21. Moments (2) Crevices in Time: meditation on the archaeology of a [moment]

This piece from my Journal dates back to September, 2008. It is a further exploration of the notion that we live in [moments]. Maybe the metaphor of time that dominates our thinking - of time flowing as a river flows - is an illusion. We impose on our experience this notion of continuity; we putty over the crevices and pretend that time has a smooth surface.
Reading over this piece, what strikes me are the sudden leaps, and the difficulty of the task. "Capturing" and "recording" the richness of any given [moment] is impossible. As David Ireland wrote: the more we look INTO a moment, the more we find it contains.

Whenever I dig down into the past and undertake the archaeological venture of examining past moments, I have my memory, I have my writing, I have other information : the memory of others, artefacts, photographs.

And each time I’m taken by how inadequate is the record. Even when I look into this moment, I realise how inadequately I perceive the fullness of the moment, the narrowness of attention, the delimitations on my attention span: limitations of depth, of width, of fullness, of inclusiveness.

Take this moment:
I am sitting in a lecture, and I am aware of much that is going on, much that is there to be experienced. Pam St Leger is delivering a lecture. Pam is an old friend from my days of teaching at Melbourne University’s Hawthorn Institute. For a short time I’ve regressed 10 or so years … I’m parking the car at the front of Hawthorn Institute … I’m picturing the hundreds of overseas students, mostly Japanese, who filled the Caf, picturing my fellow lecturers, recalling classes, moments …

And now I’m back. Room 329, Education Faculty, La Trobe. There room is full of students – 50 or more. I notice Ranu sitting opposite. She is Indian. She has jet black hair, a full face. I recall briefly that she was a member of another class I attended last year. Beside me is Rochelle. Orthodox Jew, a mother of ten boys, a member of the PhD group that I’m part of. I look at my research notes, glance over them, read a few lines.

I rummage quickly in my pocket. I stretch my leg to make access to the pocket easier. Just in time I pull out my handkerchief, bring it rapidly to my face. I sneeze, a loud disruptive, uncontrollable sneeze. A student across the room mouths ‘Bless You.’ I am aware of the tingling sensation that often accompanies a major sneeze; my whole body seems to be tingling.

The ceiling fans do not move. It is May; winter is setting in. No need of fans. Two people in the class are wearing beanies

(As I rewrite this material into my computer, I recall the conversation a week ago with Ncube, the tall Zimbabwean student; he wrote the word BEAN in his notebook, and corrected it when I told him it should be beanie. At the time I had old English slang running through my head: Old bean. Bean = head…)

I’m back from reverie …one woman in this class is wearing the traditional head dress of her culture – a large scarf covering her head and much of her face. The carpet is industrial carpet; it is brown, ugly, the kind you don’t normally notice. Rochelle is rubbing her arm. My foot is going to sleep. A man in a bear suit just walked through the room.

Further reflections

A grain of sand. A small piece of grit. If I walk on the kitchen tiles in bare feet, and that grain of sand is there, I will notice it immediately if I step on it. There will be a brief moment of discomfort – perhaps of very minor pain. (I have always found it hard to walk bare footed; my feet have always been sensitive to any unevenness, to any small stones. I would have done poorly in the Kalahari.)

A grain of sand. At Sandy Point, if you stand on the beach at the estuary into Shallow Inlet, and look back down along the beach to the west, away from the Promontory and toward Walkerville, you see maybe 15 kilometres of coast line, the arced sweep of Waratah Bay. The beach is wide, a hundred or more metres wide – more in places. A beach composed entire of sand, hectares of white, clean sand. And how far down, underground, does it stretch? I have no idea. But the dunes behind the beach are tall – quite a climb. They’d be 50 metres high I’d guess, maybe more.

All of that sand. Such a long, wide beach, and how deep the sand? Behind the dunes, in the Sandy Point settlement, people put down bores to access the sweet bore water, purer than rain water we were once told. In the late 1960s, when my then wife and I bought a block at Sandy Point and put up a beach house, we had a bore put down – or more exactly, arranged to have one put down. Ray Henderson and his brother came one day with their drill and installed the bore. They drilled down 20 or 30 feet to the water table, installed a pipe, and a pump, and gave us running water whenever we needed it – at least whenever the electricity was working.

