Jacobson’s Novella
by Jim Leftwich
Jacobson’s Novella
Jim Leftwich
Michael Jacobson
Writ Bodies Ov Titivillus
An Asemic Art Novella
Post-Asemic Press
2024
“It is not the crocodile’s job to yell: Watch out for the crocodile!” — Henri Michaux
Ah, the noises of the brain, and the noises of the mind, and the noises of the body, the drawriting (to borrow Marco Giovenale’s fine portmanteau) of a proposed asemic storytelling will not turn them off, will not quiet the sensorium to make room for divine or demonic influences. The pandemonium ebbs and floods, the clockwork chain of being beating, but it only ceases and quiets to silence some nine minutes after the final breath.
Maybe the absence of distinct or direct semantic order or ordering will uncloak the machinery, unveil the apparatus, permitting us to watch ourselves think, to observe the meaning-building processes of reading as we fail in one attempt after another to come to terms with the asemic undertow of emptiness.
How many attempts before we give up, having decided that this game is rigged and is not worth the effort it takes to play it? And, in a subtle and sudden twist of the knife the plot, is that surrender not in fact the victory we have been seeking all along?
Experientially, the most concise and precise definition of the word “asemic” is “polysemous.”
For practical purposes, we might call something “writing” if in response it permits something we might reasonably call “reading.”
We can decide what the meaning of “is” is later. For now we’re primarily interested in moving on.
If novella, then story. I am telling myself that this is a fair foundation on which to construct a series of responses to Michael’s book.
Let’s say the story or stories in this book are structurally resistant to being translated into words. In fact, they are resistant to any kind of translation. We stare at them, and they
stare back at us.
Nico Vassilakis:
“You can read anything as language is everything.”
And:
“The thing you do not want to do is explain everything.”
John M. Bennett: “Be Blank.”
A thwarted reading is still a reading. A frustrated reading is still a reading. An empty reading is still a reading.
Reading against itself produces a lack of meaning and invites a description of that lack, and of the process through which that lack was produced.
Also, a writing of an empty reading might well consist entirely of nothing other than evidence of its emptiness.
Page 5 and/or 6 wherein anthropomorphic figures or a single figure, the lettuce of swans, the wrong approach, begin again, in page 14, the drawing draws you in, you are drawn and quartered, quarantined in the darkest hour, just before the dawn, nautilus twilight, perplexed, guided by invoices, page 23 equals 5, we were not meant to read the dreamprints of our demons, if it wanted to be words it would have been words from the outset.
So. No. Not comedic nonsense. Imagine a long-dead Russian Futurist rising from the grave to slap you in the face with a copy of the paperback edition of a novel by Samuel Beckett. Banana peels not included. If it’s a trick, then you shouldn’t fall for it, but maybe it’s not a trick.
______________
Overlooking Goose Creek Valley
in the Blue Ridge Mountains
of Virginia
July 2024
