Jim Leftwich


Eight Texts on Asemic Writing

Asemic Expressionism, or Abstract Expressionist Writing

Once upon a time, long long ago (20 years), in a far far away place (Charlottesville, VA), I claimed to have identified a category of visual poetry called (perhaps only by me) Decorative Expressionism. It was busy, crowded, colorful and noisy. I liked it a lot — for several reasons, one of them being the fact that I was making quite a bit of it myself.

If anyone had asked me at the time (no one has ever asked me), I would have told them that Decorative Expressionism was the exact opposite of asemic writing.

Ah yes, time goes by and with a little "luck of the research and reading" (recollected and ruminated upon in tranquility) maybe we learn a thing or two. How does that old hit single go?
   : What I didn't know then
    What I don't know now
.. some other stuff in there, I know... 45 years ago... anyway

I would have been wrong.

That was back in the early days of this current iteration of asemic writing, when some of us still thought the prefix 'a-' meant "without; not having any." Little did we know that the prefix 'a-' was soon to take on the meaning of its opposite, "poly-". "Without, not having any" semes came to mean "having many" semes. "Absolutely thwarting the production of meaning" became "open to the invention of all imaginable meanings."

It was a transformative moment in the history of all things asemic.

When Jackson Pollock woke up in the morning, he already had a lit cigarette balanced on his lower lip. He visited his Jungian therapist every Tuesday at 2pm. They played chess, drank beer, went to Yankees games, and chased the stately, plump pigeons through Central Park.
You're getting better, Jack, said the Jungian therapist. Getting better all the time.
Thank you, said Jackson Pollock.
Alchemy of the vowels, Tantric Sex Mandala, said the Jungian therapist.
I don't believe in The Accident, said Jackson Pollock.
He walked down the crowded sidewalk past The Tavern to his studio.
He lit a cigarette, opened a beer, took off his shoes and socks.
He spent the rest of the evening working, late into the night, doing The Dance of the Collective Unconscious, In The Painting.

That's pretty much how asemic writing is still made today.

So, the next time someone tells you myriad hymnal nightpoets, hurrier, nebula nebula, tell them you know all about asemic expressionism. Maybe they're living in a book by Donald Barthelme. What do you know? Empathy is all about effort. Let there be no bullshit between Practitioners of The Craft and Sullen Art.

 

Polyasemic Thinking: A Brief Future

One thing I particularly reinsinuate about the idea of asemic writing is its persistence. Once the idea gets inside a brain, it refuses to go away. It mutates and proliferates.

Once the asemic cat got out of the bag, it set off on a mission to conquer the world.

There is a kind of pareidolia prevalent among practitioners and theorists of asemic writing; we may not see the face of Jesus in a greasy frying pan, but we do see quasi-alphabetical shapes just about everywhere. It is hard not to be joyfully reinsinuated in the presence of such a life-affirming mutagenesis of ubiquitous formlessness.

No matter whether we experience it as pre-word or post-word (I could make a case for either, or both), once the virus of asemic writing invades and occupies the brain, it imposes the shape of its cultural desire on everything in its path.

I should take this opportunity to confess: for the past 25 years, I have found myself (my selves) surrounded in all environments by the insistent reinsinuations of asemic writing.

Neither the world nor my brain seems interested in the least in my refusal to believe in the existence of eco-asemics.

Those cumulus clouds drifting over the Snake Range in Eastern Nevada resemble, in places, a kind of quasi-calligraphic drawing.

By quasi-calligraphic drawing I mean asemic writing — standard, normal, universally recognized and accepted asemic writing.

And by asemic I mean polysemic, but I suppose that goes without saying.

The twisted limbs of the pinyon pine at the edge of my campsite suggest a kind of quasi-calligraphic drawing, or polyasemic writing.

I honestly don't believe in anything called the "asemic war," but I fought in quite a few of its memorably forgettable battles, lost all of them (if memory serves me well) -- lost perhaps most decisively those in which I refused or neglected to participate.

I should have taken my stand, early on, alongside the term "gestural abstraction."