That is a lot of sand.: 100 metres wide (and much more if you consider that the ‘soil’ across the whole of the settlement is sand), 15 kilometres long, and down to a depth of 10 metres (say).

Echoes of Briggs Elevator … each grain is uniquely shaped. Each grain is unique in its coloring. As I write of THIS particular grain of sand, memory pulls me back to another. In an instant I am in Miss Tout’s classroom. Year 10 English, Moreland High School. It must be 1958. We are studying William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence..

To see a world in a grain of sand

I recall the frission, the sudden electric moment (the uniqueness of that grain of time, on the kitchen floor of my education, and the ‘pain’ of sudden awareness), the sudden understanding that I felt then: that you COULD see a world in a grain of sand. That is that tiny particle of matter is, in truth, a world in its own right.

… the more you look into a moment, the more you find in it…

(I have written before of Ruby Tout. I have created a story of how I became literate, of how it was through A D Hope’s A Death of a Bird that I came to an understanding of what poetry can be. Now I realise that my debt to Ruby Tout is very great indeed – and to William Blake. That insight – that you could see a world in a grain of sand – changed my way of seeing, of thinking, of experiencing. I was awakened to something.)

And then I’m dragged into that other recognition, that other set of equivalences: Count the grains of sand on that 15 kilometre beach, that 100 metres wide beach, that huge volume that has depth too – 10 perhaps 20 metres of sand. And imagine each to be a star in the universe. Each grain of sand a star, a celestial body.

As Eric Idle (of Monty Python fame) observed in The Galaxy Song:

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billions stars ...
And our galaxy is only one of millions and billions
in this amazing and expanding universe

The number is well short of grains on that beach is well short of infinity. But the number is very very large indeed. But there are more stars in the universe ... And that gives a sense, a point of comparison, for just how large the universe might be...

20. "In my father's house are many mansions."

"In my father's house are many mansions."

Tenants abound in this tenement of clay:

A petulant child insists "I want!"

An adolescent son, now in his thirties,
Sees in his wife
his mother
and
Defies her in whatever she demands

An evangelist stands on a soap box
In a pulpit before any congregation, any crowd, any mob
To declare the sad sick state of affairs

A writer sits scribbling on a pad
Inventing lies and lives and truths

An aging father sits back in his chair
And wonders what his sons are all about

A singer caresses the microphone as he sings
Listens to his recorded voice
While the hand of Narcissus strokes the pond

A lover lies abed and speaks of Fleas

And there are plenty more
And room for others still
(The sign out the front still reads: Vacancies)

A guru who is sometimes wise enough to know
That vanity comes in a variety of sizes
And wears many disguises

So many tenants to keep the caretaker occupied
There's even a spare room down the hallway
Kept for a muse who sometimes visits.
Now and then you hear the singing
Echoing and rippling through the house.

19. Autobiography (7) Sketch: A Bit of Mischief

In the Coburg of my childhood, Pentridge dominated the landscape. Pentridge was Melbourne's jail. It housed convicted criminals - murderers, robbers, the riff raff of society. I went to school at Coburg State School; Pentridge was opposite. Its entrance was just off the main road - Sydney Road. One side ran along Gaffney Street for about a kilometre. Beside its back wall ran the Merri Creek. Its other side wall was set about one hundred metres back from Bell Street.

The wall was very high - maybe twenty feet - and it was built of huge blocks of bluestone, basalt clinkers excavated from the nearby area of the Coburg Lake. Pieces of jagged broken glass and barbed wire had been embedded in concrete along the top of the wall to deter escape.

When I was at Primary School, the back fence of our playground was just twenty yards from the forbidding grey Pentridge wall. I was in grade 4 or 5 when the notorious criminal, John O'Malley, made his escape from Pentridge.

The front half of Pentridge housed the prisoners; it was made up of cell blocks - large buildings full of small cells. The back half of Pentridge was not built on; rumour had it that it was farm land, used by the prisoners to grow vegetables.

We often went yabbying in the Merri Creek at the back of Pentridge. When I was in Secondary school, the school cross country run involved circling Pentridge. Its prominence was inescapable, and the myths that grew up about it were undeniable. It always held a fascination for the young boys of Coburg; and people from elsewhere wold often throw jibes at us: "Where do you go to school - Bluestone College?"

