Some Ekphrastic Evening: On Fred Moten’s “perennial fashion presence falling”
Fred Moten | perennial fashion presence falling | Wave Books | May 2023 | 96 pages
Reading Fred Moten is a task often met with a certain amount of apprehension—it’s bad enough that “reading Moten” is nearly a classifiable activity unto itself: upon telling someone that you’re reading, say, Black and Blur, they will often recount something to the effect of having encountered it on a syllabus and swiftly forgetting its contents, unable to provide a basic summary of its arguments or stakes. People say, “Fred Moten is difficult.” Some respond, further still, with hostility to the idea that a text might have a reason for resisting its reader, or at least for resisting its reader’s assumptions about how it should be read. Likewise, cries of “I could’ve painted that!” ring out in the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the same skeptics are appeased by works such as Albert Bierstadt’s 1863 Hudson River School painting “The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak,” in which the natural world, the human spirit, and the relationship between them are rendered neat and legible to the critical eye. Moten’s perennial fashion presence falling (Wave Books, May 2023) on the other hand, is a deeply theoretical work that challenges, among so many typical things, this typical framework of reading, looking, and listening. His newest collection develops a poetics of indeterminacy, using visual art and music as focal points upon which to hone its faculty of critique. And, being an unyieldingly interdisciplinary text, it does so in the context of scientific, philosophical, and critical discourses that turn upon the thought of the intensive: that which resists being counted, weighed, or otherwise quantified. In perennial fashion presence falling, Moten’s fields and rivers don’t stretch, his landscapes don’t unfold, so much as they sublimate, transfiguring representation into abstraction.
The book is sorted into five sections, the first of which is titled “the red sheaves.” This long poem shifts from margin to margin like a cat burglar or an art thief peeking around massive, white corners, spanning seventeen pages before ending on a stout rectangle of prose: the rim breathes, Moten breathes, the red sheaves—though in an earlier version of the poem, his final words echo the title of painter Jennie C. Jones’s 2020 exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago, Constant Structure. The poem began as a companion text to Jones’s show, included in a brochure produced for the occasion of the exhibition, in which Jones’s abstract, geometric canvases were arranged at various heights on the stark white walls of the gallery. Jones’s exhibition is itself an allusion to a type of chord progression that coheres despite having no tonal center, its structure being “constant” even as its center is “fugitive.” Drawing partly on Jacques Derrida’s lecture “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” this earlier draft of “the red sheaves” acts as both criticism of and criticism with Jones’s exhibition: far from the workaday press release, “the red sheaves” expands the theoretical horizon of Jones’s exhibition—showing a predilection for question marks as much as for spirited overtures brought to screeching halts by periods—in the spirit of what Moten and Stefano Harvey term “study” in their para-academic cult classic, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. But, by comparison with the version that appears in his latest book, this earlier rendition of “the red sheaves” is much more explicit about its objects and objectives. In perennial fashion presence falling, the tripartite chain of ekphrasis stretching from jazz to paint to text is rendered obscure; only prior knowledge of Moten’s work and one playful instance of the phrase “ms. jones,” plus some scattered uses of the word “she,” might tip the reader off as to what is under appraisal in the text. Moten also changes the staggered, shapely prose blocks of the first version into proper stanzas and sheds much of the word count in the process, that process being one we might refer to short-handedly as versification. In perennial fashion presence falling, what remains of “the red sheaves,” besides verse, is theory.
•
In his 1925 collection Dionysus in Doubt, poet Edwin Arlington Robinson published his well-known sonnet “The Sheaves.” The sheaves that concern Robinson in his sonnet are not red, nor are they sheaves of paper; rather, they are golden sheaves (otherwise known as bundles) of wheat. He describes the ripening of the harvest, but also something, as Moten might have it, “more + less than / reason comprehends”:
Where long the shadows of the wind had rolled,
Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;
And as by some vast magic undivined
The world was turning slowly into gold.
Like nothing that was ever bought or sold
It waited there, the body and the mind;
And with a mighty meaning of a kind
That tells the more the more it is not told.
