Meddles into Preclusion
by Che Elias
Geneva: Six Gallery Press, 2003
Reviewed by a.e.m.
Either do not mention a certain silence (a certain silence which, again,
can
be determined only within a language and an order that will preserve this
silence from contamination by any given muteness), or follow the madman
down
the road of his exile.
J. Derrida
In his collected Meddles Into Preclusion, Che Elias involves himself
without
warrant, an act which as the title suggests, makes meddling impossible,
makes
the poet's own voice shut up.
Nothing figures in these poems. Both the concept and the word. The first
example, "Wolves and the Lesson of the Summer," is subtitled "(A POEM)" -
an
act which immediately calls the poem's existence as poetry "into"
question.
The opposite of a poem is a medium wave, flying between 100 and 1000
metres
(Che's poem's are sometimes delightfully long). "Wolves" transcends the
anecdotal by approaching nothing - the state of not being a poem. It's
narrative, "the blotch of all those packed," confuses verse with prose -
if
only in a relative sense. Elias' words traffic in alcoholic metaphors
that
instate mental and physical confusion: "Moving as a Constant for Days as
Wheels / What to lose the Spool of Rotation."
Elias presents difficult and ambitious designs. Nothing is both the
beginning
and the end of the other it seeks to defeat. Nothing is also the cause of
the
other's inception: "They have got Nothing Other than Another / Have seen
themselves through the starts and Ends of days." Who "they" are, I cannot
know. I suspect they are as pure and ambiguous as the void Elias sets
swirling, the white page stapled, "blotched," he claims, scarred by
letters
and words, scurrilous bits of punctuation.
Elias expresses existence as the dissolution of vision, of the nothing. A
learning curve composed of mucus. It is felt as much as it is seen. It
is
the afterbirth of a philosophopoetic exorcism:
There's still time to see how
It seems like a Dissolve
It counted then but later - everything was Gone
In a later piece, Elias attempts to align our conception of nothing with
the
orthoclasic nature of ghosts. Here still things are only glimpsed. The
position of the body refutes Elias' ability to see, to conceptualize,
to "meddle."
Ghosts of Children I almost catch of.
Then I turn around see nothing
[...]
xxxxxxxxxx if I turn
my body around to position myself at the end of my bed, I can
can see its glow being cast ...
The repetition of "can," the cephalic rotations, otherworldly callanetics
indicate the poet's inability to preclude (as well as to not to). This,
he
claims, means:
To find myself outside of physicality [ . ]
I don't want to link Elias with any of the various voices found in his
book.
However, each voice shares an inability to preclude based on an incomplete
need to meddle:
A man who is apparently
[...]
Seems to've been reconstructed as Good as Could've Been after Whatever
degree ..
Apparently. Seems. Whatever. Elias is both irrepressible and
restrained.
His text shut themselves up without the author's preclusion. His words
lurk
in view but evade sight. Words are slain and forced to arise, dragged
forward
by a virgin mother whose tongue has slopped across a thousand dictionaries
to
make up for the presence of a single man:
There is not a dreadful bone in the pieta
Placed so high that it is hidden from you
I read "word" for "bone." I read gaps and omissions. Meddles Into
Preclusion spills vaguaries without piffling, describes phantoms and
their
architectures, uses otherwordly means. Elias gets at nothing, not with
words,
not with definitions. Elias employs lack, assembling the inequities of
language in order to stubbornly roar the constitution of, what in the end,
can
only be called calm silence. Elias relies on imposition to qualify
absence
and nothingness. And I like nothing more.
You could have done a little more ...
If I would impose my own doubt -
then I would see how true doubt was
a.e.m. is Anthony Metievier, TDR's fiction reviews editor.
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