It was originally published under the title Triton. Wesleyan University Press reissued it under the title Trouble on Triton with a forward by Kathy Acker who introduces the reader to the intricacies of Samuel Delany’s prose by way of an extended meditation on the magical aspect of Orphic traversals.
For the poet, the world is word. Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each other.
Not it should be noted fuck each other up. The mode here is the copulatory. Not per se combat.
Further on she places into this mix of merging the active role of the reader.
Every book, remember, is dead until a reader activates it by reading. Every time that you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies. Aeneas did. Odysseus did. Listen to Delany, a prophet.
And we find in the second appendix devoted to “Ashima Slade and the Harbin-Y Lecures”, Delany delivering a succinct exposition of how world and word hook up.
There are situations in the world. And there are words — which are, to put it circularly, what we use to talk about them with. What makes it circular is that the existence of words, and their relationship to meanings, and the interrelationships among them all, are also situations. When we talk about how words do what they do, we are apt to get into trouble because we are maneuvering through a complex house of mirrors, and there is almost no way to avoid that trouble, short of resorting to pictures — which I am not above doing.
When there is trouble on Triton. SNAFU. Resort to pictures. (My first reading of the paragraph above treated the last phrase as declarative i.e. that in the above paragraph our author was not resorting to pictures; now, I see that the author is announcing what is to follow — the use of pictures. Still I’m iffy about the line between “picture” and “word” since both can through different modulations result in “images”.)
And so for day 1112
29.12.2009