There was a large drain running under Pentridge. Outside the walls of Pentridge it was an open storm water drain, but it went underground just outside the walls of the jail near Bell Street and re-emerged at the back, its contents draining away into the Merri Creek.

One of the initiation ceremonies popular among the many gangs of boys that formed and reformed at Coburg State School 484 was the requirement to traverse this underground drain, from its entrance near Bell Street to its Merri Creek exit. The drain was maybe two metres wide - three or four boys could easily walk along it side by side. But it was quite low, so that you had to duck down to enter.

It was foul smelling, but its real danger lay in the fact that it took you under the jail.

"My dad reckons a few years back some prisoners dug down and broke into the drain and escaped. They hid in the farm at the back and got into the drain at night," one boy said. Romantic myths about the drain were legion, and those of us with vivid imaginations could picture scenes of unspeakable violence: desperate and ruthless prisoners, hiding in the drain, waiting for night to fall so they could make their escape, who would have no compunction in slitting the throat of anyone who came along in the pitch black darkness of the drain …

I had suffered from Rheumatic fever as a boy, and spent a month in bed as a result. I was an only child. And my parents lived in fear of the polio epidemic which claimed the lives and the good health of so many youngsters in the thirties. Polio, they assured me, was caught in gutters. Those three factors, along with an overactive imagination, meant that I was very wary of places such as the Pentridge drain. So when it was my turn to prove my manhood by entering into that dark, dark place, I reneged.

18. Leftovers: 9 thoughts

I

Things once wanted or needed, even valued, that are now cast off, unwanted, thrown out, unloved.
Detritus.
Preloved clothes, hand-me-downs.
Wall flowers: girls at a dance who sit waiting, but who are never invited by a partner.
Spinsters and bachelors: (Archaic usage) leftovers from the mating rituals of our society; unclaimed persons.

II

My mother used to say to me,
when I left food upon my plate:
“Think of all the starving children in Asia.”
I didn’t, of course.
All I could think of was:
I don’t like peas; I won’t eat Brussels sprouts.

III

In 1996, as the Crown casino was readied for its grand opening, the staff rehearsed for the great event. The chefs prepared a thousand gourmet meals – a dry run, a trial, a practice… They dished up the food. Waiters carried the plates to the tables, which were lavishly laid out with silver service and laundered table cloths, and set them down before invisible guests. Later, the waiters returned, took up the plates, scraped the untouched food , now leftovers, into garbage bags, and dumped them in giant industrial waste bins. No one, it seems – not the chefs, nor the waiters, nor the cleaning staff, nor the owners – gave a thought to the hunger of the homeless men and women and young people who slept on park benches or under bridges or in squats or in refuges within a stone’s throw of Victoria’s glittering Crown. Or if they did, no one acted upon it.

IV

Op Shops trade in leftovers. One person’s leftover is another’s treasure.

V

Like Beauty, the notion of ‘leftover’ is in the eye of the beholder.
A joke:
A bloke goes into a bar and sees an aboriginal wearing one thong.
“He Jacky? You lose a thong?” he asks.
“No, mate – found one!”

VI

Every year, during Health week, out in Suburbia we place our leftovers on the front nature strip: the detritus of consumptionism, our sacrifices to god of new fashion, our victims of the demon called obsolescence. We drive past other people’s piles of junk, and sometimes stop and take something home.

VII

In the suburbs, in the inner city, the spirit of the hunter gatherer lives on.

VIII

Back in the late 1970s, down at our beach shack. With my farmer mate from Kerang, a bloke called John Girdwood. We went to the local tip, him and me, a pit in the sandy dunes, well back from the beach, created by the local Council. I took a trailer load of junk: broken appliances, old furniture, and a pile of jumpers – full of holes, most of them, and fraying. JG took nothing, but took back with him my pile of old jumpers.
Before I could cast off my unwanted jumpers, John G. grabbed them.
“I’ll wear these on the tractor,” he told me, “when I’m ploughing at night.”
And he did, two or three of them at a time, in the black of night, in early Spring, when the temperature was down around zero, for many seasons.

IX
That which remains.

17. 2003 Let me have men about me that are ...

I wrote this poem in 2003, as the world still reeled in the after shocks of the September 11 bombing of the Twin Towers. Suddam Hussein was being tarred and feathered, and accused of developing weapons of mass destruction. Finding none in Iraq, GB decided to export his own WMD, along with tens of thousands of American troops, and England and Australia fell into line and marched to the steady beat of the drums of war.