At this late stage of the gamelan, in the summer of 2022, when it has been suggested that asemic theory is becoming coherent, and t/hat the familiar vitriol (volatility, versatility, viscosity, variability, vacuum cleanerity, and snakite venomosity) is no longer provisionally rarefied, I would like to propose, once again, that the only Reasonable approach going forward (at the b/end of the day) is the embrace of Our Magickal Absurdities in a practice of the variable tradition of 3-Chord Linguistics.

Remember:
—If it is easy, you aren't trying hard enough.
...and...
If you think you understand it, you aren't playing enough attention.

Because:
There is no such thing as asemic writing.

Or asemic oil painting.
Or asemic trumpet playing.
Or asemic pole dancing.
Or asemic fly fishing.
Or asemic role playing.
Or asemic tongue lashing.
Or asemic nose diving.
Or asemic car pooling.
Or asemic cold calling.
Or asemic batshitting.
Or asemic bullshitting.
Or asemic mud wrestling.
Or asemic mud slinging.
Or asemic mind melding.
Or asemic mind reading.
Or asemic long hauling.
Or asemic log rolling.
Or asemic flat lining.
Or asemic red lining.
Or asemic retrofitting.
Or asemic pinch-hitting.
Or asemic bell ringing.
Or asemic whistle stopping.
Or asemic lip syncing.
Or asemic lip reading.

No asemic ping-pong.
No asemic IHOP.
No asemic zen slapping.

No asemic sitting.
No asemic spitting.
No asemic shifting.
No asemic passing.

No asemic hairdos.

No asemic playdough.
No asemic doodling.
No asemic scribbling.
No asemic drooling.
No asemic scattering.
No asemic sleeping.

No such thing as asemic scat singing.

/
//
///
Ahhh...
What a flippial crock of reinsinuated floppulence.
Maybe when I have more time I'll dismiss it all myself.



  Asemic Writing and Pareidolia

For practitioners and theorists of asemic writing, the perceptual deviation known as pareidolia is an acquired taste and a developed skill. We train ourselves to see alphabetical shapes where there are none, and then we celebrate our inability to read them. This phenomenon could occupy an entire chapter in the Magickal Absurdities Training Manual: The Ecstasy of Asemic Reading.

Personal Perception Management (PPM) is but one of a great many Existential Self-Help (ESH) methods reinsinuated transmutably in The Training Manual. It is known colloquially among The Asemic AntiMasters as PPMESH — Personal Perception Mesh. The tradition, or parade of asemic saints, involved in transmigrating this alchemy of perception from prehistory into the present, includes William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson, Aldous Huxley, Diane di Prima and Jim Morrison. Cleanse the doors of perception to Illuminate the arrangement of the senses.

Or the arrangement of the world(s) by the senses.

Let’s say I make a sequence of tangled squiggles…
I sound them aloud, slowly singing their shapes…
Through the processes of transcription, transliteration, and apophenia, I arrive at a deliberate mishearing of a segment from a song sung by Jim Morrison:

meatza pocca hero, Esau funk, awe yeh

The world is a poem. Some of us know that. Know it whether we want to or not. The world snuck up on us when we were young, and planted the cosmic poem-seed at the base of our tender brains.

Asemic writing works as a kind of pagan missionary for The Poem.

Asemic writing is a mutagen.

Pareidolia is one of its tools, one of its schools, a side effect, mutual aid, elective affinities, the ace of hearts up its sleeve, one foot on the other side of the grave still kicking at the pricks, reinsinuated and impoxximate.

We see what we want to see. No. That’s not right. Read what Thou Wilt. We see what we need to see. Some realities are more real than others. Asemic writing is useful, as a kind of anti-linguistic self-medication for the perpetually seeking psyche. Pareidolia is a method of ongoing research. It allows us to discover, investigate and explore provisional realities. The worlds of pareidolia are experientially real, and as such are causal agents — in our thinking, and in our actions as they emerge from that thinking.

As an entanglement with the processes of pareidolia, asemic writing functions for the perennially seeking psyche as a way of practicing reality.

 

Is Asemic Writing true?

The most important and interesting characteristic of asemic writing is its absolute resistance to interpretation.

