Experimental Life

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whom poets love to quote, writes of what he calls “bare life,” the human stripped of its social and political significance and of its specific life form, a kind of remainder or remnant.

The self as less than a shadow of itself.

This, said Lyn Hejinian in a recent talk for the PhiloSOPHIA conference in Denver, can be thrown up against a life being lived in context.

In a human world that seems to display a wild indifference to living

In a culture that seems to care little about cultural production

In a language that has been wielded to betray On a planet tired of these antics

Because the shape of the future is more anonymous than ever

What is the context?

Where and how do we live?

I mean each of us, but I also mean collectively

The experiment now is very much to figure out how to live

What does this mean for the experiment?

In a living world in which life forms are rapidly disappearing

My concerns now, as a so-called experimental poet, are different than they were

Maybe not from when I was a young proto-poet, when I believed poetry could change the world

When I wanted to tear everything apart and start anew

Not quite knowing that we are connected by memory to the past, which is the world

But certainly from when I was dedicated to the poetic performance of language above all else

Now it has come to seem that culture-making and art-making are preservationist acts

For salvaging some thinking and feeling among the tatters

I hope this doesn’t make making inherently conservative

(Should I be writing to hasten the demise of humans, to save more room and time for the other animals and the plants?)

My understanding of experimental writing for a long time was as a gesture highly concerned with the material

That is certainly like the experiment of living organisms, via evolution

But to test the material, to make it work, living things have to move it through the world

What is moving the material is not entirely the material itself, but is what is alive

Aristotle called this (life) animation

Movement connects one part of the body to another, foot to ankle

As well as one living being to another, fox to mouse

This could be called systems theory but it can also be called context

It could possibly be called content, and at a stretch, turned sideways, landscape

It calls out to another of life’s experiments, which is symbiogenesis

The making of new material via collaborative acts rather than competitive ones

One cell sliding into another one

Like a word back into its womb

Or how poets linger on the resonances of word and world in the same chamber

We can call these cells and words communities of interacting entities

Which do not obey the unsmiling reason of the fittest

For a time, it seemed that to be experimental you had to engage in a kind of stern logic

(Gloss: educated or institutionalized logic)

That the irrational, emotional, intuitive, dream life, self-life was for sissies

But just as the self keeps rushing back to language (to paraphrase Hejinian again)

So too does the delirious

As inter/action is a kind of delirium

This seems important in a time when our minds are inextricably entwined in technology

I would say locked in a struggle with “ ”

But struggle is not the word

Vine in the hive

Does it choke or connect?

There is certainly a weakening of the mind, its intentions and attentions

Its sociability among communities

Of ideas

Of living environments

We are at risk of forgetting how to talk to one another, in sentient context

To live with one another

(It is tempting to go into war statistics here, refugee status, mass extinctions, but also the rise of the thought police

As Dawn Lundy Martin put it recently, “There is no safe space”)

What is the purpose of the experiment?

What do we learn from it?

What do we expose?

What life do we make of it?

To challenge not just...