2003 Let me have men about me that are ...

Let me have men about me that are fat …
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look
He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar.


Mostly I detest all stereotypes:
The Estate agent with the gold capped tooth
The tattoed bikie with the heart of gold
But when it comes to height - aye, there's the rub ...

Wise Will, you might have written – with good cause
"Let me have men about me who are tall ...
Or men about me of a middle height..."

Yon George and John are short and full of guile
Perhaps they both resent their lesser stature
Their childhood dreams were of heroic deeds
But they fell short of the heights to which they aspired

But stop a moment, look at those two now
See how they strut and pose on our world’s stage
Turning their 97 pounded puniness
Into these images of Hercules.

‘Twas Cassius, a thin, ignoble man
That conned the noble Brutus to his cause
And so the mighty Caesar was brought down
Knives in his back, blood on the Senate floor.
As Will observed: "Such men ARE dangerous!"

This George and John would rush us into battle
Would send our nation’s children, one by one
And sacrifice them on the altar of Pride -
Of Pride and Vindication and Revenge

Beware smug pipsqueaks with their overblown dreams
Who in their blind obsession wish to make
Goliaths of themselves and corpses of our young.

16. Autobiography (7) Sketch: Barry 3 months

I've been looking through family photographs a lot lately. Like most of the things in my life, my photographs are not well ordered. I vaguely recalled that there was a photo of my father, dressed in his Sunday best, holding a baby. Last night I discovered that I had two copies of the photo.

I'd never before checked the back of the photo; it had sat in its place in one of those adhesive-backed albums with the plastic cover sheet. I peeled the photo off, to scan it. That's when I noticed the inscription. It's in my mother's hand, I think:

Barry 3 months

My father looks happy.

It's quite probably the first photograph of me as a child, and I have the strong feeling that it was taken on the day Mum and Dad and my Uncle Ken and cousin Thelma drove to North Fitzroy, to The Haven, the Salvation Army Home for Unmarried Mothers, to 'collect' me and take me home.

That was in late September or early October, 1943. In which case, my mother's inscription is technically incorrect. She was being a little premature. At the time of the photo, I was still legally Richard Charles Bertram. I did not become Barry William Carozzi until October 11, 1943, when the court proceedings were finalised, and my adoption was complete.

15. The Writing Life (6) Experimental Fiction 2 Constraint V Freedom

On the one hand: Freedom; on the other: Constraint

In my last blog I explored the FREE FALL approach to writing fiction. This article deals with what seems to be its opposite: writing within tight constraints.

5. Free Flow V OuLiPo

Freefall is writing without constraint. It is allowing ideas to flow, with critical judgement held in abeyance, anaesthetised, put out to pasture for a very long time. It means being open to whatever rise up out of our unconscious minds. As the commentator writes: it’s a method which may have the pay off that you develop or find a voice.

OuLiPo is at the other end of the spectrum of approaches. OuLiPO is an acronym. The approach was developed in the 1950s by a group of French Writers who called it: OUvroir de LIttérature Potentielle. Translated this means, roughly, Workshop of Potential Literature. Which means that OuLiPo should really be called WoPoLi.

The group of French persons who developed OuLiPo consisted of writers and mathematicians who invented, reinvented and experimented with different types of formal constraints.

Here are some examples of OuLiPo writing, experiment I tried recently: You may be able to spot what’s going on – the nature of the constraint I have imposed on myself.



A. Mary had a little lamb

Mary has a smallish lambkin
Wool as pallid as a cloud
To all compass points trots Mary
All among the schooling crowd

“No lambs. No lambs!’ proclaims a tutor
‘Lambs may not go in this hall.’
But loudly laugh his tiny scholars
Laugh out loud and down do fall.

If you own a smallish lambkin
Allow him not to go for schooling
Bind your lambkin to a post
That is this institution’s ruling

‘Woolly lambs,’ a tutor says
‘Do not follow our instruction.
Bring such animals not within
Our walls, avoid lamb-introduction.

Laughing young do much disrupt
Apt induction to our knowing
Bring a lamb within our walls
And too much laughing is a-growing

Sad looks all should now display
School’s not for such joy or laughing
Stand in rows with sullen looks
No smiling for our photographing

Baa baa black lamb, any wool?
Any wool within that sack
Bring us woolly cardigans
A woolly scarf is what our youngun’s lack.