The value of asemic writing lies in its semantic emptiness, and relies on the genuine frustration experienced during a failed attempt at interpretation, meaning-building, the collaborative construction of meanings.

Success in reading asemic writing implies an inauthenticity, either of the writing and its author, or of the reading and its perpetrator.

Authentic asemic writing denies all access to success.

The complete and utter, total failure of an attempted reading is the only acceptable measure of success for any particular instance of asemic writing.

So, to iterate — and reiterate:
1. asemic writing lies?
2. asemic writing re-lies?
3. asemic writing imp-lies?

Please refer to your copy of The Magickal Absurdities Training Manual for answers and/or elucidations.

Asemic writing has a dirty secret, hidden, as usual, in plain sight: it is all a pack of lies, and always has been.

Asemic writing is not a dispensary for recreational truths.

Asemic writing is not a dispensary for medicinal truths.

Asemic writing does not participate in the language game of dispensing truths.

We have a choice where the existential ground of asemic writing is concerned: either we admit it’s non-existence, and celebrate it for not existing, or we lie to ourselves and each other about it’s existence, and through the persistence of our collective effort, bring it — lie it — into being, no matter how provisional, damaged, and ephemeral that being may be.

Today, in the summer of 2022, there is no denying the fact that a great many things in our world are identified by one variety or another of the term asemic writing.

That in itself is good.

The concept of asemic is generative and tolerant. Let’s frolic in its wonderland! With our first mind celebrating it’s ludic absurdity, and our second mind practicing the pleasures it offers in opportunities for critical thinking.



Asemic writing and the Absurd

To the extent that The Absurd is a characteristic, or even at times a category of the historical avant garde, it can be asserted that asemic writing functions as a continuation of the theory and practice of the avant gardes (plural, at least since the end of WWII) in the form of a self-actualizing multitude of willful absurdities.
If the absurd is the incongruous, as Albert Camus asserted in The Myth of Sisyphus, then the simultaneous presence of the written and the unreadable is a classic example of absurdity, in its most uncontestable, experiential form.
Whereas absurdity under normal conditions requires a clash of juxtaposed items or ideas, asemic writing only requires itself, as a self-contained absurdity.
A self-contained absurdity is a Magickal Absurdity. It offers itself as a reality, of a type that should not exist. It troubles the stability of the psyche, as if for a fleeting moment there is no distinction between Sisyphus and Icarus, as if both are merely variations on the theme of Tantalus.
Desire, as often as not frustrated, thwarted, derailed, detoured, imbricate and futilitarian, anachronistic, impoxximate, inverted — invertebrate — involuntary, and/or joylessly reinsinuated,
stands,
sits,
lies
at the unsettled center of all considerations concerning the function of absurdity in everyday life.
In the case of asemic writing, we desire for that which is certainly not asemic to nonetheless function in our everyday lives as if it clearly is asemic and nothing else.
Absurdity is a very particular and peculiar variety of desire.
We want the world to be not only other than what it is — we want it to be precisely that which it can never be.
That variety of desire is precisely the allure of asemic writing. It is the distilled quintessence of its magickal absurdity.
That is not only why, but how, the practice of asemic writing reinvents itself, over and over, across centuries and cultures, one generation after another into the present.



Via Negativa and Asemic Writing

Mysticism, whether atheistic or otherwise, has always welcomed a spectrum of experiences valued primarily for their absurdity and futility. The experience of asemic writing, whether one is attempting to write it or attempting to read it, is fundamentally a mystical experience. It is The Face That Is No Face, the Via Negativa.

Let’s say I make a sequence of tangled squiggles, with baggy loops here, jagged-edged bulges there, poncruated with curatorial punctuation marks in the form of randomly tilted ascenders and descenders, moving suggestively from left to right on the foundation of an imaginary baseline. It looks like writing, but we can’t read it, says the entry at Wikipedia. It must be asemic writing, says a contextualized leap of faith.

What if it is, in theory and in practice, experientially, a kind of quasi-calligraphic drawing?

