reading backward/drawkcab gnidaer & Vanessa Place, La Medusa

La Medusa

Vanessa Place, fiction writer, poet, and co-founder of Les Figues Press from LA gave a reading in October, 2008, reading excerpts from her new mixed-genre novel, La Medusa. She wore all black and black hair and, I wrote later, is pretty much the fuckawesomest. And funny. When she laughs it sounds like she’s saying “yeah yeah yeah” back in her throat and it’s a real laugh, which is pretty wonderful. Conceptual artist=conceptual reading.  We, the audience, brought poems and readings that were “currently blowing our minds” and these exerpts were read inbetween the pages of La Medusa that she ripped from her copy of the book and handed to audience members to read aloud, “this way,” she said, “there will never be this exact same reading again.” Rare to find somebody (especially the successful artist type) so un-pretentious, so slightly ironic.  “Readings are awful. You all sit there, and I become the television, and I have no interest in becoming the television.”

She prefaced her reading of the very last page of the book: “Because it seems to be human nature to turn to the back page of a book first, before you even buy it, to see if you like it, I’ll begin by reading the last page of the novel. Backwards.”

Beautiful

am I.

Sentence the word the am I.
Beginning the in and end the in am I.
Dying in living and living in dying am I.
Other the am I. Others the.
Stars the
sees
she and
–– gone I’m,Casper I’m. Bomb the that’s––
says Lady our and, eyes her opens Feena and, onion peeled an as bright
pops moon the and tarwater as black
goes sky the and lift clouds the and something
for hard wishes and eyes her closes Feena, unexpectedly rain…

…why, Daddy why, we why…

…was it what recall don’t I though
,true it’s
significance some of something
said she, blue and pink wearing was she watching
was I, event any in, remember ally
-re don’t I, born was I day the, day this maybe, day one
try, her watched I though, true not that’s
,die mother my watched and Matthew murder to one that told I
light only and light in begat
am I
eyeless
the than terrible more nothing
is there and Narcissus and Medusa am I: confess I

At the end (or was it the beginning?) of the last, jarringly beautiful page of inverted, poetic text, Place paused. Took a breath. And read the same passage from beginning to end.  The contrast, the same words forming new images, inflections, connotations and meanings was startling.

I confess: I am Medusa and Narcissus and there is
nothing more terrible than the
eyeless
I am
begat in light and only light
I told that one to murder Matthew and watched my mother die,
that’s not true, though I watched her try,
one day, maybe this day, the day I as born, I don’t re-
ally remember, in any event, I was
watching she was wearing pink and blue, she said
something of significance
it’s true
though I don’t recall what it was…

…why we, why Daddy, why…

…tomorrow it’ll certainly
rain unexpectedly, Feena closes her eyes and wishes hard for
something and the clouds lift and the sky goes
black as tarwater and the moon pops
bright as a peeled onion, and Feena opens our eyes, and our Lady says
––That’s the bomb. I’m casper, I’m gone––
and she
sees
the stars.
The others. I am the others.
I am dying in living and living in dying.
I am in the end and in the beginning.
I am the word, the sentence.
I am

Beautiful.

There were two stories here. In fact, an entirely different narrative came alive in the first reading, and the way Vanessa read the words was poetic, halting and lovely as they caressed the unusual syntax, intermittently smoothing over and bumping the unfamiliar sounds of inverted lines, syntax. Meaning itself became peripheral and it became about the sounds of the words. There were moments of surprising clarity––combinations fantastically pleasing to the ear precisely because they were jarring, unexpected, because they fell outside predictable rhythms and conventions. At times it sounded like a different language.  The syntax becomes confused, nouns become verbs and the entire experience of being thrown from familiarity heightens the senses. Both reader and writer are aware in a new way.
Reading backward need not be only a frivolous aesthetic game, or simply a way to jolt the synapses. Juxtaposing the inverted reading with the straightforward reading demonstrates the impact each has on the other, and the effect of this contrast on the reader (and, similarly, on the writer acting as the reader of his or her own work). Hearing the words twice, in different combinations and inflections allows us to hear the variations in meaning, the implications of order and expectations (McGall, 10)
It was Emily Dickinson who wrote, in one of her undated journals,
“Did you ever read one of her poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have––a Something overtakes the Mind––” (prose fragment 30)
Dickinson describes an interaction with literature that speaks to the symbiotic relationship of the reader/critic and creator. She speaks of a physicality, a “plunge” that “overturned you” and of that “Something overtak[ing] the Mind.”
Creative interpretation or analysis need not necessarily be an act of writing a new text, but can also be achieved through intentional, involved and creative ways of reading. McGill and Samuels write, “Reading backward is a highly regulated method for disordering the senses of a text. It turns off the controls that organize the poetic system at some of its most general levels.  When we run the deformative program through a particular work we cannot predict the results.” (8)  It is precisely this unpredictable result achieved through such procedures that make them invaluable in the reading of literature and poetry.  In unfamiliar territories, we are more acutely aware of our surroundings, the sensory input of the situation. Such deformative procedures bring the reader/critic into a more intense degree of engagement with a text. No longer is the reader a passive observer, hypnotically accepting the words and their meanings as given and immutable, but an active scientist who kicks the tires of poetic structure, testing its give. The reader becomes a child, fascinated and attentive.

Do we lose something in the vacuum of predictability? When reading, too, becomes habitual and routine, we are swept in the centrifugal force of that which is expected, our eyes glaze over words, knowing and anticipating that adjective follows verb follows noun. Beginning, then middle, then end. There are patterns. We have spent a great deal of our lives mastering these patterns. So why shrug off linearity and safe predictability by learning new ways of reading? Why experiment with reading backwards, or vertically, from the middle out, reading only nouns or ignoring all but words beginning with vowels?
There is something akin to the child’s wonder at learning to read for the first time, the strain of combining words and discovering context and reason, in this exercise. Re-wire the synapses. If you’ve mastered the bicycle, take off a wheel. Write with your non-dominant hand. Draw faces in the mirror, or with your eyes closed. Walk backward on the path you know best; from your bed, to the desk, to the bathroom, to the office.  Hang pictures upside down and watch the landscapes evolve.
“Poems lose their vital force when they succumb to familiarization,” write McGann and Samuels, and is this, backward reading, not a strategy of estrangement? Read as though you’re learning a language for the first time, where each word is handled carefully, considered important. This is a performative exercise, but also an intellectual one. What would we learn if we turned the world or the word upside down? Down upside word, the or world, the turned we, if learn we would. What?

La Medusa is my ongoing “escape the world” book at the moment, the pre-falling asleep book, the sit-in-the-tub-and-read book, the book I won’t smoke a cigarette without, the one I’m savoring (it’s fragmented screenplay-esque quality lends itself to small portions.), the one I cannot stop underlining.  I’ll refrain from a full-out review (of sorts) until I’ve finished it, but urge you to pick it up and devour.

http://fc2.org/place/medusa/excerpt.htm

http://fc2.org/place/medusa/medusa.htm

also, les figues press   http://www.lesfigues.com/lfp/index.php