Dadaoism (An Anthology) Read online




  Dadaoism

  Dadaoism

  An Anthology

  Edited by

  Justin Isis

  &

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Chômu Press

  Dadaoism

  (An Anthology)

  Edited by

  Justin Isis

  &

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Published by Chômu Press, MMXII

  Dadaoism (An Anthology) copyright © Chômu Press 2012

  The right of the Authors to be identified as the Authors of their

  Works has been asserted by them in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Published in May 2012 by Chômu Press.

  by arrangement with the authors.

  All rights reserved by the authors.

  First Kindle Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Design and layout by: Bigeyebrow and Chômu Press

  Cover lexicon of dadaoism by: Bigeyebrow, Chômu Press and contributing authors

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Internet: chomupress.com

  “There is no easy category in which to place Chômu’s releases; the closest thing I can come up with is ‘disturbing fiction,’ where ‘disturbing’ is more than an elite way of saying ‘frightening.’ It means breaking up, if only temporarily, the way one looks at the world, providing a new and baffling perspective on the reality we all inhabit but rarely observe.”

  Brendan Moody, The Stars at Noonday

  “Since it was established in 2010, Chômu Press has released… books that deploy a range of styles to disturb and delight fans of mind-expanding fiction.”

  Chris Jozefowicz, Rue Morgue

  Contents

  Introduction #1 by Justin Isis

  Introduction #2 by Quentin S. Crisp

  ‘Portrait of a Chair’, by Reggie Oliver

  ‘Autumn Jewel’, by Katherine Khorey

  ‘Visiting Maze’, by Michael Cisco

  ‘The Houses Among the Trees’, by Colin Insole

  ‘Affection 45’, by Brendan Connell

  ‘M-Funk Vs. Tha Futuregions of Inverse Funkativity’, by Justin Isis

  ‘Spirit and Corpus’, by Yarrow Paisley

  ‘Timelines’, by Nina Allan

  ‘Jimmy Breaks Up With His Imaginary Girlfriend’, by Jimmy Grist

  ‘Body Poem’, by Peter Gilbert

  ‘Testing Spark’, by Daniel Mills

  ‘Noises’, by Joe Simpson Walker

  ‘Romance, with Mice’, by Sonia Orin Lyris

  ‘Grief Part I: (The Autobiography of a Tarantula)’, by Jesse Kennedy

  ‘Grief Part II: (The Discovery of Electricity Among the Dead, or, Looking Back)’, by Jesse Kennedy

  ‘Orange Cuts’, by Paul Jessup

  ‘Instance’, by John Cairns

  ‘Kago Ai, or, The End of the Night’, By Ralph Doege

  ‘Fighting Back’, by Rhys Hughes

  ‘Nowhere Room’, by Kristine Ong Muslim

  ‘Koda Kumi’, a Justin Isis re-mix of ‘Italiannetto’ by Quentin S. Crisp

  ‘The Lobster Kaleidoscope’, by Julie Sokolow

  ‘The Eaten Boy’, by Nick Jackson

  ‘Poppies’, by Megan Lee Beals

  ‘Abra Raven’, by D.F. Lewis

  ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicides’, by Jeremy Reed

  ‘Pissing in the Barbican Lake’, by Jeremy Reed

  About the authors

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction #1

  Justin Isis

  For the fascist personality there is no distinction between internal and external; the internal and external worlds are one. Whether the “spirit” is material or immaterial is immaterial; if we accept any kind of spirit at all, even as a metaphor, then it follows that the spirit will leave behind mineral traces in the same way that teeth and bones remain after death. For some, the motivation for writing is to create out of language something with as much mineral persistence as human bones... not in the hope of immortality (pointless) or even as a form of communication, but purely to create a physical analogue of those desires which cannot be realized in any meaningful way, due to the limitations commonly referred to as “reality” or “nature.” In other words these desires and this spirit will eventually die in the same way as the marrow of a bone will eventually die, even as the mineral remnant of the bone persists for much longer.

  Certain writers are building their own tombs with their works, in creating these exterior organs or external hearts, which will not rot as easily as their other organs. But in the end they will be reduced to just that: organs or mineral remnants gradually disintegrating. These writers doubt whether their physical remains alone will adequately express the desires which jut out of life; therefore some of them have resolved to create a more persistent organ out of language which will decay more slowly, serving also the same function as an actual mineral skeleton, which seems like a protest against “reality” or “nature”: a form of compressed desire. The skeleton seems to be striving for life even as it remains inert; its empty sockets seem like eyes opened wider than the eyes of the living, its teeth (and therefore their consumptive function) are revealed more plainly than the concealed teeth of the living. The skeleton seems monstrous only because it is exposed, opened, to a degree impossible for the living to attain. The writers in question would like to create language that is like the bared teeth of this skeleton exposed to the elements, which retain their shape and function even as they are gradually and inexorably eroded; the language is therefore the form of the spirit as it frees itself from the restrictions of form.

  Perfection of such writing is not the end result; usage/completion is. The stories in this book that escape boredom do so by corrupting their own forms, digesting themselves. Feel free to eat this book, tear out any pages that displease, add corrections and emendations. Feel free, as always, to write lies in the Book of Life.

