Paul had taken to drinking shortly after the closing of the Body Poem Gallery. His bouts with alcohol, however, were less damaging to his health than his continued run-ins with the law. At fifty-one, Obern was jailed for a week as a scofflaw. While in jail, he was attacked by a prisoner in the shower. The man carved a crude limerick on Paul’s chest with a sharpened toothbrush before raping him. The trauma was a lasting source of psychic pain.
When the limerick story hit the media, the ignominy of it created sympathy for Obern. There was a collective sense of guilt in the arts community for having abandoned the great man. Wealthy benefactors, and some of his former models who had gone on to better things, subsidized Paul and his poetry for the remaining decade of his life. He appreciated the chance to work again, but the spark was gone. His years of genius were behind him.
For a man as influential as Paul Obern proved to be, his death was a quiet affair. He lived out his last days in a small apartment, surrounded by copies of his books in their various editions and translations. Paul exchanged correspondence with writers from all over the globe. He was occasionally seen at the bus depot talking to teenage runaways, trying to persuade them to pursue a poetic life. He wrote little poetry or creative work of any lasting value during this period, but he remained an influence on the poets, painters, and tattooists with whom he was in contact.
Paul died at age sixty-two of a brain hemorrhage. There was little notice of his passing in the newspapers or on television, at least not at first. Few attended the funeral. The body was cremated in accordance with his wishes. His ashes had already been scattered before postings on the Internet alerted the arts world to its loss.
One of the great ironies of his passing was the timing. Obern’s death came three weeks prior to the opening of the exhibition of his work in Arizona, organized by Randi Lee-Smythe. Paul had been notified of the planned exhibition, but apparently never opened the letter, which was found on his desk along with various unopened bills when his apartment was cleaned out. Two dozen of Obern’s old models were put on display. Although the lines were wrinkled and stretched by time, the exhibition re-established Obern’s reputation as an artist and poet. The critical reaction to the exhibition was overwhelmingly positive. Even the ministers in Cincinnati could find nothing sensual in these models. The reconsideration of Paul Obern’s work had begun. Now we can say Obern has achieved the recognition he always deserved, and a rightful place in the history of art and literature, but there was a time when it seemed he might slip into obscurity. If not for the efforts of Dr. Lee-Smythe and others, the world might have forgotten, or simply neglected to remember, Obern’s cultural contribution.
Obern’s lasting influence can be seen today in the Body Poetry and Body Graffiti movements, and the popular practice among students of writing snatches of verse on various body parts prior to taking exams. Although most of his works are now dead, his ideas live on. In addition to my stepmother, several other models chose to have their remains preserved for the public benefit. They shall be a source of inspiration and wonder for generations to come.
For me, the writing and art of Paul Obern has been a lifelong passion. Although his works are now found in most standard college literature textbooks, Obern’s work remains unknown to the vast majority of the reading public. Most scholarly papers on Obern and his writing make very dry reading. This is unfortunate, because the man and his work were so alive. I hope, in my own small way, I have helped to set the record straight about the man, his life, and his art. I hope this lecture will cause the audience to reacquaint themselves with Obern’s works, or discover these treasures for the first time. Share the pleasure, share the joy that you find in the photographs and texts. Be inspired. Look at the person next to you or think of someone you love. Grab a pen and find the poet inside you.
Peace.
Peter Smythe, Ph.D.
TESTING SPARK
Daniel Mills
1. Either/Or
4:00. The Photo Lab blurs and shimmers, swimming in the lens of his exhaustion. Yellow light spills from hidden fixtures, filtered and dim. Shapes surface out of the sickly glow: the bulk of the massive photo tools, the keyboard beneath his gloved hands.
There are three tools in the workroom. Numbered and coded but otherwise identical. In each machine, a set of robotic arms works ceaselessly, transferring a sequence of silicon wafers from the input to the chemical bath. Once soaked, each wafer is spun to ensure a uniform coating before being passed beneath the lens for exposure. A blast of light fixes the photo-image: a grid-like pattern of conductors and transistors. Then the mechanical arms resume their rhythm, moving the wafer to the developer even as the next disc is readied for exposure.
