Intro Remarks - Oct. 14 Sonja Greckol Stephen Cain And

INTRO REMARKS - Oct. 14 Sonja Greckol Stephen Cain and Ronna Bloom and Trish Salah and Margaret Christakos with a stir of Kristin and Margot and Tom and Norma. This is my first Influency class in this session and what a line-up to read me up to this moment or some moment like it - when we influence each other further into this present. Can I catch up? Where am I in the lived time of Influency 7 which we - in secret - call 6. But I've arrived here and I want to welcome Stephen and Kate, I am eager to hear them tonight. While playing catch up, I've been thinking about time, preoccupied with how time is understood in disparate realms of thought. Yesterday I was driving that dread suspension tunnel between Toronto and Montreal where the only rescue is an IPOD and satellite radio and I heard a discussion among physicists who are arguing that the Large Hadron Collider, the one that is supposed to introduce us to Higgs Boson directly and to allow us to peak at the conditions immediately after the Big Bang, malfunctioned because the origin of the universe cannot reveal itself without disappearing or as these folks argue "introducing us to God." so it malfunctioned before it introduced us to the big HB to prevent the introduction. Within the mathematical laws of physics that are the earthly representation of the universe, it said that that the direction of time is irrelevant - the formulae work equally well backwards or forwards. To reveal the origins of the universe would be tantamount to admitting that one could kill the grandfather before the grandson is born and what would that make of the present? (Are you mistakenly trapped in a rerun of Being Erica?) This is illustrated usually with billiards, a film of a billiards game would look equally plausible if it were run backwards or forwards until the point when , with the film running backwards, the balls all reassemble, i.e. return to the state prior to the break. Now this reassembly itself is possible - it simply has a very very small probability. On the other hand, I am troubled by how "present" and the "past" interact in our psychological lives and the continuing 'rumble', using Margot's word, of the multiplicities of our selves. Kristin points to the ways that Bloom moves among various conceptions of the instability of the self. Does self ever come back to the same self? Will the billiard balls reassemble - perhaps but one could, perhaps one even should, count on likelier events. I'm left with a puzzle, time moves backwards and forward, the self is not stable,

and as poets, we take as axiomatic that language is not stable. If we substitute words for billiards, we have words muddling | ricocheting in our experiential universe, all with the potential to move backwards and forwards. Billiards of words, acronyms, words that are acronyms, careening - making|masking something out of everything, everything that is history, large and small, unassembling and reassembling, assembling on the canvass of person-in-field |personified| personunified. What is the likelihood |likeliheed of assembling? Margaret asked in her opening comments last week: How do we move from a blank to a certain kind of blank, a named blank? How do we come up with what modifies, what describes and defines the kind of blank we inhabit? How do we in short make a blank, unblank? My blank is differently constituted. I've posed a different ground, not the ground of blank, not blank but blink -- the blinking, flickering of each nanosecond, backward or forward in the blink of being in world. What is the moment of assembly, the moment I am stopped in the frame of the poem, the moment that stands in relation to previous and future moments|pages? How do I know where|when|who I am? as a writer? as a reader? or am I lost, only a flicker that passes across the rhythms and rhymes, moving to a beat assonance and alliteration and rhyme? Judith Butler argues the 'The 'I' is the moment of failure in every narrative effort to give account of itself. (Giving an Account of Oneself 2005 (79) I'm puzzling over the I's that surface in Bloom and Cain. Given that the surfaces of these collections so different, do they offer any similarities in time and self or self in time. Perhaps this will simply become my refrain for the remainder of this session. Perhaps others will be transported backwards of forwards or encircled by the "I's" which have it or habit with me and how. Question Nothing domestic in this work -- Burnt breath for breakfast. p. 46 - no laundry, no dishes, no mops, no house and home? There's piss and deodorant, porcelain and Drano which are bodily and maybe domestic. Do these move across borders? How do these disappear?

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