  Etc.

  Justin Isis, Tokyo, 2011

  Introduction #2

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Someone was bound to ask what ‘Dadaoism’ means. It should be obvious that it’s a portmanteau of ‘dadaism’ and ‘daoism’. This word was coined without calculation at the time when Justin and I were writing and curating an obscure literary blogzine called ‘Chomu’. There are two main aesthetics at work in the selection of material published by Chômu Press (these remain a ‘secret recipe’, and so I won’t name them here); aesthetics arrived at independently of the word ‘Dadaoism’. It occurred to me recently, however, that the two elements in the portmanteau ‘Dadaoism’ correspond precisely to those two aesthetics.

  Puns or jokes are often full of the equivalent of Freudian slips—accidental insights. If accident can be particularly potent in the insights it brings to the surface, however, I feel inclined to conclude that too much explanation might be a bad thing. Some of the writers contributing to this anthology have written to me, in e-mail, along the lines of, “I have no idea what ‘Dadaoism’ is, but…” I dare say this is also true of those who didn’t bring the subject up. Since we coined the word (I don’t know if we were the first to do so), Justin and I could claim to know what it means, or we could feign ignorance, or keep schtum. It doesn’t matter; t
he consistency between the two elements of Dadaoism and the two selective aesthetics of Chômu Press suggests to me that the former is something real.

  The lack of foreknowledge concerning Dadaoism on the part of the contributors of this anthology will, I hope, play the part of accident in bringing to the surface Freudian slip insights into what Dadaoism is, since, whatever it is, it must be ever ready to slip into something else.

  A useful reference point for how the ‘Dadaoism’ tag relates to this anthology might be the William Burroughs and Brion Gysin collaboration, The Third Mind. According to Burroughs and Gysin, the ‘third mind’ was something that was achieved when two (or more) minds work together creatively, producing results that neither could produce alone.

  Let me apply this concept to the name ‘Chômu’, taken from an essay by Lafcadio Hearn in which were listed the pen names of various Japanese poets featuring the word ‘butterfly’. ‘Chômu’ is one of those pen names. It translates as ‘butterfly dream’, a reference to the fable of Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou). In brief, Zhuangzi fell asleep and dreamt he was a butterfly flitting happily from flower to flower. Then he awoke and remembered he was Zhuangzi, who had dreamed he was a butterfly. Or—it suddenly occurred to him—was he a butterfly now dreaming he was Zhuangzi? Of course this revelation is a kind of chicken-and-egg quandary. Which comes first, the butterfly or Zhuangzi? The dream of the butterfly comes before Zhuangzi’s waking, so, in that sense, is first. But now Zhuangzi remembers—or seems to remember—events in his life that pre-date the dream (his falling to sleep, for instance). In this fable we have two minds—that of Zhuangzi and that of the butterfly. However, there seems to me to be in this story the implication of endless possible minds—an infinite chain. That the butterfly, even within the dream, is flitting from flower to flower, is one suggestion of this. The many flowers are dreams within dreams. But the butterfly can also exit that dream to enter what may be seen as a larger, containing dream, or possibly a smaller dream, which is contained. Are the dreams concentric, or are they sequential? Or possibly something else again?

  Whatever the exact arrangement (perhaps there must be some built in and continuous rearrangement) I would like to think of this anthology as a congeries of such dreams, which together form a new and distinct entity, which is one avatar of the entity ‘Dadaoism’, a bustling and jostling chaos-butterfly whose dream-wings, when they flicker, lenticular, show us a number of different panels in an endless folding screen. You may start to dream you are Reggie Oliver and wake up to find you are Kristine Ong Muslim. You may further realise that you are really John Cairns dreaming you are Kristine Ong Muslim having dreamt you are Reggie Oliver, and who knows where you may go from there, and to where you might return?

  Quentin S. Crisp, London, 2011

  Portrait of a Chair

  Reggie Oliver

  It began in our local auction rooms at Glemford. They are not worth describing in detail: a collection of sheds—once a farm, I believe—off a B road. Every week the detritus of other people’s lives is deposited in these buildings and is bid for by dealers and ordinary members of the public, while outside, on fine days, plants and vegetables and huge sacks of grain, and hens in cages too small for them are disposed of. Each Monday, when the auctions take place, marks the end of a thousand small worlds and their dispersal goes unlamented.

  I don’t deal professionally in antiques any more—some years ago I passed the business on to my son—but occasionally I dabble. I think I do it to test my powers. I was known in my heyday to “have an eye”, as they say, and out of curiosity I sometimes test out my eye to see if it is deteriorating in the same way that my body appears to be. It offers me a kind of satisfaction to note that “the eye” (as I like to call it) is as fresh and discerning as ever. But then, I reflect, if the rest of me is decaying—as it is, and rapidly—what is to become of the eye? Perhaps it could be hooked up to some electronic device on eBay and used to hunt out rarities across the vast wilderness of cyberspace, but I don’t think so. I am enough of a traditionalist to think that would be rather dreary, a sort of death-in-life. But then life on the wrong side of seventy is becoming a death-in-life. I am beginning to look around for a death-in-death.

