COMPOS[T]MENTIS, by Aaron Aaps (A Review by j/j hastain)

$16/100 pgs

What of ourselves can we see in what we have been given? We stare into the scraps that overflow from our open palms. We stare into the puddles of seepage which are the results of our interactions with one another.

Aaps’ new book is a bawdy proposition (“on silence- fuck silence” / “where there is talking the world is like a garden to me”)–is the possibility of interacting with a thrashing, decaying host and something positive or self-affirming coming from that interaction. What if it were possible to ascend or become enlightened, by way of decay (“the bloody, peeling body archive made lucid”)? What if upwards and downwards were not at all at odds?

COMPOS[T]MENTIS is a carnal celebration, a cantata with smegma being marked into it by invested hand. Aaps’ book is an animal preoccupied with its own genitals; do you see it smile as it gingerly fingers itself (“the ape submerged the pages in hot glue made of bone”/ “it then proceeded to consume the round, extruded, phallic fruit- a sea of infected cocks. A sea of itchy clits”)

Does it make you uncomfortable or comforted to be an I here (amidst the I’s of so many particulars)?”I only wants that feeling for the stinging exploitation of contorted others”–“not just an I, an I that lasts.” In Apps’ book we are an essential organ to “I’s own body” where “writ(h)ing [is] an I looking into a pool.” An I amidst I (as we are in Apps’ COMPOS[T]MENTIS) is a brutal reckoning with self. Is my I possessive? Is my I an “organ-cock glean[ing] sustenance from a cyborg system”? We can know for sure, that the questions that we must ask ourselves (in the privacy of our own bodies or in the public space of a review or conversation) in response to this book are forms of indelible authenticity. Such forms of authenticity are just one of the many things that we get to see of ourselves within what Aaps has given us.

We move through ape genitals as they are contracting and expanding. We are coming to know “the love of the other”; not just any other (so not a binary other) but all things other: other as quality (as opposed to as position). An “amniotic scrotum” is submerging from the”zombie compost.” We long to be what an ape is fingering (“there is an infinite stack of dead sparrows fucking and I hate them because they hurt because I hates”) and the fact that we are not “the red flush in the dirty trousers” makes us nervous, causes us to wonder how we are to respond to what we are being shown by way of what we have been given.

Mysticism is a workable location and approach; a place to go in ourselves–a place to consider what we are accumulating. As we near Aaps’ “Somatic self-portraits” again and again in the book, we find our bodies relaxing. These portraits are alternates or companions to the language of the book. In mystic space our “wineskin moods” keep us from leaping from where “the windows are imagined.””Mystery is a giant swelling amoeba edifice” is “water laid over water” is wonder, a “place to stitch the dark in.” With each reoccurring somatic self-portrait the ear, the penis-tip, flesh-folds, the surface of the eyes, the tongue, the inside of the ass, the teeth, cheeks, spit, and one’s own shit in toilet are revealed as the contents of an indeterminate circle (which is trying to sate itself by way of the crossties and crassness of the body). A sloppy hourglass is finding its way into the ape’ hand.

We hear the following call and response emanating from the ripples in the puddles below us: “what is the definition of beauty”? “The attempt is always a failure.”The ape and its rheums are bending in conjunction. “The ape’ back fat is swelling” alongside every spurt of this fanatical, mystical cum.

j/j hastain is the author of several cross-genre books including the trans-genre book libertine monk (Scrambler Press), anti-memoir a vigorous (Black Coffee Press/ Eight Ball Press) and The Xyr Trilogy: a Metaphysical Romance. j/j’s writing has most recently appeared in Caketrain, Trickhouse, The Collagist, Housefire, Bombay Gin and Aufgabe. j/j has been a guest lecturer at Naropa University and University of Colorado.