Justin Robinson Interviews Will Alexander

 

Justin Robinson: You’ve expressed facing difficulties at a young age regarding reading. Did this childhood experience help shape who you’ve become?

 

Will Alexander: Your initial question has allowed me to register an original initianation as  transmutive lingual  protocol.  Born as an only child as I would play and as I played my imagination would run rampant though I didn't know it at the time this initial psychic state ignited a lifelong lingual initiation. But at the time? (as was stated in my initial book of essays Singing In Magnetic Hoofbeat) a grammar school teacher a Mr. Beacon provided for me a magical jumpstart concerning reading comprehension. Which has led to the manner by which my language continues to register, not only to infecting  a larger community but  continues to auto-infect me as well. I remain engulfed in a seeming maniacal phosphorous that ignites as alchemical imminence as it continues to register as power that principally empowers via palindromic drone. Never have I thought via isolated perception to craft a text and extoll its utterance into print but beyond this to continue to enter a realm that protractedly continues prone as it is to a pyrotic principle that is empowered as transmutation by heresy. This presence seems to initiate a  pressure that magically condones presence by auto-osmosis, alive by living inner spell that writhes as numinous fever. This state spontaneously issues via audic fragment provoking as it does magical susurration via unprovoked lightning-like presence by streaking. It feels as if one is immersed in a river of lightning, not unlike, to generally paraphrase Michele Leris, into a lifelong phase that persists as audic blessing that over time, magically erupts into sustained palpability as presence. This is not unlike a realia that naturally para-phrases primal interiority state not unlike  the magical formation that we presently witness through the James Web continuum that teloscopically witnesses the a-sequential formation of galaxies. 

 

Justin Robinson: Indeed, it is this initial play as an only child that turns you toward a burgeoning “psychic state.” The word “play” here reminds me of engaging with non-human things, calling forth the interconnectedness in your texts between all living things. Mr. Beacon, as lifeline to language educator, witnessed your level of sensitivity to language and to life more broadly. It all makes sense, then, that your language, in whichever form it chooses to reveal itself, continues positively “infecting a larger community” as well as yourself. 

Justin Robinson: You once told me: “I’m going to write myself into paradise.” Months later your follow up was: “I wrote myself into the hospital.” Is your ability to balance the consistent call to write with your broader health an ongoing negotiation?

 

Will Alexander: There exists a reality for me to push naturally and this state for me maniacally insists on continuing to condone this insistence by what I consider to be a manical praxis keeping up with my inner state that reveals itself through language. Not some optimum ideal that exists via ubiquitous discretion. It persists as a powerful reflex that feels as if welling up from nature itself. Not unlike a persistent ether rising via powerful volcanic priority. It is existence not as some form of super-imposed celestial ambivalence but as rhythmic explosion that morphs not as a haunted spectrum, but as delirious vibratory rate that merges with its own vibration, as miraculous palindromic that merges with its own insistence that ignites as hypnotic dynamic. At an earlier stage of development I naturally blanked out on the signals that my body was sending, therefore imbalance began to exist as part of my living habitat so I began to compensate for this deficit as balance therefore what I formally ignited morphed into existential disunity. 

 

Justin Robinson: I’m hearing that this need to engage with language via explosive practice is not a vain situation, whereby language is used for superficiality, but an insistence on attunement to the creative forces within you, ostensibly creating tachycardia not as hypertension, but as lava flow that forms and informs the natural forces that amalgamate your texts. I hear also that not paying attention to language, that not giving yourself over to language, is what creates misalignment and “disunity.” Moreover, knowing the signals that your body is sending you when it comes to a supraconscious level of engagement is what creates positive circulatory health, not what causes ill health. 

 

Justin Robinson: I have a student who spends much of their classroom time dedicated to writing in their notebook. The other day they put their pencil down and posed the question: “Why don’t people pay more attention to the Sun?” May you respond to their question, and in doing so, link your language to the language of the younger generation?

 

Will Alexander: By drawing within the climate of super-imposed study he begins entry into the imagination, into the principle of the non-condoned. This limit by seeming stricture courts its opposite ranging into the realm of non-limit. This compels a state where non-pragmatic questions are posed, where penetrant insight elicits unembrangled states of awareness. What indeed would occur to general consciousness if the Sun did go bad. All disciplines would instantly enter the state of the unknown. The question instantly triggers panic by unknown entry into collective psychic state into what call collective brainstorming, where all form of prior mental assignation would instantly dissolve. Thus it would enter de Bonoesqe mental territory where all facets of the mind would issue itself into a phantom electrical state. This phantom state of mind would connect at an instantaneous level sans general product distraction. New principles of mind would evolve beyond a principle garrison mentality, beyond a non-known knowledge of itself. As J. Krishnamurti once put insight heals wounds of the mind. An ironic transmutation of the collective mental system, no longer regressing into an operant mystique. What I've laid out remains an extreme proposition that the student has began to enter through other means. He does not ignore nor bicker with his own inner means, what prevails is glistening entry into another presence. 

 

Justin Robinson: Indeed, this student poses radical questions. And they are disheartened, not by the responses received from supportive colleagues, but by the difficult overall understanding that these questions are perceived to have no place in dominant forms of discourse. I hear you regarding these “unembrangled states of awareness.” And being as inward as this student is, which may be life enhancing, is not without a sense of isolation that is palpably felt as ongoing struggle. 