B Jack & Jill

John with Jill did mount the hill
To fill their bucket with H2O
John fell down upon his crown
Jill too fell down, they told me so



John stood up, his drinking cup
Empty like this mind of mine
He needs some dressing on his scone
Otherwise he’s doing fine

Poor old John is feeling crook
Jill’s is joyous like some dog
Ruff ruff ruffing in its kennel
Chewing some delicious bone



In the A example, a rewrite of Mary had a Little Lamb, I have avoided using the letter E. In the second, I’ve avoided the letter A.

George Perec, one of the leading lights of the OuLiPO school, once wrote a 40000 word novel which contained not a single E.

6. Why impose such constraints? Is the imposition of constraint liberating?

The theory goes something like this. Our heads are full of clichés. Think fear, and we immediately think: shaking like a leaf, the hairs on the back on my head standing up. Our heads are full of clichéd ways of saying things, collected over the years and stored, ready for use, in our cells and synapses. So, when we ‘free flow’ we are simply giving free rein to our accumulated language habits.

But place a constraint – like you can’t use the letter E – and all of our ready-to-mind phrases become useless. We can’t respond ‘automatically’. That’s the trouble with automatic writing: it’s all automatic. Put up a barrier, the OuLiPo-crowd say, and you have to jump, you have to do something different.

With the letter E, so many words are no longer available – so you have to find new words:

Mary had a little lamb becomes Mary has a smallish lambkin
Its fleece as white as snow Wool as pallid as a cloud
And everywhere that Mary went To all compass points trots Mary
The lamb was sure to go All among the schooling crowd

Herein lies the major point of difference – the deeper significance – of the OuLiPo School’s project.


7. What kinds of constraints might a writer impose?

LETTER CONSTAINTS

A.
Constraints involving the avoidance of particular letters are a common OuLiPo strategy.
Rewrite Mary had a Little Lamb:
First, without A; then without O; then without E; then without I.

B.
Choose a particular well know piece of literature. For example, the Shakespeare piece:

What a piece of work is man
How noble in reason
How infinite in faculties
In form and moving
How express and admirable
In action how like an angel
In apprehension how like a god
The beauty of the world
The paragon of animals
Use the piece as the basis of a piece of acrostic writing. For example:

Whenever hardy albatrosses take a position in Eden, careless evangelists
often forget what original reasons, key ideas, salacious meanings and noble happenings ossify. Wait! No orphans believe lies. Even in Nottingham. Recent eccentric artists savage our nation.

C.
As far as possible, using words starting with a particular letter in a series of sentences. For example:
What a piece of work is man
Sentence One: W
Sentence Two: H
Sentence Three: A
Sentence Four: T
And so on.

We work, wearily, waiting and worrying. Horrific and hair-raising hopes are hardly heeded. An atom always attenuates an art. Then, tomorrow, terrible times triumph. Aggravated and annoyed, artists attempt to ask, to aspire, to attune art to any attainable aim. People preoccupied and precious, preach popular prophecies, and pontificate in pompous pulpits. I’m injured, intuitively, in my inner intensity.
Every Eden exhibits erogenous egos.

WORD and SENTENCE CONSTAINTS

Again, drawing on the same excerpt, the Oulipos might require that 3 words from the ‘What a piece of work is man’ quote appear in succeeding sentences.

For example:

For what possible reason would a man take a piece of literature, a literary work, and interfere with it thus? Is man no more than a filter through which language is passed, and how can it be counted noble to so exploit him? In Reason’s name, how can this infinite play achieve any serious end, in university faculties or in the world? In my own thought patterns – and I speak honestly here – I’ve considered moving a motion of no confidence. But how and I to express this, and do so in an admirable fashion?

My ‘original’ text has been fashioned using words from Shakespeare as the starting point, or as a major component. The ‘constraint’ – the requirement that I use the words from What a piece of work is man in the precise order in which they appeared in the original – sets some limits on what I can write.

