Entering social space is entering surveillance. Interacting patterns of sleight, shift, screen, swerve, adaptation, part-compliance, due courtesy, collaborative readiness, acknowledgement of the energy being brought by others also bargaining the surveiled.
◊
When you write something you must be sure to let your observer know what the topic is at all times. They are looking for stable topical platforms in order to array meaning quotients according to the platform. They survey your topical adherence.
We mustn’t conjecture that this topical surveillance acuity is something dreamed up by observers. They are responding to the topical imperative of speed. Speed is efficiency and topical takeaways are continually surveiled not only by observers but by machineries of delivery whose reputation depends on the perceivable topical stability of the materials.
We mustn’t conjecture that perception is something dreamed up by the aforementioned observers nor the delivery machinery. They too rely on perception being itself a topically consistent approach quotient that can be brought to a match with the encounter.
◊
Surveillance of topicality’s itself to be surveiled. Such strictures press into the skin: chicken wire patterns can resemble the brilliance of honeycomb. Topicality has the brilliance of the soccer ball jamming pattern to enable its effects.
◊
When you write something you must prepare to adhere to the letter and spirit of “submission,” a ubiquitous posture term employed in what might be forgetfulness, given the reference work enjoyed in the term: “submission” is to yield, to offer from a bowing position, to take one’s substrata place in a structure of power.
We mustn’t conjecture that the delivery systems dream up terms like this: we must be kind and available, topically. To turn the topic of submission to an account that non-aligns with the history of the term, to re-invent willing participation in swerved topicality monikers.
When you write something you must imagine that its topicality is evident because that makes it easier to keep it in the open. To submit openly to topical survey can involve picking up the words and looking under their roots to see if there’s inappropriate dirt attached.
We mustn’t imagine that dirt belongs to any topic save dirt, dirtiness, dirty. What happens when dirt as in soil as in earthy crumbles, friable compost-like matter, stumbles into the referential zones of a writing whose topic is not reliably topsoil associated?
When you take a walk in the middle of writing, your topicality picks up the matter that imbues into your shoes, if you are wearing such. The ground submits to your walking. The ground is the topic of your legs and feet as you take a turn with its available topicality.
We mustn’t imagine that unbearable topics impinge in the approach topicality in your writing. It isn’t as though the mechanics of the writing situation are at fault for the crack in the ground floor of your topic when you’re writing it. Your task becomes to shift the zone of submission to a topic that can be summarily surveyed.
◊
Such an approach chosen by the weathers of language encountering the landmass of the social subject. Seeking to scatter inside the enclosure so the scatter effect leaps. The subject leaps thereby.
◊
When you feel the flutter of disobedience in the very modalities of topical surveillance, you can think of the situation as already other than how it occurs at that moment. When the rooftops are full of calls, when electric cars pad the pockets of the jumping fascist, when uncertainty about the source grounds of information perfuses the wires.
We mustn’t imagine that there’s ever a situation in which the wires can be really uncrossed, even though we put ourselves forward to untwist them for a staged scenario of uncrossing’s topical survey. The wires get embedded in the ground whose dirt inveigles.
When you take on a topical survey, you have already agreed to align your task work with the machinery that subtends such cooperation. It’s quite itchy, tender, communitarian at the same time as it’s building an entire body part that stands for instability and calling it inside the tent.
We mustn’t imagine that observers in tents are anywhere near the possibility of escapades from topic. It’s their very topicality that hits the paydirt of wire-alignment with the topic that makes a temporary attention. How does culture get made? Dirt gets filled on dirt, mouthfeel organs picking their way out.
When you take up a topic you give yourself to it also; ectopic provisional sutures can co-hurt. Slinging the words on to a surface almost a window to a cultural set of giant ears – imagined, co-constitute – whose holes thrust out beeswax armature.
We mustn’t imagine the ears create their tropic bypass. Culture gets made with bodies that are constant, fetishizing, devotional towards other bodies that resemble them enough for breath’s sufficiency. Bodies are not topics – can they be perceived only topically? Some might say so and in saying so rescore topicality’s surveillance.
◊
Head-on evasion is to strengthen the topic whilst entering zones of scatter – not with purposes other than those brought by the weather of language encountering the landmass of this social subject.
◊
When you want to topic, when you get ready to submit, when you want to strike the wire of surveillance that resounds inside and outside, survey, sure thing, always already twinging that wire, twinged in the shared machinery, you might not even have the apparition of topic’s choice.
We mustn’t imagine that the machinery of perception can follow without cease along one of its infinite cables – where does culture emerge? The skin of the sufferer right there being surveilled, the absence of survey where it might do good, the soft soil whose ambience makes your footfall outside the writing.
When you strive for the grace of participation’s welcome you count your letter strikes, the footprints of the topics every one of which creates the substrate, you think in topical writing that begins to approach survey’s exhaustion you exhume exemplitude.
