to take the flash off, I destroyed the first two pictures but finally managed to get the best I could manage with my particular camera, an ancient-by-today’s-terms point and shoot. Didn’t really do the moment justice. No ecstasy there. Didn’t get the image sharp enough to match my already fading memory of it.

Photograph by John Baillie

Still it was an exciting encounter. Thinking I could get a photo of that strange light made me regard the beautiful effects it had on my environment much more consciously than I might have just walking by them with my mind occupied with the usual wasteland. So to me, among all art forms, the idea of the encounter is what photography is most clearly about.

Photograph by Renee Beaubien

As I mentioned last week, I recently read Rollo May’s The Courage to Create, which is where I’m primarily picking up on these concepts of ecstasy and encounter as facets of the aesthetic and creative experience.

May talks about both concepts extensively in his book. Two of the more succinct statements he makes regarding them are:

[A] heightened consciousness, which we [identify] as characteristic of the encounter, the state in which the dichotomy between subjective experience and objective reality is overcome and symbols which reveal new meaning are born, is historically termed ecstasy. … Ecstasy is a temporary transcending of the subject-object dichotomy. (p. 105)

The Encounter — a quality of commitment, which may be present in little experiences — such as a brief glance out the window at a tree — that do not necessarily involve any great quantity of emotion. But these temporally brief experiences may have a considerable significance for the sensitive person, here viewed as the person with a capacity for passion. (p. 100)

Photograph by Renee Beaubien

May’s argument is that creativity is a necessary aspect of our psychological make-up enabling us to interact proactively with our world, through a series of encounters that produce an ecstasy in our perception concerning that which surrounds us. Which mostly sounds like writing poetry to me. But as I’ve mentioned before, I think poetry and photography have a lot in common. And putting things in terms of photography, I think May’s conception of the encounter would resonate more strongly than poetry even with people who may not consider themselves terribly creative.

Why do we take pictures? My wife recently mentioned to me that she’d read that a high percentage of people consider their photographs to be their most prized possessions. These are people who are hardly all out there trying to capture the most aesthetically satisfying blends of light and form in a digitally accurate format.

Photograph by Renee Beaubien

No, these are the people who believe they’re capturing tangible evidence of their own memories in an image that will last eternally — or at least until the hard drive crashes without a backup. EVERYONE! Always remember! Back up your photographs externally today! Or you may live to regret it.

I like May’s idea of the encounter. Especially as applied to photography. People who take endless snaps of their relatives at family events or record each exciting moment of a foreign holiday aren’t necessarily thinking they’re being terribly creative. But those moments are too important not to try to save. Human memory is very fickle — generally useless beyond a few moments to any degree of accuracy. Two people can argue about what they recall about any given event endlessly, but a photograph tells the facts. There is the real memory, made concrete.

Selfie by John Baillie

That’s not necessarily true of course — photos can be faked by the devilishly creative. But you get my point.

The fact is that the idea of the encounter rings true for any photograph taken for whatever reason. All the family is together on this day, looking this much older — we’re all encountering each other at this moment, so snap! That’s how we all were on that occasion. There’s a beautiful sunset happening over the lake tonight on this long-awaited holiday. I don’t want to forget this encounter, so — snap!

Photograph by Renee Beaubien

With the facility of the digital camera and its capacity for endless images, more encounters are being recorded each day than ever before. I won’t even mention nude selfies on the top of Malaysian mountains causing avalanches. Some encounters can be a lot more dangerous than others.

However, if this practice was as random as I’m making it sound here, merely having a endless series of digitally stored photographic encounters wouldn’t be important enough to make their My Pictures folders such a high percentage of people’s most prized possessions. The fact is, most people get something out of looking at the photos — and remembering — well beyond the mere fact of having them. And that’s where the touch of ecstasy steps in.

Photograph by Renee Beaubien

Even for the self proclaimed non-imaginative, having these photos to look at, no matter how many times your mother cut the top of your heads off in most family shots and managed to completely eliminate your ex-brother-in-law and what kind of a loss is that anyway? in that one particularly hilarious group picture, still produces a good feeling. Maybe not the full temporary transcendence of the subject-object dichotomy Rollo May talks about, but we’re getting into the right territory.