A tool alarm sounds. He stands up slowly, awkward and amorphous in his clean room garment. At the machine he unloads one cache of silicon wafers and feeds in another. The tool clicks and purrs, satisfied. He boxes the finished batch and places it on a nearby cart.
When the cart is full, he will wheel it to the loading station. The wafer track will carry the boxes to another station, another workroom. There each disc will be wired, an intricate network of micro-transistors created in accordance with the photo-image.
Later, the wafer will be tested, a spark sent through each of its transistors to ensure functionality. He has never witnessed the process but imagines the disc as a darkened plain, a city glimpsed at night in the moments before touchdown. Light follows light across the wafer, white and dazzling, blindingly pure. The transistors flicker. Off/On. Either/Or.
He returns to his workstation and settles into his chair. He glances at the computer clock. Twenty minutes remain before the next batch will be finished. Time enough. He un-hides a browser window and opens Wikipedia.
2. Suiting Up
The hands are washed, the mouth rinsed. The bouffant is donned, the veil that covers nose and mouth. A hood slides down over the hairnet, concealing the face except for the eyes. The clean suit is stepped into, the shoulders secured by a series of metal clasps. Lastly, the boots. They slip on over the sneakers and are snapped into place at the knee.
Click. He is ready. He loops the rubber lanyard around his neck and adjusts the ID badge. The plastic card is marked on one side with his name and photograph. The other side bears his ID number along with a barcode by which his every action is tracked and catalogued, later to be checked against the test records to determine his failure rate.
A set of double doors opens onto the factory floor. He swipes his badge, causing the light to blink from red to green. He hurries inside, joining the others as they disperse through the factory, heading for different labs and departments.
His feet slap the tiles beneath him, silenced by the din of heavy machinery, the drone that haunts him, even in dreams. It lives inside of him like a sickness, the shriek that wells up from the floor and howls down the unlit corridors, sounding in such moments like the cry of an infant.
He keeps walking, unable to stop, unwilling to listen. Late for his shift, he scurries down the narrow hall, accompanied only by the bang and screech of the wafer track overhead. A box passes, heard but not seen: a train in the midnight distance. His heart quickens at the sound, roaring into the silence that gathers in its wake.
3. Labyrinths
He reads at work. All night sometimes. Books are forbidden—paper sheds dust and particles as effectively as human skin—but his computer is networked for Internet access. He opens up Wikipedia or Project Gutenberg and reads from his computer screen.
Although he studied English in college, his interests have diversified in the six months since graduation, turning toward classical philosophy and medieval theology. For weeks his studies have focused on Augustine and Aquinas, their influences and followers. Tonight he reads about the medieval hierarchy of the angels. The four-winged cherubim: calf-like hoofs, human hands. The fiery seraphim who sing and dissolve in the flames that birthed them, only to be reborn and burn again. He clicks from page to page, following links wh
ere they open onto others, creating a labyrinth through which he wanders, restless and alone.
After three successive shifts, he struggles to remain awake. His thoughts, shattered by fatigue, return re-forged from the hum of the Photo Lab. In the storehouse of memory, described by Augustine in the Confessions, he imagines the coils of the clean room, the endless hallways that bend and circle back. Even the factory’s nested architecture is doubled by the pathways of every microchip he creates, by the linked structure of the Web.
Night after night, he floats through each of these mazes in turn, weightless with exhaustion, seeking out the same object at every center—escape or something less, something more—until a machine alarms and he rises to empty the output.
4. In the Corridor
Another night. His lunch break.
He logs off from the computer and makes his way toward the changing room. He fumbles down the corridor, turning right then left, his thoughts circling one another in the darkness of the hallway. He reflects upon a passage from Kierkegaard: Not with deliberation but from deliberation itself. Deliberation itself. He repeats the final words to himself as he walks, beating back sleep as with an incantation.
