Harold Carr

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home :: writing :: 2004-08-03-differentitiesAndNomadPoetics.html

Tue, 03 Aug 2004

Carr's Differentities and Pierre Joris's Nomad Poetics

In the spring I reported on my reading of Umberto Eco's Serendipities, in particular the search or restoration of the "the language of Adam" - the mother tongue. Now I'm reading Pierre Joris' A Nomad Poetics, which I came across in the philosophy/critical theory section of the Santa Cruz Bookshop last Saturday while in California. PJ goes in the opposite direction: "There is no mother tongue ... nor any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects ... Language is an essentially heterogeneous reality" - citing Deleuze and Guattari.

A Nomad Poetics is a collection of essays from 1990 to 2002. The essays relate to my B/E, Poet's Apprentice and Differentities work: In a dictionary "the end of every definition leads out of the dictionary into the old uncanny other lives of the word, showing even the most familiar word to be a changeling, a mutation, a creature from some black lagoon.

My Differentities centers on the "black lagoon," creating a web of identities and differences of words, ideas and concepts leading to a poiesis (i.e., process of creation) in which everything moves and is connected in a network of Differentities.

"The days of anything static, form, content, state are over. The past century has shown that anything not involved in continuous transformation hardens and dies. ... There is no at-home-ness here but only an ever more displaced drifting."

"1) that language has always to do with the other, in fact, for the writer IS the other."

"2) that there is no single other, there are only a multitude of them --- plurality; even multitudes of different multitudes --- hetero-pluralities."

"3) ... writing as nomadic practice --- on the move from one other to another other."

"[3a: the critic/theorist: the dog that barks as the caravan passes]"

"4) ... a between-ness as essential nomadic condition, thus always a moving forward, a reaching, a tending. (I hear the need for both tension and tenderness). and an absence of rest, always a becoming, a line-of-flight [as against Being, which is always a being-toward-death, stillness]."

My Differentities foregrounds the between-ness - the links or trails from one camp (a definition is a temporary resting place) to another.

In my first attempt at Differentities, via the Poet's Apprentice program in the early 80s, where I replaced words in tests with only words deriving from Old English or Germanic, a computer science professor commented it sounded fascist or like a Nazi program. He was accurately pointing out tendencies in the original Old English focused version (tending to the language of Adam) - although he missed the overall goal: poiesis - the curiosity to see/hear where it leads. Now, 20 years later, as the Poet's Apprentice has developed into Differentities, the focus is clear - to play in the muck of the black lagoon of the origins and emergence of sounds, syllables, syntax and semantics.

... or, as Pierre Joris puts it, "... total miscegenation is the only goal we believe in. Purity is the root of all evil."

Or, citing Nathaniel Mackey's Discrepant Engagement: "... in the interest of opening presumably closed orders of identify and signification, accent fissure, fracture, incongruity, the rickety, imperfect fit between word and world - the creaking of the word - the noise upon which the word is based, the discrepant foundation of all coherence and articulation."

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Harold Carr

Harold Carr