And for those who actually use photography as an intentional means of creative expression!

Photo montage by Renee Beaubien

Well, the sky’s the limit. So go out, snap snap, encounter encounter, discover and rejoice in your world! A little bit of necessary creativity never hurt anyone.

For more photography by Renee Beaubien,

go to Beyond the Prism on Flickr, at:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/128997372@N08/

*****

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

Everyone’s got complaints during "Judgement in Space" for Episode Fourteen, posting Monday, June 22nd. While The Electric Detective explores the geography at Barometer’s Rising on Friday, June 26th. Reality Fiction Three: The Interrupted Edition continues at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Three Episodes to go! Two Ishes and three Electric Detectives! We’ll tie it all up at the end of July.

Episodes to Date:

Episode One: Dante-Ish — Mak’s Inferno

Episode Two: Chaucer-Ish — The Hermit’s Tale

Episode Three: Malory-Ish — Le Morte de Mak

Episode Four: Doyle-Ish — Mak the Kipper

Episode Five: Carroll-Ish — Madelyn in Wonderland

Episode Six: Stoker-Ish — The Down For The Count Shimmy

Episode Seven: Tolstoy-Ish — Anna Makerena

Episode Eight: Lem-Ish — So there is …

Episode Nine: Hoffman-Ish — Dr. Hoffman’s Happy Gene Machine

Episode Ten: Shakespeare-Ish — Hamlet the Barbarian

Episode Eleven: Poe-Ish — The Usher Motel

Episode Twelve: Kafka-Ish — Metamorphos-Ish

Episode Thirteen: Finney-Ish — The Invasion of the Hotel Detectives

Episode Fourteen: Miller-Ish — Tempering the Cauldron

All with illustrations by the author. The complete roster of 34 Contestants have now appeared, so we move on to the supporting cast, the Judges, and the Guest Judges.

gods of light and ecstasy

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Gods of Light and Ecstasy

Photograph by Renee Beaubien

There’s an argument I constantly hear going on between photographers that quite frankly baffles me. On the one side, you have the high definition devotees. The only measure of a photograph’s worth is how sharp it is. Then you have the obvious softer side, declaring that blurriness or any other effect involving less than crystal clear microscopic reproduction of image is precisely what can make or break a photo aesthetically.

Clarity! Tone! Particularity! Texture!

Like one automatically has to override the other. What if you’re trying to take a sharp picture of the mist?

Photograph by Renee Beaubien

Obviously both arguments have their place — I don’t think any art form should be judged exclusively by any single criterion. In all fairness, the single-minded fanaticism does seem to fall primarily on the side of the high definition aficionados. Those who work with the fuzzy as well as the crystal clear generally take a broader view, incorporating both practices as proper aesthetic tools.

But we may well sigh in exasperation that the argument still continues at all. When you think about it, the dispute has been going on since the time of the Greek gods …

Or at least until philosophers and psychoanalysts decided to couch it within those terms. I recently read Rollo May’s The Courage to Create, and I extended some of his concepts to the photography argument.

Primarily I refer to the dialectical balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian principles in creativity. In Greek mythology, Apollo was the God of Light, and Dionysus — Bacchus, really, in the Greek, but for some reason the Roman version of his name is always used in these discussions — was the God of Revels, shall we put it politely? Letting it all hang out, we would have said in the seventies.

According to Rollo, in terms of aesthetics, the Apollonian principle is that of form and rational order, and the Dionysian principle that of surging vitality. I rediscovered these terms in May’s book, but really they were first coined by good ol’ Fred — you remember Fred? — Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy. Which I read when I was nineteen, and got as much out of as I would have if someone had just bounced the book off my head. But hey. Time passes. A lot of what I thought made sense at nineteen totally baffles me now.

But I digress. It doesn’t take a genius to make the connection between the Apollonian principle and the high definition yea-sayers in the art of photography, and associate the less-than-clearly-delineated effects of those who prefer the fuzzier approach with the Dionysian principle.

