Unpacking Visionary Deadness

A number of semi-manifestos were penned around the composition of Apparition Poems in 2009 and 2010. The author introduced a phrase which was meant to carry signifying resonance, as an ensign, defining an aesthetic, defending a position, and opening a vista onto both what was then a contemporary Zeitgeist and what literary creation entailed in America under the aegis of that Zeitgeist— visionary deadness. The phrase centers itself on a contradiction in terms— that, of course, the visionary, in both the broad sense of experiencing visionary consciousness (i.e. not continuous, not cohesive consciousness, and interpretive of what’s seen as the manifestation of symbols, rather than quotidian, non-relatedly objective matter) and the tactile work of imposing a newfangled aesthetic, as a product of untamed imagination, is itself the product heightened, illuminated life, rather than decay, erosion, and decomposition— perpetuators of inert matter into grounds of permanent dissolution. The artist’s conceit— yoking together by force the harbingers of illumination with harbingers of doom— was born of circumstances, both personal and impersonal, warped by the turgid sense that the Aughts, in the city of Philadelphia, had left excess waste products in all channels, which by 2009-2010 were eroding, moving the locale from dynamism into stasis.

How to find enchantment in this sense— dynamism to stasis, the down-bound— must register as an appeal to the affective. When emotions are thrust onto a skewer, by a sense of reversals, intransigence, and ontological confusion (the being registering his or own sense of being as jostled, shuffled, or physiologically wrecked), what the mind takes cognitive pleasure in seeing is an acknowledged awareness that a low level of objective truth— the existence and subsistence of states of decay, erosion, and decomposition— establishes its own hegemony in the world of things which populates the mind, creating a warp or sense of warpage by which darkness creates its own sense of illumination, chaos creates its own simulacrum of order, and despair creates an inverse mode or manner of exultation. Visionary deadness describes this syndrome or sickness, this perversion, and warped jouissance, and works towards a definition of what the book Apparition Poems is, and what it perpetuates in its totality. The cognitive enchantment with death, and its own ensigns, suggest that the mind relishes the game or challenge of transmuting what is dead or dying into the living matter of freshly created art, and that the ultimate game which emerges is a simple one— to blow Gabriel’s horn, summon things from their grave, compel, by force, what is dying to live vibrantly again.

Stretches and strains appear in visionary deadness as an aesthetic sign. What is summoned from a grave— dead, inert matter— would seem to hold no attraction even to a warped writing consciousness, especially one attempting to attune itself to philosophical frequencies. Dead, inert matter, unilluminated by outside forces or energies, is quite dull and dreary. How, with the flip of a light-switch, do we make the whole imbroglio of visionary deadness palatable? When what is dull and dreary (dead, inert matter) is moved up a few frets to a new key, it ceases to be dull and dreary and is illuminated by both the mysticism and the mystique of horror, and the horrible— what could bear the monikers eerie, macabre, sinister, ghastly, haunting. Apparitions are often named as such. The matter informing the poet’s consciousness, thusly acquires an imaginative glow. The appeal transmitted out, through the book, is a mystique of the imagination, from within a haunted house, where death boasts a patina of excitement and excitation, just by being close to an ultimate suggestion of surface beneath the surface, life beneath life. Words take matter and forcibly reanimate it, all done as a mirror to a higher plane of objective intelligence— just as plummets into the warpage of the moribund reinfuse and recertify the poet’s sense of the transcendental (surface beneath surface, life beneath life), plummets into knowledge of flaws in the structures of both reality and the universe which contains and shelters all certain reality, are a flight upwards into (conversely, and perversely) greater depth, and greater awareness, through the reification of this knowledge.