CAUTION: Danger Ahead

A lifetime ago, when I was an undergraduate at UC Davis, a ‘new’ art form (I use the words ‘art form’ loosely here because it was mostly pedestrian) was sweeping the campus. Collage, in all its machinations—decoupage, posters, graffiti, love letters—was the 'new' way of pronouncing deepest philosophical thoughts, decorating dorm rooms, or preparing class assignments, and no form of printed material was safe from being snatched, ‘cut’ and rearranged to fit the wishes and designs of the finders of such matter. Words—unless spoken—were hardcopy in those days, and photos had not yet made it to the digital world. Old magazines abounded, destined for the (not-recycled) trash if not re-purposed; newspapers were everywhere too, although their unstable print dyes did not lend themselves to any process involving wet glues unless a distinct smear-look was desired. Textbooks, which at the time were rarely sold back to the book store because professors rarely reused the same text again, provided a plethora of words, and discarded dictionaries—a rare and coveted find—offered exact words to make most important points.

In that era, the ability and drive to self-express through text-destruction overrode any taboo that might be felt nowadays when we can create whatever we want—neatly, concisely, or deliberately messy—with a computer and color printer that circumvent harvesting valued materials.  So, when I finished Adam Smyth’s “Shreds of Holinesse,” I was overcome with a bit of nostalgia.  While bibles and library books were off-limits (mostly) during the early days of my college career, it is not difficult for me to understand the motivation of George Herbert and the Little Gidding Company to create—with real cut-and-paste techniques—new poetry, new concordances, new works of art compiled from re-purposed printed material. Short of access to a printing press or resorting to handwritten, hand-illustrated formats reminiscent of monks in scriptoriums, re-purposing existing material was the print artist’s only recourse.

But Smyth asks us to take another look at cutting:

Scholarship has in the past understood cutting primarily as a metaphor for something like quotation: an act of transcription a copying out, from source to text. But what if we treat cutting as something literal…? (456).

Like Cassie, I too flinched with Smyth’s constant use of the words “cutting,” “blade,” “knives,” a reaction, I’m sure, to their modern (and sad) association. But that revulsion is rather apt when considering my text, Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Cutting—in its most malicious interpretation, with all its blades and knives—is one way of looking deeper into this novel as the author, Katherine Anne Porter, tracks Miranda’s movement in and out of consciousness when she is in the throes of influenza. The reader is given no visual notice that Miranda’s perception of the real world around her is being usurped by the paranoid, terrorized unconsciousness that claims her when her fever rages.  When Miranda’s illness-induced nightmares assault her, she hangs on desperately to words in an attempt to make sense of the cacophony of awfulness heralding her approaching death:

Oblivion, thought Miranda, her mind feeling among the memories of words she had been taught to describe the unseen, the unknowable, is a whirlpool of grey water turning upon itself for all eternity…eternity is perhaps more than the distance to the farthest star. She lay on a narrow ledge over a pit that she knew to be bottomless, […] staring into the pit, thinking, There it is, there it is at last, it is very simple; and soft carefully hung words like oblivion and eternity are curtains hung before nothing at all (Porter 198, italics mine).

It is easy to imagine that both Miranda and Porter’s readers would appreciate a clue when she is entering a non-existent fever-driven world, a world that, in spite of the shock, disgust, panic, and monsters that envelop her, is not real and will not be there to haunt her if her immune system pulls it together before the virus kills her. What if Miranda’s breaks with reality were somehow highlighted, ala Little Gidding-on-hallucinogens, with cut, broken, untidy text? Insertion of some of Smyth’s ‘specialized poems’—those that are “printed, folded and manipulated […] in […] twisting form, its final words returning the reader to the start” (473)—would fit the bill. Glue smears, disjointed lettering, misspellings—all would provide a visual representation of what it feels like when a mind looses touch with the body that formerly anchored it. Warped, distorted, and deformed bit of text would best illustrate Miranda’s delusional and thoroughly collaged-world and would be a functional—if disconcerting—'heads up' to the patient and the reader to tread with care on the next passage of this novel.