Nature Abhors
(Four Favorite) Artists' Books (by Johanna Drucker) Online
An online repository of Digital Objects by Danny Snelson

History of the/my Wor(l)d (1990)

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my

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beginning was the

world, nursed on

the warm breast

of chaos fast fol

lowing a night of

initial explosion, making light into a face swaddled in warmth and

hard publicity. Genetics produced the fullness thereof and a new

1. Ideas take flight, fast and sloppy, winged with desire to make their swift way in the world, hiding their strike capacity in the secret moment of impact which rang in our ears as we ran away confused by that first big bang.

1.

The all-American dream girl: long-legged, blue-eyed, blonde and a huntress, a Dluse, the law and the word adored.

letters. Our earth took us to heart and mind in the intellectual embrace of a cool companionship.

DDDDO D DDDD

cosmology emerged as the

...

flight from

2 •

3. S'ix days or seven a brother or two sisters, not pictured here, were the stars of the nuclear configuration, fractured and split in the familiar pattern and spreading to the cardinal points of of the psychic globe, raised in the old testament way, with

InnOCence

natural light, harsh, swift judgement, and stories, many many stories told over again against the text to dis\tuise and ~ distract our labor.

locked them ~ out of the garden.

Self a blocked off space of time, private allowance, childish hands marking a face organized as science.

DELIGHT was unearthly in the early stages of undress. Knowledge was a hot routine to the primal primitives,

4. Grandfather one day from the sea and another in a bucket, tracking sand, one of ... our own most ancient relations, dense with history, his own, end the knowledge of

.. others: so the shape of the headdress, stars and animals to find their way and satisfy the primitive ache of the human imagation.

byone, in a long

list of names

crossed out in a

major struggle

for survival.

and formed the hard won figures into a name scrambling

THE LAW

7. Travel to forei~n lands was recommended as a cure for ennui but writing, home was harder than they ima~ined with a lan~ua~e invented for business. and the whole nei~hborhood look

came down the

In~ on. The brother ~ave advice while the sisters

filled up pa~es with what were Indecipherable

forms.

mountain & up our heritage dic

tatlng transgres

the order on the soft linoleum and scattering

the language underfoot. Literacy and intimacy

collapsed in conversations stolen from routine

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** 8. Take aim little weapon of my heart and make the best possible

t

use of the tools and tar~ets of self-torture.

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At school they were put through their

paces, and the first swift thrill cam.e

from watching the man put his daughter

on his knee and then out of sequence

lightning strikes!

Hand in glove, now abandoned, slipped into the pocket of repressed behavior, dressed up and then

Sions we were subject to perform. Suckling the calf until it turned golden exhausted their piety. Banished to the desert the chosen ones

spoke out on the empty air.

schooled to understand resistance, inherent anger ground into the soul swallowing memories of tortured afternoons, athletic energy bound into. anklets curbing the instincts against the strict measure of hard rules.

SNAKES and

partIng waters

charmed them

back into civili

zation where

writing began in

their own name.

Now language

11. Days in salt water and other clues dished up when the waters parted and then hun~ out to dry, beached

debris from the summer's washed out memory turning,

pink the hot atmosphere of re~ret.

o"

RUTIN

10. Fra~ments of the ori~inal memory comes in molecules like the one which reeches clear as breath with its tale of early success and easy Iivin~, a tale told by an idiot, si~nifyin~ crumbs left on the path to find their way home.

14. Makln~ way the sl~n of the passion -f1amin~ red

DDDDDD:=J ft"

t _ _1!i .

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11. Moses, In the fash ion of t h e day, testin~ the safe and sane means of enterin~ the waters from which he could work his own prefi~utatlon wh ile his brother refused to let him touch hot sand.

colonized the whole

Mediterranean and

spread trade on its re

ceipts. The cold north

Pleasure was slight, sweet, and spasmodic, secret and unachieved. was still peopled by primitives rubbing themselves with blue to resemblethe cold.

