Lure
Black Widow Press, 2022
Imagine entering a loft
space, say in lower Manhattan, that is empty of furniture, but filled with a
number of randomly arranged objects: a car engine hanging from the ceiling on a
chain, a carrousel, a bunch of balloons, a stuffed coyote, a vase or orchids, a
cockatoo, a huge map of Budapest, a Civil War era cannon, a nude female mannequin
holding a polka-dot umbrella, and so on. How are these things related, other
than the space they occupy? There’s no immediate context that ties these
objects together. You might assume it’s an artist’s studio, but what kind of
art are they making? Everyone will have a different story. Everyone will weave
their own web of silky postulation. The creative urge will be aroused. And even
though there’s no answer or rational explanation for any of this, it’s still
intriguing. Something in you has been aroused. It gets the juices going. And
that’s what’s wonderful about collage. And this is the lure: the allure of the
lure is in its catalytic spark, the way it triggers a reaction in the
associative brilliance of the unconscious. Levinson’s Lure, as much of
his writing, operates on a similar principle.
There’s
always a feeling of space in Levinson’s writing, not just structurally or the
way the lines are arranged on the page, but psychologically, in the freedom it
offers. The openness of the language induces a state of uncertainty and
confusion, a little like being on a blind date. At first, you feel awkward. You
don’t know what to say. But if the date goes well, a random name or event might
pop up and break the ice and get the conversation going. Trying to find a
language to describe Levinson’s language is a challenge, partly because it runs
contrary to all the norms of modern linguistics, but also because there’s no
obvious message or mood, no evident narrative.
The
human mind is most at ease in a sentence with all its working parts in order,
riding along smoothly, guided by prepositions, connected by conjunctions,
hurled forward by predicates, with a well-upholstered syntax to lean into while
the various evocations, connotations, denotations, imputations and implications
provide a terrain upon which the mind can do its business. Thinking is hard.
Perception comes a little more easily, but it’s tricky. That’s why language was
invented. This worried Socrates, who believed that this luxury, when it became
written, would corrupt the mind with its hallucinatory power and erosive
convenience. He wasn’t wrong. That’s why reading has always struck me as a bit
decadent. The French symbolists took this to an extreme, creating an intricate
machinery of perfumed stars and pale naked bleeding wings out of nothing but
void and a glass of absinthe, a bit like the Federal reserve pumping money of
the air.
If
this sounds like conjuration, it is. Writing is essentially a magic act,
legerdemain, doves or endless scarves flying out of a sleeve or pocket,
voluptuous women sawed in two. Levinson takes us backstage to see how things
work, how the illusions are achieved. He’s a strange kind of magician. He wants
us to see that the real magic is in our own spirits, our own brains, our own
capacity to invent, to defy the constrictions – or constructions - of physical
reality.
The
writing is mostly asyntactic; prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, and all the
other grammatical cogs and lubricants that orient our relationship to a
sentence are used with scrupulous spareness. Nouns proliferate. The effect is,
at first, a little jarring. You’re on your own. Torn down are the scaffolding
and pulleys of rhetoric. In its place are stacks of lumber and sacks of cement.
Where do you start? How are these things meant to be assembled? Not to worry.
The blueprint is already embedded in the brain, in the temporal lobe, just
behind the ear.
Take
“Gyration,” on page 62. “Gyration” begins with a quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s
Eureka: “We require something like a mental gyration on the heel. We need so
rapid a revolution of all things about the central point of sight, that, while
the minutiae vanish altogether even the more conspicuous objects become blended
into one.”
The
sense of urgency here and its proposed formula for experiencing the quantum,
non-linear universe surrounding us, is an appropriate lure.
The
first line reads: “seersight astral lyre fever kinetic threadout torque cycle
boost.” Wow. A lot to take in, I know. My immediate sensation is one of
teeming, words teeming, ideas teeming, substantives teeming, morphemes teeming,
everything teeming and streaming and gleaming and dreaming and beaming.
Sections of the line can be read variously as, “seersight astral lyre,” an
object I can picture so strongly a narrative emerges of a prophet and his
astral lyre playing the music of the spheres. Or: “lyre fever.” I’ll bet that
feels weird. Or: “kinetic threadout torque,” something that sounds a bit like a
software term, or aeronautical adventure. “cycle boost.” I know what that is:
that’s the thing you use to get your rocket into space when the gravity is
heavy, your boosters are pidgeonholed in semantic undergrowth and your pants
are down and the monsters are coming. That’s when you need a cycle boost.
And
this is just the first line.
The
next line reads: “pre-allocational fitness loop centripetal urge skin-in.”
Skin-in? What’s a skin-in? Is that anything like skinny-dipping? Prepuce? A
happening involving skin? Let’s get together and have a skin-in. I need a
skin-in. I don’t know what a skin-in is, I just know I need one.
Things
calm down a bit in the third line: “fringe hazard.” I know this one from
personal experience, and so give it a personal spin, a brisk gyration that will
send the minutiae spinning into space and the cosmic axis to bring us in closer
to the hub, the nucleus, the core, and away from the fringe, where the banners
are bananas and the hazards are hazardous.
And
so progress tends to be slow as I linger on these lines and let the words soak
in.
The
last line of “Gyration” is “Eureka.” Though actually it’s not, as the word is
split into “Eur” and “Eka,” which is how I read it, before I went “eureka!”
Eureka is, of course, the title of Poe’s book-length prose poem, as well as a sudden
triumphant discovery. Which is pretty much how I feel as I linger among the
lines in Levinson’s Lure, ingesting it slowly, so I don’t get too dizzy.