Photograph by Renee Beaubien

You can understand the Apollo camp’s infatuation. Never has the current technology allowed the photographer to capture more detail more easily. Today’s cameras allow their users to photograph a super-reality. The camera sees a more highly detailed reality than the human eye could physically ever manage. The person taking the photograph never sees the full reality able to be imaged until the machine shows it back to her or him. Worship Apollo! Never has his light shone so strong!

But then …

Take the photo home and stick it into Photoshop, and Dionysus can run wild! The technology works for both sides. In Photoshop, if she or he likes, the photographer can continue to emphasize Apollo with even greater intensity, heightening clarity to truly divine impact. Or she or he can explode the image entirely and in a burst of Dionysiac revelry create something entirely new, with effects ranging far beyond mere high definition reproduction!

Photograph by Renee Beaubien

The technology is so new, the full potential of what might be done with a simple photograph these days hasn’t even begun to be explored. There is so much that anyone with even only a half-decent home computer can do, that it’s presently inconceivable just what a camera snap can be the starting off point for these days … Let your ecstasy take you where it will! Let’s go nuts! Or Bacchic, even …

But one thing does stand out to me in this proposition. The argument for Apollo has practically been lifted out of human hands strictly into the eye of the machine, while the argument for applying the ecstasy of the Dionysian principle still remains strictly within the vision and direction of the human agent.

Only the machine can see and provide the highest level of form and rational order that can be portrayed through photography these days. If a human isn’t even capable of physically perceiving the detail a scene can be captured in, than who’s really leading the process here? It’s really nothing more than a human deciding that some scene might make a good composition, but not really knowing what they’re shooting for sure until the camera tells them.

While when you want to fill a photograph with surging vitality, the human still has to be the one to step in and infuse the energy into the image. The machine is better than we’ll ever be at capturing the form and order, but it don’t care spam about surging vitality.

Photo  Montage by Renee Beaubien

So obviously I arrive back at the same conclusion I started out with. A really good photographer will understand and apply both the Apollonian and the Dionysian principles to her or his work. Only even more so with today’s technology.

But there’s still more to think about here. Let’s tackle light, ecstasy and the encounter next week.

For more photography by Renee Beaubien, go to Beyond the Prism on Flickr, at:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/128997372@N08/

*****

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

The lightning continues to strike in The Electric Detective Chapter Thirteen, on Monday, June 15th, while Dusky Dredful makes an unusual step into a semi-dramatic mock up of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible on Friday, June 19th. Reality Fiction Three: The Interrupted Edition continues at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Revelations and witch trials! Flying gargoyles! An Episode presented for the first time almost entirely as a single dramatic monologue! The tension and mystery mounts …

Episodes to Date:

Episode One: Dante-Ish — Mak’s Inferno

Episode Two: Chaucer-Ish — The Hermit’s Tale

Episode Three: Malory-Ish — Le Morte de Mak

Episode Four: Doyle-Ish — Mak the Kipper

Episode Five: Carroll-Ish — Madelyn in Wonderland

Episode Six: Stoker-Ish — The Down For The Count Shimmy

Episode Seven: Tolstoy-Ish — Anna Makerena

Episode Eight: Lem-Ish — So there is …

Episode Nine: Hoffman-Ish — Dr. Hoffman’s Happy Gene Machine

Episode Ten: Shakespeare-Ish — Hamlet the Barbarian

Episode Eleven: Poe-Ish — The Usher Motel

Episode Twelve: Kafka-Ish — Metamorphos-Ish

Episode Thirteen: Finney-Ish — The Invasion of the Hotel Detectives

Episode Fourteen: Miller-Ish — Tempering the Cauldron

All with illustrations by the author. The complete roster of 34 Contestants have now appeared, so we move on to the supporting cast, the Judges, and the Guest Judges.

physicality of words

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

The Return of Marcel Petard?

What was I thinking?