13. Communications overreached the lon~ arm of absence takes its toll on the line and makes ~ood with the Increase of static waitin~ patiently in the service of t h e lord.

15. Everybody who was invited came, I think, but It was not my party and I cried waiting for the supper to

redeem us from the awkward social situation

WHOLE TRIBES became

l

involved in the naming of eleg,

h

t.

t)

ments as forces acting out w their own revenge in the quotidian mythology of humanoid actions. Cities sprang up and lent the goddesses a

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untranslatable into the daylight speech of cle.

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16. Some lamb: Bittersweet and poignant memory, the sacrifice made as a ritual the night before death, real death.

17. Somebody had promised a

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hu~e contribution but the food * ~ot cold and had to be sent back * to be reheated in the kitchen where the cat was eatin~ its way * throu~h the turkey headfirst. '.

name for their towns. Ritual sacrifice foretold a future without

Response was vetoed clapping a hand on the dream through the

which we would

have been inha

bited by extra

terrestrials. In

thin clothes of sleep, squeezing the moment with inept attempts at a climax

the wars Troy was trampled

ech of clean vocabulary after the harsh taboo snapf-ed shut the door to understanding.

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18. Disciples without principles, thank ~od, sat throu~hout, side

* by side their heads bobbln~ up and down on the waves of conversation they each felt just like the brother they n ever had.

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DDDDODDDDD

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Roads went in everywhere & tales of pyr amids and pic

21. Heaven and earth feB to their organizin~ system, order broke out everywhere like a plague of conspicuous reason.

ture language

time in exotic

the measured space of pages paid out like

filtered thru the mails. Airwaves carried \t

.c .t!~'.

messages belore '~!.~~~)

j~(

the phones and

lands where a place named Europe might have been a nation in the mind

but got toured and recorded in an infantile essay colonizing the domain of the real.

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a virus of civility in

23. Search parties -the son with the

sun with the mother to the ends of the known earth or at least the bay with tales of adventure too wild to sit well by

vaded the land. A

the domestic hearth.

child born from light was hung up as a man

Knowledge as language, the word of the mother, got passed through exchange linked hand to mouth.

for meat and changed the course ofthe emo tional mainstream. Allegiance became a

Sudden expletives caught on the phone lines.

24. Chart sent out from the old country laid out the city before they landed on streets which Impressed the primal territory until they were Indistinguishable

22. Looking over his property and loving It: new worlds or at

least new continents burst into view.

by

1.

25. Trying des perately to get the sewers Into place before the folks arrived they poked at the pipes with their sticks and sang sang sang .

...

hard rock of gospel spread through lions and into the arena of freeplayand phallacy. The last of the conquerors fell (rather

26, Primitive tool were used for games and eating dirt off the end of the blade in the process of squeezing ~~~ the earth between our teeth when the knife failed to penetrate the reluctant ground.

ages ofhumankind. Principles both human and ".@ divine solidified ~

27. First first lady a real trend setter _ barked at the moon and back a~ain, all the way home in a cab and then -, checkin~ h er pursefor pennies they all fall out and are brou~ht into the

safe haven of her children's dreams.

as an exerCIse · through which Mind was made .

..•.,.

~ Rich bejewelled

Conversations heard from the floor playing audience to one-sided

sequences of sound working communication out in the blanks between

: * and fortified the

* : * middle ages sent

themselves to be

'.' 28. The ima~e, not quite alikeness, used on a product line, came back to haunt her when she went out to :. : shop ami found herself buyin~ herself in a shockin~reco~nition, blind faith and brilliant li~ht, hot speedof heavy vo1ta~e.

