Sandwiches

that hole that

everyone tells you about

isn’t really a hole

you see

it wants too much

really it is a tapeworm or a baby

but that isn’t right because those are

mostly stationary and chill out

around the area of the body felt as stomach

well the ladder only if you’re female and

you might know is as a fetus then but

you understand

tapeworms and babies are like where people place the hole

because hunger and holes and stomachs go together

No I am trying to argue

the hole is not a hole

but awholenother creature

so why would I do so

by describing creatures that make you feel hungry

which people have already satisfied with a whole

set of descriptions centered around holes

see the hole moves around

which isn’t very hole or tapeworm or baby-like

well babies kick and tapeworms grow

but not enough

so maybe that’s where the butterfly thing came from

but people still say they are in your stomach

like the babies and the tapeworm and the hungry hungry hole

right now the little guy or woman or women or guys or thing or

person or other animal or some arsenic-based life form we haven’t named or seen

is in my finger and I imagine what it or he or she or ze wants is not a sandwich

but our ancestors were not sure they would have sandwiches to eat

they needed to share their need for sandwiches

so maybe you would give them one

or so they could know you also needed sandwiches

which somehow almost felt like eating just to share

the little creature in my finger

knows I am a product

of millennia of sandwich eaters

past the patent of sliced bread

going all the way back to beyond

the creator of sandwiches

then further to those

who didn’t know

but knew they wanted sandwiches

whether the creature in my finger

wants a sandwich

I’m unsure

but the creature knows I’ve wanted sandwiches

so when we talk the creature uses hunger as a word

for something different and I know and he knows

at least my desire for sandwiches enough

we get somewhere

still I am sitting here with this creature in my finger

who isn’t a hole but uses holes to tell me everything

so this whole description of my creature is unnecessary

I could have told you I am perpetually in need of a sandwich

even after eating and you would have understood

creature would have done that

I could have told you I am Tantalus or the ancient mariner

or someone who read but never understood John 4:14

I could have gone the other way and played the Rolling Stones for you

we could have talked about lack and lust and how they are like holes

which would have been a way to say teehee while picturing vaginas

I’m sorry. I just have this nagging suspicion

this hunger this desire if you will

that we will never come to know the creature

not because the creature isn’t knowable but

because creature is trying

so hard to talk

in a way we understand

so we won’t be xenophobic

that we see desire and hunger

not the substance creature is composed of

which may be close to those but isn’t them at all

I am just curious what creature is

because creature is

so intimate with me

there is no one closer

and I wish creature would stop

dumbing everything down for me

so we might be more than just acquaintances

which if you are content with hunger and have

no hunger to know what hunger isn’t if hunger isn’t

would make this whole thing an unappealing sandwich

maybe even as bad as one with rancid meat or moldy bread

or maybe you just don’t like turkey

and I made you a turkey sandwich

for which I remain apologetic.

I just really don’t want to think the answer to it all

is to crush creature under sandwiches until the creature dies

or that there is no creature because that would really mean

there is a possibility of holes in this whole thing beyond perceived ones

and that leaves me with this particularly empty feeling

you might recall as horniness or thirst or maybe hunger….

Is there anything to talk about without sandwiches on the table?

in the woods

In all of these conversations in all of these locations there is good and not so good an maybe even evil. I had an image of their interaction in my head, but another interaction with my friend Evan Clark resulted in his creation of an image other people can interact with and that interacts with this poem.