Me, the guy who regularly blogs about pretentiously nonsensical published literary criticism? I write a review of Ron Romanowski’s new poetry collection A Reader’s Guide to the Unnameable last week, and as part of it I pen a line like “He provides imagery that finds its own path, circling the poems’ themes and leaving the reader feeling surrounded.”?

Portentous, pretentious, and nonsensical? I confess to the first two — hopefully because then the line will therefore also be quotable and may find its way onto the back of Ron’s next book — but I dispute the last. I happen to mean what I say.

I spend all day with words, and as a result, they take on a physical reality for me that not everyone experiences. The idea of words genuinely performing the actions of circling and surrounding a theme and reader is a real thing to me. And I found that happening in Ron’s poetry, with his particular style of inundating the reader with cascading imagery. 

Take for example the last few stanzas of “Moon Drops: Wherein Time May Not Equal Light”:

God-scent in a rosehip     or the combustion

Chamber of a motorcycle engine     the roar

Of a brand name IED     see-through yoga pants

Bought for a discount no one will see me

Posing since the sixties     after paperbacks of Swami Sutra

Make a glass road     of lunar pathway images

Up the lumbar river     luna’s petites lunes

Lead from glass to window’s ledge through

Garage edge thorough telephone wires through

Lower earth orbit     half her life in sickbeds

Should build our own family hospital

Read The Time traveler’s Wife three time

To realize clothes make the fiction     bedclothes

Make doctors into patients     sick chapels dot com

Leading to the moon     step on them every

Step to the sea of tranquility     breathless

See what I mean?

Ron himself sums up the concept best perhaps in one of the central pieces in the book “One-Minute Date Night: Cubic Woman May I Introduce Cubic Man”:

Let’s forget our eyes for a while, don’t need the eye test

Run over the work as texture, optic nerves as fingers.

Think of the friends one can make by just stepping

Into their embrace. Where is desire? It’s in holding thingness.

I’ve always thought words hold physical presence as well as meaning. Seeing words take form flowing from my pen across a notebook page or waterfalling down a computer screen is an necessary existential part of my day. To my eye, that is beauty and order appearing in the world. No matter how nonsensical what I may actually be writing may be at the time.

I picked it up from good company. Can’t possibly list them all here, but some best examples might be the lugubrious Howard Phillips Lovecraft and my much loved William Burroughs to start with:

Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness. The witch — old Keziah — Nehab — that must have meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz — the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek — worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream — Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young …

from “The Dreams in the Witch-House”

With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms — Heavy Metal People of Uranus wrapped in cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes — And The Insect People of Minraud with metal music — Cold insect brains and their agents like white hot buzz saws sharpened in the Ovens — The judge, many light years away from possibility of corruption, grey and calm with inflexible authority reads the brief — He appears sometimes as a slim young man in short sleeves then middle-aged and red faced sometimes very old like yellow ivory — “My God what a mess”

from Nova Express

Words that step up and physically assault you. It can happen.

China Miéville’s Embassytown novel uses this concept as the central core of its theme. On an unimaginably alien — except to China Miéville — planet, the natives actually make use of their human invaders as part of their language. The female protagonist of the novel physically becomes a metaphor in the alien language, having to physically perform the act that establishes her as “A girl ate what was given her”. Whenever the aliens want to express this particular concept and what it means metaphorically to them, they evoke the woman to represent what they want to say.

Sort of like what Marcel Petard’s become for me. A hockey defenceman renowned for scoring goals into his own net.

I just read a book by another science fiction writer, Charles Stross -- yes, that Rule 34 -- who plays the game by an even different set of rules. Technospeak become poetry. Almost. I wasn’t at all certain what he was talking about at times — and by that I mean following the science or the economics, not the plot — but I certainly love the way it sounds.

