Frog Hollow Press, 2019
Immediately one is struck by the unity of
Simon Brown’s chapbook, this mud, a word, from Frog Hollow Press’s New
Brunswick chapbook series, but it would be a mistake to consider this unity as
singular or particular. Instead one is presented with a rather open text,
allowing for multiple readings, with each reading encompassing the whole text.
Where one reading explores the individual’s relationship to language, another
explores a sense of place, or provides a criticism of capitalist notions of
private property. The reading that will be explored here will be the positive
reconstructivist th(read) the author has woven into this meditative tapeestry.
This book begins with the exclamation,
“Hear me!” and one is quickly led to understand that it is an overflowing an
affirmation (instead of a double negation, etc.) of the self in scism, where
othering occurs. The speaker in the introductory phrases attempts to extricate
themself through definition and lands on, “...myself and my own mud / for I am
she -” before entering the first long sequence of the book.
The first long sequence is written in the
first person plural and starts out with a “reach in the dark for something
else...to take its form and lose its form, to lose its form and take it up
again” and continues with this Deluezean (as opposed to a dialectic)
progressive permutation that “crawls” forward as the speaker is disentangling
themself through constant appending. After a series of revelations through
“fog”, “shadows”, and the limitations of speach, the speaker accepts the scism
as a whole and percieves “the old mistakes of separation.”
The next several pages contain, or rather
sets free, a series of unanwerable questions in the shape of birds flying, most
notable is the unasked question of when. This omission firmly places the
speaker outside of time, ie the extra-temporal now, and by doing this the
reader becomes complicit, an active participant as one attempts to answer the
questions, experiencing the moment together in the all inclusive now, the whole
situated in the undecidable, or infinitely calcutating.
The
answers never come, or do they? The next section is a set of five more or less
equal stanzas of exclamations. As one begins to corelate these phrases to the
previous questions, one is confronted with the possibility that acceptance of
the undecided is the “risk of being covered” and one must “remain thirsty and
uncovered” while the “squinty eye will know itself”. It is this squinty, or
focused, I that proceeds on through the next long sequence.
Speaking from a complete whole, as I,
magnifies everything else, through acceptance of risking indecision into a
revelatory, or reminiscent, actualization of things at hand. The permutations
progress this time beginning with, “the sun is bright” and continues to examine
things under the light as the subjective identfies itself with them. Them, the
particular rendered in general, the “fading edge” between the terms, the
“losing song I sing and lose, I sing and lose as long as I can.”
So there it is, a th(read) that has been
teased from the book, a book that is thread bare, revealing as it conceals.
This work has many threads to follow, even if imposed and unintended. What more
could one ask from a book? The book provides many readers their own threads to
pull, and wondering what tapestry Simon Brown is weaving next.
