Helen Keller or Arakawa - Hardcover

Gins, Madeline

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 093605011X ISBN 13: 9780936050119

Publisher: Burning Books, 1994

Synopsis

Fiction. Art Theory. HELEN KELLER OR ARAKAWA gives rise to a new form of speculative fiction, conveying the potential for human experience now and here rather than depicting worlds distant in space or time. The novel tracks consciousness and identity through the intermingling paths of its three protangonists: the historical person Helen Keller; the iconoclastic artist Arakawa; and the writer herself, Madeline Gins. At the same time, this innovative work advances and upsets key tenets of contemporary critcal theory. This is a beautifully published book whose author is a participant in the recent show POETRY PLASTIQUE at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. The catalog for that show, edited by Jay Sanders and Charles Bernstein, is listed in this SPD catalog.

About this title

About the Author:

Madeline Gins was born in 1941 in New York City where she lives today. With a keen interest in physics and philosophy, she graduated from Barnard College in 1962. She studied painting at the Brooklyn Museum, where she met the artist Arakawa. In 1963, they entered a long-term collaborative partnership that began initially with an attempt to actively catalogue Arakawas diagrammatic paintings as they were being sold. Together, they plotted out schematically the range of capabilities of a human being, inventing an original lexicon of description, which resulted in The Mechanism of Meaning first published by Bruckmann in Germany, 1971. The work was revised for Harry N. Abrams, Inc. in 1979, and expanded for Abbeville in 1987. Their ongoing collaborative work has also resulted in large-scale architectural installations exhibited throughout Europe and in New York.

Gins created the Containers of Mind Foundation in 1987 to discover the forms of mind which test the limits of the body, galvanizing her long-standing interest in researching the nature and conditions of mortality. Reversible destiny architecture, Gins says, would reveal the site of a person and much of what goes on within to find out what is preservable and on what terms. Construction of specific sites of reversible destiny are planned for Japan in 199495. A practicing poet from the age of thirteen, her first work of prose written in 1960 investigated sunyata, or emptiness. Her published books of poetry and prose include Word Rain (1969), Intend (1973), What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984), and co-authored with Arakawa (1987) To Not to Die.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Draw Me a Diagram

Was I picking up sounds of that conversing which goes on in the course of a lines being inscribed as formed?) Trodded. Cud rudder. Cram bud into pud, aditi [Sanskrit: infinite]. Huddles the hum in the pud. Faint charcoal puddles. Go around by the luddle [the back or side-gate]. So thud I. So tut I. I tud so. Save the crumas. Pass the cucurbite [gourd]. Until the next wink then [wink: in Anglo-Saxon: to close the eyes; to blink; the modern English sense of wink] Yf he can buy sume collucione, do his neghboure ronge. Chaucer. The fleshment. There was much flacor [flying of arrows]. Flaesc. I did but see the flean of the fleshment as I looked up at the first [a. space of time, b. ceiling]. Parsi [to one side] con [angle]. This was treow.

At length, a line is always the length of an uncupped pud. Or as said above, the pud extrud. Bite the bud.

I want a scale diagram of my own for any terrain.

We all do, was the reply.

Remember my having told you of our having tied rope up all around the backyard, of our stringing it back and forth from tree to tree and from bush to fountain, trying to maintain it mostly at the height I am with arms stretched out above me, but also placing it at heights from anywhere from between up that high to not much below the ankle. This was done to fulfill one of my greatest ambitions which was to be able to run uninhibitedly about without doing too much or any damage to myself. As long as my hands grazed or sensed to graze this rope I could be sure I was in the safe zone that encompassed a terrain with which I was familiar.

I am helped in a related way by a diagram of my own house thats inscribed inside my right foot. I have it that the layout is marked out within the foot itself at a height of about seven-eighths of an inch above the sole on a parallel plane to it. Due to the way a foot narrows as it rises towards its ankle, I was forced to draw my precious mnemonic sketch greatly scaled down, giving it a total area of a bit more than one-half a foot (that is, the standard foot, not mine in particular); I might add that Ive also committed myself to the securing of a companion piece of a schema for the left foots supra-sole area; this I handle in a much more informal way in accordance with its subject matter: all the comings and goings within my home, Arcan Ridge (nearest actual address: right foot).

I start out of bed. I must put bed behind me. The woodenness of the footboard is behind me. I verify this by reaching out in back of me and rapping lightly on it with my knuckles. The bedroom has three windows. Assign one window to each ear, that is, have one be placed to the right and one on the left; a third window (these intimations of windows of the thickness of image, image alone, I have always secretly longed to call thwindows.) takes its orientation, I allow, from the back of my head; the third window opens out in the wall that is directly behind the bed that is behind me. All this has been worked into the scale diagram in place within my right foot. That line of this diagram drawn parallel to the back of the heel, drawn alongside it from within, represents the houses back wall; a part of this is the wall directly behind my bed in the bedroom, the one which, upon awakening, I, as just described, regularly consign and on a considerably larger scale than I am able to use within the foot to the back of my head. Through this diagram, as it is projecting out I can, by thus projecting it, change its scale to fit my need and exploding through me, troops all the rest of my house.

Thus do I carry in and as me a diagram of the imagination. I am stretching that labyrinth within which I stand (as I), inserting into it all the other labyrinths or rooms that come along, that come to mind. Standing in the living room, I look at a diagram giving the layout of the entire house. With a diagram of the whole house displayed within it, this one room is made to contain, in a sense, the whole house. The living room, given how it is named, would be the right room for this to happen in. My having a diagram of the house makes it possible for me to prepare for and know each of the other rooms before entering them. Because Ive been to each of these so many times before, they can, one by one, spring out of the diagram as I choose them to. A diagram makes it possible for a part to contain the whole. It can be seen that this canvas presents a diagram of part of the imagination. Here is only a part; the rest of the imagination is busy with a great number of other things and events.

About this edition

• Publisher: Burning Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 093605011X
• ISBN 13: 9780936050119
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 307