~

I~I ". C~m."".on' ..... h" "''''on' .h. ~m."m"

~

~ ~ applied far too much to match her fron tier mentality.

be redeemed for prizes while the treasures of the earth emerged and followed a predestined path towards grace and the European capitals.

phrases young sentences like birds took off in imitation of adult flight

MONARCHS took

domains by poisons

into lengthy halls of overheard complexity

30. The civi1izln~ Influence of homesteadln~ was not to be discounted.

nuancin~ a dance of action into calculated speech

flirtation a body lan~ua~e

more than repartee

and personality into realms where History, which began a bit later, whispered into their ears about the invention ofperspective, a necessary ingredient to

31. The gate to the alley had to be kept locked and they listened to ope.a after opera in the yard hoping to find a clue to their own Identity.

raked us with a ruthless a

32. Technology was Improving all around them at a great pace; appliances mutated according to the genetic programs which centuries earlier had been the exclusive province of an all too fr"gile kingdom,

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abrupt severity.

IS

T

timely representation of the past.

the wit served as a hook, no bones about the sharp-edged tongue

REAL books

were composed

and typed out

through the fin

gers of bright

boy apprentices

on their knees

before the glory

of handmade

33. What was the make of this machine? An enemy sub so cleverly disguised, snuck through the curtain and began to perform -those clever devils.

tasks. A huge library burn2:~;::::: ed much of antiquity in its

this UlUSt have been

.nund••,nnn•.

path, which was reinvented

Domestic acts shifted to a violent expression, straining to hear from an upstairs landing the·

by Italian ecstasy and then put into order by the Teutonic violence ofclassification. Whole continents rose

children pressed to the walls with ears bared,

bellies filled with harsh notes of judgement,

35. Outlaw funds fell into responsible hands, work was a legitimate excuse for not going out. and he paid his investments handsomely into his pockets, where they did not go to waste exactly.

Playthings bothered to com

38. Moses and his brother were not among the guests that afternoon, still, we dredged the bay for bright, tiny fish and brought up puffers white like pearls. bellies glistening in the net, inflated promises which

dissolved under scrutiny into taxonomy_

while ancient cultures could only hold their breath so long against

the inroads ofhomogenlzlng commerce.

stl

giving in to instincts by response to force, the

39. Summer sun and ritual activities performed in the dunes without end or warning, dreaming of a

primordial swamp full of treasures from which we had sprung, unlabelled, onto the w.t and shiny surface of (he mudflat.

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l to come looking for engagement.".

)ng dged , ht ~

1

hich

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40. Science made our minds into a conversatioD9 scene of a microscopic partnership, a binary arranltement stuck to specimens with pine and gum trapping air and information in the same bubbles the eye pretended to know.

41. The uncles rode with Jesse James and made a legend in her body which was athletic form restrained beneath the good behavior of maiden aunts intolerant of adventure or imagination.

A TINY ROCK was doormat to a continent and on the pretext of religion a clearing was hacked out of the

.. children boarded into schools with unforgiving mistresses and strict orderings of the day into a regime of yearned for discipline, the beating craven as submission, being taken, hard reprimand

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structures of obedience

wild woods for a meal and several centuries' expansion. At the instant of independence

11111111111111111111111 ., nm. <ok•• U. m••••" ..d ,,'.m.Om 0."" ".m,'" '"' d..~U

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Long leisured afternoons turning the book into pages of delight, vicariously thrilled by the paperback lives into unarticulatable drives and desires.

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~ -1/. 45. 45. Pods, ciphers and other mysterious devices found their way into the bloodstream of modern life and proved themselves as promised in those lessons learnt at the knee and poured down our ears like ~ospel
ly 1 irrelevant otherness, rendered useless, secondary in the constant search for small print and thin paper into familiar squabbles, decapitating its lineage and making way for the trains that were to be. Frozen wastes deterred yet another hero, keeping the whole

46. Later we learned to eat our words and pretend to enjoy them, but in wartime the men in the subs had to be content with what looked conspicuously like salad.

from his grasp until he was also banished to languish while the rest of the world whose history is unwritten

D for a heroine densely trapped in plots and vapors which meant destiny playing itself out through :lf

here and elsewhere developed apace apart.

