Alex Farrow, creative fiction, 2023
[Forward: On the Publication of a Manuscript and its Correspondences]
Novus magazine is a small campus publication dedicated to representing in earnest the creative voices of our campus, publishing forward, clear, stylized, and innovative works. Our team had received a submission by a formerly notable local campus writer, and had rejected it on the basis of style, versification, and what our editorial team deemed non-conductive sentiment. A close associate of ours had then been thrown into a lengthy correspondence with a local campus journalist of the Trident Times following our rejection of this manuscript. This journalist had deemed the manuscript to be an extremely significant piece of writing in opposition to our editorial opinions. Published here is that correspondence, made public at the request of our associate, and that journalist. An edited copy of that poetic manuscript is attached as an appendix as well. Throughout the correspondence, liberal references to the manuscript are made, and our editorial team has done its best to properly source and cite that manuscript. The manuscript is composed of seven poems, each 14 lines long, save for the first poem. Nearly every poem has an attached section, save for the second, and seventh poems. In order to reference the individual poems, a citation format is used as follows: Each 14 line poem as well as the first 10 line poem is marked with an [S.], followed by the poem’s numeral(I-VII), then line number. So poem five, line nine would be referenced (S.V, 9). Sections are attachments of their connected poems(referenced with [s.], the numeral, and line number), and the line number is counted down from the first line of the corresponding poem, the space between the section and poem serving as the “0” boundary. For example, the first line of the first section “a wasted hour till release” would be referenced (S.I.s.i, -7), as that line is seven lines away from the first line of the corresponding poem. It is the hope of Novus that the publication of this manuscript, as well this correspondence, will help to clarify some understated and occulted facts of the recent literary currents of our campus, and begin to bridge the gap into a new mode of writing and expression. Thank you,
-Adelie P. Gwyn,
Editor in Chief,
Novus Magazine
[i]
to: Adelie P. Gwyn
re: Susanna K. manuscript- editor inquiry
In confidence I'd say that this is the most accurate depiction, something just short of a mirror reflection of Suzy. Taking my view and association into account, I would confidently say this is something of an honest description, a real sentimental self portrait of sorts laid out in these letters. I believe very few individuals mean particularly well to be seen by any-body, especially these days, there is simply no need, but Suzy has revealed herself here, honestly with honesty she has. Suzy, by her nature, I know, I draw this, never is to identify with material reflection, arrangement, arraignment or garment. She is, in my impressions, without affectation, insofar as being for lack has no such quality of affectation, and should it, well, Suzy is turned over, for I also believe she is without contingency. It is a point of lack that she makes continually in everything, it is inherited [and] perfectly determined, always within every expression, every deliberate and façadal mannerist action with her is a detailed and precise act of simple fatalism, her determinants bloom their own way over her life like vines strangling a concrete garrison of sharp consciousness. In him there is this as well, more than definition, contradictory dimension. Why then, for fuck’s sake, does she still mirror his pose, why take after one who has done much by force to overwrought her own, his own, and all their subordinate’s thoughts. Maybe she has finally come around to him in a different manner, so as to finally forwardly face him, to meet that impossible gaze. I can no longer say that Suzy does not know, but of him I know, and for him an act of knowing is an impossible heresy: there is no knowing but kinesis. For him there is a way, characteristically, universally, completely embodied in robes of plainspeaking, a way to bring about some kind of action at a distance, lead of thought to gold of etcetera etceteras, all done in clear language, a cut dazzlement for pampered eyes. I could not tell Suzy against this mode enough, she could not listen. There is no possession of him, only by him. He may prefigure antagonistically in this sequence, but make no mistake, he and I are within this thing likewise, as well as you and that little world, to greater and smaller degrees. Most of and above all, she is centrally overlapping all others. This is all there is of her ends, egoism.
-H.