in the woods there was a promise

a promise valley people

might kill the people of the mountain

for but she didn’t have to kill

anyone to get from city to woods

she knew that part at least

though somehow she decided

paying 6,000 dollars was necessary

to end up near trees that were not placed

by people or whose futures weren’t

forgotten for the sake of power lines

she knew she could drive to trees

but then she’d drive back the next day for

bed or sandwiches so she paid 6,000

for the freedom of the forest with the added

benefit of a cage to keep her from

wandering back to the city

luckily the people she paid

called the cage a classroom

they very much liked

each bar that they had built

which they knew as pushing

you to be uncomfortable

the same uncomfortable they’d been when

they first went to the woods and been provided

bars by some kind them she didn’t know but knew

by knowing the new them actually the new them

hadn’t built the cage at all it had been there for

awhile but no one knew its origin

in the cage was a nice lake and some mountains

the cage grew and shrank according to traditions

a necessary part of traditions was her not knowing

them so they were new enough for her that she could be

uncomfortable like they had been and realize that in the city

she had been reigned in by ritual or having a comforter on her bed

she didn’t notice that none of them were standing in the cage

with her while they talked so fondly of their memory or idea of the place

and they kept swimming in the lake so she thought they must be in the same place

soon though someone remembered a part of the cage they hadn’t mentioned yet

a bar that had looked really nice when they were inside the thing

when they erected bar again it happened to go right where she was standing

piercing directly through her foot

hello? She asked.

This is more than uncomfortable.

I cannot really move.

From here I cannot swim in the lake.

I only have two trees to look at.

I ache.

Once we were in the cage! They said.

From the sentence she deduced their new locale.

Can’t you see better from out there?

Don’t you know I’m bleeding everywhere?

So you say you are uncomfortable? We were once uncomfortable.

No no no

Two days ago, I was uncomfortable.

Now pain has forced my eyes shut.

Just look out at the lake and you’ll be fine.

I can’t see anything.

I can’t open my eyes.

This last bar you talked about has wound up through my foot.

Bar?

Tradition?

There are no traditions. You shape your own cage.

I really wouldn’t have put steel through my foot if I had a choice.

Do you notice you keep saying I? We gave you the classroom with a lake so you’d say we.

We don’t want such a constricting classroom?

Our classroom looked like that and it was good.

Where are you?

They were outside the cage in a cage they’d built to maintain the cage.

Teams

Nick and I make a good team, except when we don't. We make good talking buddies. So many nights after class we developed the ideas that eventually started going into this blog while talking over tea in this Hoover Streetapartment building. We love abstracts and trying to understand wholes as best we can. Now though, it is time for parts and it's hard not to feel like we are generalizing or generally missing things when looking at the world that way. Like that game of telephone that never got very far, I worry we might always be concept folks and not practitioners.

I've been trying to go back through notes and feelings to remember the parts of our ideas. Nick has been computing like mad to create a prototype. We are trying to facilitate collaboration and have been collaborating to do so. The goal is eventually to create a site that allows for and even pushes collaborative creation in multiple genres and between genres. But just as the surrealists began playing with exquisite corpses in the creation of poetry and prose, only moving on to collages of words and images and creating images once they got a handle on the words, we had to start small too. We had to take our abstracts down to something we are capable of now, but even though we are creating a more limited version of our concept to start and even though all new things are made from old, what will come out of this still cannot be determined. Our limited idea has endless possible outcomes. Will we only attract an audience of our friends and classmates or can we extend the reach of our machine to those beyond our social sphere? Will we have encouraged the creation of inside jokes, a group of people dedicated to making art relevant to and capable of reaching as many folks as possible, some loosely affiliated people, some bad poetry, genius? We'll soon see and then soon have a better idea of where to wander next or how to wander better.

Some Documentation

For our website, Nick and I don't want names of people or of art. Instead of titles, the art will be categorized by subject matter, and instead of names, people will go by IP addresses so that if we don't get the categories right at least we have changed them from the norm so people will have to adapt.

If I had eaten the burrito, I would be different.

Copy. Right.

On a summer night in northern Michigan I was doing somersaults in the water while trying to fend off the sleep that sun--still on my face even under the stars-- demanded with the help of water's chill. When I surfaced for air--instead of the comforting voices of people who talked so much that day humming over the surface--I made out a bit of a yelling conversation. One friend was rather angry about an MIA song sampling "Straight to Hell" a song by the Clash she'd grown up listening to while the other believed that you are always using something old when making something new. I surfaced and listened to the voices softened by the water ripples but carried over enough I could float on my back and hear.

Where collaboration went.


Something Older. Something better?

Every time I write my opinion about copyright law, I should have to cite that night. Who do I cite though? My friend's voices or the water rehashing sounds I'd heard before without paying for any of them or the muscle memory of my body so self-assured from years of floating on a lake that the motion had been perfected. In that moment, I knew that even though my friend could pinpoint the bit of the Clash within MIA's music enough that she was annoyed so much else went into that song that wasn't new. Everything has roots. No song begins in midair. No person starts as a tabula rasa.