He shuffles forward, ducking down one corridor then another, until he finds himself in an unfamiliar section of the factory. He pauses to regain his bearings, his gaze straying from the walls to the wafer track above, recognizing nothing. Figures drift past him, arrayed in featureless white, colorless but for their eyes: brown eyes, blue. He does not think to ask his way.
After a time, he emerges in a workroom lit by fluorescent bulbs. The lights appear to him with the suddenness of a winter sky, the stars that cut from the early dark. The workroom is cramped and unfamiliar, crowded by the presence of four hulking tools. Wafer Prep. The machines are similar in scale to the photo tools, but he cannot guess their purpose. He ventures a tentative hello, raising his voice to be heard above the drone. No answer.
He presses on. Two corridors branch off from the workroom. He chooses the nearer hallway and plunges once more into the gloom of the factory’s bowels. Red bulbs blink from the track overhead, flashing Off/On, Light/Dark, winking like the specks of distant planes, flares in the void of ever-encroaching space.
Another white shape. A woman.
They nearly collide. He steps aside and presses himself against the wall, excusing himself as she glides past. Her eyes are brown, the lashes long and curling. From her eyes alone he knows her to be young: his age, a little older. Her ID badge dangles from a lanyard, turned inward so only the barcode shows.
She disappears down the corridor. In her absence, he feels suddenly cold, curiously bereft. It is as though his blood has slowed, draining to his feet to leave an unfilled space inside of him. Red lights flicker overhead, casting colored shadows. He looks up. Another box hurtles down the track, echoes fading from the dark.
5. Days Off
He walks everywhere. Through parks shimmering with humidity. Beneath trees that bend and wilt, bronze steeples that throw back the sunlight. The city is endless: a globe-spanning sprawl pocked by swathes of sickly forest, rivers of stinking water.
He drifts along aimlessly, listening to music in headphones. Scriabin: fragments of Pleroma, the chords that close out Vers La Flamme. The old bluesmen. In the midst of a downpour, he plays records by Skip James and Charley Patton, Blind Willie Johnson. “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” With eyes closed, he listens to the howls of these long-dead musicians, hearing in their words—in their fragile, fraying voices—the dim reflection of a scream uttered once, at birth, and then filed away in the storehouse, never to be retrieved.
Some evenings his feet carry him up the hill to the university from which he graduated last year. It is early August. Weeks remain before the start of the new term, and the buildings are uniformly dark, locked up for the season. Through the first floor windows, he sees empty classrooms joined by miles of hallway, rank upon rank of identical exit signs, blush-pink, that deepen toward crimson as dusk sinks into full-on night.
He heads home. In the kitchen he switches on the lights and fills the kettle from the tap. He strikes a long match and ignites the gas range. With one hand resting on the kettle, he turns his head from the stovetop and finds his reflection on the window.
His skin is pale, dotted with swollen pimples. He hasn’t shaved in days and the stubble sprouts thickly from his chin. His eyes are glassy and hollow. In them he can discern a trace image of the Photo Lab, the factory floor. The half-buried memory of another, a woman, her eyes brown and deep—
The kettle shrieks.
He takes down a mug and drops in a teabag. Adds a splash of water. Steam drifts up from the cup, creating an intricate web-work, a maze in three dimensions. It hangs in the air before his face, motionless at the moment of unfolding. He exhales.
6. The Woman
He thinks of her often. Remembering. Fantasizing. Some nights, when he is alone, the Photo Lab fills with the image of a face—her face, he knows, though he has never seen it. The eyes are hers: rendered colorless by that yellow twilight, dissolving like steam with the shrill beep-beep of the tool alarm. During his breaks he retraces his steps through the labyrinth, seeking out the empty workroom in Wafer Prep, the hallway in which their eyes met.
