Between Omens, Amens, Demands, Amends: Conversation with Adeena Karasick on Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations
Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations (Lavender Ink, 2023) is Adeena Karasick’s most recent book which flies onto the scene as both a text and a multi-media project involving an award-winning audio/video collaboration, as well as a 52 page full-color, “Flight Deck” that just aches to be read/performed, collaboratively or solo, on a cross-country or trans-continental flight.
While most commentators that I have thus far read focus on the Aerotemania section that comprises that second 53% of the book, I found myself more drawn to the poems that make up the first section of the book: The Book of Lumenations. Since these two sections are so very different from each other, I asked Adeena if she’d be willing to talk more about some aspects of the first section with me.
CS: Adeena, while reading “Eicha IV,” I felt letters calling attention to themselves as much as the words they’re in, the look of lower-case letters as much as the sound, architecture:
Sifted Riffs of Spilt Surfeits (17)
The rounded s..s..s, the laughing funny freak fop flag of half-mast(iff) ff
sharing the skyline with the obelisk skyscraper of the l
& the “t” with pronation salmon for feet more like a dancer’s curling toes
than the allegedly firmer foundation of the straight and narrow “l”
that only appears once and is overshadowed by the fs and the ts
& lower case “i” whose neck is so much more numinous than
its rigid upper case phallic metaphysics of presence (can I denote without connoting?)
ah but in shifts the f and t form one letter in this avenir font,
hard not to personify or bodify a touching encounter,
and in surfeit the r and the f, embrace as one letter …
What is the question? (Stein’s last words) Is this anything you’d like to riff on?
AK: Hey Chris! What an utterly archetexutral reading! I love how your paradigmatic comments really accent its compositional makeup- as one letter morphs into another highlighting their look, sound [t’s, f’s, an uncrossed l]– their syntactic e/rrangemenets derangements leading to new ways of reading. And through all the dancing flags, salmon feet and curling toes, all the sibilance and fricatives, constriction of breath in the mouth and lips, alluding also (if I may add), to the Latin musical notation, fortissimo, (ff) with power, force —
Very fun also that you noted the font was Avenir – which i don’t usually use, but was so drawn to — not just because of the look of it, but as you know the book’s title, is Ærotomania, and in French, airplane is avion, which (both sonically and tangentially semantically) felt so close to the word avenir – which refers to all that is “to come” – ie read through Derrida in note #9 of the title poem:
The future is that which—tomorrow, later, next century—will be.
There is a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled,
foreseeable. But there is a future, l’avenir (to come) which refers
to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected.
For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable.
The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival.
So, if there is a real future, beyond the other known future, it is
l’avenir in that it is the coming of the Other when I am completely
unable to foresee their arrival.
Like Benjamin’s, “Jetztzeit” (now-time) outlined in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, a notion of time that is ripe with revolutionary possibility; time that has been detached from the continuum of history; poised, filled with energy, ready to leap into an ever-becoming future. And thus, the very font itself, speaks to the contemporaneousness of past, present, future, and so was happy to be able to (in both form and content), have that typographic element “fly” with me through the text.
CS: Perhaps your “violations” of expectation (I originally read “spilt” as “split” and “riffs” as “rifts” which means split), even on the most microcosmic levels of languaging, enact, or embody that Jetzeit (the now-time), jetting as time flies away in the Other to open space for the revolutionary possibility of the entirely unprecedented and unexpected away from our conventional training in alienating standard English that, as you mention at various times through this sequence, is involved in policing (earlier in Eicha IV first read “balletic” originally as “Ballistic”).
The phrase also invites me to sound it. I have to look to say it about 5 times. Then it’s in short term memory enough, I can look away & mantra chant it indulging mouth muscles trying not to think about what it could mean. After about a minute of that, the meaning maker may try to unriddle, or grammarian to unpack (to do those police in different vices). Sifted Riffs of Spilt Surfeits? It harbors a personal meaning (or enacting) for me, as musicians listen back to a 30 minute improvisation (spilled surfeits) and collaboratively sift through riffs (and grooves where we “locked in”), to find the diamonds in the ruff riffs, to shape into more structured song that help the improvisations build together, porous poesis purrs.
