This Modern Writer: Fragments on Openness by Amanda Silbernagel

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One commits a categorical error when one says that artists create out of an inherent masochism. Masochists enjoy pain despite consequences, artists enjoy consequences despite pain– generally speaking.

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One creates art not because one believes it is worth dying for; one believes art worth dying for because one creates.

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Rupture is a form of violence: violence to form. Artists are those who through violence to form create form.

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The goal of art is to create the effect of rupture without creating the appearance of rupture as such. The same is true for philosophy; only here the disclosure of violence is far less avoidable.

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When an artist admits that there exists no “right interpretation” to a body of her work, we are willing to overlook this fault. When a philosopher admits the same, we throw his body to the wolves.

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Most will agree that the purpose of art is not to sooth-say. Now if only we could come to this same understanding about Philosophy.

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The joy of understanding—be it a text, an idea, or a person—consists in its ephemerality. It is what makes love possible.

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A dike breaks, a blood vessel pops, and the liquid content for which the tunnel was prime and sole medium becomes altered—in the sense of unconstrained. The destruction or removal of a constraint through rupture for conscious subjects comes the introduction of another, different constraint: the feeling of responsibility for being’s outflow, for where it ought flow.

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(Closed Circuit, Fig 1) No rupture: no decisions: no responsibility: no history: no interpretation: no meaning: no interpretation: no history: no responsibility: no decisions: no rupture.

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(Open Circuit, Fig 2) No rupture: no decisions: no responsibility: no history: no interpretation: no meaning: no interpretation: no meaning: no interpretation: no meaning:

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And what if the center of a system is nowhere to be found?

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Our age maintains a remarkably high tolerance for tangents: as reflected in the technologized and Wikified attention span which has patience for only that movie, that novel, that article, that conversation which unravels as fast and as far and in as many directions as a dried-out dandelion head: a chase we perhaps find intoxicatingly reminiscent of a simpler past, a past we never had.

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A world reduced to a series of accidents (or unbreakable chains of causation) is a world our understanding of which is futile at worst, impossible at best, and in any case artless.

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Repetition is the indicator of intention. If an image recurs in several of my poems unbeknownst to me, if I repeat the same mistake multiple times without noticing the trend and intervening: repetition is here indicative of a double-negative, or unconscious positive, intention. I did not intend not to repeat myself.

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(Possible instances of rupture, Fig 1) I change the channel, I quit my job, I scan the radio, I divorce my wife, I click on a link, I drop out of school, I put X on hold to intercept a call from Y.

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(Possible instances of rupture, Fig 2) My friend changes the channel, I get fired from my job, the person in the passenger’s seat scans the radio, my wife divorces me, an ad for product X pops up on the screen while I’m searching for product Y, I get suspended from school, X puts me on hold to intercept a call from Z.

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Where blockage differs from rupture is in its relation to content. The flood wall forces back the rebel current. The current forces back the trapped army, or caravan of slaves. It is often a parental gesture, and so “in your best interest,” that the block or blockage performs for (and on) you, the subject. The only emancipation to speak of here is of the sort whereby a child who leaps out into a busy street is said to be “rescued” by the hand that yanks him back to the sidewalk: the safe, the bloodless, well-lit, unobscured, good old fashioned, straight, conservative, republican concrete slab, where the child may transport to school from home and back to home from school, unharmed and accounted for.

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(Possible instances of blockage, Fig 1) I change the channel, I quit my job, I scan the radio, I divorce my wife, I click on a link, I drop out of school, I put X on hold to intercept an incoming call from Y.

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(Possible instances of blockage, Fig 2) My wife changes the channel, I get fired from my job, the person in the passenger’s seat scans the radio, my wife divorces me, an ad for product X pops up on the screen while I’m searching for product Y, I get suspended from school, X puts me on hold to intercept a call from Z. Blockage is tantamount Christian grace. The negative freedom in which it consists is freedom-from danger, harm or risk: eternal for the Sheep, finite for the child; and so also with the corresponding illusion of freedom-from responsibility. Hence: if I die before I wake…

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The search for an answer, an imaginary case in a posited set, is an instance of blockage of the question, and hence a negation of movement—opening and force.

