Poetry

The Argotist Online

Home Articles Interviews Poetry Features Ebooks Submissions Links

KANE X. FAUCHER

Kane X. Faucher is a doctoral student at the Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism at the University of Ontario. He has published in both literary and academic contexts, most notably in Exquisite Corpse, Janus Head, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Hackwriters, Retort Magazine, Azimute, and Variaciones Borges: Journal of Semiotics, Philosophy and Literature. He has two novels to his credit: Urdoxa (2004) and Codex Obscura (2005). He lives in Ottawa and London.

Astrozoica 5

Your white house lacks

Roman arches

Completing

Historical cliché

Online Toynbee & Gibbon

Notwithstanding.

Fan the Nero-nic flames

Of the king of kings.

George is a fine name

For a dead war or

A child we have taken too

Seriously.

Boo! We’re doomed

When laughter dissolves

Into post terror media society

Shock.

CEREBRUM CHAOSMOS

I am wondering on a point,

If the formation of a brain

in the womb

is associated with extreme agony.

When there are moments of

Voluptuous lucidity,

And the person feels in flight,

The racing of ideas,

Is it the pain that prods

Or the anticipated pleasure of arrival?

Does the brain only manufacture

In weak times

Clumsy metaphors

(the brain as jungle, as mysterious, as

overcrowded, as arterial traffic network,

as global communication schema, as etc…).

May I stick my brain

Upon a branch

Of these same metaphor trees

And invite the fulguration

Of metonymous dissolution?

Or does this brain merely skid

Upon a grease trail,

Itself an ultimate signified

Without realizing it?

Chronophagica

Jean Genet and Georges Bataille for pope,

For popes run in packs, and

I am the master geometer of all my substances.

Andre Gide cardinals and

E. M. Cioran grand inquisitors.

Let us revamp the Vatican

And revampirize the clergy cloth.

Descartes is on the spindex.

AT MY THREADBAREST

The plan is to make a carbon copy of my emails

On sheets in triplicate

On canary yellow, carbon

On robin’s egg, carbon,

In white primary copy to be filed,

Below on each my signature

All used up.

O Technosis!

You make my exchanges lolling affairs,

As though I am dragging my testacles to the races

To have them cupped by the emperor’s chief aid.

From these emails in triplicate,

Including the one that goes to the little boy down the lane,

I will write a novel or

A grocery list. I have not decided.

I am crucified on the vel-disjunct of either/or, you see.

SELECT APHORISMS FROM ASTROZOICA

Plato, Kant, Hegel, lumped together. They have given us the first reversible cow. What fun your dialectic proves to be among the children and their board games! The dialectic is for those who have an erotic joy of filling our forms and questionnaires. When the petty dialectician stamps his foot impatiently and orders me to make a decision, he takes my silence as bad schooling, as ignorance, as bad manners. “Choose!” he declares, but I see no real choice before me. Am I to choose, and if so, between what? Mind or Body? Being and non-Being? Master or Slave? The dialectician presents me with the reversible cow, tells me that no matter what choice I make will bring us to its synthesis. Choose one side or another, but it is still the same cow!

The Birds. O Stymphalion birds, how you peck at those softest regions of the flesh, how you never tire of plucking at me as your daily zither! And the tighter you pluck, the greater my tension…for I am no chronolute, but an aionic string-bundle in the tall pillar that holds up the roof of all your clocks! Your Orpheus will now speak directly, without intermediaries, to your governor, Thalidomides, whose mechanicaloric clock has nothing more than two hands and a face (and so cannot budge, dearest perchers upon the busts of Poe!). I am heralding the age of the flattest time with no depth, nothing but face and distributions along surface tension…a time with no depth is its own quasi-cause and its most filmic affect! Are your gears, pulleys, springs, fulcrums, and pendulums not redundant? Say, have you ever witnessed that nocturnal delight when our dear friend Descartes was slipping hot wax into the Newtonian tick-tock, poison in the king’s ear? Do we not enjoy when one saboteur of nature does unto another?

Sick are those who fuss and fret over the perfectly manicured lawn in their suburban barrios, who despise their own bodies while they giggle and blush at the sight of another’s. I am too jealous of my time to pull the heavy curtain back for any of their inevitably failing types! What will the revolution bring if I am the one who must bring it upon my back? I will ride the ass into town, and this will be my lesson. I will not resort to the tactics of shame and guilt that have for so long been the currency of theologico-theoretical exchange. Shame and guilt is the law, while I am of the weeds that grow long and wide across any surface without self-restriction.

143

Culture as idiopathic. Careful critique cannot begin without taking an interest in the methods and tools by which it may be engaged. One must first be a hammersmith before one wields the hammer, for even the hammer of critique must not be immune to the midday exposure when all is seen. If we are to lay to rest that idiopathic uncertainty of cultural values, their origins as to their values and the values of those origins--genealogy!--we must take careful stock in the precision of our instruments. It takes an eagle’s eye to see both far and up close, a mild temperament of joy so as to easily slough the detritus one invariably accumulates on critique’s way, and above all a well-crafted and unapologetic hammer. For apology--and apologists are many and legion--is not the faculty of the hammer of critique, but the finicky needlework of inveterately needlesome old maids. Whatever the eagle’s eye, open temperament, and hammer discover, let it be discovered without revision, embroidery, exaggeration, caricature--and above all with the audaciously brazen courage to consider the possibility that one may be in error! If in case of error, one must return to the question of the tools, to refashion at will an even more precise instrument, but no less active in its ability to break the law tables as a hammer. Creation must begin with the destruction of persistent childish fictions, and true critique is double movement that creates as it destroys. How? Look to the painter who destroys the blank and absent surface of the canvas with but a brushstroke, and then you may glean the beginning of this process. Destruction as positive, creative, but in a certain way.