In (this version of) yours, tones of lamentations become tongues of lumenations, “ruddier than choral, sapphire, milking crimson syrup,” a voice of affirmation that can be medicinal after overdosing on static primary colors, making light of its own perjured “yaysay.”[1]
“As care curls/ in her swirled whorl’s
spurred leisure/stirred
spur of porous roar…”
As music dips into the “u” of curls, & love train dance steps follow “swirled” written on the floor, an €motion (the dance between motion & emotion) allows me to feel your book’s macrocosm in its microcosm, graces and insouciances, less like neurosis than the (url spurning) blues, lumenating variations in (not just on) tones of lamentations.
flares in the florid lore
of soaring horror
Not being aware of the Hebrew text, I am missing some references. How much does that matter? Would you want to say anything about that? Feel free to surprise me with something I am unable to foresee.
AK: oh i adore how you read this through a musician’s ears / not only taste its rhythms grammar, lexicon but “play” it through its slippery riffs though improvisatory modes of meaning – or how as you kinda say, these “luminated” / illuminated or lamenting tongues are in fact medicinal – or i might add hermeneutic – which makes me think of Derrida’s “Pharmakon” – that which heals by making sick.
And through the motion / emotion, machinations and variation of sonic sense both caressing and extending the original Hebrew text – which laments the destruction of both the 1st and 2nd Temple and Jerusalem, yet written though Covid, this new version, in conversation with not only its language and history, speaks to the destruction of all our cities, as desolate widows overcome with misery. And through reflection, deflection, refraction and the fracturing of language, homophonically re-situates the original text to the horrors and hope of the present moment — and moving through desolation ruin, prayer and recovery, exploring ways that in rupture, there is rapture.
In the original Hebrew Lamentations text, Eicha 1 focuses on desolation, Eicha 2: misery, Eicha 3: hope, Eicha 4: lament and Eicha 5: prayer (a kind of repentance and recovery). Working between various translations, editions, renditions, additions, permutations and re-combinations, i gave myself quite a bit of leeway, but aimed to maintain a fidelity to the original in both its sonic texture and emotional resonance. And as such, becomes a text of defractions and transpositions, contrascriptions, substitutions; an annextual discourse of contemplative hunger; or a ventriloquized latticework where each phrase (as Anne Bloch might say), a contaminative “lexicell,” exaltically and ecstatically dis-easing the way a virus might enter another’s DNA — erupting as a consanguinity of interconstellated contingencies, referencing not only the specifics of its own historical circumstance, but a reminder of how dis-ease is an ever-present condition.
Or read through McLuhan’s, Laws of Media whereby an artifact enhances, reverses, retrieves and obsolesces, these “translations” these Eicha translations, do not so much obsolesce the original but in Zoharic terms, (13th C. mystical discourse), employ the concept of atikin haditin, a pseudo-Aramaic neologism that means “ancient new,” journeys deep within the original and makes it new.
And of course, not only is it re-visiting the Biblical text (and making it “new”), but with this particular section, it’s a definite shoutout to Zukofsky, his “With a Valentine (the 12 February)” Hear, her / Clear / Mirror, Care / His error…” and re-investing it with a kind of prayer for the new era.
CS: “Contemplative hunger” reminds me of the end of Eicha I:
“And this is the delegitimized.
vow’s trauma blockages
in the grief-hardened hunger.”
It’s such a perfect description of desolation. I feel that virus “erupting as a consanguinity of interconstellated contingencies” between Covid and people from according to tradition, 2463 years ago whose city was destroyed by Babylon, and how your piece can be read through both (and therefore other) contexts. And I love the way you subtly music and emote (?) enact the difference between desolation and misery in the first two Eicha. Would you want to say more about those two Eicha?
AK: As we were all living through such trauma i was interested in upacking what the differences between “desolation” and “misery” was exactly, as often these sentiments are somewhat interchangeable. So, in Eicha I was thinking about how “desolation” isn’t just emptiness, bleakness, hopelessness, sorrow but implies a sense of separation.
And certainly, during Covid we were all so separated – and so it begins, “And as the city sits / in the ferocity of discordance / I will dwell alone in the fields / melting with provenance, tributaries / heredity.” Crating the weight of history within it, coupled with a sense of desolation, devastation. And re-living the rallies and uprisings, demonstrations, mandates and resistances; ruination permeated our bodies, our minds, and our cities:
And gone is the drifting splendor
the veritas of naked signs’ sacrifice
magnified in inconsolable deflection
Also, with a right justified margin, graphematically speaking to the ever-encroaching right wing agenda…
And in “Eicha 2” it moves toward a sense of anguished misery; enacting that sense of distress, discomfort, despair, (how you highlighted): writ[h]ing in “grief hardened hunger.” This one starts with a visual poem palimpsestically overlaying various aspects of the word “light” and “drowning,” “screaming in strung shadows, revenance” // slain in the synchrony of / slung slaughter…” And drenched in desolation and desire, mystery, misery, cries out and says, “Lie with me / in our ash-starred silence” — but due to the absolute solitary locked-in-ness of the period, all one can do is “suck the sting of sun clung lettered-skin / as I open my mouth / wide against you; ink gnashed in the twinned ignition of scar-studded scripts” — alive in the “choked zones” between the body (corps) and body (text).