This is not the Via Negativa. It is direct experience of the mystery. Direct Experience of The Mystery. There is no wrong reading, judged and condemned by official authorities on the matter. There are no Official Authorities on the matter. And there is no range of acceptable interpretations of the experience, no spectrum of permitted discourse about the acceptable interpretations.
There is no attempt at reading, not of any variety, and therefore there is no writing, of any variety, asemic or otherwise.

Asemic writing, in its absolute failure to exist, can function in our lives as a kind of pagan spiritual discipline, one designed to give us greater access to the experience of experience.



Asemic Writing and The Tragedy of the Absurd

When I say absurd, I don't mean quirky.
I don't think absurdity is a variety of comedy.
Finding comedic relief in inconsequential weirdness does not qualify as an experience of the absurd.

Certain styles of comedy monetize a surrealist juxtaposition of clangorous items and/or ideas to elicit Spasms of Guffaw from a naptive audience. As such, they serve a purpose: to disguise the osmotic suffering of those immersed in the petroleus ooze of The Capitalist Ongoing.

The absurd does not organize itself in order to acclimate our minds around any of the currently available varieties of unbearable realities.

The absurd is: a variety of that which is incomprehensible within the human universe.

A mystery is: that which is uplifting because it is experienced as being incomprehensible within the human universe. We celebrate an encounter with mystery.

The absurd is experientially devastating, annihilating, a psychological sparagmos. We may, after a fashion, celebrate the fact that we experienced it and lived to tell the tale.

Asemic writing is capable of embodying, and conveying, the tragedy of the absurd. But only for the those who want that, who want that kind of thing. For those who do not want that kind of thing, asemic writing is also fully capable of being abstract art school dorm room wallpaper and glamping picnic tablecloth design. I know, I am not being very nice, I'm sorry. Did you by chance see Sun Ra and The Arkestra 40 or 50 years ago? They had The Look. Sparkling robes down to the floor, Egyptian Spaceman Hats 3-feet high. Marching around the stage, chanting, gesturing with their instruments towards the ceiling. I saw them with a few hundred other people in 1982 and not a soul was laughing. We're they absurd? Absolutely. Sublime? Yes.

The Tragedy of the Absurd is experienced as a Magickal Absurdity. Asemic writing is capable of existing along that spectrum of experiences. I learned that in the late 1990's as part of my introduction to the idea and the execution of asemic writing. I have never been able to want anything else from it.
 


Asemic Writing Is A Kind Of Poetry

If, at times (if not, in fact, all the time), it must seem as if I have no idea what asemic writing is, I can only defend myself through an appeal to my experience of the theory and the practice: asemic writing came into my life as a continuation and an extension of my practice as a poet.

I wrote textual poetry for a little over twenty years before I started making visual poems. After making visual poems for a few years, I started making what was originally called spirit writing (by John M. Bennett, in his capacity as the editor of Lost and Found Times, a magazine of experimental poetry and related matters).

That was in 1997. The following year, Tim Gaze published a small chapbook of my quasi-calligraphic scribblings entitled Spirit Writing. Maybe I didn't know what I was doing at the time (the theory and history came later), but I had no reason to think of this new development in my work as anything other than poetry.

These days, and maybe for the past fifteen years or so, it seems that very few theorists or practitioners think of asemic writing as a kind of poetry.

Asemic writing, as a kind of poetry, is all but limitless in its potential. We should take the same sort of approach to it's study. For example: I have been told that asemic writing is all about linguistics. I have no doubt that the study of linguistics, and the application of that study to an engagement with asemic writing, will add substantially to our understanding of the subject. But, as with all other varieties of poetry, linguistics is only one among very many approaches to the study of asemic writing.

I am never interested in having the last word on any of these matters. Maybe I am interested in having the next word — and then, in having had some of the recent words. The conversation around asemic writing is ongoing and, like all conversations around all varieties of poetry, it seems to have no necessary or inevitable end. I am interested in expanding the spectrum of acceptable discourse concerning the subject of asemic writing. I hope my writings on the subject will function as invitations to others to participate in this process.

               Summer, 2022.

(Editor's note: Thanks to Marco Giovenale & slowforward where some of these pieces first appeared.)

 
 

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