[ii]
to: H.
re: Susanna K. manuscript- editor inquiry
Thanks for the impression, H. I had a similar reaction in response to the material. We still receive submissions from Susanna semi-regularly, and had published the early ones in some of our smaller releases, but the editorial staff has backed away from her newer stuff, it is, like you say, too in line with a specific and unpopular pose, non-conductive to us, even in manners of style.
I asked you for your editorial opinion due to a Trident Times reporter who has been badgering staff for information and manuscripts from those days when you, her, and seemingly every half-poet was under D.T.’s metaphorical mountain. The reporter is putting together a campus culture piece (or something or other) that will detail that fallout from your graduated cohort. I warn you, privately, staff respect The Trident, but this reporter’s endless excesses have started to drive everyone’s wits out, they are on for eternity with this project, and are evidently never exhausted by their own voice. Endlessly, tirelessly, asking for manuscripts, editions, and impressions; they desperately seek firsthand experience with it. Earlier we had out Sussanna’s manuscript for review and too quickly they took it hostage, demanded we forward a copy to you, and ask for your response. We give our burden to you H., and to them your email, sorry and good luck, I’m forwarding your response to them as well.
p.s. if you’re interested I’d be happy to send over some newer copies of our most recent publications, we have adopted a new printer of a very fine quality. Josh said of it Arion-like, very fancy stuff. Have you kept up with the new website?
-Adelie
Editor in Chief,
Novus Magazine
[iii]
to: H.
Trident Times: The D. T. Generation- C.C.P. F.Q.1999- H. Correspondence
H.,
As Adelie may have mentioned, I am a reporter for The Trident Times, my name is [Daniel]. I am aware you are a graduate overseas, indefinitely it seems, but as you may know the upper culmination of our quarter here is approaching, and our drafts are due. I chose to pursue this ephemerally well known yet not well documented, rumor fraught, second hand story of you, your cohort, your creative partner, and that old mentor of you all. I come to plead, to overturn your position regarding Susanna’s most recent manuscript submission. You may not realize it, but I have inferred that your impressions among Novus staff still hold some degree of tantamount taste, your word is felt far and deep in campus writing, inscrutable as it is. To your benefit and from your action this seems to be the case though, there is silently among the campus literati, undergraduate and graduate, something like the remains of a parched current, a winding and indirect path coiled by natural and unnatural forces that leads the active imaginations here towards some very limited ends. Your ends, the ends of D.T., the ends of your self-discontinued publication Opuscule, and that treatise of negative creation contained across its first two volumes. And to the investigator this is fascinating stuff, mainly because these volumes are all but scrubbed out of written history, a treatise drafted, written, delivered but briefly, offered in pyre (S.V.s.iv,-4-6/ S.VI.s.v,-2-3), and is now by name all but lost to the culture of its creation. But it still spurns its way through the ends of our young writers, obsequiously they nurture from it, it is ingrained as some aesthetical virus in their creations, wholly disseminated by impression, such a thing is felt, tactile in words and attitudes, but not manifest or called directly by name. But I have here one head of that hydralike stream, not to cleave, not to let go, one who can expound their source maybe.
H., of Susanna’s most recent written self-portrait, I ask in earnest, speaking to your background, of your specific knowledge of her, what of it betrays herself, as you seem to imply. What I have gleaned from your response is that Susanna takes after D.T., but not according to the way you would have one take from him (for don’t we all take from D.T.?). To you Susanna presents ends that are overly determined, they are photographic negatives, but according to your’s, D.T.’s, and ultimately Susanna’s old premise of creation, they are not properly negative, their negativity is not one of pure negation towards the propagation of self activated generation, they stand as a simple cancelation of the self, they do not overcome Susanna, it seems to you.
I contend your position because H., I believe in this nearly discarded manuscript there is an earnest overcoming of your trio’s critical enterprise, a subversion of your own subversions, a sublimation of D.T., who becomes what is cast as a negative towards himself, issuing a new potentiality for creation that surpasses our zeitgeist. I believe you recognize this, Novus recognizes this, and for her treason she is cast down and out, she is scrubbed according to your will, you will not have her operate outside yourself and her past. I believe Susanna has proposed a poetic treatise towards true freedom here, and like any true plight of freedom, it is thrown out by what can only be called tyrants. I am prepared to make a case for these letters you see.