Poet and critic Yvor Winters writes that the poem “symbolize[s] the impenetrable mystery of the physical universe as seen at any moment and the mystery of the fact of change.” As understood in this (more or less standard) reading of the poem, the “undivined magic” of Robinson’s changing field is the stuff of gnosis, those laws or forces that govern the observable world, regardless of their availability or legibility by the reason of beings that reason in it—erring on the side of legibility, we can call this metaphysics; erring on the side of illegibility, we can call it esotericism. In any case, we can call it autumn, but that’s not to diminish it: Robinson’s field is a literal field, but a literal field might also be a symbolic one, representative of the higher truth that it models. As Asher Brown Durand, another painter of Hudson River School, writes in number eight of his “Letters on Landscape Painting,”
“Realism, therefore, if any way distinguishable from Idealism, must consist in the acceptance of ordinary forms and combinations as found. If strictly confined to this, it is, indeed, an inferior grade of Art; but as no one contends that the representation of ordinary or common-place nature is an ultimatum in Art, the term Realism signifies little else than a disciplinary stage of Idealism, according to the interpretation given, and is misapplied when used in opposition to it, for the ideal is, in fact, nothing more than the perfection of the real.” From this follows Robinson’s own assertion that “[t]he world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.”
Moten’s field, on the other hand, is self-symbolic. Moten’s field, shared with Jones, is one of painterly abstraction. And whereas the literal field, an open expanse, is the epitome of extensity, Moten’s field, one that isn’t “all over” but rather “all up in,” is one of what he calls “depth-feeling,” one of intensity. He asks us to
look how we get a depth-feeling of words on leaves. but what’s a depth-feeling? a variant on, or a vagrant all up in, a picture-feeling? is it glad, man? is it sad? is it three-dimensional emotion? a feeling of it—which is softly unillusion, imperspective, anoptic trick in actual travel, someplace to dance and tarry where the words make thunder in the air—might drive you mad, man. open blocks, or boats, or text ferrying knots between foam and dry. can they be staggered, torqued, quadrilateral in turned through the difference on their margins? the dream would be a way some blocks might verge in the ardent grids of eye tests, to get the feeling of a structure always verging, having always deserved writing, as if writing be walking back and forth to turn some air on in the room, or turn the ground over, or turn jewels into motion on the wall. the stroll, while we stay here, is cursive, and suddenly trance is torn, and then there’s tearing.
Like the writing of many great theorists, Moten’s writing responds best to the turn-your-head-and-squint method of reading (a method all but absent from the average American education). Even in the final chapter of The Undercommons, Moten and Harvey stress that their concepts should be understood loosely or only insofar as they have theoretical and/or practical utility to the reader. Moten and Harvey emphasize “play” above all else. But to be exact about Moten’s poetry, we might say that it only exists midflight: “to write the / movement / of our viewing / in the moment” implies the possibility of motion, motion being a phenomenon only begrudgingly admitted by phonetic writing systems that stress the interaction of nouns with verbs and other parts of speech. To be even more precise, we might say that Moten’s poetry is differential, multivalued, not so much slippery as it is slipperiness itself. And just as the “classical” world of Newtonian physics—with its golden fields of wheat and trees from which certain apples might fall on the heads of certain physicists—dovetails with everyday writing, likewise poetry, particularly Moten’s kind, embodies the nonclassical world of the quantum field: you cannot simultaneously know both the direction and the momentum of Moten's writing, and to even suggest that the two exist at the same time is inhibiting. That sort of certainty is only borne out in a Robinson’s field, in its rolling extensity. Far more adequate to the notion of the quantum field, which Moten appears to link closely with the field of Jones’s abstraction, is intensity. Like an ancient mystic poet, he describes Jones’s surfaces as involving “unillusion, imperspective, anoptic trick,” as if in plain sight of his third eye. He “turn[s] some air on” in the writing, in the paintings—temperature is one of the classic intensive phenomena, being that though it may increase or decrease, this does not correspond to an accumulation or a diminution. As if between atoms, as if between between atoms, Moten and Jones have gone “someplace to dance and tarry where the words make thunder in the air,” someplace that is not a somewhere.
