Angel Dance

Each technological device is a prosthesis, says Tom's McCarthy, speaking for the other word unspoke. “Every point of contact between a body and its media extension marks the site of some secret burial.” To bury something died and gone, the burial is secret because the murder is. What did Tom kill? He killed the word. He killed it dead. Watchman Lee used to call the dead Adam's residual soul power a secret. If you take Watchman's glosses, those oracles who lost their powers  were reduced to writing. You saw them hunting round the cemeteries by night with spades and boots, flashlights looking for overturned earth. Trying to dig the word. McCarthy by radio set up in words, novels, poems to restore communication with these dead lost powers, transmissions of the med, tech, word.  

Comes the short list of poets who read, who influence you, the answer is every word spoken, heard, unheard, cried in every vision. But who needs to hear the same thing twice, or worse, if the broadcast is remixed, then let it transfix, thinking the one primal cry, ooooo, out of which all others flow in the river of sound-light great hymn being speak.

Tom thinks novels and poems differ,  "a novel is not selves, but networks; what we hear in poems is not signal but noise. Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static.” This essence neither hears nor speaks, a phase we all love since we are. To be wrong but right, that is remixing the dead is something like A Shout, "a set of signals that have been repeating, pulsing, modulating in the airspace of the novel, poem, play—in their lines, between them and around them—since each of these forms began...attune your ear to the very pitch and frequency of its own activity—in other words, enable you to listen in on listening itself...."

 The poet-fictionist Romance of Tom's Geräusch Rilke’s word static angel dance, here,  here  and here, is not the same motor or angel dance. Instead, "boring a hole in the lobe of the ear and pinning it to the door. This has everything to do with hearing as one born of the spirit, or as said in another place, he wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen as one being taught. So it says further, I have more insight than all my teachers, an insight that no more transfers by words than life is known by the dead. My ear you have opened."

Leaf Meditations and the Language Revelation? More McCarthy here.