Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
'How much can you tweak English before it malfunctions?'
'QAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE': The visual poetry of Mike Cannell
What does it mean for a language to malfunction?
What funds its means? What makes it done for?
First we have to ask: What is the function of language? What is it is supposed to do? And who decides—who assesses its function?
Is language a Paul Klee twittering machine? A W. Heath Robinson fantasmallegorical don’t-shut-your-contraption? A speech balloon animal? Does one’s signs fit all?