•
Moten concludes his lecture “A Defense of Two-Dimensionality,” delivered virtually at the Teatro do Bairro Alto on July 7, 2021, with a reading of the sister poems “tiling, lining notes” and “tilling, limning notes,” both of which appear in perennial fashion presence falling. His teenage son can be seen skipping through the background of the video, running laps around the camera frame as if to measure Moten’s discourse, weaving and whizzing between shoulder-high stacks of books and a single midcentury modern chair. Notably, the phrase “double silt” appears in the first of the two poems (and later again, in the eleven-word “medra nostra”), along with a reference to wave functions. “Double silt,” a pun on the infamous double slit experiment that established what is today known by physicists as particle-wave duality, works like a backdoor between the concepts of rivers and quantum fields, two of the poems’ many thematic nodes. A look at the paintings of artist Jack Whitten, the most characteristic of which are tiled with acrylic paint chips, confirms the source of Moten’s inspiration
As he makes explicit in the lecture, Moten is interested here in the paintings of Whitten, whom he calls “a physicist,” and Moten is awash in the swimming-pool moods of his mosaic paintings, likely the ones from his “Quantum Wall” series. Moten forges this path through his lecture with the help of the work of theorist and physicist Karen Barad, whose idea of the “void [as a] lively tension” comes in handy for Moten. If a commonly touted understanding of what constitutes a good painting is whether it can deceive the viewer into perceiving a three-dimensional space on its two-dimensional surface (whence the common assumption that “being good at art” means to be in possession of photorealistic capabilities), then abstract paintings like those of Whitten will tend to subvert that expectation. Whitten’s work confirms Moten’s understanding of the canvas as more than a passive recipient of paint, as integral to the painting itself, the backdrop of the scene of its mattering, its blank, cosmic womb.
Throughout perennial fashion presence falling and throughout much of his work, he emphasizes the way that content prophesies form, or the way that form supervenes upon content—which is to say, he emphasizes the way in which the void leaps and sticks its landing. (In an interview with the Brooklyn Rail, Moten describes himself as being in the “Creeley-Duncan-Olson” tradition of American poetics, in which case it comes as no surprise to discover his devotion to their dictum that “form is never more than an extension of content.”) Like in “the red sheaves,” paintings, though paintings themselves are always in possession of some degree of dimensionality, are passages into the decidedly non- or pan-dimensional quantum field, where abstraction can happen—and which Moten tends to picture aquatically, as if in a different kind of blues than the blues. Returning to Whitten:
this scroll of cut, outbroken canvas
looks like looking with a movie. injured, lined out
surface adores flatness with thick
character acting, mapping distressed by aerial
grounding, scuffed ornament, microtonal
abrasion all over again. the textural slur
of tilling and limning, emma and emily
whispering, the precise irregularity
of anamosaic gesture, is a habitat
of schools in a bessemer tree, a reef chorale
and blue hint shadow, graphic
soft enough to tess and more
and wreathe.
Moten takes Whitten’s “reef chorale / and blue hint shadow” less as a body of water than water embodied. The “reef chorale”—as opposed to the coral reef—sings some aspect of its becoming, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. More so than the land, the ocean, with its fluxes and fathoms and flows, seems to figure in Moten’s mind as the nearest estimate of an intensive space. Imagine Whitten’s canvases arranged as if rippling blue on the blue spacetime, blue like anything distant yet otherwise proximate, the blue answer to an unspoken, blue question. Elsewhere, Moten swims—dives into Hayward Rivers, the pianist, drowns within Sam Rivers, the saxophonist. “sea, / ms. jones?” Moten asks Jennie in “the red sheaves”, “a book whose / pages wash long shores.” Note here how, like in the instances of “double silt,” Moten hones the critical faculty of his text by using wordplay in a manner that is not merely or simply playful. Thus, Moten goes leagues deeper than the critic who resists innovation and experimentation in their critique.
So Moten troubles essence, Moten troubles presence, Moten troubles dimensionality. In his theory of the art object and the subject alike, it’s the process, the ing hanging off making, that makes a difference—abstractions and intensities undergird all representation. (Perhaps a better word for this “constant structure,” this phase space, is economy). Like the landscape in Albert Bierstadt’s landscape painting, Robinson’s field is three-dimensional, but Jones’s and Whitten’s fields are two-dimensional, prefigurative; Jones and Whitten are attempting to paint the “vast magic undivined” itself. That words like “field” and “river” slip, albeit metaphorically, into our very discussion of the abstract is only a testament to the depth of penetration, like roots into soil, of those ideas that Moten seeks to theorize not just away from, but through: “matter builds / from groove and shift to / gather, for tonight / we are the book, we are / the field we are.” Here we find the etymological relationship between sheaves of paper and sheaves of wheat, and here we find the analogical relationship between real fields and imaginary ones. He writes that “the / bright read extent of our / reach beyond grasping // is what abstraction is supposed to give, what imaginary numbers give.” Moten’s sheaves are blank pieces of paper, or unmarked voids, either to be made “red” with the distinctive red stripe that characterizes the series of paintings from Jones’s exhibition, or to be made “read” like my copy of perennial fashion presence falling was after I finished it. Just as much as it is conducive to a living, oozing, pulsing reality, artmaking is seductive of the unreality without which reality cannot be real, of those imaginary numbers without which quantum mechanics just doesn’t add up.