IRIK’s credit rating has got to be in the shitter, so betting they’ll collapse is a sucker bet. What I think Kyrgyzstan is doing is, they’re selling CDSs to foreigners who expect IRIK to collapse under the debt. And they’re over-selling, selling multiple CDSs leveraged against the same asset. Meanwhile they’re using the income from the CDSs to reduce the debt load — until they arrange for reunification, which, with 72 per cent in favour, isn’t going to be hard. The idiots who bet on IRIK collapsing will miss out on the fat payout they were expecting: Serves them right. What interests me is why the IMF and the credit-ratings agencies aren’t yelling about it. The Kyrgyz government must have figured out a way to buy off the regulators and oversight agencies. So what’s the angle? There’s one obvious one: inward investment.

from Rule 34

As Harold Pinter once wrote:

FIBBS:   Which ones don’t they like?

WILLS:   Well, there’s the brass pet cock, for instance.

FIBBS:   The brass pet cock? What’s the matter with the brass pet cock?

WILLS:   They just don’t seem to like it any more.

FIBBS:   But what exactly don’t they like about it?

WILLS:   Perhaps it’s just the look of it.

FIBBS:   That brass pet cock? But I tell you it’s perfection. Nothing short of perfection.

WILLS:   They’ve just gone right off it.

FIBBS:   Well, I’m flabbergasted.

WILLS:   It’s not only the brass pet cock, Mr. Fibbs.

FIBBS:   What else?

WILLS:   There’s the hemi unibal spherical rod end.

FIBBS:   The hemi unibal spherical rod end? Where could you find a finer rod end?

WILLS:   There are rod ends and rod ends, Mr. Fibbs.

FIBBS:   I know there are rod ends and rod ends. But where could you find a finer hemi unibal spherical rod end?

from “Trouble in the Works”

Maintaining a taste for this sort of thing is really just a holdover from the childhood wonder of discovering reading for the first time. It’s not a mistake to start children off with the magic of nursery rhymes and the utter musicality of much of what is written for younger readers, hopefully with the intent of enchanting them so thoroughly with our language they won’t want to abandon the practice of it as they grow older.

My girl friend’s name is Lulu,

She comes from Honolulu.

With an ice cream scoop, and a hula hoop —

My Honolulu Lulu.

Dennis Lee — “Lulu” from The Ice Cream Store

No, the mistake is brainwashing children to think they shouldn’t appreciate that sort of word-use anymore when they grow up! Our education system has got a lot to answer for.

Thankfully there’s usually still some subversives out there who embrace silliness as an adult way of life as well.

     “What’s the word I’ve heard you use from time to time — begins with eu?”

     “Euphoria, sir?”

     “That’s the one. I’ve seldom had a sharper attack of euphoria. I feel full to the brim of Vitamin B. Mind you, I don’t know how long it will last. Too often it is when one feels fizziest that the storm clouds begin doing their stuff.”

     “Very true, sir. Full many a glorious morning have I seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, kissing with golden face the meadows green, gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy, Anon permit the basest clouds to ride with ugly rack on his celestial face and from the forlorn world his visage hide, stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.”

     “Exactly,” I said. I couldn’t have put it better myself. “One always has to budget for a change in the weather. Still, the thing to do is to keep on being happy while you can.”

     “Precisely, sir. Carpe diem, the Roman poet Horace advised. The English poet Herrick expressed the same sentiment when he suggested that we should gather rosebuds while we may. Your elbow is in the butter, sir.”

P.G. Wodehouse — from Much Obliged, Jeeves

Marcel Petard may well return to the ice rink of my blog writing — probably on a regular basis, I have no illusions concerning my own consistency. But I think on this particular occasion, I’ve made sufficient argument to indicate even he might manage to miss his own net occasionally.

*****

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

Lou Moons and Googie Girls! The Body Snatchers Invade to send up a scifi classic Monday, June 8th in Episode Thirteen, with the results posting on Friday, June 12th. Reality Fiction Three: The Interrupted Edition continues at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

What really happened in avant, beta, after ninety percent of its characters were hijacked into the Contest.