-[Daniel]
Campus Culture Correspondant,
Trident Times
[iv]
to: [Daniel]
re: Trident Times: The D. T. Generation- C.C.P. F.Q.1999- H. Correspondence
[Daniel], despite your grand affirmations and barbed words, I feel I must entertain you in your endeavors. I do it not because I feel I must prove you wrong, justify myself against you, justify you to yourself, or properly show you my Susanna and our D.T., but because for posterity there may be nothing of Opuscule’s First Treatise but faint sweet memory amongst myself and Susanna. I’m surprised you are even aware of that pitiful publication. You even admit, it bears no direct fruit, it has become ephemera completely subsumed within the creative psyche of campus as some simple bit of matter is absorbed in the gut to feed the mind, the substance is no matter, its contribution minimal and satisfactory at best. I do not aim to sway the fine folks at Novus, their project is completely diverged from our own. But Susanna is not diverged from me as you say, and I have known and read her well enough to know this.
I will begin a chronicle for you and contextualize her submission against your vision, Susanna notes only in veiled impressions, in essence she writes to me alone, and D.T. is always our sole subject. Susanna has not escaped him, she has not gone outside of us and our treatise, amongst us it is a pact of blood unbroken, and she writhes against this.
It is funny, the pointless revolutions in these pieces, Susanna's motion, her half-delicate action, her non presence within her own images, semi-silent wailing. I will elaborate her letters for you, for she composes by lines of cruxes:
Light snow grains fell over Munich International, Suzy and I had landed and hailed a cab out of the airport to a rendezvous before Garmisch, D.T. waited for us in our transit at a cafe in Wolfratshausen, by the bank of the Loisach. We met him there with his wife, Elenora, paid our compliments and had lunch before heading west onto the bundesautobahn 95, D.T. secured a temporary license and rental car, now the make of the car escapes me. I remember Elenora and Suzy talked a long while, Elenora carried the form of D.T. concisely, they spoke exactly the same way. They spoke in the cafe over coffee while D.T. and I arranged the car for the trip to the Zugspitze, and finally from the road we called Suzy to the car to leave, she exited and crossed the street, waved goodbye to Elenora, and there:
“form across the road”(S.V.s.iv, -3).
We left Elenora in the north, and our caravan went south towards Garmisch. I drove the two, and D.T. on the autobahn told us for the first time of his making without making, making from nothing, he said he had placed himself far away in his free hours, his mind watching over a sea in an old body, from this vantage he explained is where he would ‘make’, or, as it came to be known, ‘ceased, so as to make’. Impressions floated according to their own activation, animated themselves only as a consequence of determination, of their determinants, by their own necessity they took breath(S.III. s.ii, -1), and were wrought as a new form uncoined, Susanna also decries those “different airs”(S.III, 10-11 ). Along the autobahn is where D.T. brought to us his readings on those long gone Roman defilers(S.III, 6 ), his idols perched against the millennium and empire, Decebelus’ stone gaze overlooking his work and people as the Face of Harakbut, half-known and sacred, artificed itself over a river in the Amazon.
After the Zugspitze, after the winter, Suzy and I returned to the States, returned to the university, with the last of D.T. for publication, the last manuscript for Opuscule, the first treatise of D.T.. The seas brought rains over the coastal scrub in the late winter. Suzy and I returned to the shrined cliff face (S.V, 12-14) overlooking the Pacific, steel gray modest surf in the winter, our residence in the north of the university overlooking the sea. In the past there we penned ourselves outright and revised for abundance, now we lay in shock of that treatise of lack. A long silence overtook us now with that manuscript, in it there was now nothing possible but silence(S. IV, 9-14 ). Susanna knew there was no more as it was in the past, strewn throughout these pieces, [Daniel], are impressions ultimately reflective of that new pose, unconquerable, not within the bounds of her to overcome by her own effort.
