Buzz-Daze Jazz and the Quotidian Stream
by Carolyn Guyer
When I was a child, I was told - by very sincere, earnest women in black uniforms - that we can know God exists, and is indeed God, because only He can create something from nothing, a power unknown in human beings. I've always wondered if this rationale is one which proves or disproves the existence of a God, but whether or no, I do not doubt the premise that human creativity truly depends on what already exists.
I want to speak to you a little today about this unholy creativity. As a woman, a mother, an artist, I believe it to be the most fundamental human process, one which operates in our lives transparently and pervasively. But something I've come to understand about our creative process is that, because it has more to do with elaboration than fabrication, we cannot speak it directly. We can speak around it, can point at it by reflection as in a mirror, we can nonchalantly oblique our way up to it, but we can never say it outright, definitively. Still, there are ways we can know it.
During the writing of my hypertext fiction, Quibbling, I began to notice something of a patterned state forming in and around many of the characters. Eventually, it even took a name to itself: buzz-daze. For nearly two years I traced the pattern, slowly coming to understand how incessantly creative the characters in this work are, indeed, how we all are. It began with this odd bit which didn't seem to fit anywhere at all:
"What's wrong? You look in a daze." Wert eyed Heta across the top of his sandwich. They had taken her to eat the moment she had arrived for this, her first visit. "You don't seem yourself."
She looked sideways at him and tilted her head. "What would you like me to be? I'll be whatever you want." It was an automatic response, self-protective, not really meant as a jibe, but Priam started teasing with "Oooo" and a smirking grin. His friend was blushing and Heta was thrown off balance even more than before. She looked at Werther and in a quiet voice that tried to make up for the misunderstood remark, said "I'm not sure where I am yet. Give me a little time, that's all."
I kept this piece sitting in the work for a long time, unattached to anything, sticking notes on it asking myself why it was there. Then later, my questions still unanswered, this next one appeared.
Once while Agnes was visiting B.B., they were running some errands around the small New England town when Bea turned to Ag in snappish irritation and said "You seem to be in a daze. What's the matter?" And, indeed, Agnes had been lagging about a step behind, not attending very sharply. She was hurt by B.'s remark, and spent the afternoon alone trying to understand what a daze was. She finally came to think of it as being split among places. It was always hard to be in a new place with someone else, because new places require a little transitional adjustment, an exercise in orientation. If you could be by yourself in a new place, the known and unknown have a natural play, overlapping, merging into one synchronous experience. But if someone else is with you, the rhythm takes on a buzz, like static interference; thus the appearance of a daze. Do you see?
Well, as you surely can see, this is a woman prone to abstraction and rationalization, to the point of being downright obscure. Taking a note from Agnes, then, who clearly thinks, but who refuses the bare bones of clarity, I want to jump over to a sidebar of cerebration which a friend loaned to me during the writing of Quibbling. It's an essay called "The Smooth and the Striated" by Deleuze and Guattari, a couple of those French thinkers found to be irresistible by most American hypertext literati. In this work, the masters of a thousand plateaus gave me something for which I had been looking almost fifteen years. A way of holding a perverse knot that Agnes and many of the characters in the fiction would continue to worry. It has to do with, god help us, the non-existence of abstracted dualities. By this I mean all the usual, traditional representations: Female/Male, Night/Day, Death/Life, Earth/Sky, Intuitive/Rational, Individual/Communal. The list goes on as long as consciousness itself. We make these things up! The terms "smooth" and "striated," as used by Deleuze and Guattari in their essay, are an attempt to generalize the easy concept of polarity in order to make it useful in trying to understand what really happens, that is, the constant transformations of one pole into the other. What is important to recognize is not the impossible duality of the poles, but what happens between them. You might say it's What We Learn, what we actually experience in space-time as we conceive ourselves, as we conceive space-time. "Smooth" and "striated," then - representing poles that don't exist - can be understood in only quick strokes of words, nothing that settles too soon or stays too long. Pierre Boulez, who actually coined the terms for a musical model, said, ". . . in a smooth space-time one occupies without counting, whereas in a striated space-time one counts in order to occupy." Now here is an image I can grasp immediately. It correlates directly with my own sense as an artist that the process of creating ourselves always involves two polar events: Acceptance and Control, that is, occupying without counting, and counting in order to occupy. One is not preferable to the other; rather, neither exists without the other, which means that the only thing we can truly be interested in is the complex mixtures of the two, how they proportion themselves as they move through each other. Nor is it such a simple thing as to imagine a range along a spectrum between Smooth and Striated. No, the thing compounds itself, becomes not just complex mixtures, but complex-complex mixtures. The poles appear to move, but are actually being created anew by the dimensional transformations between them, we occupy space-time after all, and we make these things up!
