REVIEW OF A DARK SAMADHI BY KRIS SAKNUSSEMM

REVIEW OF A DARK SAMADHI BY KRIS SAKNUSSEMM

I’ve been having dark fun and disturbing visions with DS. I think it’s deserving in every way of the Robert Smith and Corpse praise. There is a quirky and novel sense of craft but also what the mathematician David Hilbert called “spurkraft”–hunch power, resulting in both a sense of randomness and precision.

The first level of reading experience I liken to the CSI/X-Files thing of a torch being flashed around. We see flashes and hints–like what we were talking about with the movie Jacob’s Ladder or “Weird scenes inside the goldmine,” as Jim Morrison said. (I saw a few umbrellas and sewing machines on dissecting tables–I even got a glimpse of a very unnerving toy giraffe that my sister made years ago out of argyle socks!)

Directly/obliquely, we get exposed to a very eclectic mix of psychic environments that feel like a blend of alchemist’s lair, morgue, editing suite, second hand store, backstreets, bodies, primeval broth–and a complex composite unconscious–not so much Collective as determined (as only the most sophisticated organism-devices can be) to dismantle itself. Evolution through cannibalisation. Reality as rejected organ–and some new species of dream state arising in its place. The next stage seemed to move past the breakdown of boundaries into a reconfiguration of associative paths and symbolic patterns of connection. Like what Burroughs talks about in “penetrating the silence of the hieroglyph.” Getting to the silence requires a discipline but on the other side is a very lush garden of interrelationships, which may be some sort of higher platform analogue of what’s transpiring at the deeper system level of synaptical firings. Or as Kesey would put it, “What happens when you commune with the spirit of a monitor lizard.” (I don’t know if you were thinking of that in your poem about said beast, but as we know, everything is connected.)

I think it goes without saying that there are some people–and in many cases they can be theoretically cultured, regular readers of both poetry and prose–who aren’t willing to take these kinds of journeys or to give themselves over to the liquidification of conventional thought patterns that your work provokes. I would ask, why they bother to read at all–but in any case, I’m certain you’re not trying to write for them and don’t care what they think. So, as I’m sure you know, this is going to be too “weird” for some and that’s all they will be able to say. Another group will I think talk about the question of “coherence” and the issue of denotative, representational meaning vs. the possibilities of abstract language.

“Trance states prove to be forms of metanoia, temporary restructuring of reality orientation” - Joseph Chilton Pearce.

This is where the reading experience began to stabilise and to come into a sustainable focus for me. I began to see the book as definitely the work of someone who has trafficked in the visual arts from several points of view. I came to see the cover art as not only “appropriate” but as an explicit, literal hieroglyph for the shadow garden of thought and image patterns behind and within.

Having arrived there, my attention shifted back to invidual lines and the repetition of certain types of phrasing and fixational icons. I was aware of an underlying sense of structure to the book as a whole, but I found myself less interested in trying to delineate and define that and more compelled to examine the micro level of metaphor and declarative statement–and the hearing/vocal/audio aspect. The musical sound elements starting coming through very vividly and I grooved on that for a while–the sit in the sunny corner and watch the smoke rise part of the acid trip.

In coming out of that, and moving toward some holistic response to the book, I found myself thinking of one of my favorite poets: e.e. cummings. Too often cummings is thought of merely in terms of his typographic and syntactic mischief, but his real genius was for lines of preternatural lyric clarity: “a world of made is not a world of born”…”It’s always ourselves we find in the sea”…”a finger pulls a trigger, a bird flies into a mirror.”

I think there is a strong spirit of and lyric affinity with cummings in your work, particularly in the Coda(s) section, which contains one of my favourites in the book–”It Will Not Be Long Now”. For fully realised, accomplished, always surprising but still highly accessible pieces, this is the section. I particularly like “It will not be long” because it is so different from the overall tone and mood of the book. It lets light in and humanises the larger whole. The fact that it has such a powerful effect on a reading of the book at large may suggest something of its internal completeness and integrity. I think of it as a hologram.

On the totally other hand, I admire your explicit focus on “text” and the painterly and semiotic way that this is experiented with. What holds these two very different modes together for me, is an obsession I share with scenes and images like the “cages of brooding GI Joes”.

There are moments in the book where the “high self-conscious” language of poetry is invoked–and then subverted, which sometimes bothered me but other times is very effective. Ferlinghetti is good at this. Where it works especially well–and morphs into something all its own is in something like “Ode to Drowner.” I dig the repetition of this imagery and theme, but this poem is also in my view one of the strongest all on its own.

I think the reader comes away from the book with a curious collection of founds objects to add to the Secret Cabinet and the unnerving but strangely refreshing sense of having survived exposure to some kind of industrial strength psychic solvent–to have accessed forbidden areas of thought–not because of their subject matter–but because of the medium and semantic chains of connection. It’s a little like the kind of thing John Lilly was getting at it, when during his LSD sensory deprivation tank experiences, he became aware of the inherent noise levels within the Central Nervous System (some people apparently hear high-pitched whistles, othes popping sounds like bacon frying.)

Or to put another framework to it-which may link the more straightforward lyricism with the textual experimentation, information theory tells us that the concept of “message” is based on a dynamic ratio of “signal” to “noise”.

There is thus an obvious interdependence between signal and noise, but this only becomes apparent when we have a predetermined idea of what we will designate as message. I think what your poems do is play with our sense of message and establish new ratios of signal to noise. Thanks for the read.

I’m sure I’ll go back to different sections at different times and find something new each time.

KRIS SAKNUSSEMM
Feb 2006

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