The transformative movement, the turn of the sequence placed at the exact midsection of these pieces, is the death whistle of Suzy’s work. Suzy’s inclusion of this excerpt of the first treatise for the third section is a vain attempt of acknowledgement, through her inclusion of it she would hope to serve herself to overcome D.T., to use his final negating conjecture in a process of cancellation. This is what I know you would posit as Suzy’s motive as well. Suzy believes herself to overcome the new style by herself, by her pithy half-hearted negations she serves to rid herself of D.T. by wholly embracing him in rejection. But this is not so, Suzy has not offered “[the] object already in possession of itself”(S.IV.s.iii). D.T.’s inclusion here may even be the only apparatus needed to neutralize Suzy’s work, the entire work celebrates its own negation by this instrument of judgment: the work is all subject, without any conclusive “non affirmation”, this piece, these pieces, answers the non-real in limp gestures towards imagistic impressions of Suzy’s self, towards myself, and D.T.
-H.
[v]
to: H.
re: Trident Times: The D. T. Generation- C.C.P. F.Q.1999- H. Correspondence
H., I cannot help but feel your senses have flown out yourself, there is one abandonment here, one totalizing impotent negation and that is your constraint, so articulated, well but ill-informed, of Susanna. I do believe you are in fact within these pieces, constellated throughout, I believe you yourself mark that “wry figure”(S.V, 3). Yes the more I contextualize through yourself, the more I believe I truly do see you are correct in this, in your own self-imposed self-placement. Suzanna is speaking to you, she contains you in these pieces, as she directly contains D.T.. They undermine you, call you, your impositions onto Novus, all your “messengers, lackeys, droogs” (S.VI, 9). The dry stream that delineates our campus, is patterned by your well of negative gravity, and Susanna only swims against this, in spite of this and D.T.'s treatise of aesthetic Law. I lament for Susanna still moored here in this university, its impressionistic imperium, enveloped within this stupored divan of negated spirit. The inverse of what you believe is at work within Susanna and her pieces, there is here only freedom contained.
Susanna’s letters are a sequence of deliverance, they circularly bring about an independent awareness of herself, this university, its faculties, currents, histories. They contextualize themselves always outside of these things so as to differentiate away from them, within them, this is the role of that scap of D.T.. There is no attempt to dance within the bounds of you, him, the lost treatise, there is only a pining for release, transformation, self-awareness.
There is no ground for you to expose these vignettes of her life on, there is no direct reference model Susanna evokes in that sense. The works may simply be a reflection of the vast plentitude of experience that may contextualize the spirit, but they are a work that is ultimately speaking for the spirit, not these created contexts. Throughout these seven pieces and their accompanying sections I read a series of movements of an unhappy consciousness.
Through cruxes, yes, these pieces are hinged by their cruxes, S.I witnesses the transfiguration of the town to a city of lordship, this is a veil, a symbolic referent pertaining to something immaterial, something only encountered when two overlapping referents are brought over each other (as in another populated mind), the fold, represented as an interpersonal “sigil” (containing those associations) binds the mandate of life. What is action by mandate but reflection and iteration, not transfiguration. Must we not forgive ourselves of our mandates? Where is the chink in the continuum of mandate, this being a through line of evolution, the seat of being to becoming, unthrottled by the convention of the decayed, there is a chain of being wrought above from below, this chain old, weathered, sometimes hollow, through it is drawn in a line. Susanna paints this principal mandate of D.T. here, and by S.II there is our first act of the potentially transfigured spirit, a sublimation via metaphoric placement. What I have read in this piece’s allusion is the spiritually Roman overlaid onto our contemporary life. We are Romans, this country, state, population, university, municipality, polis is Roman, it carries that DNA and does not abandon it, perfectly reified here now. The first act of embodiment occurs within S.II, the city embodied in Susanna from her conscious township, populated throughout(S.II, 8-9), and still hollow. S.III is to D.T., the movements of this piece hinge on experience of him, remembrance, witness of his works, here for our