Author's Notes: "Acts of Dissipation"

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

Je deteste this kind of commentary about one's own work as unseemly and uncouth, but. . . .

I can't see this as particularly confusing or complex. The syntax is uncommon, but I don't think the vocabulary is unfamiliar.

I think the grand theme is apparent enough in the title and the first few sentences. Out of chaos emerges order, which has its day, imposing its own structure and forms in its arts and sciences and forms of communication, its own architectures, before eventually beginning to shatter in the face of the new, the unanticipated novel revolutions in perception, in the rising forms of unforeseen organization that are obvious and readily apparent to new, youthful eyes unencumbered by the blinders of the past, whole new blossoming worlds to which old eyes are not privy. This is a continuous process in creation as old-timey belief systems must shatter and rupture and decay in the face of new ways of looking at things. But as the line about Ymir indicates, the new world is fashioned from the body (the doings and history) of the old: in the anti-transubstantiation, the flesh of the god is made mortal and youthful and fresh, a theme to be revisited when we make it to the tree and stream. But first. . . .

The gaping matronly abyss is the birthing of the new prevailing worldview; the continuing act of the birth of creativity; novelty spilling from the womb of wondrous imagination. Briefly reference to the legend of Marduk and Tiamat follows, which is simply another version of the tale of Ymir and the creation of the world out of a dismembered body. Then, beginning with the words 'These long-hoarded seeds implanted,' there follows a long sentence, extremely simple in its construction: every phrase structured exactly (or almost exactly) like every other phrase, before the punch line at the end, intended to catch the reader up in the drumbeat of inevitably heavy, pending doom as all the truths and logics that have constituted a lifetime commence to splinter and fragment and dissolve and dissipate. Everything that once was whole is now dismembered, drawn and quartered, all familiar and trustworthy structure broken, hewed and scattered and scrambled. Immediately an apocalyptic vision sets in, beginning in the last few words of the long sentence in which the seas break their bounds and invade dry land, submerging the continents, and then so on.

This is the epic overthrow of every life, of every worldview, though perhaps this is a myth-cycle no longer fashionable to the orderly, scientific gestalt of the modern Western world (wherein we neglect reflecting on the fact that this gestalt is itself a secret language built upon axiomatic faith and shared folklore and fairy tales and legends). Finally, the image of the tree and the river makes the whole cycle organic; Ymir was not slain fully unwittingly by Odin, Vili and Vé; Ymir at least subconsciously was an active participant in his own creative, generative destruction, and now his body/wisdom are returned to the tidal pool of genetic knowledge from which future generations are destined to be stirred together and constituted and born. In this final act of shattering, fallen leaf by fallen leaf, his spirit is recycled and redistributed and will be reborn again and again into all futures, as it has been in the past. The damning lie, I suppose, might be that of incomprehension that we tell ourselves, of our incomplete, short-sighted understanding, of seeing ourselves as unique and independent and singular products of our own creation, as if we're the authors of our own souls, perhaps; although, in truth, I prefer to leave this as a lesson for the student to resolve. . . .

And then, at the very end, all the foregoing is revealed to be the eddying action transpiring within the cauldron belonging to the fateful witches in that Scottish Play, a play all about broken down body parts and minds and intermingled psychic nightmares and prophetic visions and the crushing powers of subconscious imagination. But one must not speak of such things, and the only way to ward off and dispel evil spirits is to quickly quote from The Merchant of Venice, as the final line does.

But this is about -- if my lines, or anyone else's, can be said to be about anything (and I would never profess that; but for argument's sake) -- this is about the psychological meaning of severance, of disassociation, particularly as symbolized by severed body parts, the fragments uncannily implying the absent whole; the stitching together Frankenstein-wise of horrific, unfamiliar new bodies out of the found fragments of the past, taking bits here and there but discarding the bulk and boiling it all together with a horrible and noxious aroma. This is organic life; this is the march of our recorded chronicles; this is the recurring generation gap that makes a broken step function of history. The demolished and shredded cannot be rejoined and healed; all looking into the past is a product of fantastic archeological reconstruction and story-telling and creative guess-work that reveals as much (or more) about the missing pieces as what's glued together. Memory fails; large swaths are unrecoverable, unless they become the humus of the soil of future dreams. Interpersonal drama, the stuff of our day-to-day lives, fails too; old conflicts, if they are carried on across generations, are practiced out of ritual, not out of retained primal beliefs and the founding psychic wounds. This kind of formalized (or stylized) mutilation, this psychic dismemberment, is inherent to the myth-structure of man; it is not particularly calculated for shock value; it is an organic, eternal process; but then, so is the return to the river, although it's hard to remember this, maybe, during the preceding ages of dissipation.

I guess this is an assertion of what I had in my mind before I started writing this; if the piece fails to convey these notions, then it fails, and I accept that judgment. "Acts of Dissipation" is free in the world, and is open to anyone's interpretation, anyone who might care to muddle all the way through to the end. But I don't think it's a collection of mingled poetic phrases, although I would find that criticism of many other things I've written completely justified.

[Steps down from soapbox and skulks away, but feeling a little better about self.]