Saturday
Dec062008
Allen Fisher Interview (Extract 2)
Saturday 6 December, 2008 in Allen Fisher [wpvideo SLQzZloa] Download edited transcript (PDF, 36KB) Extract 2: Edited Transcript Allen: I've had a train of thought for some time now using words that on the surface seem to be unenthusiastic or negative. I find that a positive word like 'damage' is one that isn't quickly taken on as a positive, or a word like ‘trap’. Just in the same way that we can shift 'tools' into something which is quite murderous. I'm quite interested in the way that you can experience vocabulary differently, by difficulty in the sense we've just spoken about. I'm not interested in being obscure however, so I'm on an edge here. Alex: There's no sense that you're trying to test the reader. Allen: That’s right, but there is a moment when you put yourself at risk for that reason, as a writer.
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Steve: It's interesting you use the word 'damage', because it troubles me. We managed to get hold of Scott Thurston's interview with you at Roehampton, and in that you talk a lot about incidents and creating incidents. It doesn't trouble me wholly - incident is interesting in that it implies accident - incidental - and something happening as well. But it also implies this notion of ‘damage’, the idea that you might see an incident - for example, a paramedic would respond to an incident. There is a link between your positive use of damage and the notion of real physical pain. In the interview when you’re talking about crushing the cylinder, one of the metaphors you use is for the moon landings when they crushed the lunar lander to test whether the human bodies inside would get crushed. It's a violent image, and it's not purely aesthetic, and there's a link between real incident and textual incident, which I'm interested in. Allen: Okay, I'm not sure where to go from there. Steve: I'm not sure either! Allen: I think the reason that the word 'damage' works for me is because of that danger, because it is on the edge of being... a word you shouldn't play around with too much. When I did research into damage, one of the things that quickly dawned on me was that we are losing brain cells day by day, generally speaking, if we're older than 20, 22. We're not going to get them back, so that's damage to some extent, but there's a sense in which if you didn't do that, if that didn't happen, you would probably be overcrowded, you'd completely pass out. Alex: That ties in to ideas of the body, DNA constantly repairing, being constantly broken and reformed, then through that occurs mutation, which leads to evolution and so on. Allen: So in a sense you might say why use the vocabulary 'damage', why not think of something more positive like 'replenishing'. Steve: It's necessary damage. Allen: That’s right. I think I use 'damage' because of its energy, I think it makes you listen, just twice. Steve: I wasn't linking it to real physical violence in order to make it sound like you shouldn't be using the word. 'Damage', real physical damage, should be written about in poetry, it exists. I was just wondering to what extent the aesthetics of using it is brought into a practical consideration of it. Allen: It crops up so much in the work that I've really enjoyed, and therefore I’ve also used it in my own work, like tearing, tearing through a text. I enjoy a lot of - not everything - but a lot of what Burroughs did in the late 50s and early 60s with texts, and I've enjoyed other texts that have done what you might call 'damage' and reproduced/produced different texts as a consequence. I think I've found it - it's the physicality of it - much more energetic and interesting in visual art, for instance, or in music. If you think of it in either of those two things, you get almost a disruption as a consequence that is uplifting - but at the same time if you analysed it and thought about it that's come about because of something quite violent.✂
Allen: ...just to undermine what I'm saying, that isn't to say I don't enjoy calm work. It's a matter of how we define where we are when we're saying it - that is the difficulty of this. Because clearly if you're watching a flat area of water and you drop a small pebble, then that damage is not violent in a big sense but it would be quite a nice thing to watch.
Steve: Your attention level is piqued. Allen: Yes. I don't necessarily think of violence in the violent sense. It might just be a change of level. Alex: I have a sense that it's not the text or the event caused by the text that the energy comes from, it's from within the reader, and the process of reading the text. Allen: But that needs stimulating, or it needs producing, or it needs encouraging, and so I think that's what I've tried to do, and I think it makes some of the work difficult as a consequence. Alex: So how do you reconcile ‘damage’ with scientific and mathematical structures, that - in the way that they're explained at least, in abstract terms - are very rigid. Allen: Make it less general. Alex: For example, going back to the cylinder again [with] the Fibonacci sequence [printed on it] how do you reconcile the deformation or damage of that very rigid sequence with the actual energy present in the work? Is the rigid structure of the science and maths in your work a source of energy? Allen: On one level at least, what it does for me - and it doesn't need to do this for the reader at all - is it gives me something to hold on to in order to bring about a change. I don’t think you can bring about a change if you don't know where you are. It's finding a process which pulls from you what you already know but didn't know you knew, and so what that arithmetic system does - it's done it actually always in poetry, really, and I'll come back to what I mean by that - is that it puts certain parameters, certain expectations on the process that you're involved in. You've got to find the right things to fit, otherwise it doesn't work, in order for the disruption to then occur, and what that does is it pulls from you an experience or a set of selections that you wouldn't have otherwise made, or might not have otherwise made. If you think of the old systems of writing sonnets in rhyming verse or something of that kind, rigid on one level, those artists or those poets are having to use particular words because they rhyme and can't use other words because they don't, and quite often they'd have the struggle of trying to find a word that'll rhyme, and they will therefore find words that they wouldn't have otherwise found. That's a simplistic level of what I'm trying to get at. Alex: It's a constraint for you so you can work through your own writing. Allen: Yes, in the best sense though. Constraint in the sense of, otherwise why, why take any care over anything?
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