D Fainting spells conjured empty houses full of secret passages and spells played out as rituals in

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tl

ft' pARALLEL lives, dark colonies and lighthouses combin

47. These birds used to get messages and even a little entertaining gossip across the trenches, tucking the best bits of gossip up under their wings before letting It fly.

ed in labor and

abuse, the too

Sweet sugar of fiction sucked the brain into romantic poses

postures gathered from tales in which one figured oneself

* * * powerful dynamic of intimate relations.

' one who was her who was I is I.

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>ugh

48. Elected officials came to depend

in the long twisted afternoon. more and more on luck and table

manners.

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Childhood pacts swept away the cobwebs of correct behavior, opening pockets of time out of

50. Even the primitives had ~otten bobbed hair and wore nothln~ next to the " skin but spandex stretched from limb to limb accoss a ~ap In the or~anlzed domain of knowled~e.

ONE CIVIL WAR

49, Fetish commodity the realities here were u n speakable but had somethln~ to do with

broke out a rash of

dancln~.

conflicts while the

onto the receptive surface of the skin and also marked

by scars of pleasure stolen as pain in private lives whose

witnesses were bound and gagged to remain immutably

machines bred for the

business took over

everywhere in the

landsc~pe and on film.

51. Not all of us had fun that afternoon and left behind she cleaned up In the manner of role IIlodels provided and with batteries included for

complicit and anonymous.

once.

t of sight and mind which precipitated into verse and rhyme intime.

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52. Which contains a camera, a machine

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* ~un, a recording device, an electronic

bu~. and a season premiere ticket-all*

without benefit of fin~erprints.

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CITIES SPOKE to the

face of the factories which

dominated the metaphoric

skyline with the blue and

hopeless smoke of indus

trial dreams. Little children

~

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. * .,

53. Makin~ do his beard was a little rou~her than usual as he bent to chan~e the an~le of chin to a~ile blade.

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suffered to come unto the heavy heat of labor and finally the trains came, stark track on the back of a con

tlnent.

The adolescent juices mauled the intellect stealing its baggage and corrupting the soul of willingness into ~

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DISENFRANCHISEMENT followed naturally from the politesse of exploitation while a

* refracting itself hormonally each fracture finding a cracked voice

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thro mod

:.:

and

54, After the accident a famous man cannot show his face and so takes up other means of confronting the world .

~ ~

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D D [J D ~"] D D DOD 55. And so the aliens planted their own

machines and made them grow sending

little messages like valentines and a few

got loose and went into space and landed

back on the dinner table and would not behave.

55.

56, The tack squad had to restore order any way it could -it was clear the enemy was playing hardball with our hearts and minds.

whole generation call

;ness into a dark passage

ing themselves bene

* factors concocted

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*

* stable seeming institutions to cast their own

~:

names in the shadow

~

through which to make a mask of passion mocked by the inept handling of the SEnses and vocabulary in a fabricated agony.

57. What was wiped off her face and came back to haunt her unmercifully with a gaping rush.

58. Dumb cliche but there was a close transit throu~h the sky so It loomed like a dinner plate deceptively lar~e and inordinately beautiful.

of hard cut stone before their passing. Suited, seated male busts replaced the conquering heros at the edges of the farmland.

Calling in cliches to aid in their development the stories progressed precipitously.

COST OF LIVING rose into the air to be

W~

b, sa af

,..
59. Crowned heads of state, humbled by events In the heavens, 60. Birthplace of a nation sprin~in~ up ready-made memorabilia just in the nick of time to fill the politick cate~orl' of ~enerlc childhood home.
crept into place In the haystacks
of history.

61.

62. Captains of industry. exemplars of value. civic lunches in the best tradition.

Pairin~ was obsessional as writin~ was tracks traces

locked in drawers to which the key had been abandoned.