Maybe we should go back to Agnes's problem about being in a daze. She seems to think that being by herself in a new place has a predictable rhythm, sort of like waves on a shore, "occupying space" washes in and washes out. Nice rhythm. We like this, no problem. But when B.B. was with her, there was some sort of striated imposition on her daze, a buzz, or interference of complex mixtures, B.B. insisting on Agnes's attention, directing her presence as it were (isn't this what always happens when we're with other people? that's when things get complicated).
Here's another character trying to understand the phenomenon. This is Heta watching the waves on Lake Michigan.
Waves coming in to shore can behave quite strangely. I suppose there are patterns, maybe even names for them, but they never seem quite the same to me. One time I saw them actually trying to leap backwards and forwards over each other like children tumbling, learning how to play that game.
This is more like the rhythm we're most familiar - or unfamiliar - with, the daily burbling jazz of buzz-daze. We're always just tumbling to the last chord. Here's Hilda trying some jazz.
"Well, no, I mean it. Why shouldn't men get to wear skirts? Women can wear pants, can't they?" Hilda couldn't help doing this sometimes. At the office where she worked there were quite a few young men, all sorts, some from down the hall, some in her own area, and they tended to come and hang out around her desk because . . . . oh who knows why? One subject they couldn't stand was homosexuality. Some of them would get so red and choked with anger at the idea they could hardly speak. Hilda reveled in this and rubbed it up occasionally just for fun.
"I mean it, Robert. You don't know how nice it is to wear a skirt. You don't know what you're missing."
"You're crazy," poor Rob would splutter. "It's disgusting." He just wanted normal talk. Like what was on TV last night. Or how to get the Mac to print the font he just found.
You could be a little nicer, Hilda.
I think of this interchange as a fairly commonplace occurrence, a situation where people are in a sense collaborative artists, people creating themselves, Hilda and Robert, in narrative juxtaposition to one another. That's inside the story. In the literary lump of the fiction, the thing that doesn't exist without a reader, the reader/writer creates Hilda, Robert, and herself, in space-time. It is exactly the same process used by any writer of a literary lump. One of the characters in Quibbling, for instance, is a writer trying to make a hypertext fiction of his own. He keeps a journal of the experience and says things to himself like this:
Jrnl Aug 29, 1990
Sometimes writing this stuff is like being in a daze. The shifted, split focus; the overlay and interchangeability of reality and invention. Altered state? jeez. No wonder they all drink.
Nor is this writing-creating any different than other kinds of conjuring. Agnes again, doing what she does best:
Extreme exhilaration and daunting fear merged at the exact moment when she stood between kiln and can. The knowing and unknowing extended down her arms and straight out into the long tongs with which she grasped a glowing red pot, glaze at precise melt. It was an infinity of getting to the can where dry pine needles had been placed for smoking the incandescent clay. She could spend an entire day doing this, dancing between kiln and can. As she and the others worked, they placed their finished pots one by one, like words, all along the outside ledge of the firing pit.
The paradoxical nature of buzz-daze, of the complex mixtures of polar impulse, predictably becomes less of an enigma when we don't look too hard, that is, when we go along every day turning fragments into wholes, the quotidian stream, talking in the office with Robert, walking down the street with B.B. Despite all of its compelling electronic sidewalks of links sliding and gliding us along, hypertext fiction still requires this same thing of us, that we traverse the little leaps - and the giant ones - necessary to make sense of our lives, that is to make story, to write ourselves. Just as creativity is more about elaboration than fabrication, so hypertext is more a verb than a noun, more about the flux of making, it is a re-forming rather than a form.
Waves coming in to shore can behave quite strangely. . . .I saw them actually trying to leap backwards and forwards over each other like children tumbling, learning how to play that game.
We are, all of us, creative beings. But what we create isn't, by itself, what keeps us tumbling. Learning How is the combinative impelling force, where refrain arises. Always the reason to learn something is to learn something else. Closure, resolution, achievement, the objects of our lives are inventions that operate somewhat like navigational devices, placemarkers if you will. We go on like waves unsure of the shore, sometimes leaping backwards into the oncoming, but always moving in space-time, always finding someplace between the poles that we invent, shifting, transforming, making ourselves as we go.
Hypertext as a literary re-forming embodies this unreasonably logical creative urge, this dazed process heedless of The End, seeing even the looming icon of death as a link, as just another change. We are the experience of learning. We are complex mixture. We are always the moment of duality triangulated, or as Stephanie Block of Vassar College puts it, "And every womin at some point on her wrist back or neck curve knows she has expanse has the life of triangle where the point is toward her and the other two points stretch away from her in perspective."
How bright the fields and hills during the fast dances,
how the shadows mass and loom during the slow.
I wonder if the God of my childhood's nuns, the He who could create something from nothing, might not occasionally envy us our third and infinite option, buzz-daze mingling, the coalescent, rhythmic ability to create nothing from anything.
References:
Block, Stephanie, mini-zam, private correspondence, Poughkeepsie, 1992
Boulez, Pierre, Boulez on Music Today, trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Bennett, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988
Guyer, Carolyn, Quibbling, Eastgate Systems, Inc.
Essay Index | Home