Friday, July 2, 2021

rob mclennan: Thee Display, by Nora Collen Fulton

Thee Display, Nora Collen Fulton
DOCUMENTS, 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then the philosopher Eudoxus of Cnidus wrote a book about the constellations, said to be part psychology, part mathematics, part guide to maritime economics. It was lost.

Then the poet Aratus turned the social memory of that book into a poem he called The Phainomena and got almost everything wrong. Only fragments survived.

Then the astronomer Hipparchus of Nicaea annotated those poetic fragments with contemporary scientific knowledge to point out his predecessor’s embarrassing mistakes.

Then the politician Marcus Tullius Cicero translated the annotations into Latin as if they represented a whole and mistook the annotations for verse. His Aratea ended up becoming a canonical poem of natural philosophy, but everyone knew he was a bad poet.

Then some anonymous scribe(s) illuminated the Latin manuscript, depicting the now-customary forms of the constellations of ‘Aratos’ using Carolingian imagery, and reproduction of the poem ended up shaping its text into those visual forms.

Then the historian Robert Brown created the first English translation of the poem using both the Ancient Greek fragments and the illuminated Latin text. He then shaped the poem into a piece of evidence for a white supremacist genealogy of stellar image-making; it was called Phaenomena, or the Heavenly Display.

Then Google’s automated book digitization project converted hi-res scans of his book into text. at the time OCR technology was still having problems differentiating splotches of ink or dirt on a page from language, and couldn’t compensate for the curvature of a scanned surface, but the blind rush to archive left no time for cleaning or contextualization of the results, which were unreadable. As for the image-to-text process itself, “When a page is scanned, it is typically stored as a bit-mapped file in TIF format […] To the computer, it is just a series of black and white dots [tagging the space where language is recognizable]. The computer does not recognize any ‘words’ on the image.”

Then my dog died.

A third title by Nora Collen Fulton, following Life Experience Coolant (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2013) and Presence Detection System (Philadelphia PA: Hiding Press, 2019), is Thee Display (2020), produced as “a joint publication of The Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism, Montreal.” As the project self-describes at the opening of the volume: “DOCUMENTS is the publishing imprint of the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University, Montreal. Our aim is to publish work attesting to the multiplicity of practices, techniques, and modes of theoretical intelligence that informs contemporary poetics. If poetics refers to the theory of poetry (its forms, histories, critical categories) it is also the theory of poiesis (of making), and this larger field draws it beyond the boundaries of poetry as a specifically literary activity. As we study this tension between poetry and poiesis, we want to document its contemporary transformations by publishing texts that have shifted and sharpened the focus of our attention to philosophical problems, embodied histories, political contradictions, artistic experiments, and scientific models of structures and form.” Produced in an edition of two hundred and fifty copies, Thee Display, as well as other volumes produced through the series, is freely available on the Centre’s website.

On first reading, the fragmented and theory-driven poetic of Thee Display appears to exist as a deep study of translation, examining the limitations of translating knowledge, form and theory as well as the breakdown of transcription and legibility. Fulton writes on philosophy and constellations, the death of her dog, the external and the internal, power and its relations, and a variety of transcription errors, working exactly what her opening piece suggests she was going to: attempting to salvage a text from broken digitization, including commentary and, when necessary, filling in the gaps. Hers is a translation of fragments, keeping the inarticulations and misreadings, akin to Anne Carson working through the remnants of Sappho, or the scraps of text Emily Dickinson composed on bits of envelope, displayed in full through The Gorgeous Nothings (New York NY: New Directions, 2013), edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner. Whether constructed, salvaged or misread, Fulton puts the misreadings and mistranslations on full display, allowing scraps to remain as scraps, as she writes as part of the extended, and heavily fragmented, “Rededication”:

‘.V pl>>y on worda, uijToi —’ —a ./>pm/-pm/=6utf -wiui
  
ReprewntedjHs on lliel”ann>>r

Tofiff. For not iySioKoi xitKos iaitna TofuiiE of ffyj/mut by
 
Micyllus, and generajlv nt (he present

iiaipilrai (Schol.). But there is a further meaning: time. The
 
Hone was Mwilryly portrayi-d (V. aifn

Fulton explores conversion, digitization and loss, and how information breaks down and shifts between forms, adapting through the translator’s work. There are echoes of Nathanael’s ongoing work in Fulton’s poetic, a way in which theory and language are pulled between two poles, existing in the between state: changing form, but not fully formed. “The stars are so numerous and so much alike,” she writes, as part of the piece “Summering,” which continues:

That some such classification was absolutely necessary
To enable us to speak of them with any exactness, and there-
Fore the wonderful discoverer

And inventor stepped in to assist mankind: —

So thought the wonderful discoverer
It good to make the stellar groups,
That each by one other lying orderly,

They might display their forms. And thus the stars
At once took names and rise familiar now.

There are some cosmic things going on here, writing of stars and the heavens, offering slants on creation and re-creation, an origin story into how one body translated into another. Fulton offers both text and slant, fragments and commentary. “What proof does he give, or can anyone give for the original names of these constellations? None. Then, regarding the question from an abstract point of view, is it more probable that in the first instance people called a constellation by a name in some way associated with a beast or a bird, by a more general or a more special appellation? I reply, undoubtedly by a more special appellation. If a man thought, ‘This constellation reminds me of an animal or of a bird,’ he would be almost certain to go on in his thoughts to some special animal or bird. And so he did; and constellations reminded him not of an Animal but of a Bear, Lion, Ram, Billy Goat, Dodgy Hare; not of a Bird, but of an Eagle or a Crow or a Crane or a Piper.”

Thee Display is a book centred on and around translation and mistranslation, but also one that speaks to transition, as Fulton offers bookending prose on either side of the scattered and structured fragments of the book to speak to more personal ideas of change and between-ness. She writes a book not of becoming, but of shifts, misreadings and readings, the power dynamics that police bodies, and the possibilities of being fully, finally understood. As the final lines of the volume offers:

I told her what she wanted to to hear: that my relation to certain elements of my body and identity has become untenable and needed to be modified. But during one meeting out of our mandatory six, I slipped up, and in a moment of weakness and misplaced trust I told her the truth. “Why do you suddenly feel like it’s the right time to transition?” My answer, which I was barely able to relate due to the convulsions that the sudden sayability of it opened up in me, was “My dog died.” I’ll put it another way. Just as it really is our destiny to be separated from all that has ever truly seen us – perhaps in the same way that Badiou says that philosophy is destined to communism, to the inexistence of any “us” – this unmade destiny must now be made. Why? Because my dog died. That was when she stopped taking me seriously. She couldn’t see behind the constellation.

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan (fully vaccinated) currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), with a further poetry title, the book of smaller, forthcoming from University of Calgary Press in April 2022. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

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