It is a week before he stumbles upon the room a second time. He finds it far from empty. Wafer Prep buzzes with activity, two men standing at every machine. They regard him blithely, expressions betraying nothing, mustaches visible through mesh veils. One man nods to him in greeting. He returns the gesture but hurries past into the adjoining corridor.
She is not there. The hallway is empty and cold: red lights, skittering shadows. In that moment despair surfaces from somewhere nearby, closer to him than he imagined possible.
He does not give up the search. Most nights he skips dinner to wander the factory floor, following the wafer track from workroom to workroom, earning curious glances from the men he encounters, dispassionate pity from the few women that notice him.
Two weeks later, he sees her again. Their second meeting takes place in a workroom on the opposite side of the factory, more than a mile from the Photo Lab. He glimpses her from the corner of his hood as she crosses the lab, a box of wafers carried in her two hands. She is shorter than he remembers, her hands slim and delicate, the hands of a child.
He steps toward her. Their eyes meet. A shadow darts beneath her veil, flickering behind her irises: a dying bulb, fading into blankness. Her badge would be visible were it not for the box she carries, which hides all but the final letters of her first name: —ra. The top corner of her badge is jagged and blackened, the rounded edge crumbling, as though burned away.
One blink, a hint of acknowledgment, and then she is gone. She vanishes into a nearby hallway, the clatter of her footsteps swallowed by the roar of machinery.
He does not think to follow her. As before, he experiences a sensation of coldness, the chill from a snuffed flame. Hunger steals over him, an inexorable fatigue. He leans forward and rests his head against the side of one of the prep tools. Gears drum within.
He becomes aware of a man standing behind him. The newcomer regards him with obvious concern. You alright, son? the man asks. Can I get you anything?
No, he says, shaking his head. I’m okay.
7. The Seraphim
Alone at his workstation, he reflects on this second encounter with the woman. Her half-turn at the sight of him. That brief flicker. Recognition? He doubts it.
He pictures her as she appeared to him in the workroom, holding the wafer box from the bottom, her hands small and fragile, doll-like. The loss he felt at her departure. Her ID badge: neatly concealed by the plastic wafer box. Was it only his imagination, or had the corner of her badge really been blackened—burned, somehow—tarred by its brush with the tester’s spark?
All night, the question pursues him, driving him down one maze then another. At 7:00, he clocks out and heads to the bus stop, where he
waits half-an-hour for the next bus. When it arrives, he steps up, swipes his pass. He wraps his jacket around him and lies back against the seat, lulled into sleep by the drone of the engine, the whirr of the road beneath him.
He dreams of the seraphim. Six-winged—blind and faceless—they are monstrous and they are beautiful. Infinite in number, they gather in interlocking rings before the holy fire, creating a pattern of limitless complexity: a luminous, seething maw from which boil up the remnants of a song. The music is simultaneously delicate and violent, suggesting his stifled rage, his newly glimpsed despair. The notes reach upward, always upward: edging toward ecstasy, tumbling over. And still the angels sing, swollen with song and rising. Toward the flame.
Immolation ensues, the moment of all undoing. Heat bursts upon the gathered seraphim, white like the flash from a photo tool, consuming them even as it gives them birth: the rings reeling, reforming, the fire spitting from the center like a caged beast, its hunger boundless, insatiable.
But the song never ceases. It is there even after the bus jerks him awake and deposits him on the curb two blocks from the house. He hears it in the roar of passing trucks and in the distant toll of eight as the morning clouds depart and the summer sky fires with the fall of day.
8. Commuting
Early evening.
The August heat seeps into his bloodstream, infecting his dreams like a fever. He wakes. His heart thuds with the aftereffects of nightmare. 5:29. He claps down on the alarm clock just as the minute turns, cutting off the bell in mid-chime.
He rolls out of bed and crosses the bedroom. For a time he stands before the shaded window, drunk with terror and exhaustion. Sweat rolls off his body, dribbling from his fingertips to spatter the rug. His own stink assails him: damp and fetid, the reek of an opened grave.
Dadaoism (An Anthology) Page 20