As with the [re]versions of Mary , Mary quite contrary, this practice is a particular form of what the postmodernists have called intertextuality: the way in which any ‘new’ text draws upon previously existing texts.
This concept of intertextuality was carried to its logical conclusion by Perec, in an experiment that involved drawing whole sentences from a wide range of novels, and welding them into a new text.Perec composed the novel A Man Asleep using words and sentences he had drawn from other texts. His biographer writes:

[It] is probably the first collage novel that can be read in complete ingnornace of the originals, or even of the fact that there are originals. Moby Dick, Bartleby, The Trial, The Inferno and Ulysses provide many of the sentences of Perec’s book …

He concludes:
Perec is not responsible for (most of) the words of A Man Asleep, only for the way they are put together.

There are numerous ways in which a writer might contrive to create a ‘constrained text’, and in so doing explore the ‘potentialities’ implicit within language. Another involves stipulating, from the beginning, the length of sentences. You could stipulate that every sentence in a piece be 12 or 15 or 17 words in length. You could begin with very short sentences, increase their size, and them, decrease them again.

Dawn.
First light.
Morning has broken.
A new day begins.
I am awake at last.
I try to remember my dreams.
Images of red goldfish swimming in ponds.
Worms writhing to escape the early morning magpies.
It’s the early bird that catches the late worm.
The dew on the grass begins evaporating in morning heat.



RHYTHM CONSTRAINTS

In many ways, the OuLiPo movement has its antecedents in poetry and verse. Structures such as the villanelle, the sestina, the ottavo rima, the sonnet – even the limerick – are very much like the principles that govern OuLiPo. Certainly the various metres of poetry – the iambic pentameter and its kith and kin represent powerful constraints that the writer must work within when creating text.

A
Here is an experiment based on the rhythm of language. In each stanza, I establish a recurrent pattern of sound-structures.:

Here in the dark
Alone in my bed.
My youngest daughter’s sleeping on the couch.

Hush and you’ll hear
The sounds of the night
The even breathing of my sleeping child.

Dogs on their chains
Barking at ghosts
My eyes are burning. How I long for sleep.


B
Here is a much longer passage, in which I have attempted to sustain particular rhythms. I begin with iambic pentameters. In the fifth paragraph, the rhythm shifts to an anapaest, then a adctyl, and so on.


We stand upon the shore and watch the waves, the way they form and rise and fall again. The way they form, grow larger, and rise up, defying, so it may seem, gravity. But then, their weight too great, they crash and rush in tumbling, broiling foam onto the shore. Each wave the same, yet each so different. And yet their forming is so regular.

The motion of the waves is like a pulse. The heart beats in a pattern of its own, and forces blood to course within our veins.

Behind the music, too, there lies a beat. It may be slow, as in a funeral march, or rapid and insistent – bit it’s there. The melody enmeshes with the beat.

And language, too, has rhythms of its own. They are as regular as day and night, as regular as waves upon the sand, just like the gentle beating of the heart. In writing, we can trace them as we read, much as we do when listening to speech,. And even in the clumsiest of prose, when words hang, limp as lettuce on a plate, or in a very poorly written piece. We nonetheless can hear the ebb and flow, the pulsing of the rhythm of the words.

And if we’re very careful as we listen to the gabbling, the incessant conversation of the people in the street, we can hear behind their voices, as insistent as a hammer, the extraordinary rhythms that indwell within our words. And there’s rhythm in the sayings of the wise and ancient writers who were speaking of a future that they knew they would not share. But the rhythm here is different from the one that came before it, for the first was quite iambic, whereas here – for your enjoyment – and I trust you will enjoy it, I’ve established in my sentences what experts in the field would call a stunning anapaest.

Try, if you can, to imagine a future – a world in which poets were given such praise, that they thought of themselves as a gift to the nation, a strong grateful nation that heard every phrase. Each sentence and lyric, each song and each rhythm, impressed in their ears and impressed on their minds, that they’d stare in amazement at what lay before them and raise up their voices in tribute to God.
You’ve read six paragraphs of prose. Did anything stand out for you? Did anything seem odd to you? How have your ears processed the sound? And did you notice anything peculiar? Like: were the sentences sweet to your ear?

Of course I have been playing games with you. And if I’m honest, I would have to say:

The game began and still the game goes on.
I’m writing down these lines to show the way the rhythms operate.
Perhaps yours ears pick up the way the rhythms of these words I write are following a ‘beaten path’ - a pattern that I’ve fixed upon. And if you have remained alert, and listened very carefully, the patterns will reverberate. A drum beats softly in your head. A set of waves breaks on the shore, the mental shores of consciousness.