 

Justin Robinson: Your writing speaks directly to ongoing catastrophic historical injustices. I’m thinking about the Moriscos in Secrets Prior to the Sun and “The Congo” in Refractive Africa. At the center of both texts is a fierce and unflinching radical love. Please talk about this love, which does not engender answers, but rather an impactful risk that generates recalibrated ways of knowing and engaging with these histories.

 

Will Alexander: What I've imaginally emblazoned in Refractive Africa remains a nubile tenor of consciousness. A more flexible state that seeks the state of a lingually less harassing principle, that never precludes via the tenor under the aegis of fatigued language by linear composting. Not mirage as discipline but by magnetic inference where words naturally attract themselves to themselves, what I would call spiralling momentum. Never egregious realm by ostentatious comingling but alive by  attration to psychic higher principles.  Both the Moriscos of Granada, and indigenous inhabitants of the Congo and greater Africa, were forced to dissolve their natural rooting through toxic violence and displacement. This forges natural gathering as resistance via unification as natural attraction. What emits from this attraction condenses into natural love via the tenet of enforced uprooting. By retaining form according to prior psychological valance an evanescence proclaims its own blazing according to prior metrification as balance. Unified by dillema, not by ostentatious reaction as causation, but a protracted form of healing ensues as an ensemble that heals sans self-deracination. As I've stated in my proto-publication On Dar el-Hikma, the general demeanour of psychic inclusion via higher thought in Christian and Jewish elements would have not embrangled contact would have sustained higher presence within North American natural indigenous principles that of course included the Chumash. This latter psychic state proclaims the mind by seeming ineffable, by a state of mind, that may have led the general mind beyond its current predicament. 

 

Justin Robinson: I understand from your response that the language in Refractive Africa maturates organically, without superimposed ideal, model, or linearity, which aligns itself with “psychic higher principles” much like the language cultivated by the “Moriscos of Granada, and indigenous inhabitants of the Congo and greater Africa.” The radical love within each text asserts itself via language that connects again with the language and ideas which excelled in critical supraconscious ways prior to colonial violence. This “natural love” promotes healing through discursive practices that lead “the general mind beyond its current predicament” of psychophysical annihilation.   

Justin Robinson: I want to talk about Los Angeles and what this world city means for you. In your essay “Los Angeles An Anomalous Maze” from A Cannibal Explains Himself to Himself, you say: “Los Angeles is suffused by so many other psycho-lingual experiences that English is now in rapid transmutation.” What do these “psycho-lingual experiences” look like when they join the language of the Chumash?

 

Will Alexander: Los Angeles being the region that I've hailed from I pose it not as a regional fixation not via Hollywood and its related psychic intervals that impose themselves through entertainment, but a region rich with imaginal enrichment. I think of a quartet of names such as Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenburg never synonymous with the stars' built upon sovereign entertainment. Instead it has harbored imaginal innovation that has remained my principle psychic infection. To remain in this state that I have morphed into what I consider to be one of dazed tribulation. My art never possessed by numerical character, but upon imginal resistance as destination, upon indwelling radiance. Never sequestered into mystical vincinity according to belief but as identity by what I presently call charismatic spirally that poetically infects its rise into higher lingual vincinity. A precarious state within present pseudo-standards one needs imaginally invade a living lingual dusk, a precarious maelstrom of energy that lifts itself into a magnetic lingual state. Because Los Angeles remains off the main road of Eastern material capitals such New York  and Washington DC I am able to project this lingle state within fielding an unstable aninimus concerning the maturing of my present praxis as if I blinded myself according by untrue emotion. 

 

Justin Robinson: It's this “quartet of names” among others that continue to hold “imaginal innovation,” energetically infusing the streets of Los Angeles long after their physical departures from earth. Perhaps because of these above-mentioned names the City of Lost Angels ceases to be placed in close approximation to Hollywood stardom. And it’s this studio embranglement that necessitates, in part, your “living lingual dusk” as intrinsic boundary. Not being an “American” city perse, Los Angeles for you organically and continuously creates itself by heterogeneity rather than economic or congressional stints.  

 

Justin Robinson: From your first book Vertical Rainbow Climber to The Coming Mental Range and texts yet to be published, were your parents able to witness your lifelong engagement with language, including drawing and painting?

 

Will Alexander: As I look back on things it must have crippled them with difficulty. I was never embrangled by aspirations derived from a householders conditioning. Instead my eye was set upon clinging to a non-pragmatic seeming impossible pinnacle poised upon the principle of an impossibly defiant vertigo. Even if I were poised say upon the sullen gambler of that may have a race horse junkie I may have been more understandable to them with them feeling less deprived according to psychic deficit. As it was I remained within invisible demeanour as if I persisted in a state parallel to evolment from a coffin rising into verbal effulgence sans understandable vicinity. Vertical Rainbow Climber remains for me a prince gift of daring spirited on by the likes of Bob Kaufman. For me it continues to persist by tenacious lingual rise, a principle foment that gathers internally not unlike volcanic bursts from the Saturnian moon that is Io. 

 

Justin Robinson: Yes, you recognize your parents’ difficulties, and yet were entranced, then and now, by this “impossibly defiant vertigo” to go a “non-pragmatic” direction. This lack of pragmatism made you less understandable to them. The “gift of daring” that is Vertical Rainbow Climber provided you vital feedback, inspired by Bob Kaufman in particular, that language recognized you in ways, perhaps, that your parents may not have been able to, then. 

 

Will Alexander is an American poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and visual artist. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002