CS: Thank you for calling my attention to the connection between the right justified margin and the ever-encroaching right-wing agenda which, now that “Covid” is officially over, feels like as much the disaster these poems speak to as Covid was. “Eicha 3,” brings into play a wide array of interpersonal dynamics and rhetorical registers more nuanced than the “hope” of the original. As the addresses to the implied you could be read as commands, invitations, pleas, prayers, desires or even descriptions of what the you is already doing, conversant with complaint, I feel an erotic friction that makes me want to re-sculpt signs/of foaming rupture as the poem moves from:
Hail the billow of campy siege, the truance
of gilded travaille
to “curled indices/ in the call of farce.” And when I read the final four lines, the hope seems absolutely dissipated, if not the “fitful defiance,” but the poem (or its speaker) is not even necessarily characterizing itself as “fitful defiance,” it could be reminding us that the policing interlocutor has (mis)seen it that way, for many things may be projected onto this poem as I cast my mask on you/it in my attachment to campy hope, especially in farce-fed foamy rupture that fears it’s sucked the eros out of your city and then has the audacity to fine you!
AK: There is definitely an erotic friction in Eicha 3 – campy, playful, defiant, desirous and commanding. And i’d say your “mis(seeing)” is more of a mise-en-scèning lol highlighting the ever-contradictory predicament [“screaming revenance”] we were endlessly mired in — which made me think about how this sense of ambiguity, inconsistency, paradox was so especially ever-present during Covid — not only were there so many mixed messages, ie mask wearing, the washing of boxes, but even language became extra slippery – remembering how say, pre Covid, remote learning was about navigating the clicker; social distancing was ghosting; and masks were for theatrical affect. Or how flattening the curve was to watch one’s carbs; or wearing latex gloves was part of a BDSM night of phat passion ; ) or when aerosols housed hair spray, spray paint, room fresheners not the propellant pressure of respiratory nuclei; when UV Light was for tanning; when chloroquine was to ward off mosquitos; when the longest lines were those of Proust and Melville, when language…was a virus.
All to say yeah, as i sit “naked with his yoke in my mouth,” still “suck solace in the eros of my city” — even as “[i am policed] in the milk of daybreak”. Eicha 3 def moves with daring / defiance through fear, eros, hope, speaking to the possible / impossibility of control.
CS: I also am in awe of the multi-media recordings you made of the Eicha pieces if you want to say anything more about them
AK: Aw thanks! They were made over a long period, one at a time and only finished #5 a month ago. i wanted to highlight the physicality of the words in a more spectral way; to hear it and see it, perform with it and in it, and take the words and their resonances, their vigilance, thresholds, agonies and garrulousness off the page and onto walls, floors, ceiling, screens. So, i created videopoems from the text (each one ranging from 1- 5 min each) with music composed and performed by Grammy award winning composer, Frank London, and me performing them. Each one has a different textural feel – but each of them highlight a mood of longing languing, misery lament and hope; aspects of light / shadow, veils all mired in a kind of bifurcated / fragmented sensibility. Two of them incorporate some of the visual collaborations with Canadian vispo aritist, Jim Andrews, and 3 of them were in collaboration with Italian filmmaker Igor Imhoff. With the help of New York film editor, Max Drexler, I recently compiled them together as a 5-part suite and just learned that the full 20 min film has won three 2023 IndieFEST Film Awards Awards in the categories of Experimental Film, Jewish Film, and Woman Filmmakers, as well as 2 others from 2 Awards of Recognition from the Accolade Global Film Competition: Best Experimental Film and Best Jewish Film…and have been “Officially Selected” for the 2023 ARFF Berlin International Awards, 2023 Indie Short Fest, 2023 Depth of Field International Festival and the 2024 WPRN Women’s International Film Festival; so this is all pretty exciting. I like the fact that the work can exist as a multimedic / polymodal piece – as text / sound / performance, questioning the varied ways we perceive language and meaning and how that can be ever-shifting, depending on its media. The entire film (with fuller description) is available here: https://filmfreeway.com/EichaTheBookofLumenations
CS: So glad to hear about the upcoming screening! You’re doing amazing work. I also like the way your book flows from the gravitas of the Eicha, to a more New York School kind of humor in “Talmudy Blues II,” whose very title proposes such a wonderful syncretism.
