The Pleasures of the Short-Circuit
Daniel Barbiero
About halfway through Toss Repeat (SurVision Press), his James Tate Prize-winning chapbook of prose poems, John Monroe Johnson gives us the provocative image of a séance in “Dim the Lights”:
Above the kitchen table floats a presence there’s no explaining. Nothing of the original remains. If you press your ear to the base of a tumbler you might hear it passing. I wouldn’t call it soul or spirit. A charge across two poles, perhaps. Arc of dependence. Or science.
Hush. The séance is about to begin.
“Dim the Lights” reads as an elaborate metaphor for the moment of inspiration. Call it an invocation of the muse, but in contemporary terms. That inexplicable presence floating just above and presumably out of reach isn’t a messenger from the spirit world but rather could be an image for the creative impulse before it finds expression in a given form or material. What’s inexplicable about it is its source—if not in soul or spirit, then in what? Perhaps some deep layer within, a voice we don’t (yet) recognize as our own, an electric and electrifying charge that seems to come from an Other secreted within ourselves. Once it does find expression, once we do recognize it as ours—as it takes on some of the peculiarities of our habits of speech, say—its initial, inexplicable presence gets lost. Arguably it’s then, at that moment when it’s transferred from inarticulate impulse to articulate text, that nothing of the original remains. And the séance--the creative act proper—can begin.
Johnson’s séance suggests itself as a metaphor for the creative act because there does seem to be something mediumistic about the poems in Toss Repeat. They’re mediumistic in the same way that automatic writing is mediumistic: their surprising images and associative leaps of logic are consistent with automatic writing’s channeling of language unfettered by conscious direction or the demands of the reality principle. I don’t know—I don’t think—that Johnson’s poems are examples of automatism; arguing against that possibility is the plain fact that they have a finish and balance that indicates craft, albeit craft that enables rather than stifles imaginative fiat. And, they have a certain self-awareness: they seem to know what it is that makes them what they are.
When in “Vespers” Johnson writes
It happens behind your eyes, so you don’t see, words on one side setting their hearts on the other. I eat and sleep, play quietly in the morning before anyone else is awake, look for what the cat left on the doormat. Has the day been short-listed? And what, if anything, will grow out of it, as music grows out of melody, tempo, the tension between repetition and randomness that touches us but keeps its distance?
He could be referring to his own art. The “it” that happens behind the eyes may be the moment of the creative upwelling, a moment which gives rise to the words into which it’s translated while leaving something of the original affect or sensation that necessitated it—the words’ “hearts”—aside. I see Johnson’s musical analogy as pertaining to the poem that grows out of that “it.” Its language is like music in that it has a “melody”—the phrases and images of which it’s composed—which propel it forward at a certain clip or tempo, but its tension arises not from some movement away from a tonal center or from disruptions to the regularities of rhythm, but rather from its leveraging of an apparent randomness at two levels: from the alogical way that its sentences align themselves in sequences, and the dreamlike displacements of its imagery.
For example, there is this passage from the first stanza of “Persistence of Vision,” the title of which recalls Dali’s famous painting of melting watches, “The Persistence of Memory”:
It was about that time. We followed it down a deer path to a horseshoe bay where the wings of vinegar flies diffracted light in florescent colors. Everyone brought parasols and pink erasers. “That’s nice,” someone said. By which he meant ignorant or wanton, fastidious or shy or pleasant. Or something else.
Johnson sketches here an oneiric scene of unlikely objects meeting in a mysterious landscape. Like the atmosphere of a dream, the meaning of the scene, its emotional content, is ambiguous. It falls under the bland descriptor “nice,” but what exactly is “nice” here? It can mean the several incommensurate qualities the poem specifies, or something else entirely. It doesn’t want to be pinned down. The upshot is that what’s “nice” can be unsettling, and paradigmatic of meaning generally. What it seems to say is that meaning—in language as in a dream—carries a certain undercurrent of anxiety, a suspicion that the boundaries containing words’ referents will begin to dissolve the more precisely we try to articulate them, and that even the most concrete mode of expression will inevitably sink into the quicksand of metaphor. Perhaps in acknowledgment of this anxiety Johnson often uses the ambiguous pronoun “it” in places where a more specific noun would clarify what exactly is being referred to. In “Vespers” the “it” that’s followed down the deer path, like the “it” in “Persistence of Vision,” is an open variable left to our imagination to fill in. Johnson concedes something like that in this passage from “Variation”:
It had all been doable, taken in pieces, the processes interchangeable yet never indistinguishable, fluted chambers through which the impulse passed without diminishment, though its structure varied (bonds broken, electrons stripped from the outer shells), always something to read, something to watch while calibrating the image. Once you’d seen it your mind made up details. It’s surprising how little it takes to suggest a figure, however difficult it may be to say what it is: human, fish, flower, above ground or below, fixed or free.
Once again the meaning of “it” is left undefined and deferred, but in a sense it, or “it,” doesn’t matter. Suggesting the figure is the poet’s job; filling in the details is left up to the reader’s interpretive imagination. In this updating of the Surrealist trope of the incongruous image catalyzing thought, what’s left when definition is subtracted from meaning is the provocation of a certain delight that surpasses the anxiety of indeterminacy. What Freud said of the joke based on double entendre wordplay—that its bringing together two otherwise alien areas of thought produces a pleasurable “short-circuit” of ordinary thought—is also true of these prose poems: they are liable to produce a pleasurable short-circuit in the reader’s mind.
Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes about the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Utriculi, London Grip, and at ē·rā/tiō. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press; his score Boundary Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press). Daniel Barbiero is online at https://danielbarbiero.wordpress.com.