Book Cover for The Opposite of Claustrophobia, Eileen Tabios
The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2017
The Opposite of Claustrophobia: Prime’s Anti-Autobiography
Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-909443-88-4
71 pages £8.00
71 pages £8.00
Resurrection Software, A Review
of Eileen R. Tabios’
Prime’s Anti-Autobiography
by Jonathan Mulcahy-King
The Opposite of Claustrophobia: Prime’s
Anti-Autobiography is a tender blend of modernist, de-colonial
and procedural code in which poet Eileen Tabios elegantly defies Plato’s prescient warning against the
dangers of web-connected memory, and that relying too heavily on external
memory (he was referring of course to writing at the time) would have
irreversible consequences on our ability to remember.
I forgot because I thought it best to
forget
everything rather than remember schemes
informed by my desire rather than what
actually transpired.
(p.
58)
Defiantly,
Tabios melds the computational with the haptic to create something refreshingly
unique and politically poignant. In her explanatory essay ‘Babaylan Poetics & the MDR Poetry Generator’ (Amnesia: Somebody’s Memoir, 2016), Tabios
outlines her method. This is Tabios’ sixth collection (of an impressive 40 plus
book career) in which she has utilised what she refers to as the MDR, or “Murder
Death Resurrection” machine. The MDR is a database of 1,146 lines Tabios
created from her reading of her previously published poetry in order to present
poems that are not, as she writes, a product of conscious personal preference. Here,
each line begins with the phrase “I forgot”, in homage to Tom Beckett. In doing
so, each line in the book is representative of a memory and the book, itself a
long poem, the act of remembering.
I forgot space is difficult to
depict without the
negative grid.
(p. 66)
The Opposite of Claustrophobia also hinges on what Tabios terms “Babaylan Poetics”, a poetics based on
indigenous Filipino practices and culture, taken from the word for Shaman/
healer/ community leader, is an attempt to de-colonialize her Filipino roots
through the manipulation of the English language and the restoration of a ‘sacred
wholeness’. For Tabios, this is brought about as a result of the displacement
(through cut-up) of English, the ‘enforced tongue’, and serves to relate the
pre-colonial, spiritualist idea of interconnectivity—that seemingly unconnected
parts have meaning as a whole. In doing so, Tabios de/reconstructs the English
language as a kind of restorative Justice. This is key to understanding Tabios’
unflinching conviction that poetry can impact greatly on culture and our understanding
of the world, as she writes (p.59),
I forgot Arthur Rimbaud who said the bears
are dancing but what he had wanted to do
was move the stars to pity.
Although
Tabios creates an auto-affective method, she does not wish to stage her post-modern death,
but be at play amongst the structural decay—while she increases the
intermediate space between intention and action. It is significant to Tabios’
trajectory that she not relinquish full authorship, if such a thing is even
possible (many artists and writers have attempted this, most notably Jackson
Pollock, whose drip paintings have spurred much debate, as patterns form even subconsciously
and as a product of muscle memory), instead, rather than a poetry of pure
automaticity, Tabios’ is a meditation on what it is to remember, to be human…
I forgot we, together, formed
tuning forks
longing for empathetic hits.
(p. 22)
… and what
it is to be a poet staving off ennui, and does so with bold complexity, and as a result joins the
strange metaphysics of the cut-up canon alongside its key architect, William
Burroughs.
I forgot how one can sag into night as if
night
was a lover.
(p. 22)
I forgot a poem with multiple
references that
became whole through a
scaffolding of jazz.
(p. 67)
The Opposite of Claustrophobia then, is a celebration of
remembering, as a haptic art, and speaks to
an important facet in the evolution of personal and collective memory—that there
are cognitive consequences of our ever-growing reliance on external memory (Smart
2012), and in this sense is a meditation on our tendency to remember
how to find that information, rather than remembering the information itself
(Sparrow, Liu, & Wegner 2011).
I
forgot grabbing at my fading dreams only to recall a vision of skyscrapers
crumbling from
the
slaps of iron balls.
(p. 7)
I forgot longing for a sky
without horizon, but
acceding instead to the eye’s clamour against
the opposite of claustrophobia.
(p. 14)
Having
let this book’s ideas germinate for a while, it is clear that the opposite of
claustrophobia is not agoraphobia, as
logic would suggest, but perhaps the comfort of being confined, an embrace of
the state in which one could feel constricted by the crush of societal and
neurostructural schema, and that it is this
comfort—of being confined to our memories and how we embrace this
reflexivity between our personal and collective/ cultural memories that
differentiates us in an age of overwhelming automation.
I forgot a lake capitulating
with ripples from a
stone’s impassive penetration.
(p. 23)
References
Sparrow, B., Liu, J.,
and Wegner, D. M., (2011), ‘Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of
Having Information at Our Fingertips’, Science, 333(6043): 776–778.
Smart, Paul R., 2012,
‘The Web-Extended Mind’, Metaphilosophy, 43(4): 446–463.
Tabios, E., R. (2016) Amnesia: Somebody’s Memoir. Black Radish
Books.
