The Emergent
This month is the ten-year anniversary of the publication of my The Re-echoes, a single book-length poem. 99 pages to loop the loop of what is and what is is.
is Spiral Infinity
If you look into the thick of the cover, you might see the haunting contours of a face. Most people do. The book’s cover contains all the words and lines of the poem inside it, overlaid upon each other. The pattern created is random; and yet, a face emerges.
Pareidolia. Trick of the mind. Absolute randomness and, still, a meaningful image takes shape.
Hidden messages. The Man in the Moon. Voices and groaning in white noise.
The publisher and designer, Christophe Casamassima, put all the words in the book on its cover, a super-reflexive idea in keeping with the book’s riverrun recursiveness. He did a similar thing with his sound design of “The Turning” from Heraclitean Pride (as posted here for Poetry, Thought, Word Magick): the oceanic background sound is the foreground original recording of my voice endlessly looped and overlaid. The results in both book and recording are intense abstract patterns - any discernible figures or utterances coming out of such processes are purely unintentional.
Casamassima also did the recent broadside of “The Countenance of Heraclitus,” with text superimposed over a rufous print interpretation of Heraclitus’ face based upon a bust from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. The Countenance of Heraclitus.
This seems to be a theme from Casamassima and Furniture Press Books - the face as a ghost in and through or over the text - and no less with the publisher’s latest chapbook series, Serial Pamphleteer Editions: see the heads in profile of Ariel Resnikoff and Casamassima himself in the first two of eight from series one.
Iterative faces by design; and yet, solely in The Re-echoes cover, a face emerges as if by magic. What if it’s more than mere cognitive pattern-seeking (and finding) in the randomness?
The uncanny. A marveling feeling. Awe. Beyond the Man in the Moon, there’s a Face on Mars mimetolith, not to mention mars canals (which I do mention in The Re-echoes, along with “carousel pill” and “whirligig” and “fetid mansion”): get too close or change the angle and it turns out nothing’s there. That’s true above, in the cover; as you approach the face’s defining lines, it devolves into palimpsest - overlapping words, letters, print blur smear. So too with all painting, beyond Pointillism: approach the canvas and the picture dissolves, you get to the paint. So too of all matter, for that matter; go in closer and closer on objective materiality and all there is is atoms, energy, and empty space.
No, the face is really there on the cover, you can outline it in consensual reality, you can see it and others can see it; objectively, it is there. Especially with pareidoliac1 heads and faces, that tendency towards personification, anthropomorphism - of the supposed inanimate, or inhuman - is indicative of a need if not a reality for the universal person, persona, image of a humanoid god; anthropomorphism is on a continuum with deification, and the multitude of faces coming out of nature and chaotic matter is a spectral manifestation of the thought of Universe as One Mind. This particular visage on the cover of The Re-echoes is unsettling, a shuddering edifice of implication. Is this an alien, a future human or sentient android, or a god or daimon, Jung’s Aion? The face is really there, hazarding out from the haphazard; accident - a channel for emergence. Of what? What is the significance, the movement and meaning, energy-motion (e-motion) meaning, of a static face? Or is the face actually moving? Yes, it seems: forward. Towards us.
I think such emergence of an image out of arbitrariness is a breaking of the veil. Beyond pareidolia as cognitive projection, what beckons in and from the vatic face? I think I have an image of my daimon; or else, my Aion. The face isn’t still; it’s an unwavering flame in its lingering - it dilates with breath and gaze-crosses distances. It has the breathing layeredness of presence.
Recently, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of The Re-echoes, I was in the studio with composer and sound engineer Nelson Samir to record an interpretation of the poem at its full length. We had a great time working together and he has carte blanche to transfigure the voice recording as he sees fit. More on that soon - towards creating something listenable at one sitting.
Meanwhile, and in time for you to leaf along with the sound piece, the book is available at Small Press Distribution. You can also then peer more palpably into the emergent universal Aeonic/Aionic face.
The Re-echoes by Magus Magnus at SPD
As I proofread this entry, I wanted to double-check if this word - as an adjective - was in the dictionary (not that it would stop me from using it if it wasn’t). I came across an essay by Maureen Thorson, Confessions of a Pareidoliac. She uses it both as an adjective and a noun.
The fun thing about discovering this link, aside from resonances and contrasts with my own immersions in pareidolia (including an explanation for that movement I perceive in the static face), is that Thorson blurbed The Re-echoes when it came out back in 2012! - she dealt with the manuscript before the cover was created, by the way. I’m not gonna say anything more about meaningful coincidences and signal-patternings, forget it. Chance is all there is, everywhere.
"In The Re-echoes, Magnus weaves a multilayered call-and-response that slingshots from reproduction to history to evolution to etymology. What emerges is a hymn to all imperfect repetitions, a contrapunctus in honor of the 'generative combinatorial' that makes us at once very like each other, and totally unique. As in 'a game of telephone,' the point is not to clone, but to decay, fracture, to make the message 're-known, re-owned.' Strange loops abound, allusive and improbable, abundant and anomalous. As it 'avers the converse / conversation,' Magnus's fractal play of sound and sense delights, gives pause, and delights again."
Maureen Thorson’s latest book is available at SPD as well: Share the Wealth. I’ve been enjoying her poetic generosity since the book came out this spring.
Wonderful Magus. I must read this!