audience is an act of revelation of that infamous figure, he is a mortician, worse, a necromancer in the profession of the mortuary. His action found empty, falsely animated, unpotentiated, the lifeless corpse is offered the briefest glimpse of reconsciousness and gone again back towards nothing as before, and before that and before. Marking the central turn of the sequence, s.iii and S.IV, the centerpiece is that morsel of his treatise, an effectual dirge. Again here is what has been before, turn, sublimation, revelation via reflection and image. The culmination of this middle piece by the end is a dissolution of images, the admittance of vanity, the exclamation of muteness. This muteness is the little death of the mortician, s.iv and S.V his funerary procession. A pyre is raised for him and his memory that seeps throughout the polis. The end of this funerary occasion is the prayer to that old artificer, who must be distinguished from D.T.. This is the lord of D.T., of the polis, the living embodiment of creation, the union of content and form(S.V.s.iv, -7). Lamentation is left, and a final transfiguration of our Susanna is revealed, she being the unshaded warbler (S.VI.s.v, -1). Next, the ritual mycenaean Labrys(S.VI, 4) is revealed to cut that law of the treatise, and once more a final transfiguration, life to language (S.VI, 6), and that final self obliteration, Susanna has become that lack of D.T., complete exterior interiority, self activated, self silenced.
-[Daniel]
Campus Culture Correspondant,
Trident Times
[vi]
to: [Daniel]
re: Trident Times: The D. T. Generation- C.C.P. F.Q.1999- H. Correspondence
For your ornate interpretations, you have missed Suzy, unfortunately, [Daniel]. You have not released her from herself, you have not permitted her the freedom you so desperately wish for these pieces to evoke, they are not free as you wish to permit her. If your aim is to put forward this work as a true declaration of something new, something unbridled, then you must realize, and I will have you realize this now, I am not present, I take part in no current, I exert no force on whatever undercurrent of aesthetics the university subconsciously evokes. There is simply myself, my solitary and private correspondences with Adeline and the Novus team, who I am happy to advise, but not mentor. I dictate nothing of their publications or modes, I seldom see their new issues. My “binding” of Suzy comes only from that well of concrete experience which we share between ourselves and D.T.. As Suzy creates, I create, and D.T. now is fallen in silence perpetuum. Suzy is not released by you, she is not bound by me, for as Suzy is, she knows she cannot be. And this is read perfectly in these works, that is why they are unfit, mute, they cannot cohere to themselves, to Suzy, to D.T., they sprawl and bleed and there is no new life born here. I advise you [Daniel], to give up Suzy, to let this manuscript away, it is not fit for any opening up of unknown ways, it is facile, incomplete, absurd, in this they are the perfect culmination of D.T.’s enterprise. I will admit this for you, the thing is failed, these works are failed, they evoke that quality of the treatise. Novus has already made themselves clear, these pieces are unfit for publication, even if they carried those lofty qualities which you are so eager to imbue them with, Novus would not publish them, Novus needs not recognize incompleteness, in a sense they may be unbound of D.T. for that quality, in some small way going beyond him by simply existing after. Susanna does not exist after D.T., this is evident enough, and neither do I. [Daniel], as I said, I do not scorn you, I appreciate your investigation but cannot stray from my eyes and true senses and experience. Susanna’s work may perhaps be best left outside my own judgment, even her letters do not reach me anymore. [Daniel], you have convinced me there may be more than nothing in these pieces, but they cannot stand alone. I will reach out to Adeline with a copy of our correspondence, she may find it interesting enough, forward enough, to publish, to highlight something of what once was, something that struggles to be now.
-H.
[APPENDIX: SUSANNA’S MANUSCRIPT]
[S.i
a wasted hour till release
his way, outside again until-
I really know him, I might not at all
wait in silent attendance any more.
what is spun today, as if this hall were
to be my own place, my whole life, in an hour
passing by,]
S I
in that, it is, has been,within our foil,
there is transfiguration.
as it is, my own town,
turned into a city, wrought through a sigil fold
and every occurrence by mandate
and act in penance.
in relief stands the old,
miniature, as if they make up the ground
of that singular aspect above,
empty and disfigured now.