  I am not quite there yet. That is why I go to Glemford every Saturday morning for the weekly viewing. I go to see if something might happen which could take me down some irrevocable road, either to life or death: really, either will do. And that is how, one Saturday in June, I came to find the chair.

  Of course, as Magritte might have written in similar circumstances, it was not a chair at all. It was a picture of a chair, and it interested me immediately.

  In my day I was something of an expert on English rural primitive paintings, and this was before they became the fashionable accessories of gastro-pubs and rural second homes for weary bankers. You know the kind of thing: paintings on board of grotesquely fat prizewinning pigs or cattle seen in severe profile, flat face-on portraits of men and women who look as if they have just come from a very long sermon in a Methodist chapel, detailed views of buildings with curiously skewed perspectives. The best of them date from the early part of the nineteenth century. There is a kind of earnestness about them, a dedicated attention to detail, but withal an innate strangeness which seems to us both comic and touching. The painting that I had found that Saturday in Glemford had all the right qualities, but it was not the representation of a prize ram, or a Congregationalist Minister, or a farmhouse: it was of a chair. I had never seen a primitive painting of a chair before.

  It hung upon the wall of the main auction room, amongst the faded Victorian watercolours and the sepia prints of forgotten Old Masters and the embroidered samplers trapped under glass. It stood out because it was the only oil painting on that wall and it had a fine black ebonised frame with a gold slip. There would be bidders, I suspected, for the frame alone, but I was for the painting.

  I cannot say that I liked the painting, or that I disliked it. Long years in the business have bred out of me the spontaneous aesthetic pleasure of the amateur: I know too much simply to enjoy. What I understood was the quality and the rarity of the thing: it was these objective attributes alone that stimulated me. They gave me a frisson, not exactly of pleasure, but certainly of a kind of alertness, a sense of being alive, and for a purpose. You may call that pleasure if you like.

  The chair in question stood against a background that was split horizontally into two halves. The upper half was a pale green colour and was presumably intended to be a wall. The lower half, which was the floor, was represented by bare yellow floorboards that the painter had drawn meticulously, but with little sense of perspective so that they seemed to descend almost perpendicularly from the wall. The chair itself was a relatively plain late Regency mahogany dining chair with splayed legs, a concave wooden back and scrolled finials. The seat would appear to be of black leather secured to its carcass by plain brass tacks. It was quite accurately painted and the artist had obviously taken more pains with it than he had with the background.

  I suppose I was attracted to it because furniture is, or was, my other area of expertise. I thought I might even keep the picture, though I have not much use for art as art. I used to, of course, so I would not categorise myself as a philistine; but, as with other desires, the candle has burned low.

  On the Monday when it was to be sold I decided, on impulse, to go to bid for the lot in person, instead of sticking to my original intention, which was to leave a maximum bid on it of fifty pounds by phone. As it happened the bidding went quickly over fifty pounds and I eventually secured the painting for slightly less than three times what I had intended paying for it. Why I was being so reckless I did not know, but the process did quicken me a little, so I suppose it may have been worth it. I took it back to the little cottage where I live alone with my cat Seth and found a space on the wall of the sitting room where it should hang. I put it up that day. For once there was no delay or indecision: I usually take ages to hang a pictur
e or site an ornament. There it was, and I did not quite know why.

  It is at this point, on the few occasions I have told this story, that my listeners begin to suspect which way it is going, and so perhaps will you. You will assume that, having got this picture home and hung it on the wall, it began to exert some kind of baleful influence over me; and that, moreover, there is a denouement in which I discover that the chair had originally belonged to a murderer, or had been painted by a murderer, or some such. It is the kind of story I used rather to enjoy myself, so I can sympathise with your disappointment when I tell you that nothing like that occurred. The picture in question did not—I think—have a baleful influence on my life, nor have I discovered anything about the chair depicted or the artist who painted it. In fact my story is barely a story at all, in the ordinary sense, but it was an experience.

  For some days I lived with the painting and my cat in perfect contentment. I did not question my impulsive purchase; if I thought about it at all I was rather pleased with it. I supposed that eventually I would sell it on, but I doubted very much if I would get much profit out of it. That did not seem to matter. From time to time I would speculate on why the unknown artist had taken such trouble to depict an inanimate object.

  My leisure hours these days are many and I have time for such ruminations. One of the curses of old age is boredom. You think, when you are younger, that retirement will present great cultural opportunities. At last you will finish Proust, study Dante, or listen intelligently to the whole of Wagner’s Ring Cycle; but somehow I have lost the appetite for such things, if I ever really had them at all. Perhaps it is simply that I no longer have that capacity for sustained concentration which Proust and the like demand. I still have some pleasures, but they are simple ones, like going for a walk on a fine day, or playing with my cat Seth, or eating well. Sometimes I just like to sit with a glass of malt whisky, staring at the wall and contemplating the slow pageant of my thoughts as they pass through my mind. It was as I was doing this one day that the experience happened. The piece of wall at which I was staring happened to have the portrait of the chair hanging on it.