Symposium of the Whole

Eros a rose out of sore, eroseion of sorrow, eros arose from pain and renewed desire, pain burning being. Eros rose sore coexist in their phantom frequencies, in encounters that startle, empty, animate. Supported by their uneven pacing, they appear in a patterned circling complexity: sometimes song, sometime shade, sometimes rip, sometimes rhythm.

Thrusting the attention towards muscular tensions, unintensional but significant, reopening a life into care, recognising being and being with others, beginning to sing again even when the song has long gone and must be reimagined, patched up, mended but driven.

Words of eros-rose-sore are brought together by movements of spinning—inward, backward, outward, centrifugally and centripetally, fugue and petals, escaping canons and shedding flowers. They circle back onto themselves and spin outward, they never solidify into concepts: from a piercing gaze backwards in a film sequence to whirling dervishes in a music video, from the anti-clockwise movement of models in a fashion show to the breaths-into-words of Western mystics, wild and hushed. In that site where to look back spinning means that what is looked at is not past or gone but is yet to happen. It is received and heard as something which must be. Something which morphs neurosis into new roses into eros.

Rhizomatic Repair is an emergent participatory ecological and intrapersonal engagement with mending. Practical knowledge sharing gives way to group writing praxis, the results of which literally feed worm communities, merging our byproducts with their own, creating compost to sprout toxin remediating botanicals and plants who will become the paper for future iterations of the practice. 

Jerome and Diane Rothenberg refer to the poet as a “defender” of biological and psychic  diversity, in this iteration of Rhizomatic Repair we attempt to tether into the difficulty of being with our wholes, our incompleteness and our pastness.

Antidisciplinary Contaminations. We study subjects, and organise education into disciplines, but what effect does this categorisation of knowledge have on our ability to conceive and perceive holisitically? In Life Class, artists are often taught that in nature there are no lines around things, but that understanding is contradicted by the disciplinary compartmentalisation of knowledge into fields. Culturally, we are in a moment of entanglement, a widespread awakening to the (long observed) reality that we are not separable from our environment, and that the phenomena and organisms with which we intra-act do not fit neatly into disciplinary categories. Acting upon that realisation, many have already commented, requires a synthesis of knowledge and practices from multiple fields.

Using the science of spectroscopy as a totalising lens through which to view the world and our place within it, and drawing on precedents set by artists working outside their own discipline, and on examples of bio-geo-eco-physical phenomena from the sciences, this talk explores arguments for the jack of all epistemic trades. Rather than considering a lack of specialist expertise an impediment to understanding, might it not sometimes enable novel insight?

From theurgic rite of evocation to children’s toy, iynx spins with imaginal passage and presage, a poetic basis of mind, corresponding in amongst control and participation, cosmic sympathy as ethics of fine feeling, where part looking at whole sees whole, when whole looking at part sees part. 

‘I started a rushing system’: Kelly will explore vibrational language through her book No Measure (Calamari Archive, 2024)—how words, piling up like grains of sand, collapse under their own frequencies—how repetition creates a vibrational topography that, like Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, impossibly reaches toward the body, manifesting a measureless erotics. 

I’m interested in a ‘symposium of the whole’ as a proposal for living together according to an idiorrhythmic ideal; a situation in which everyone can think, talk, and eat together in their own way, at their own pace. The image is seductive, yet difficult to conceive; what does the symposium look like, sound like, how does it exist in space and time (I think it’s easier to hear than to see, how does this relate to its dimensions)? This difficulty is formal, representational; I wonder how to organise such a symposium, what sort of committee would be required, who’s invited. Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg make their selections, offering an image of the symposium as a ‘range of discourses’ that can be contained in a book. The problems with anthologising as holistic methodology are well known, it’s impossible to include everything. Herein the seductiveness of an image; there are no material limitations to stall us. Roland Barthes’s study of ‘novelistic simulations’ in How to Live Together leads us from image to narrative, and it’s clear that different approaches to organising our symposium suggest different ethics. Poethics might be a better term, insofar as it implies composition, supporting the fluid metaphor of idiorrhythmy; Denise Ferreira da Silva can help us think through this. Rather than a programme, we could devise a score for movement, parallel, and interruption, a veering arrangement of proposals ventured by the committee and only partially summarised in my report (it seems the symposium exists beyond its conception, is already taking place). Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag theory of fiction’, especially as it’s demonstrated in Always Coming Home, makes a case for holism as narrative structure. I find myself conflating the ‘symposium of the whole’ with the ‘carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle’, ‘a whole which itself cannot be characterised either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process’. Storytelling as a collective practice in living, in affirming life and death. Given Le Guin’s self-conscious attempts to unlearn an anthropological mentality and to think with Native American history, knowledge, and practice, I’m keen to read her work alongside Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s theory of ‘grounded normativity’: ‘Grounded normativity houses and reproduces the practices and procedures, based on deep reciprocity, that are inherently informed by an intimate relationship to place. Grounded normativity teaches us how to live our lives in relation to other people and nonhuman life forms in a profoundly nonauthoritarian, nondominating, nonexploitive manner.’ In telling the story of our symposium, we experiment with the decolonial potential of world-building, bringing the whole into being for as long as we can hold tension in relation, withstand the pressure of our fantasy of a ‘bag of stars’. An early meaning of ‘whole’ is a body that’s unharmed or recovered from injury; implicit in being whole is the inevitability of woundedness, if it hasn’t happened already, it will. Le Guin reminds us that ‘The image of the other’s pain is the centre of being human.’ Our wounds may lie outside our bodies, our healing too. 

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