George Quasha

review of
George Quasha & Chie (bunn) Hasegawa's Ainu Dreams
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 10, 2013

It seems almost critically 'inevitable' for a person such as myself to appraise any writings based on dreams in relation to Surrealism. But doing so is myopic - dreams predate Surrealism as do people's conscious relationships to them. Nonetheless, I have the tendency to appraise any dream writing by thinking along the lines of: 'Does this dream-related writing advance such things? Does it offer anything new?' &, it seems that I've concluded that, yes, Ainu Dreams does have something new (or, at least, newish) to offer.

Perhaps what distinguishes Ainu Dreams is Quasha's extraordinary approach to Hasegawa's extraordinary dreams. Why "extraordinary"? That's harder for me to pin down. Quasha explains: "The poems are based entirely on the dreams of Chie Hasegawa, a Japanese artist living in America for more than a decade, who prefers the nom be [sic - tENT note] plume bunn (and writes it in miniscule). I have written the poems in active collaboration with her, the dreamer, who was most often physically present during much of the writing process and exerted a continuous, sharp and uncompromising corrective force on the composition. The poems are deeply faithful to the dreams and preserve their actual content, and even in various ways the language of the dreamer. At the same time, Ainu Dreams is a work inside poetry and develops according to the inner necessity of the poem itself and by a metapoetic principle: that each poem embodies an originary poetics, unique to its own possibility." (p 11)

Even that explanation strikes me as inadequate as a reinforcement of my assertion of extraordinariness. I'm hardly an expert on the history of dream description & don't know how many writers have undertaken writing about other people's dreams but it seems to me that the number wd be considerably fewer than the number of writers writing about their own dreams. I, eg, have contributed dream descriptions of my own dreams (typos'n'all) to the Annandale Dream Gazette ( http://www.annandaledreamgazetteonline.blogspot.com/search/label/tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE ), a "Poets' Blog of Dreams" ( http://www.annandaledreamgazetteonline.blogspot.com/ ). As I understand it, Quasha's undertaking of addressing Hasegawa's dreams in poem form was partially due to her own lesser familiarity w/ English.

Quasha is precise & uses neologisms to heighten this precision. I don't always agree w/ what he has to say & am sometimes even strongly philosophically different but I still have a great appreciation for Quasha's clarity of thinking. An example of what I disagree w/ is: "For my part I have found in the process of this composition further confirmation of a lifelong view - namely, that the poem has a source outside personal boundaries, even when a poem is driven by what seems most personal." (p 12) I disagree not so much w/ things being from "outside personal boundaries" as much as I do w/ the unquestioned use of the notion of "personal boundaries" to begin w/. Furthermore, it smacks a bit too much of "divine inspiration" - something that I find many intellectual weaklings falling back on to slyly imply their own 'divine' conduit status. Quasha, however, is much cleverer than that, using a 'quote' from "Ontononymous the Particular" at one point (p 12) - an apparent mouthpiece of his own invention/description.

What's, perhaps, the most convincingly remarkable here is the way some of the dream poems don't seem descriptive in any ordinary sense at all - &, yet, I have faith in the sincerity of Hasegawa & Quasha. Take, eg, the 1st of the poems (reading from front-to-back) that caught my attn in this way:

"A Logic of Two Kinds

"There are two kinds of people:
those who catch
and those who pitch.
Then there are those who hit.
I remember you said
there are two kinds of people:
those who can catch
and those who can't.
I catch.
So I decided to become
one who hits." (p 50)

How wd this be made manifest in a dream?! I don't really accept it as that at all.. but.. I do, anyway.

But, let's backtrack: why Ainu Dreams? "Why? Why indeed. I am on the verge of making up a story: The Ainu, a shamanic people of unknown origin still living in Hokkaido, are exemplars of the collaborative. (p 131) "But it would be fatuous to claim any "real" connection between our Ainu Dream and the actual songs of the Ainu. We pay respect to their intimate connection to the power of dream, its power to haunt - homing, frequenting, settling in, staking ground in the mind. But the name Ainu has a currency all its own in our discourse." (p 132) "See the Ainu Museum on the World Wide Web from Shiraoi, Hokkaido for more information. They report: "Ainu" means "human."" (p 138) & why a pomegranate on the cover? "POMEGRANATE / the view from the split / purpura and fleshy / squeezing in spirited being inhabitant / inwardly in touch breaking in through / to all and else" (p 141) "Cover design and photo collaboration are by bunn, George Quasha and Susan Quasha, based on an idea by buun." (p 143)

"This source arose spontaneously when I heard buun telling her dreams (in English, infused with Japanese qualities), which moved me with the force of a poem but without the realization in language. I registered this "call" by writing "The Fool," and this created for me the inevitability of this work." (p 136)

"The Fool

"in black
misfit tights
came up to me and said
everything is one half
comedy
and one half
comedy
and handed me
with his two hands
his two
heads" (p 15)

I vaguely remember reading about both Salvador Dali & Luis Buñuel saying that it's boring to listen to descriptions of other people's dreams &, yet, both of their work heavily features dreams & their work doesn't bore me at all. Quasha addresses this: "I came to see the non-separability of dream performance in and of itself. I love to listen through the dreams of other people" "Listening deeply through another's telling, as if one were tuning into the dream itself" (p 134) Quasha, too, pulls it off beautifully. The succinctness of this Logic of Two Heads is honorary P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory) regardless of who gets the credit: Ontononymous the Particular, the dreamer, the poet, &/or the unspecified other.