Episodes to Date:

Episode One: Dante-Ish — Mak’s Inferno

Episode Two: Chaucer-Ish — The Hermit’s Tale

Episode Three: Malory-Ish — Le Morte de Mak

Episode Four: Doyle-Ish — Mak the Kipper

Episode Five: Carroll-Ish — Madelyn in Wonderland

Episode Six: Stoker-Ish — The Down For The Count Shimmy

Episode Seven: Tolstoy-Ish — Anna Makerena

Episode Eight: Lem-Ish — So there is …

Episode Nine: Hoffman-Ish — Dr. Hoffman’s Happy Gene Machine

Episode Ten: Shakespeare-Ish — Hamlet the Barbarian

Episode Eleven: Poe-Ish — The Usher Motel

Episode Twelve: Kafka-Ish — Metamorphos-Ish

Episode Thirteen: Finney-Ish — The Invasion of the Hotel Detectives

All with illustrations by the author. The complete roster of 34 Contestants have now appeared, so we move on to the supporting cast, the Judges, and the Guest Judges.

readers guide to the unnameable

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Cubist Poetry?

Anyone who reads Ron Romanowski’s new collection of poetry A Reader’s Guide to the Unnameable will know I’m not an unbiased reviewer, as soon as they look over the acknowledgements. Where Ron states that I and a few others were early readers of some of the works included in the book.

I won’t say I had any effect on the development of the book, as I didn’t have a clue where Ron was going with it from the eight or so poems he sent me during the book’s gestation. I merely gave him the most honest impressions I could of what I read, as a poet of his status deserves nothing but the objective truth. If I thought the piece worked, I said so, if I thought what he was showing me didn’t, I told him that too and tried to explain why.

It was too long ago for me to remember the process well enough to know if he took my advice or not regarding the final form of the poems I critiqued in the book, but I do know this: I like the book. And I’m more inclined to give the credit for that to Ron for pulling the collection together the way he really wants it to be rather than to anyone who might have given him out-of-context suggestions along the way. There’s too much of a coherent thread running through A Reader’s Guide for that not to be the case.

But being in on a book’s genesis does give a reviewer a little background insight someone who doesn’t know the poet might not have. As it happened both Ron and I tackled the same series of biographies on Picasso around the same time, and I gave up before he did. I complained I found the biographer too focussed on miniscule detail and gossip, rather than larger themes. Ron phoned me up sometime later and said I was right! But that was okay! That was a cubist approach to biography, and he didn’t mind that at the moment, because he’s writing cubist poetry in the new book!

The back of A Reader’s Guide to the Unnameable mentions that among other themes, Ron is continuing to work on “definitions of authorship and identity”. His last two collections, the big book of canadian poetry and Incantations From The Republic Of Fire, took these issues much to heart, as Ron wrote the works as if they had been produced not just by him, but also by five other distinct poets, the New Festival Theory group, with their own distinct histories and personas.

The displacement of authorship isn’t so clearly delineated in A Reader’s Guide, but is still there. Many of the pieces are not from the point of view of Ron Romanowski, but reflect the experience of a persona within the poem. I’m not even certain if you can call this persona a character per se, as in a novel or play, as Ron seems to be taking the exploration of authorship beyond that dimension. Ron creates the character and situation, and then the character writes the poem. Except it’s really all Ron. Or is it? How far does he get lost in these people’s lives?

The first poem, “The Fall Girl”, lays out the theme of the title, A Reader’s Guide to the Unnameable. An unthinkable event occurs that must be dealt with by those who are left behind. Ron’s book is here supposedly to offer some guidance on how to do that. “His granddaughter was found hanging in a garage, right up and over the beam. / This loose carousel of a season had dangled her, / symbiotic lost-and-found month rustling life to the ground.”

Despite the horror, life must go on, as illustrated in “The Fall Girl (Coda)”:

If her death was not inevitable there is no cure.

If her death was inevitable there is no cure.

It was inevitable but that is no cure.

It was not inevitable but that is no cure.

Go on.

This isn’t a black and white world. States seemingly in contradiction exist simultaneously, and every aspect of their existence must be granted weight equally. So it doesn’t matter if the crime against your sensibility is unnameable, still you go on, carrying that fact with you. Every angle seen at once — a cubist existence.

