Let’s just flip to flop the upside down world to enter into the Bernstein’s pataquerical world with Wittgenstein’s sense of affirmation─ “double negative is an affirmative” to echo the Upanishadic mantra─ negation of negation─ where “the negation-sign occasioned our doing something” (Wittgenstein 1958: 147). So start your mental activity: flip to flop the upside down world. That “tactical reversal” may “create a space of greater freedom” because “negatives have a queer way of becoming positives” (Bernstein 2016: 316). So start your action: flip to flop the upside down world in “Zeno’s way”:
………..Why does Charles Bernstein reject the norm of “virtuous sentiment” of poetry to renew normativities with Pataqueronormativities─ the patanorm of “poetic truthfulness”? The reason has been unveiled in his forthcoming poetry collection Topsy-Turvy ─ “Virtue’s a kind/ of despair,/masquerading as care”………where does norm comes into picture to shackle (to normalize as called by the official verse culture) this aesthetics, the pleasure of mind? English dictionary says normal─ “according to, constituting, or not deviating from an established norm, rule, or principle.” Normal = nor(m) + mal, where mal is the word forming element of Latin origin that gives the sense of “bad” or “evil.” The verb-root of mal in Sanskrit says─ some entity that is nurtured within a limited boundary that may be limited form or sense of words or the limitation for the capability of interpretation/ appreciation of poetry or art. The most conventional synonym for mal in Bengali is pawnya [Sanskrit: goods]─ the verb-root is pawn [Sanskrit: someone or something used by others for their own purposes, nearest to English pawn], used to signify commodity. When poetry is bounded by institutional norm to make it a commodity, it is attributed as normal by the institutions where mal indicates a sense of malpractice or malnutrition. This normative mode of practice is called normalization by the official verse culture. They also think that normalization should include morality─ the reason, I think (not for fun but for pun to relish with a paan in the mouth!), is that their intellect speaks from the head (not from the heart) to tell that the word normal includes all the letters of the word moral. But in practice, Sanskrit origin of moral is nyaya: an action, matter, or subject that is right or true only if it has a previous history. So to speak, morality resist innovations. Therefore, Bernstein, the innovative poet, always remains outside this official normative zone but inside the natural principles of “poetic truthfulness” and freedom, betting against delusion and tyranny to pursue a “growing imaginary”, through the intensity of language. Bernsteinian Pataqueronormativities fosters the new path of poiesis not by the norm of “virtuous sentiment” but by “virtue of imaginative intellect” against “the common tales of market and economic dominance” to reject “the brutality with which the dominant culture reinforces its own naturalization [normalization] through the insufficiently critical, which means loving, practices” that fails to accept “the special possibilities of imaginative intelligence to create needed alternatives to the real” as Paul A. Bové writes in his re-visioning of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba in his latest book Love’s Shadow……………………….
Charles Bernstein writes in his Jacket2 page: ” On June 15, boundary 2 editor Paul Bové, convened Yunte Huang (from California), Runa Bandyopadhyay (from India), Abigail Lang (from France), and me for b2’s webinar on Topsy-Turvy, focussing on non-U.S. perspectives, in anticipation of an issue of boundary 2 coming out in the Fall. In the b2 issue, Runa gives a Vedic and Bengali spin to her reading of my poetics, Yunte writes about our ongoing mishmash of American and Chinese encounters, and Abigail continues her exploration of American/French poetry exchanges in an introduction to her translation of my work”. Read details of the webinar here
Both Charles Bernstein and Runa Bandyopadhyay read Bernstein’s poem “Covidity” from his latest poetry book Topsy-Turvy in the boundary 2 webinar. The poem starts with a line “The covid gonna get me” and ends with the line “And we are much misunderstood”─ a vacillation between understanding and misunderstanding.
Covid, yes, we know the word, the parasitic organism, which toggles us in the queasy state of increasing depression, frustration, helplessness and uncertainty, but what the word Covidity means?
Like the novel strain of Coronavirus whose many region of epidemiology is still unknown, beyond the human understanding, language always continues to evolve. Unknowns are new, new words, new forms to possess multiple possibilities of new patterns. Bernstein’s paroxysms of pataquerical imagination are antiparasite to open up a new trail in an unknown terrain, to imagine a growing imaginary through language. But our intellect wants to locate the poetic imagination, though it is in its very nature that imagination can’t be limited.
Today, when we are standing under the geopolitical war of poetic Covidity across the globe and trying to be inside, the word misunderstood still keeps firm grip on the innovation of poetic language, grasping for fresh air in the present state of breathlessness of language under the pressure of high-minded moral and didactic principles of the official verse culture.
The present Covid politics of the world, walled themselves by the “goddamn 15-foot walls” as Charles Bernstein writes in this poem, of imagination that can’t even imagine that they can’t provide enough fire to burn the trail of deaths even when they have the virtual ID of the whole population. I think these “all-too-human” actors thought it is virtual only, not real at all!
Today the air is contagious with virus, the parasitic organism, called word virus (in Burroughs’ sense). Bernstein’s “Covidity” wants to enforce its own Marsial law in Spicerian sense in the Bernsteinian psychopoetic society against the Martial law of lockdown, enforced by poetic authority.
An interactive Session between a Poet and an Photographer. Whether there is a conceptual fusion of poems and images; whether poems are signs in the image or the image in the signs; whether the silent soul of images can be touched with the flame of words─ these are the ideas explored here with the explorer and photographer Pronab Kumar Dey.
Runa Bandyopadhyay 