A Humument: a lesson in un-reading (ii)

The adjective boustrophedon in Greek translates to “as an ox turns in plowing”: from right to left, from left to right, and the from right to left again. And so on. In English, the word is used most frequently to describe the sort of text that requires to be read in such a manner. Instead of the English convention of starting at the left margin and moving across the page from there, a boustrophedon text like those written in ancient Greece—or where the phenomena otherwise appeared, such as with Arabic dialects of Sabaean or Safaitic with their scripts—required this back-and-forth strategy to be processed. Sometimes, the letters in the sentences themselves were reversed, adding a mirrored effect to the phrases as they snaked their way across the page. Maybe an odd thought to us now, though it shouldn’t be; Hebrew, Urdu, Arabic, and Farsi read right to left, and Japanese, Korean, and Chinese scripts can be constructed vertically as well as horizontally.

Most published books in English—as is the case with any dedicated system of linguistic processing—adhere to its conventionalities, and so the left-to-right movement becomes a motorized, unconscious skill humming quietly behind the scenery of any text we encounter. The process of acquiring written language, at least in the largely English-speaking educational system of the United States, proceeds on the basis of a few simple principles like this, principles that are treated as implicit the moment after they’re taught. There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet. There are five vowels, with a sixth if you count y. And we forgo the labyrinth of the boustrophedon for a consistent, uni-directional approach to the page, one that eliminates surprises in the name of order. From a utilitarian standpoint, this is to be desired: what would we do without a framework to go by? Without a compass to set us at straight about the maps before us, where we can travel on them?

The benefits are clear—so clear and assumed that they become invisible, and in turn impermeable. How does one get into a poem without a series of crucial assumptions? Letters mean. Clumps of letters means. Clumps of letters in sequence mean. These sequences in a particular order mean. And in order for us to get at that meaning (in particular, for us to get at sequential meaning, i.e. what things mean when their order is non-negotiable) we depend on that set of simple principles. When I pick up a book, I know where to start and where to; same for when I read a poem. This is efficient for the conveyance of meanings that can be made amenable to these principles and their formats. But it also bears out a sort of “slickness” that doesn’t encourage or even sometimes allow any access to those assumptions once we’ve decided to adopt them. And in addition to unlocking a certain sort of meaning—a narrow and dictated sort of meaning—it locks other meanings out.

Does this mean texts like A Humument are problematic? Only in terms of the rules we set out with, which come and go at will (though I know little about linguistics, my un-profound agreement that the rules of any one language change drastically with time places me in the descriptivist camp). One might say that a text written in a certain language should expect to be judged in terms of the procedures of that language, but this raises the question of which procedures and at what moment. Even if one wants to suppose the constructions of this moment, our present day, we’re left with ambiguity as to the specifics of culture and location. The question’s an important one, though, seeing that the reading of English text from the left gutter to the right hardly seems to change given such unknown variables. Considering books like A Humument, which don’t give any clear indication of how they are to be read, invariably poses this problem of approach. It’s a problem that takes the form not only of How do I write about this object? but How do I read or interpret this object? In the canopy of this family tree, though, is the first and foremost question: What is this object?

I spent my last blog post in this series discussing A Humument in terms of categories—all to no avail. But the attempt to assign categories to the “project,” as I termed it, seems to me as fallacious as imposing hundreds of years of aesthetic preference on an object that so obviously tampers with its own lineage. Still, its interaction with that lineage isn’t a disowning, but an interrogation. In other words, it’s possible to talk about A Humument as though it were a book and only a book. There is enough evidence to go by—the text out of which the project is born can still be seen through Phillips’s paint and collage work. W. H. Mallock lives on, though more as part of A Humument’s genetic makeup than as a ghost or perceivable presence.

For this reason, the project inhabits an eccentric space in terms of convention. It wants neither convention nor its own system of meaning, but something the reader brings to it, an intuitive energy beyond the pages akin to that of their creator. The book—and we can, perhaps lazily, call it a book because it was written, sold, and read as such—out of which it was created, A Human Document, isn’t ever removed completely: in facts its visibility in Phillips’s work is absolutely necessary. Without it, the project would be a series of paintings and not a fugue of the past and the present, not a direct conversation between a dead voice and a living one. But despite the inclusion of text from the novel there’s still a sort of disavowal going on here, a way of acknowledging the purposes and uses of convention without engaging with them; that engagement is ceded to a third part, in this case Mallock.

