(Un)VEILED is an étude of Madison Morrison’s Every Second, in which Greek texts are interlaced with contemporary texts.1 The étude speculates about alternative interpretations of Every Second had the texts been juxtaposed: all the ancient texts followed by the all new ones—or vice-versa.
The étude is implemented as poésie concrète. Poésie concrète in the contemporary understanding was, arguably, triggered by Mallarmé’s Un coup de dé jamais n’abolira le hasard.
A text can be interpreted in a linear manner to unveil what is usually called its meaning. The same text interpreted as poésie concrète unveils another, quite different, meaning. A text of mathematical equations, chemical symbols, characters of a foreign language, all which are unknown to you, can be similarly unveiled.
In his Parmenides Heidegger strives to unveil the veiled; this unveiling informs (Un)VEILED through Heidegger’s words: “through the Roman reinterpretation of the Greek experience of the essence of man, logos, i.e., the word, became ratio. The essence of the word is thus banished from its ground and from its natural locus.”2
(Un)VEILED simultaneously juxtaposes and interlaces “Odysseus” and “Ulysses,” all the while applying modulation firstly via the eclectic world constructed by the bus driver's gathering hand,3 and secondly, via words from Heidegger's Parmenides about the correlation among “Being, word, gathering, hand, and writing.”4
The essence of a text is textuality. Textuality is an attribute of words; of a building; of the way you dress, behave, speak; the car you drive is an eloquent text — not being empowered to drive is even more eloquent; a cloudless sky is a text . . . Textuality is constructed as an imbricated set of symbols, behavioural norms, meanings . . . Textuality is implemented as language, imagery, forms of knowledge.5
Poésie concrète generates tension as it hovers through and slips across the multiple interlaced and interlacing, and simultaneously juxtaposed and juxtaposing interpretations of a text.
1. Madison Morrison, Every Second (Alexandria: The Working Week Press, 2004)
2. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992), §4 P69 [101-103], “Multiplicity of the oppositions”
3. Morrison 2004, 136 passim
4. Heidegger, 1992, 85
5. For further reading concerning textuality see FnL Osowski, Transtextuel, Blanche in Postmodern Queer 22 (Lambeth St., Kensington 3031, Victoria, Australia)
Stéphane Mallarmé. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: NRF Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1945.
Martin Heidegger. Parmenides. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982.