"Taking Space / Walking as I was / from waking / to sleep, I caught / this very moment, I mean / I found myself at this / particular angle of passing" (p 70) & I found myself reading these texts as poems 1st & then re-reading (some of) them as dream descriptions 2nd. Imagine reading yr grocery list as a grocery list 1st then as a poem 2nd. Now imagine taking both of those double-takes further into numerically higher dimensions of _____-takes.

As for the drawings? Even tho they may be my least favorite element of the bk, I still find them to be like seismograph calligraphy, remarkable enuf in itself.

When I was 3/4s of the way thru this bk, I slept & then awoke to remember a dream & then awoke again around 5AM & went into the bathrm (so as not to disturb my sleeping companion) to write the following dream description:

"Secret phone dream: perhaps 11PM in a Microtel rm in Middletown, NY, Tuesday, Jan 1, 2013:

"An old fashioned phone, perhaps similar to the ones that the rich people have in Fritz Lang's 1923 movie "Dr Mabuse, The Gambler", is sitting on a table in an otherwise stark, apparently unoccupied room. Perhaps the part of the phone that one wd hold is light brownish. Someone, perhaps multiple someones, begin to realize that whoever has installed this 'phone' (its 'true' nature being uncertain) has done so in a way so as to leave no traces - the 'phone' is meant to be secret. It's gradually deduced that the 'phone' is meant to be in the path between callers to me & my phone (although not, seemingly, my cell phone - the only one I actually currently have) in order to assassinate me. This is not a paranoid dream insofar as there seems to be no fear involved - just observation and hypothesis."

"The recital [récit] is neither a story nor an allegory ... not a story that happened to others, but the soul's own story, its "spiritual romance," if you will, but personally lived: the soul can tell it only in the first person, "re-cite" it ... an Event of the soul .... Henry Corbin3" (p 132) "3Avicenna and the Visionary Recital" (p 138) [See & hear "Avicenna's Floating Maori": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPOFMfbtRmc ]

"One does not necessarily think new thoughts although one may think differently; and it is not a matter of interpretation, particularly where that implies a system or principle (psychological, religious, philosophical, aesthetic); on the contrary, what we are pointing to here is outside the interpretive. One protects the delicate life of the dream by preserving it from interpretation" (p 135)

"Philosophical Immunity

"I was in a closet
and realized that someone
was trying to stick
needles in my skin.

"So I decided to gather together
the complete works of Socrates
and wear them
as armor.

"Now no one can get to me.
Suddenly the idea comes into my head
that I should be doing the exact same thing
with Nietzsche and Sartre." (p 38)

Many people have the had the feeling that they're having a profound thought while under the influence of a consciousness-expansion experience only to find upon leaving this state that they either don't remember this profundity or that it now seems trivial. ""I can't remember my dream" is perhaps the most common report. But what if memory is only one of the roads in? Or if what one needs is an attractor that calls the dream out into its further life? / THE POEM is well equipped to apply for the job. To really qualify, however, the poem may need to suspend certain of its own familiar modes of self-awareness." (pp 127-128) "Stop. I've just realized something. A gift / of this occasion - it doesn't matter / where I sit. / By awareness alone / you can be in touch / with anybody, everybody / at the same time. / Right then / Barbara comes over, we start talking, I recount / the consequential events, she responds / "Oh that / is the act of / eso-grip" (p 75) George Quasha gets it down, he's been there & come back conscious.

"G. Says He Knows How to Catch Time

"which is falling fast
from the tall building.

"No one believes him but me.

"For his part he's totally confident,
explaining that he'll use Manhattan,
which is three times the size of falling time,
to catch it.

"Just before it hits the ground
he indeed stops it.

"It didn't even touch Manhattan.

"At the same time I start to tell my dream
right here inside the dream.

""At last! The first in three months!" he says.
I get mad and say, "I'm not
telling you, period."" (p 102)… (mais)

Yes, after decades of having this bk laying around unread, I finally finished it yesterday. As soon as I started reading it again I cd barely wait to finish it so that I cd write: THIS BK IS THE POETRY COMPILATION EQUIVALENT OF THE HISTORY BK ENTITLED "A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES" (by Howard Zinn). For that matter, it's quite possible that the earlier comps edited by Jerome Rothenberg entitled "Technicians of the Sacred" & "Shaking the Pumpkin" also qualify.

I tend to mainly collect poetry collections that I think embody remarkable scholarliness & this one takes the cake & runs w/ it thru the wildflowers (or something). The apparent diversity of the comp really just highlights the unifying visonary nature of the poetry presented. The title is taken from a William Blake poem & the editors do a very, very impressive job of choosing material that takes Blake to the inner & outer limits (& absence thereof).

There's even a Pittsburgh poet that I've never heard of called Haniel Long. & there's a Clayton Eshleman "Ode to Reich" (as in Wilhelm Reich) that references André´Breton's "Ode to Fourier" wch I've mentioned elsewhere.

The bk has an introduction followed by a section called "RE BEGINNINGS"; followed by another called "MAP ONE: ORIGINS"; then "A BOOK OF RITES & NAMINGS" wch is subdivided into "Definitions & Namings", "Rites & Events", & "Sound Poems & Incantations"; then: "MAP TWO: LOSSES"; "A BOOK OF HISTORIES"; "MAP THREE: VISIONS" subdivided into "Magic & Vision" & "Sacred Plants"; "A BOOK OF MUSIC"; "MAP FOUR: RENEWALS" subdivided into "Image-Making" & "Symposium of the Whole"; ending w/ "A BOOK OF CHANGES".

Interspersed are scholarly editorial notes putting things in historical context, giving critical commentary that helps tie the poems together into the theme of the section they're in, etc.. The overall FEEL of this bk is of humans trying to work it all out & to transcend, TRANSCEND thru a variety of inspired means.

… (mais)