..

.~ . transformed into a .. .. broadcast image. N ow ~ was the time for some

serIOUS war mOVIes,

blinding the trenches
~~s~O~~~Sg:;:,~:;:e':°f:i:s~i::I:~. andburnt at both ends and the stake for the sake of actual sacrifice but wasn't it WI-th Serl-OUS eXpIOSI-ves
after all too late?

.. while an entire genera . tion was sold to the

~

*

~.; 61. The red s un shone in the full fat belly of the whale. lDaking its ~:; way against all odds.

65. Free dancln~ lessons became standard public policy-here demonstrated by an obli~in~ member of the board.

Long enough to fly many devious messages into the soul and back

Science threatened to take over with its rote mythologies and nothing broke but

narrative of

horror. A deep

slump follow

ed the quick

drunk of eu

phoria and the

proverbial bal

loon of finance

burst and was

thrown from a

window by

64. Into the mouth of the monster they went, intrepid, as the quiverin~

membrane vibrated against their touch, inhaled as so much dust into the very nostrils of the ventilation shaft and wonderin~ what dreams they had bou~ht into.

the heavy hand of publicity.

,

"

but hearts in a dialogue encapsulated in a past which hid it from the mother ship.

~

SAINTS & GENIUSES, leaders and rebellions, were all quietly allowed to come

67. Frozen assets, a hunk of mammoth, which was hidden, the deep freeze of mind, resistant to thaw and temptation.

-i~oooooooo..o.oj l.oovoooo....oo

.:; Ie ...........' '.:,. \,

66, The mysterious forces of the universe clouded our limited understandin g.

into their own and go

back out again. A totalizing pull toward fantasy mobilized the

68. The Inevitable course of history all in those few sentences, emblems, and primal codes, a fine matter of private memory, dripping its grey instincts onto the page.

...

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Writin~ was still reli~ious, practiced late with candles

and incantations unedited for later reference 69. Avery po~ular mid-century jello

mold, trembhng on the edge of some discovery·

troops again while style became the distinguishing feature of the genocidal regime.

and developin~ revery. When speakin~ ceased the notebooks fi led with seepage, horror spreadin~

inw

in an all too comforta

7!

ble relation to the aud ience while the media

BARBED WIRE crackled against flesh

70. The season instituted once and for all to set the pace of sales events and keep up with changes of fashion hanging in the air around the capital.

DDDDDD DC

DDDDDDDDDDDDD

manufactured as the day's events. Women were returned to fami

" .M".'oo"h••• h ..~.'.U=.." liar bondage and we

balanced on the ed~e of the universe

_o.'n••n"~."'..oohU.'on. ate meat instead of fresh air in the spirit of

corporate enterprIse

without returns on our

until the drug release brought words to

surface as displacement, opaque, hermetic,

arcane and sealed against the cops and

robbers game of understanding.

While love was a

77. The heart of the mechanism, the soul of a new machine howlin~ in the wilderness in order to be heard.

mon

78. out

79. The order they had placed almost without thinking mocked them with its familiar face and tone.

Dark were the days and li~ht was a beacon companion overflowin~ all boundaries,

SO. Hovering auras haloed their heads and thestateof grace was not

entered Into without passing through the border patrol and making

sure they were in the right place in their reading. But when they

looked in the book -

investments while our sparkling earth risks being lost along with all the other forms of innocence consumed in the history ofthis world.

monster out of place and words were bound and determined makin~ their impression by proxy as exchan~e.

7S. A drug king pin, doubling as a teammate out of his league and into ours.

.. Now taking my tongue back into my lap. *

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In fond and profound memory of my mother. At the Bow and Arrow Press, Adams House, Harvard University. Summer 1989 through late Spring 1990. In Caslon on Warren's Lustra dull. Many thanks

to Gino Lee and Charles Steele.

Of 70 copies this is :::2-~

c/~U~

DRUCKWERK

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