The Inframergence
Screen shot from The Inframergence
The
Inframergence is a large poem written from
approximately 2007 through 2013. The original event that was the
motivation for this work came as a kind of vision in 1994. Sitting
in the Musée
Marmottan Monet in Paris a feeling came over me that if I sat
there long enough, I was about to get an idea — of what kind, I
didn't know. Monet was the first “modern artist” I learned to really
look at as a teenager; I spent hours in front of the two Monets in
the Denver Art Museum, just looking, entering that state of mind
that I came to know so well as the word trance, the state from which
poems emerge. So I had a powerful emotional relationship with Monet,
and sitting there at the Marmottan it was an enormous experience,
with tears streaming down my face. So I sat, waiting “for word”.
What came was a powerful visual image, which I could not comprehend,
but knew I would have to write one day. What I saw was a kind of
braided vortex made of colored glass strands. What was this. I
didn’t know. Eventually, the braided vortex became the spiral that
is the outer interface of The
Inframergence.
So: the outer interface of The
Inframergence is a spiral of buttons, each of which leads
to a screen. Although the screens may be read in any order, the
buttons are arranged chronologically in the order written, from the
outside in. On the outside of the spiral, the buttons launch screens
that are polylinear: skeins that stretch across the space. But
stretch within a space; as the cursor moves off of the
skein, the skein recedes to the back, its pair-mate comes to the
front, reading in the opposite direction: boustrophedon of
resonance, linear by internal sequence but travel inverted, the eye
thus moving but at place. Travel but non-travel. Linear for
resonancefall but not navigation.
As you move to the inside of the spiral, the screens become less and
less linear. The skein parts coalesce. Then become word clusters, of
a kind I have used many times. Then structure begins to emerge: a
structure of simple dominance / receding, mediation through. This
structure is a form of protosyntax; in a way The Inframergence is a kind of
“prequel” to the diagram notation used in much of my work. At the
screens that launch from the innermost buttons of the spiral, larger
spaces collapse to icons, which are buttons which expand to the
“open” state; this collapsing and opening preserves spatial
relationships, making a kind of “spatial stretchtext”.
The spiral is thus a kind of evolution-in, structure and structure
evasion together, in close confines, interoperating. The
oscillation. Not a contradiction, but scaffold and chorus-brushed
flock, granular, together but separate, intact but chorded.
Infrawhere.