But, much like in what physicists call the “observer effect,” Moten isn’t just writing about Jones’s paintings when he’s writing about Jones’s paintings: he’s also considering his own writing, his parallel art, the necessary interference of his critical instruments. In this way, “the red sheaves” is compassionate as well as self-compassionate. It develops a common vocabulary, a common theory of art between Jones’s and Moten’s practices. To use a metaphor that Moten himself might use, when one soloist in a jazz band responds to the solo of another, that is criticism. Moten’s sense of art criticism, explored throughout perennial fashion presence falling with a simultaneous and necessary commitment to a poetics of indeterminacy, is riffing. Picking up where the last block quote left off, “tilling, limning notes” concludes:
a totem is
a haunted keyboard, and this ingenious
mechanical device is so we
can differ in elegiac practice—
for criticism is grounded
differing and deciphering is
separation’s scale.
For Moten, criticism is differing that has been “grounded,” as if with jumper cables. It’s spooky, too—this could just as well be a description of a Ouija board. Criticism is Moten’s encounter with the other, as is art. And if perennial fashion presence falling makes anything clear, it’s that the boundary between them is entirely permeable—that is, if it even exists in the first place.
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Moten’s project in perennial fashion presence falling and elsewhere is a dismantling of normative subjectivity—and what better way to dismantle subjectivity, to expand it and contract it and turn it around and upside down, than through the lyric poem? This is corroborated by the work of Black* visual artists like Jennie C. Jones and Jack Whitten as well as scientists and theorists like Karen Barad, as disparate as their practices may seem. But even more than Moten dismantles personhood, in perennial fashion presence falling he dismantles thingliness, too. He dismantles art, he dismantles freedom, and he dismantles you and me, revealing at their cores that “void [as a] lively tension” that Barad imagines, a dismantling most apparent when he writes:
this
exhausted, endless
swerve of beauty
from art, of move
meant from free
dom, jail being
their being held
in being, not ours,
is way past you and
me and the lives
we hide away from
them and you and
me in looking after
them. art works their
being there. that’s
the cold, funerary
origin of the work
of art.
Art slips out of a hole in your sock. Art comes from something like death, or the ability to die, its own “cold, funerary / origin.” And though art may not be alive in the stable terms of life as recognized by the political state, or the history of philosophy, or the literary establishment, or the art world, it is certainly alive in other, more moveable ones. It’s as if he distinguishes the image of art from art qua art, the capture and exchange of art from art, the restricted art from the general art—Moten’s fondness for the word “general,” in this sense, echoes Georges Bataille’s notion of General Economy: Moten’s art operates outside of the purview of value, in the “general chicago,” which is the general point, the general idea, the general poem he’s always writing.
some ekphrastic evening, this’ll be both criticism and poetry and
failing that fall somewhere that seems like in between. this both/
and and/or neither/nor machine comes in having been touched
by what’s seen and wanting to touch what’s seen through some
extraordinary realities.
So begins the poem “epistrophe and epistrophy,” a poem that doubles as an essay on epistrophe, a literary device that is the opposite of anaphora. Moten also seems to have in mind “Epistrophy,” the first song ever copyrighted by Thelonious Monk, and quite possibly “Epistrophe,” a poem by Amiri Baraka which alludes to that song. The “both/and and/or neither/nor machine” that Moten refers to in the first stanza is exactly what I would call perennial fashion presence falling: an infinitely complex critical mechanism that meets art on its own terms, in its own terms, because their terms don’t differ; Moten’s ekphrastic evening is tonight. And though it begs close reading, his latest collection is a successful synthesis of critique and the critiqued that finds its theoretical underpinnings in the realm of quantum mechanics, intensive science, and the metaphysics of indeterminacy: beyond and beneath Robinson’s early-twentieth century pastoral, it constitutes an ultramodern pastoral in the abstract pasture, the very condition of possibility of Robinson’s pasture, the intangible frontier. And though it may, like much of Moten’s work, pose a challenge to the uninitiated, it’s worth rising to that challenge—if only to savor moments like “got ’im!,” a poem that returns us, hilariously, to the water:
other little
man white
is a gator
got trapped
in a garbage
can, roll
down to
the pond
and release.
know what?
call a realtor,
get up out
from there.
your house is
in the damn
pond. really,
it ain’t even
your house
so fuck a
realtor, just
get your shit
and go. or
just go, shit.
*though we should note that Moten renders this word lowercase, like all other words, throughout the book