-
SII
This city, and it is something of a city
is home to few, particularly no-body,
save the transient,
and those that pass by with
great or little ease.
Although I live here,
and see her women and Persians,
her Greeks, Phonecians, Nubians, Syrians, Jews and
Romans,
there is only one path I see followed by them
and Him, and that is out broadly, West.
I, cleaving the thoughtless clouds off them,
have no more use of those knotted empty spaces,
for reft of them are their bodies, threshed is their air.
-
SII
[S.ii
for he sought to say “they are all one breath, as in a line” and couldn’t]
I had gone out
and saw that terrible rock-face,
in which he had brought out Kung
or a magnificent Harakbut Rostro, made natural through his hand
or some head for the Ocean or River,
something of his own hieratic Decebalus, Mithridates, a stamped constellatory flame all his own.
and in his own logodaedality
he has claimed his own form for himself,
and chained all others up in his art;
for he says they are all breathing,
exchanging different airs in there,
but there is nothing but the brief clambering
of dead souls interred again by him,
objects as images, names, extensions, only pass by in reference, witness, to the ear.
-
S IV
[S.iii
“It is possible to bring out the new style in sparsity of verse, in negative space of perspective; by allowing what is out of view, and thus non-permissible, or non-real to dominate the senses of the piece, it must be un-situated, falling into itself, its own conclusions and apprehensions answered in exterior successions. In this the subject is to be non-natural, it is to be entirely the subject alone and its own conclusive non-affirmation. Therefore it is simply an intensity of exterior interiority, compounding to a climax of non-being, the subject to complete the object already in possession of itself.”- D. T..]
the select few of words,
and done-in paths
of faces gone,
and now, among
the little grasses, thin boughs,
their imprints, as done on sand,
are now given over
not felt at all below, or over.
but all throughout the ones on the beach
there is one impression washed up
without cast or mold,
and entirely by nature,
all too brief.
these are the only signs and words I see and hear and know, in vain!
-
S V
[S.iv
content ∪ form Δ The Embodied Symbol
“... in the end, it is
a dirge for hours,
and a pyre of memory.”
“form is across the road:
I recognize her face first
and then she is gone.”]
and the[ir] senses have left their hearts,
and they shuttle them Northward by him,
that wry figure abandoned for
his long seasons, his days
and work away from their
shuttled funerary caravan.
and in his place, only the
various offerings, praises, substitutions,
ultimately, every variegated libation of his phlegm
putter and sputter out among them,
they extrapolate and integrate himsleves
again. Oh artificer,
lead me along the field or steppe, by shrine off of cliff face
bring me from this chill we now know, the shepherds are so tired.
-
S VI
[S.v
a burned note,
offered in pyre,
I offer lamentations.
there is no shade for that warbler ]
there are many words of words that fold over onto themselves
or else come up again against themselves and in their speech
I say of the many differing acts,
they are partitioned double axes, commissure by two rivers of
Law, like a pebble:
as living is, the Language is.
I had somehow sunk into everything
as if the whole world, her peoples,
his poems, and various messengers, lackeys, droogs
and attendants were but cushions
on the divan, and I was again
enveloped so deep, as it were not myself,
but those cushions that prompted my sleep.
Lack, in perpetuum, forever there, I am without.
-
Sussanna’s Voice, VII
it is not sufficient that the late ages
are o’ergrown outside themselves.
their turnpike is against us, really
for we invade as outlanders,
and contemplate them after we have reft
what little we could hear from out-
side their walls, or over their shore;
after some great outpouring hushed out in the night.
and like children trying to catch
a stream, there is some flaw in our hand.
I am inflicted with marsh-fever,
like Marius, finally run aground;
my many sires I have waived off; Greeks I have waived off,
“this city, Rome, may not last forever”.