THE BLACK (SUN) STONE

One of the ways in which the Oulipo groups, and especially Georges Perec’s literary explorations have contributed fundamentally maybe the way in which he tried to explore the material before him thoroughly in ‘Life : A User’s Manual’ and at the same time point out the structural paradigms that delimit the use of language. For example his attempt at removing ‘e’ from an entire text point towards the possible exclusion of some particular aspect from entering an entire text through an act of micro level corrections, bringing into focus texquality itself, how impossible it was for thought to decide not to indulge itself with some aspect tabooed and kept out entirely, thereby mutilating itself. The materialist turn in literature of which he was a Simon Templar himself, its episteme, seems to have pointed out to him its ap’a’rias, carefully built into and kept in those text which was basically the absence/ presence of God or the infinite, segregated from a discursive orientation that could turn to this resource as well as other. The exclusion of the letter ‘e’, a literary exercise which could be a formal and stylistic material exploration in language, then, points towards the keeping out of something in that materialism itself, that of the other, that of God, that of any letter, of any space at all(Species of spaces), wherever it came from, and the return of what was thus kept out, as an infinite force, into language. In Malayalam, a wasteful ward is often called a ‘പാഴ്വാക്ക്  ' which was also at another instance ‘വീണ് വാക്ക് ' (word from the skies, from God, for instance).   One of the obvious travesties of the text to many, perhaps is that the ‘e’ is present everywhere without exception, while at the same time it cries out about an absence larger than itself, which is just another façade for presence. This, one could say, is like the insistence of the letter ‘I’ in the unconscious(Lacan), since it is the denial of this trace in the text that returns, evermore powerfully and asks for its reformulation.

   
 Poykayil Appachan’s song, listing out the names of ‘Useless’ timber (പാഴ്മരങ്ങള് ) is an instance, then of this return to the ledges that constitute knowledge.

  The metaphor of Valmiki as having come from a ‘Chithal Puttu’ (Termite’s nest- Valmikam) points then towards this instance of a thorough ‘degeneration’ (entartete kunst) of the material, as in Sade, in materialism, and of the soul, through this clipping and extraction of the 'valuable', by the destruction of the common place, as was done, say, when language was subjected to a certain acculturation or civilizing mission(as in Sanskrit) whereby the nation of civility ate up its own entrails, by keeping off the ‘accursed’ share, that of the other, sometimes taken as ‘Satan’ but who was also with god and none other than him.

    The poem called ‘Dhwani’ by S. Joseph, which tries to talk about the sliding of meaning in dhwani (Abhinava Gupta) and its ‘irrelevance to the real’ or ‘masking of the real’ of the fact that a mother who sets out to leave her home quarrelling with her son and doesn’t have access to another place to go and whose words bring back to language the agony of the predicament of the other, and the somewhat ‘cruel’ play of language. Joseph’s poetry, for instance, by deliberately moving away from this aspect of the real, that of word play, brings back to us this aspect of the sign system, that of the ‘Synagogue’ (Reading of signs) (saraswam iti) from which was later extracted a ‘pedagogy’ (saraswati) or an excess committed on language (a sort of sadistic, abusive or pedophilic aspect) thereby reverting to delimitation of meaning and play in language to a ‘ politically correct’ history that is built up on the exclusion of the unimportant. The poem ‘Dhwani’ then, that attempts to subvert the ‘word play’ and establish the ‘real’ is also in itself a play with what is ‘real in language, the aspect of experience, by positing it against word play, which is also a play of experience and a play of the infinite, which lies embedded/embodied in language, and which has a ‘reality’ of its own. One of the contributions of Derrida, then, was that through his passage through an instance of the hounding out (also a sounding out) of the other (as in Racism/ Nazism/ Brahminism) for which his very name somehow becomes a monument (Derr-ida)- An instance of Der (space/ instance of Fear- as in Dar-e-Salam, Fear to say salam! A fearful  interlude) which was also the instance of its recognition, or the return of that very excluded other as a central concern in politics. An instance that we may recognize in the angled position in which Derrida seated himself in a photograph, in a corner (Someone speaking in a corner –is that someone Mackie the knife?-Brecht), or in the narrative about Walter Benjamin’s flight from Nazism, or of Nikos Poulantzas flight.

            ‘Syncopation’ or the collective coming together (Being in Sync in ovation/opiation/ ope-ration) of blacks in music, in Jazz, wherein the emphasis is shifted in the rhythmic constritution which was ready to take a move towards hybridity and innovation, play of sound, of differences in simultaneity moving beyond orchestration, as in the music of Sun Ra’s ‘Space is the Place’ (a Sun God himself)

and Louis Armstrong playing Mackie(AUGUST MACKE) for Brecht’s movie , thus come from this attitude of irreverence to the canon, attempting a sonal truth- speaking going beyond the mild and non- toxic legalism of ‘composition’ itself, reverting to the plenitude of sounds, to the total sonal edifice, to silence (John Cage, Octavio Paz) to the play of time, the possibility of Constructions in sound that went beyond what was ‘rhythmic’( a high themic error of rhyme), ‘composed’ and ‘musical’ also signifying the return of to infinitely    experimental rhythimic                                                                                 
construction and deconstruction).

In Sunstone, Ladera Este(To Fear the Estates), in its  ‘TUMBA DE AMIR KHUSRO’ –A Margarita y Antonio Gonzales des Leon’ by Octavio Paz the opening lines

Arboles cargados de pajarossosteinen a pulso la tarde

are translated  in English as

“Trees heavy with birds hold

the afternoon up with their hands”

(The Collected Works 1933-1967, Ed. alttext-Eliot Weinberger.,1992, Harper Collins, India)

Which in actual fact misses out on the large implications or the Moorish undertones of the poem. I would rather translate this as

“To load the cargo of the  family tree(or the Christ(X) mastree (mastery))

On the insulted birds in flight (Those spoken of in pejorative terms- Jesus/Buddha/ the Jew  in passage)

To sustain the horrible attempts to retard their pulsations, that is painful to me.”

Which shows that the trace of the authors attempt has been removed and an ‘alt text’ (Halt/ colt text) constructed thereby the translation losing altogether on its literary implications (trans- ungendered/ in meditation relation), which seems to have been the point of this translation (which in malayalam could be ‘mozhimattam’ (മൊഴി മാറ്റം) or to change the voice or trace of the authorial in the text rather than paribhasha(പരിഭാഷ /  പറിഭാഷ libidinal language).

           
The difference between ‘Sade’s strategy of using authoritative transgressiveness  of power, of Nazism/ brahminism/colonization (120 days of Sodom) and the travails of that attitude (inherent in materialism), the total lack of all ‘ethical’ foundations and the resultant predicament, the abusive put forth in a form of ‘moral’ narrative, and that of Pussolini's insistant humanism in his "Salo: 120 days of Sodom" which attempts to interpret Sade's attempts and its aporias from an anti fascist experimental attitude showing us how texts can be altered in circulation keeping some faith in the original traces, when the insistance on the "I" or authorial trace and function are of paramount  value.