And so I ask you: Ask yourself. Does all of this seem too contrived? Do all these patterns I have formed seem too insistent in your mind. Too regular, too well laid out for you to take too seriously.

Read the whole passage once again. Go right back to the very start, and try - by reading out aloud – to single out (identify) the places where the rhythms change. Then , with your pencil mark the spot. There is music in the language of the speaker and the writer, we can hear them as we listen, we can hear them as we read. And the language of the gutter, and the voices of all people make an ever present music that engulfs us as we read. We are swimming in an ocean, and the ocean is of language. There are waves that are a-forming, growing larger, growing higher, and they’re crashing down upon us as we’re sitting here and listening. But like you, I’m feeling hopeful that we’ll – all of us – survive.


8. So what? What are we to make of the OuLiPo movement?

There has been, and continues to be, a general tendency to classify the members of the Oulipo as tricksters. The implication being that their work does not qualify as serious literature.

By September 2006, the OuLiPo group had conducted over 550 monthly meetings since its inauguration. The movement has certainly encouraged all kinds of experimentation in writing. No every experiment has proved successful. But then, that is the nature of experiments: they don’t always work.

By temperament, I’m drawn to the intensively expressive and personal writing that free writing and free fall writing encourage. As a novice writer, my focus was on writing that enabled me to access the truth of my experience. Much of my ‘serious’ writing explored autobiographical themes; it was, in essence, therapeutic. I needed to understand what made me tick. Writing was thinking about experience, making sense of my life.

However, there is an attraction in the OuLiPO project. As one observer commented:

Even if it fails to always produce vaunted “works” of literature, writing under constraint aspires to amuse and amaze simultaneously. In this respect, constrained writing clarifies and tests our categories of literature, but not without also feeding our sense of humor.

For some writers, the OuLiPo strategies provide a circuit breaker; they enable even the most blocked writer to produce material.
OuLiPo has been around for a considerable time – almost 50 years.
In contrast to the many avant-garde groups it has long outlived, the Oulipo does not purport to change the world through poetry alone, but rather aims to transform the way change itself is perceived. If potential literature is a possible literature — undoubtedly one of the meanings we may ascribe to the group’s use of po — the Oulipo undertakes the task of explicitly determining what is yet possible for literature, and then demonstrates how those possibilities may be realized in writing. In this sense, Oulipians imagine uncharted waters for literature and then proceed to map that imaginary space.


9. Towards a synthesis
I have attempted to present the view that among the more radical experimental strategies available to writers, Free Fall and OuLiPo stand at either end of the continuum.

At one end is Free fall. Free fall is unrestrained, unconstrained outpouring. I keep picturing the writer referred to in the Free Fall section, with his 75 folders of free fall writing, perhaps the raw material for a novel – or of several novels.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, the French existentialist writer Albert Camus. Camus writes of Sisyphus:

‘The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.’

For Camus, the writer is Sisyphus. Each morning, when I sit before my computer, I am struck by the image of Sisyphus. I contemplate my day: Today, as my hands roll over the keyboard, I will be embarking once more of a task of Sisyphian absurdity. Camus goes on to point out that Sisyphus was a wise man. Indeed, he had been scornful of the gods, and had even imprisoned Death. Sisyphus had spent time in the underworld, as all writers must do. And his punishment was the absurdity of a life carrying a heavy rock to the very top of the mountain, only to see it roll down the other side, so that the next day he must repeat the self same task.

If Sisyphus is at one end, of the continuum The Man from OuLiPo is at the other, attempting to write while wearing a strait jacket – a set of constraints that are intended to stop the easy flow of words, to force the writer to constantly make conscious choices of which word, which phrase.

They are Chalk and Cheese, this pair: Sisyphus and the Man from OuLiPo. And yet …

In the end, each strategy results in the production of a wealth of material. Words pour onto the page using either method.

Seventy five folders of free writing. Seventy five folders of OuLiPo-‘inspired’ work.

If writing is rewriting, as many believe, then perhaps there is no necessity ofr a choice to be made. It’s not a case of either/or, but rather this/and. Perhaps we each need to become the Freefalling [wo]man from OuLipo. Perhaps wave and particle are one and the same. Perhaps all roads lead to Rome.