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I rape my intellect by refusing my body to the poem.

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I’ve been told that the function of image in my philosophic works is, among other things: morbid, inappropriate, wretched (!), unsound (?), distracting, arresting, politically incorrect, metaphorically exacting, entertaining, intriguing, tolerable—and in each case I’ve wondered, stifling a slightly maniacal laugh, what the commenter would think of my poems.

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We call “accidental” those elements which appear in a work, and appear integral to that work, of which the artist was unaware during the creation process. Yesterday we called the cause of the accident “chance,” today “the unconscious,” tomorrow “linear feedback shift register.”

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Tell me your greatest fear, and I’ll tell you what you look for in art.

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As the mystery element that makes the brilliantly and technically constructed work soar, the accident in art is context-sensitive: hinging in part on the viewer’s perspective, and in part on the design that houses the accident—and therefore, in part on the creator: her careful placement and installation of windows and doors.

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It is not surprising that many pilots were also photographers. It is no accident that certain photographers were also pilots.

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It is surprising, but no accident, that many philosophers were also poets.

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Analytic philosophers of his time and at large considered Nietzsche’s aphoristic style to be a dangerous scam. A scam, due to its presumed lack of rigor, or its displaced or misused and/or abused rigor, in short: its misrepresentation of the word. A danger, due to its capacity to seduce, coaxing readers through the tightly wound corridors of his psyche, where the way is obscured by the flare ups and outages, the play of the light, of the mood; where the entire visible portion of the course is riddled with metaphor and devoid of Truth.

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The aphorism is a threat to today’s discourse: not for the reasons that Nietzsche’s aphorisms were perceived as a threat by his contemporaries—the lack of a fixed center therein, the concealment of this lack—but for our decreasing ability to distinguish between brevity and fragmentation, ambiguity and incoherence.

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Brevity is insufficient as a condition for aphoristic writing. The text message with its 160 character limit, the “tweet” with its 140 character limit, does not by virtue of this limit automatically constitute an aphorism.

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Just as the placement of two or three letters before a name does not designate a philosopher, but rather only a profession that bears the title “philosophy,” the placement of a question mark at the end of a statement does not transform that statement into a question.

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What is called a question? Does this statement count as a question? (Click yes or no.)

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A question frequently posed to artists: why this? what do you mean by this? It is interesting to consider, by comparison, with what bafflement and even offense a similar question would be taken by a parent, regarding their children: why this? Why conceive this?

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That seriousness and indifference, work and play, are contradictory concepts is seen as obvious by most people. A critical distinction too often goes unmade between indifferent work and serious play.

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Sincerity is a weapon that can easily become the artist’s fatal flaw. As a famous poet once said, it is conducive to the poetic process to feel at liberty to incorporate into the poem as many birds as one desires; when the poem is done, he then simply deletes all the birds. Here “birds” can be substituted with any subject about which the artist is “sincere.”

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Poetic creation is an economy of indulgences and restraints.

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When the audience quit responding in the manner which the artist, armed and blindfolded, had come to expect—the artist, blind and ineffective, lost faith in her weapon.

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Nowhere does the artist feel more alive than at the threshold of creation, where the life she breathes into her work is sacred insofar as it is both first and last breath.

***Some content may have been borrowed from the author’s poetry.

Amanda Silbernagel is a writer from Fargo, North Dakota who currently abides in West Texas. Amanda’s poetic and philosophic works have been published in print and online journals, such as Ouroboros, PANK, Arsenic Lobster, Breadcrumb Scabs, Thirteen Myna Birds, Hamilton Stone Review, Red Weather, Yellow Bicycle, and Love Child. Other works can be found on Amanda’s website, “the philosophy of poetry // & v.v.” (www.amandasilbernagel.com).