AK: lol thanks – more and more i just need to amuse myself : ) – so the book itself moves from the campy lament of the Eicha – to a more overtly humorous / jouissey play in “Talmudy Blues II” – this piece is full of yiddish puns and Jewish sayings that all are diverted, aphorisms that get hijacked, which I must say, was a lot of fun to write – The poem was written for Yiddish cultural theorist and translator, Michael Wex, whose New York Times Best Selling, “Born to Kvetch” definitely plays in this playground — unlocking some of the hysterical / historical etymologic, religious /or historical bases for some of these sayings. I love the dance between the languages and idioms, borders, orders, laws, codes, where all is shattered, fragmented, wandering and rebellious underscored by swervy, jouissey JEWcy play. i don’t expect everyone to get all the references – but say in the self-referential lines :
like messy babameisse
it’s wearing its Talmudic lenses
waiving its big yicchus —
So, uh babameisse is yiddish for “storytelling” or “gossip”, and yichus, though literally, means a “long (and esteemed) lineage,” colloquially it refers to uh a long line / being well-hung, ha! i was just enjoying tasting the deliciousness of the language riffing on these intralingual puns. Or again as in “like the Maggid of Mezeritch / it’s got a big tisch.” : ) The Maggid of Mezeritch (Don Ber ben Abraham of Mezeritch) was a disciple the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism and was regarded as the first systematic exponent of the mystical philosophy. And within Hassidic Judaism, a tisch, which literally means “table” — refers to a joyous celebratory meal with their Rebbe -where the gatherers sing and bang on tables and tell stories. So with a defamiliarizing and perhaps sacrilegious joyousness, just playing around with the connections of the celebration of big booties and uh how engaging with them is a holy act ; )
CS: As one “razed Catholic” in churches that edited out the “make a joyful noise” part, this is refreshing to hear. The Catholic church could certainly benefit from a “tisch.” Now I’m curious about how this first section we’ve been discussing (“The Book of Lumenations”) relates to the second section “Ærotomania.” Although the last piece in the first section is the latest installment in your multi-book “Checking In” sequence, the piece before that, “House of the Rising Son(s),” in its pandemic confinement (a house is not a home), feels like a polar opposite in to the linguistic flights of the second section. Am I making too much of this distinction?
AK: Yeah, i guess it could feel that way, but i was more thinking of it in terms of moving from darkness into light – starting with the darkness and hope of The Book of [Lamentations] and ending on the sense of flying through new and unexpected destinations; exploring ways sometimes we have to travel through horror, darkness, tragedy, uncertainty to get to some sense of light. So yes by way of “House of the Rising Sons” which was really an ironic commentary of the Trump years, and then the highly parodic “Checking In 2” which through playful mashups of literary, pop culture, political, religious and consumerist references, is a kinda investigation of our over-saturated mediatic environment, of incessant updates and self-aggrandizement, and speaks to our ongoing desire for information while acknowledging how fraught with myth that information can be), we arrive at the 52 page title poem, “Ærotomania.”
And in full color, (thank you very much Lavender Ink / Diálogos), that section explores how the airplane as an erotic theater, a social text of secret motives, is structured like a language. As both a love letter and a lament to the airplane, it speaks to ways both individuals and meaning get transported to multiple and sometimes unexpected destinations; and how, like language itself, the airplane becomes a symbol of hope. So, in this way it harkens back to the beginning of the book — And this section particularly, as a border-blurring text incorporating elements of visual poetry/concrete work, asemic/sound poetry, theoretical discourse, and poetic, philosophical, and Kabbalistic aphorisms, highlights how language is an ever-swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and codes and transports us physically, aesthetically, prosthetically, psychically, through passion, politics, pleasure, and promise as we negotiate loss and light towards new ways of seeing and being. And, like the airplane itself, language flies through a variety of zones and registers, soaring to higher and higher levels, carrying its passengers through radically transformative possibilities. All in all to say i see the movement from “Eicha” to “Ærotomania” (with all its stops along the way) as a multi-legged “flight” path navigating through the sensual and the censored, tactically syntactical pacts of permissions, missions, misprisions, anxieties and abandonnements, obsessions and flourishes — and through sky-wrung darkness,
[1] I feel “becomes” in its complementary, non-uni-directional causal sense, recursive, otherness beyonding between pre-flight light fight flights derailing armed short-hand cuddlecore emoji celerity stalks calling, culling assurance’s alacrity assonance dissident di-stance…