Perhaps even more bizarre is precisely how the project manipulates convention. It never seems to abandon entirely the English convention of reading left to right and up to down. What’s more, there’s something of a hierarchy among the words that are allowed to shine through on its pages: clumps are delineated by bubbles and “associated” via trails of white space between them. But given the zany nature of so many of these groupings, it’s hard to read them as more than suggestions. The book is both complicit in the creation of the meanings it makes available, and also uninterested: by the time any meaning is available to be made, the aesthetics of the project have convinced us of their dubitability. It’s almost as if the guiding strings exist to ape the signposts we rely on so heavily and with such lack of awareness. Let’s take a look at the text from page 119 of the fourth edition of A Humument to get a sense of the richness of Phillips’s erasure and selective highlighting. For length reasons, I’ve minimized the amount of white space between the “stanzas” and, with no small amount of irony, left-justified the text:

slowly
open his mouth
and

sing
my last
book of surprises

One of these days

time
on his lips, …

The first two stanzas in the excerpt are linked, as are the last two. But there’s no link connecting all four of them, though my experience with encountering these words in Phillips’s book was very much what I imagine encountering this simplified sample is like for those unfamiliar with his work. The brilliance of the project is that it allows for linear meanings like this to be entertained—able at least to be articulated, if not definitively proven. A Humument toys not just with conventional sensibilities but with the way such sensibilities have rooted so far into our unconscious that they’re indiscernible from our own mental processes. The project’s lack of interest in, or dedication to, preconceived notions of language invites other readings besides the one I’ve quoted above, which is perhaps closest to how the text appears on the page. But let’s consider an alternate approach to page 119, one in which we recast the text from the bottom of the page to the top:

on his lips,
time

One of these days

book of surprises
my last
sing

and
open his mouth
slowly

This reading transforms the selection of text almost entirely from its previous state. “Time” itself is on the lips of the “he,” even “One of these days”; “book of surprises…sing // and / open his mouth” reads almost like an imperative. In the space of a handful of haikus, A Humument mines the meanings of hundreds of them. The possibilities multiply even more when we disrupt any linear order, backward or forward, in favor of free association:

One of these days

time
on his lips,

slowly
open his mouth
and

sing
my last
book of surprises

The semantic fluidity of this reading is entirely an arbitrary conjecture, one made available to me by the art-object but not coerced by it. This is the brilliance of the project’s uncertainty, its nods to both randomness and order in turn. In keeping formal readings available it mocks them while endorsing them (and whether this endorsement happens consciously or unconsciously is no matter, as we’re likewise deprived of our standard toolbox with which to break down written works). A secondhand consequence of A Humument’s scattered geography is that its sense of temporality also becomes more complex than our background assumptions. Viewed as a book, it works in certain ways; it obeys the practice of binding the leaves on the left side, where the text is justified. And the pages are demarcated each from each. Still, such visual acrobatics toy with the timelines of how we encounter the project, and thereby its geography. In a reversal of that assertion, it toys with the geography of the page and thereby our timelines. Both are correct descriptions, in my mind, of what happens when analytical modes of thinking about text are confronted with dissidents.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee also offers wonderfully disorienting moves that cause problems for the militant maxims of formality, many of which compose the backbone of our basic reading education. Unlike A Humument, the irregularly segmented text of Dictee both deviates from enforced modes of reading and at times enforces them. The book begins with a listening of the muses that places them in a column side-by-side with their associations; though the matchings are clear, the eye is free to wander. Ideograms, photographs, handwritten letters, and white space all erode the certainty of those first principles of reading. And yet other parts of Dictee also enforce them. There are several numbered lists in the poem, a format that provides readers a highly mediated approach to the text. Like A Humument, Cha’s Dictee is also an act of archaeology—though Dictee ostensibly mines the self to a more pointed degree that A Humument does. But both works defy classification, and both make use of the objects they wish to talk about themselves in order to invent a discourse to talk about those objects; they create essential tautologies that operate only within the confines of the work.

What practical lessons can be drawn from a text like A Humument or Dictee? Or, for that matter, any other text that questions linearity or preconceived ways of seeing? None of the artworks explored above offer any answer or consolation for a lack thereof. Their methods are neutral, but volatile: the old ways aren’t obliterated, and the new methods aren’t exalted. We’re left with a practice of un-reading, one that will never fully erase those first principles, but one that also won’t promote them at the expense of the possible. With these texts, we’re called to consider everything in what Charles Olsen would call “the large area of the whole poem,” or “the FIELD,” in relationship to every other component. As he writes in his monumental 1950 essay, “Projective Verse”:  “It is a matter, finally of OBJECTS, what they are, what they are inside a poem, how they got there, and, once there, how they are to be used.” The materiality, i.e. the object-hood, of Mallock’s novel, and of the photographs and brushstrokes Cha appropriates, exists on an imagined Cartesian plane. Relationships between features can be mapped on this plane, but dictating directions is more difficult. But perhaps, in the case of Phillips, it’s an obliquely successful endeavor: though the lack of instruction fails to prompt a indisputable movement from left to right or from the top of the page to its bottom, another action becomes required. To make anything of his project we’re asked to rely on intuition—to turn inward and bring out what’s there, to put the mind on equal terms with the practices it created.