We mustn’t imagine that exemplitude is anything other than topical survey’s exhaustion. Idea magnets heave their search and plank on the mettle of a One (subdue its type): such topical clarity, such rest from survey! Topicality’s another word for stitching the dirt back on to piles whose machinery aligns devotion.
When you comply with topicality’s devotion you can participate in the glory of knowing where you stand – this is a good: you open all your cans to the implosion of surveillance, whose inveiglement cannot hurt you now. To bring the survey to the hearthstone at the pitch point of the tent.
We mustn’t imagine such resistance is anything other than entirely performative. Putting yourself at the distributed centers of co-suffering. Cutting the topical streams right at their embankments. Submitting to agreement clauses with smile’s apocope. Counting your own adherence to topical surveillance so as to spare your future dirt any trouble in the stitches.
◊
Words can enter and scatter surveillance. Topical surveillance can press the skin of someone already trained to make scaffolding, delicate paper layers, analogue parity imaginaries with the whirr of planetary machinery.
◊
Book Report: a Singaporean poet, Hao Guang Tse, performs in such energies in Tse’s book The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association (Tinfish Press 2023). The book’s poem titles frequently indicate a close relation with the resist-submit energies communicated elsewhere in this present piece being written now.
Here are some of Hao Guang Tse’s poem titles: “repeated errors in the survey form are intentional”; “not the mirror image but the reverse side of the mirror”; “as like hives of meaning, buzzing & not quite stable”; “the ghost words want to learn how to fly.”
The legible (what I elsewhere also call) “soft text” of the poems’ layout happens in irregular ladders of associative signs evading presented topical surveillance. Reading among and across the lines picks up unscripted soft text oxygen. The lexical tethers occur in lines whose curtailed compliance goes in plural directions, as in this example of a (fully quoted here) “poem body”:
Kwong’s face in the face red w/ shame
of Hong of which is red in some
Chineses &
Kong air or port or portly
like
tram driver “I love how your neck’s
helping people”
alternate uni form’s
verse twisted ahk you
said well I will react you
social media starlet
don’t I’m not you do you
helping me
blind ourself
[The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association, p 49]
This poem, titled “in building socialism w/ Chinese characteristics,” performs and retroverts its topicality like a sea cucumber’s self-evisceration. The latter image is a felt interpretation of the poem’s impact in terms of topicality compliance. In this legible self-evisceration, all the innards are available: as for the sea cucumber, the poem’s innards function in ways removed from earlier or other organization to reboot defaults and construct severed mimetic life in organic rebuilds one may or may not be around to observe.
The layout of Tse’s poem delivers a perceivable double column read-down continuity, intensified in the syntactic and referential connectedness of the left column and then of the right column. All the same, the tethers also leap left-to-right (where ◊ marks intralinear blanks): “face ◊ red w/shame”; “alternate uni ◊ form’s”; “I’m not ◊ you”.
On the right column is perceptible political color-symbolism, “red,” associated with and swerved from “shame” (w/ which it retains inherence) to more than one way to deploy the referenced global language (“Chineses”). Then gainly air body forms serve transit custom, “air or port or portly” leading down, word by twist, to social media cliché (“you do you”). The right column’s five “you” forms spread the subject. Soft text opportunities blossom kinetic transparent bruises among hard text – color symbols (bodily, political), elements (“air” referenced and empaged), and fragmented body (polytongues, twisted neck, blind [eyes]) – and also re-disappear.
On the left column we are presented Hong Kong, the tram driver’s articulated claim, and the negating response from the face of Kwang. These negating words are not attached as words but described as expressive embodiment: “Kwang’s face” “said well I” “don’t”: the face “said” without the words that are printed: the body’s most overt mirror is allocated signs that appear elsewhere as reported otherness of possible interpretation. A socially unacceptable set of sentiments is deflected from its topical expectation: the poem does not submit although it tenders.
The layout spread of the poem’s report pivots on a “like” whose placement is akin to that of the humanimal solar plexus of the poem body: there’s nothing like similitude discourse to punt the topic in airs and let it skizzle. The terminus word “ourself” shapes a singular with a plural personal pronoun since there’s nothing like relation to call out the imbrication of the subject and same-same. The poem is quite itchy, tender, and communitarian at the same time as it’s scaffolding an entire body (ontologically contiguous presence-and-absence) in the regionally topical surveillance tent.
All the poems in Tse’s book perform with a similar layout, teaching us to enjoy the poems’ plurally resistant topicalities – until the last moments, when electrified strikeouts appear. The penultimate poem unappears entirely into now-repletely-seeded soft text, three unscripted pages beneath the title “Cassandra, cobwebs are spun back & forth in the sky” (67-69). Elsewhere in the book “Cassandra shouts // on the roundabout” “wants the head” (30), and now at the end her addresser observes the lingual evisceration of the poet’s prophecy pages, emptily full, compliant in the (given and ungiven) forms. Imagine here three blank pages following such a title’s provoked commitment. This poem’s body cannot be surveyed – except with everything the book has already given, withheld, and rappelled. Such a tender cultural offering to participate in poly-eviscerate topical webs, to be re-spun.