He examines the concept head-on in one of the central poems from the book — “One Minute Date Night: Cubic Woman May I Introduce Cubic Man”:

We are all Cubists, let us not wrong the thing

Because of perspective. Let us set our own pace

Touch lips in the freedom of cubist space

In which the effort of our condition reads

The fuzziness, collage, shadow, just where we

Want it.

The book goes on in the same manner, happy moments, more tragedies, different personas, deep personal insights, all juxtaposed on the pages creating a strange balance which might leave some readers feeling somewhat unsettled if they can’t accept this isn’t the usual sort of rhythm one might expect in a single point-of-view poetry collection. 

Ron’s is a voice out of order challenging assumptions of the accepted angles of approach. He provides imagery that finds its own path, circling the poems’ themes and leaving the reader feeling surrounded. He can leap from the fine detail to the grand cosmic view in the slip of a line or turn of phrase. Any conclusions suggested on the micro-level always leave larger unresolved implications on the macro.

Ron supplies the reader with tight shifting pictures, with one thought rapidly taking up a continuing argument before the last one’s done simmering. His language can dare you to keep up and sometimes might annoy you when you want to go a different direction then it  generally takes you. But I think one of the most important themes at the heart of this book is that Ron Romanowski is not afraid to remind us of the broken people, and take up their easily dismissed tragedies as matter for deeper emotional connection. As in “The Fall Girl”, “1400 CC’s Stricken at the Crossroads”, “For the Lake Boys”, and others.

And then to balance the cubist composition again, he also provides us with “Great-grandmother’s prize zucchini casserole”.

I found my favourite piece to be the four page “North America”, which I think best exemplifies the cubist theme in one poem. The language tumbles across the page in a quiet, entrancing tangle of dynamic equilibrium, resolving near the end finally in “all the facts / footnotes / a reader’s guide / with fettering author’s footnotes”

Is that the most we can hope for from a collection of poetry to explain the simultaneity of conflicting events our non-linear lives constantly throws at us? In an attempt to guide us through the unnameable, can any author give us anything more significant than “fettering footnotes”?

I would say no, in Ron’s case. I think A Reader’s Guide to the Unnameable reveals a more liberating experience in its reading than fettering us in its creator’s formal references.

No, I would say instead Ron Romanowski is more an accomplished practitioner of song and dance storytelling, providing us with a narrative thread through the disparate works to lead us in, and then performing a bit of the quick soft-shoe to tap us out. Because while we all keep on dancing to keep ahead of the unnameable, the tragedy, and the approaching fire, Ron doesn’t let us forget we never stop loving and smiling either.

A Reader’s Guide to the Unnameable

Ron Romanowski

Augustine Hand Press, 2015

*****

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

The Electric Detective continues with Chapter Twelve on Monday, June 1st, while we take a new look at an old story, care of Jack Finney (who?) in Episode Thirteen, starting Friday, June 5th. Reality Fiction Three: The Interrupted Edition continues at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Surprise murders, witchy metafictional existential discussions, and strange visits to a hotel’s greenhouse …

Episodes to Date:

Episode One: Dante-Ish — Mak’s Inferno

Episode Two: Chaucer-Ish — The Hermit’s Tale

Episode Three: Malory-Ish — Le Morte de Mak

Episode Four: Doyle-Ish — Mak the Kipper

Episode Five: Carroll-Ish — Madelyn in Wonderland

Episode Six: Stoker-Ish — The Down For The Count Shimmy

Episode Seven: Tolstoy-Ish — Anna Makerena

Episode Eight: Lem-Ish — So there is …

Episode Nine: Hoffman-Ish — Dr. Hoffman’s Happy Gene Machine

Episode Ten: Shakespeare-Ish — Hamlet the Barbarian

Episode Eleven: Poe-Ish — The Usher Motel

Episode Twelve: Kafka-Ish — Metamorphos-Ish

Episode Thirteen: Finney-Ish — The Invasion of the Hotel Detectives

All with illustrations by the author. The complete roster of 34 Contestants have now appeared, so we move on to the supporting cast, the Judges, and the Guest Judges.