Descended from Chaos—Reading Jordan Scott

By Margot Lettner

Here we have an experimental, imagined instant in the consciousness of a person with attention deficit disorder, on waking into their dimension and finding it housed in another place (with thanks to a friend for describing walking with fire in the head).

Much like a marble in a pinball machine, I’m still working my way around, into, through, over, and under (read in as many prepositions as desired) Blert. I’ve bit into its three sections of “chomp sets,” wandered its “fables,” and savoured its often maddeningly titled set pieces: “Jökulhlaup” and “Valsalvas.” It reads in my mouth like a ten-kilometre hike in the Kootenays in July, before the snow has all melted from the upper trails and the avalanche chutes are full of fresh scree, making the whole trek one big scribble of surprise, avoidance, imagination, and blunder on the trail map. Or is it Scrabble?

What is stutter? What is it like to perceive A, compose A, and utter B? What sense or sensation? Blert explores constructions of technical cause, physiological effect, and self perception (e.g., the fables), as well as recommended or invented mechanisms and exercises for coping with stutter (e.g., the oral/aural reality challenge of “two cheeseburgers, french fries, and a coke”). Blert is the experience itself, embedded in its words. Its voice is neuroimaging talking—if the brain picture could speak it would sound Blert—but fed through a monitor that says “what you’re doing here, it’s not the way we do it.” The lovely We, arbiter and scribe bringing order to our chaos; the social voice that curates the rules and the range. Rules of etiquette, range of ethos—breach undesired if not unconscionable.

This is the recurring line from Blert’s first “chomp set” that inspired my opening collage:

if you must have an idea, have a short-term idea:

 

a Cocoa-Puff

a two-step bluff

a fleeting rime

(19)

A short-term idea in words. A short-term idea in focus. Both may be desirable in stutter and in attention deficit, perhaps as in easier to get out and easier to hold to, respectively. Both mediate, diminish, or remove blockages created by nature (physiology, brain chemistry) and nurture (experience mediated by culture). They are different ways of being—but, this is it—they are ways of being.

Blert is another being, as much as my collage imagines the birth of another. What Scott challenges, for me, is the assumption that we—all of us—start with the same box of building blocks. I’m not referring here to postmodernist “ism”-based critiques but to a much finer dice. Our world now has ever fewer languages, many imperiled or already lost. Some, for example, have no verb forms for the idea of “future” because their speakers have no such concept, do not think of the future. Nor does their language necessarily have a future. Time is, simply, now. Different building blocks abound, creating what we often see as aberrant thought, word, and ethical structures. In one of her polyphonic comments the other week, Margaret Christakos suggests another seeing for being: “Archistructures. Arch kissed ruptures too. I want some lust in my cross sections.”

There’s lust in Blert: “lactic acrobat/pretzel lumbar/licorice ganglia/crackulates scapula/calliope tremor coccyx” (20), or “The torso grind against tundra’s soft cotton” (53), or the softer side of “sea cow, sea lily, seamy seamstress, sea lion, sea lettuce, sea potato, sea moth, sea holly, sea gooseberry, sea dog, sea nettle, sea elephant, sea bee” (45), or the exquisite “prawn throat” (27) that seems to hang at throat’s base. And there are ruptures “techno like a Tourette tide spaz” (50).

Scott’s pieces are a tough read for me: in the whole, in the parts, in the words, the sounds. They are re-re-re-re-reads. I can’t read the collage that I started this reflection with, either. Physicists are now broaching the idea that we’re descended from chaos, not order at all; that chaos is a central organizing principle in the universe—an order in and of itself. Speaking of fire in the head, my friend asks “Why am I like this? What possible good comes of it?”

2 + 2 = 4, 4.1, 5, 3.8, 0, blert…blert