Enigma of the Absent Presence

[imomus]

I spent the night at Transmediale: Fly Utopia!, a festival event containing performances by Discom, Dorine_Muraille, Kevin Blechdom, DAT Politics and others. You can see photographs of the event, and me posing with some of the performers, on iMomus.



To pass the time before the music began, I played Twenty Questions with my friend Mario. He, coming from Spain, had never heard of this game and found it excellent. In Twenty Questions, one person thinks of a thing and the other has to guess what it is, asking up to twenty questions which can only be answered by 'yes' or 'no'. It is a game based on a present absence, or an absent presence: all attention is focused on a thing unknown, which one attempts (despite it being unknown, invisible, absent) to model, turn around, measure. It is very satisfying to touch the enigma with your hands, and put it through some tests which render it slightly more visible, until -- of course! -- it becomes visible. Or doesn't. It is also amusing for the person who knows the object, the present absence, to imagine it put through operations that only someone who didn't know the etiquette normally attached to it would demand. When Mario was thinking about Curiosity, for instance, he enjoyed me asking if it was something invented by a scientist. And when I was thinking of Noriko Tujiko, I enjoyed Mario asking 'Does it shave?'



Later, listening to the music of Erik Minkkinnen and Dorine_Muraille, it struck me that an important part of the pleasure I get from these big sheets of abstract sound, aside from the simple pleasure of listening to sounds so textural and structures so unpredictable, is the vertigo I get trying to imagine a world in which something this fearsomely, uncompromisingly otherly is what passes for pop music.



It is this sort of pleasure which awaits readers of Ben Marcus. His texts (Notable American Women, The Father Costume, The Age Of Wire And String) are short, precise and puzzling. They contain things which we cannot see directly, yet which we know are, in some dimension, orderly and sensible. They are collections of observations for which the taxonomic template has been hidden. The absence of the (unusual) key makes the key the main thing in these texts, whereas in normal texts the presence of the (usual) key makes it invisible, a sort of 'elephant in the room'. Marcus' texts may seem mad, but they contain a strong promise of deferred sanity, and the quest for this is the hook. It is a pleasure to construct in one's mind the wholly fresh parallel world in which these sentences make perfect sense.

Read an extract from 'The Age of Wire and String' at Amazon and some other stories by Marcus here.



I enjoyed listening to Phillip Dodd's Night Waves interview with veteran absurdist Edward Albee, but it sounds as if the unpredictable, in Albee's new play about a man who falls in love with a goat, is in a much more predictable place than Marcus would have put it. Luckily I managed to add the missing ostranenie by playing PS1 game Driver in indestructible cheat mode while listening to the interview, wedging my car in front of trams that the furious police cars were forced to ram so hard they often flipped right up into the air.