Some genres even expect people to reuse notes or continue on a structure and even knowing where those came from we can't ever understand the entire genesis of an idea because so many other ideas were part of creating a new one and so much was there before that. While we can try to piece back the origins of everything our role as piecer changes everything and time does and sometimes just walking past a television saying something or other may imprint on us and show up later and we may not even know. I think there is value in knowing where things came from, but I don't know how anyone claims an original idea. They are not new. The things they saw, heard, did. The language they have to work in. The people they talked to. Their genes. Do we have to cite all of those things?

Of course I do my best to adhere to copyright laws, but in all the voices how do I know for sure which ones are in mine or when someone else has taken mine. Is it really taking? Should I cite the makers of my computer knowing my ideas come out differently on here than in a journal? I hope that my words appear in someone else. I love when a phrase starts being uttered regularly by a group of friends and no one knows who said it first or who said it to them. Should they trademark the words? What happens when a year later they meet someone else who has been saying the same phrase longer than any of them? Experience mostly overlaps. When we say mine mine mine, we forget how much is ours.

Intrusions

Interruption.
And then Forkergirl said
every interaction changes you
Sean Penn

In the middle of our work on whatever this project was going to be, Forkergirl went and threw Sean Penn into the mix.

And then Forkergirl said
at least I didn't say
Charlie Sheen

but of course Forkergirl knew she had said Charlie Sheen too and both celebrities were now imprinted on our project. I felt like we had pulled over for gas on our road trip and had our car keyed. HAHAHAHAHA. Forkergirl frolicked around the room a little too smug about what she had done. The weekend before I had gone home and seen Mr. Sheen on the television. My Dad was quite interested in the story. Then I knew Mr. Sheen was exactly what we did not want in our project. The culture of celebrity like the culture of Facebook is centered around the identity of individuals. We want art where no one person has too much control.

Our website will only allow posters to write something between the size of a text and a tweet: 150 characters at a time. Then the post will have to be approved by multiple people. Then someone else will post. Posters will keep going back and forth until they have created something with no one name or voice dominating the project. Someone can claim the work is finished, but others will have to approve that claim as well. We don't want a world where "By: Charlie Sheen" comes before the ART or where Jessica Suzanne Stokes comes before every post. We want to inspire collaboration centered around what is being made not who is making it.

Identity

While everything spills over into everything, we have to start somewhere or we'll only have talking to talk about for our final presentation in English 420.

Meta-Exhaustion
Age has replaced writing about what I have learned
with writing about whether learning is possible.
One paper about that should have been enough
One suggestion of solipsism should be effective too but
people keep telling me my brain is in a jar,
keep making me write that I don’t know anything.
In the bathroom parlor of my stain-glass pseudo gothic revival church,
there were two mirrors facing each other. I would wait until the sermon
to pee. And then I’d stand there in the parlor and enjoy what in child’s time
felt like days and may have been eight minutes of staring at myself and
my other self and my other other self and well you get the image(s).
But that kind of thing has messed with my head.
It is one thing to stare into the abyss for a minute or eight but to stare infinitely
into infinity is just exhausting. I’d like to know something again but the world
has fallen away and all there are are dueling mirrors.

Here is the idea. Ellen Dissanayake in her essay "Very Like Art: Self-Taught Art from an Ethological Perspective" argues self-taught art is something that was evolutionarily selected for not because of its ability to attract mates to the creator but because art once served as a vehicle for uniting communities and united communities were more likely to survive (Dissanayake). In these communities that practiced art-making, the time, energy, and creativity put into the creation of art reflected how much people cared about the community or at least the event or deity the people were making the art for and the act of creating extravagant art mobilized and united communities (Dissanayake).

The internet is often focused on the individual. When I put the text of my facebook page into wordle "Jessica" "Suzanne" and "Stokes" were some of the most prominent words displayed.

Nick and I want to create a website focused on the creation of communal or collaborative art. In a community where name is not important.