..............................................................

Tom Beckett

from

APPEARANCES: A NOVEL IN 365 FRAGMENTS

9.

Fragment from an Interview with the Author

Q:  You’re a man, aren’t you?

A:  I’m told that I do a reasonable impersonation of one.

Q:  Do you like art?

A:  I love Arthur.

10.

What happens is indiscernible. 

No analogies are being drawn.

11.

Dear Hypnotist,

Talking to myself last night I discovered myself as Other on the Projectionist’s 

screen. 

The last time we talked I was entranced by you. 

Call me.

Love,

The Ventriloquist

12.

Dear Reader,

Have you never been ventriloquized?

I know I have.

Sincerely,

Desire

13.

What does it mean to speak as if one is two persons?

What does it mean to speak as if one is two things?

Is everyone, everything, an overture or an aperture?

Both?  More?

14.

The Ventriloquist may be self-effacing, but it’s no dummy.

Relax. The Hypnotist just wants to make a suggestion. 

The Projectionist screens all of its calls.

Desire is itchy.

The Subject is lost in thought.

An Other feels itself (to be pursued).

15.

The mirror images of the one who is you are stammering that the mirror images of 

an Other are:

Science,

Art,

Politics,

Love.

16.

What are the essential confusions?

What degree of resolution do you require?

17. 

The name of this intersection is liminality.

18.

The constellations of Characters constitute Exteriority’s Chorus.  It rumbles 

beneath the pavement. 

Overtures and apertures, voices, shadows, screens, frames, alter egos.  Sliding 

registers. 

19.

The Author (Arthur?) is thinking now about secret identities, metafiction, and the 

textual/sexual unconscious.

The Author (who?) is what?

Things are never quite what they appear to be.  Some essential aspect is 

indiscernible.  Size figures.  Things, persons, events almost always loom larger or 

smaller than one thinks.

20.

Twenty Recognitions

1.  Information is not thought.

2.  Plot is not writing.

3.  Writing is not nothing.

4.  Nothing is not Desire.

5.  Desire is not not History.

(To be continued.)

21.

Arthur is mulling scenarios. Arthur is humming and scratching an itch.  Arthur has 

attachment issues.  Arthur is aroused.  Arthur is anxious.  Arthur is a bundle of 

overtures and apertures.  Arthur is an aporia.  Arthur is just barely discernible, but 

Arthur is here.  Arthur’s not going anywhere. 

22.

The world one inhabits is a mutating list poem.

The world one excoriates is a mutating list poem.

The world one dissolves in is a mutating list poem.

23.

Twenty Recognitions (continued)

6.       Anything is happening.

7.       Rules change.

8.      Change rules.

9.      Everything is something other than what it seems to be.

10.  Everything is real.

11.  The world is incomplete.

12.  Seeing is conceiving.

(To be continued.)

24.

The Ventriloquist, the Hypnotist and the Projectionist hang out at  The Cave. 

The Cave is a basement-level dive bar.  It has no windows.  Its walls are painted 

black.

The Ventriloquist, the Hypnotist and the Projectionist constitute a performance art 

power trio known as Vaudeville without Organs (Vw/oO).

The Cave is where Vw/oO plots its “projects”.

Vaudeville without Organs’ past projects have included (but were not limited to):

      ·      A series of thought experiments which will absolutely not be disclosed

      ·      A series of thought experiments which may be disclosed at a later date

  25.

  The Subject is all over the map.  Arthur is all over the Subject.  It        

  goes with the territory.  Arthur is lost.

26.

The Projectionist’s inner life proceeds from a chiaroscuro of  perception and 

sensation.  The Projectionist’s working vocabulary consists of shadows.

The Projectionist’s outer life exceeds what it knows.

27.

Word is saving Appearances.

28.

The Ventriloquist is an extremely self-conscious, psychosexually bifurcated entity.  

The Ventriloquist is polyamorous.  The Ventriloquist becomes aroused when a 

dummy sits in its lap.  The  dummy is a blow-up doll of indiscernible gender. 

29.

The Hypnotist is a poor taker of notes and a terrible typist.  And yet, the Hypnotist 

functions as the secretary, the keeper of  Minutes, for Vaudeville without Organs.

30.

Desire instructs the Subject to undo buttons.

31.

The Subject wears a mask it calls “coherence”.  The Subject is a map that has 

been drawn by Desire.  The Subject is a bath drawn and drained (over and over 

again).

32.  

One’s Other is different from any other.

33.

Science is a sieve, a grid things fall through.

34.

Art(hur) is a screen and a rain cloud, a sustained chord, somebody’s Other, 

perhaps a cello or a cockroach.

35.

Politics is no longer seeing History.

36.

Love sucks the sense of things.  It’s like Space and Time in that way.  But never 

forget: Love is a character, too.  Just like History.

37.

History is what substances are.

History is a blindspot among blindspots.

History has personal problems.

History has ADHD.

38. 

It.

It.

39.

Twenty Recognitions (continued)

13.  Meaning is constellational and constitutive.

14.  Everything translates.

15.  Nothing is entirely translatable.

(To be continued.)

40.

Back to The Cave.  Vaudeville without Organs (Vw/oO) deep in its thought 

schemes.  The Ventriloquist, the Hypnotist and the Projectionist  entangled in 

cross-purpose representations, disordering their senses and rearranging each 

other’s sentences. 

41.

The Author is the trace of a verb embracing Arthur.  It was going to write 

something different and then forgot.  Forgetting is an aid to writing (sometimes).

Beyond the Author’s window is a blinding swirl of snow.

42.

Fragment from the Minutes of a Vaudeville without Organs Session at The 

Cave

Ventriloquist:  What is this thing I am speaking speaking through?  Who speaks 

speaking and what is spoken to?

Hypnotist:  What is this thing I am suggesting suggesting to you?  Anyone have 

any suggestions?

Projectionist:  What is this thing I am showing showing you?  Anyone here from 

the “Show Me State”?

43.

Arthur sees the Subject everywhere.  In everything.

44.

IT!

45.

History is no angel. 

46.

Love  is overtures and apertures. 

47.

Now Politics is talking smack about History.

48.

Art(hur) has more than the officially recognized number of senses.

49.

Science moves like an experiment in navigation.  All of its body’s sutures are, 

sooner or later, on view.

50.

The Other wants to be Art(hur). 

51.

The Subject comprises more than less negative space.  The Subject cannot be 

televised.  The Subject appears to itself as a palimpsest built up of layer upon 

layer of invisible writing.

52.

Desire can be seduced.

53.

The Projectionist thinks of itself as a maker of aphorisms, a maker of embryos and 

weather systems.

54.

The Hypnotist thinks of itself as a suggestion box.

55.

The Ventriloquist thinks of its dummy as an equal and as a lover.

 _____________________________________________________________________________

Tom Beckett  is known for his work as an editor, publisher, poet and interviewer.  In the 1980s, his journal The Difficulties was instrumental in the promotion of Language Poetry. Unprotected Texts, his Selected Poems, was published by Meritage Press in 2006.  More recently Otoliths published three volumes of E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S interviews curated by Beckett, and a collection of 4 long poems called Parts and Other Pieces. 

Read more about and by Tom Beckett here, here, here, and here.