A Document About Hannah Weiner

of Maxwell Clark

                                                           “A truly perfect relationship is one in which each party leaves

great tracts unknown in the other party....”

—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

4.

I begin (having long ago since already once begun) by noting how ghastly terrible is the secondary literature on Hannah Weiner’s canon at present (2015). In their bombastically putrid drivel, utterly inappropriate to Weiner’s entire “outsider” ethos in its unabashed sophistication, or whorish scholasticism, her (“so-called”) commentators thus far have positioned themselves such as to prevent me from naming them personally, so as not to risk suits of defamation from these same “morans” (mostly, if not all, ‘Murican—as well)—which would seem to me to be the price of the frothing apoplexy which might come over this word of mine, indeed, and even lead me to pitiless rhetorical whippings and wantonly lucid tortures, if their own names actually appeared anywhere herein. Her heretofore commentators would be those who cannot be named anymore, were I the sole arbiter of society’s tastes in criticism (which I am not, thankfully). Verily, however, Weiner has been very much too egregiously and indignantly addressed as an author yet so far; and so, too, also almost afar and away moreso too improperly, inethically, and even, as such, disgracefully addressed—as an author... almost as if her disabilities, as they are presently called in the normal sense (sensors) of the world, also rescinded her rights to be an author, or authority, and so thus also a literary (et. al) personage of respect, much less veneration. To address Hannah properly and respectfully (if not also in admiration or wonder) is not, nor ever will be, to confusedly, delusionally, and errantly clutter together, almost unformed, and at the most elephantine and boring lengths, any incoherent nonsense of lately fashionable, but (and thus so) pretty-much meaningless, or affectless, and thus so also exceedingly morbid, or dead, i.e. “unproductive”, specialized intellectual terminologies, their syntaxes, rhetorics, and/or phraseologies, et. al.

3.

Instead of writing a bunch of "INTELLECTUAL scriptures" (Spoke, 'JUNE 20 SAT') about Hannah, haha, because the persons who have been writing these so far are "STUPID AND THEY KNOW IT" (ibid.), I am just going to respond to Hannah's writings, mostly Spoke (—because: ... lazy—), however I feel Hannah herself would like me to: "BECAUSE I CAN BE FELT [...]" (ibid.). Hannah can be felt, yes, or at least I feel her, still, if maybe only because I'm quite highly pleased to believe in just such a (happy-true) delusion as this feeling for her, or the caress of her trace ("sis thats a strict revolutionary/ principle" [ibid.]), which I already cherish about her and this writing of her. I write of Hannah not in the "INTELLECTUAL" (hahaaa) way then (or again), but rather just with the (such intense and so kookiest) feelings I get of her from reading her works. Or: "I AM WRITING" (ibid.). MEANING: Hannah is writing this a lot, too, and moreso than most anyone else for now, because I'm —"...now..."— focusing the best and most of my attention on the feelings her words inspire me to. She's still hiding-out in there, in her journals and plus whatever else of hers is still around, if maybe only for me alone upon this drear earth, because she likes me a lot too (evidently a lot, lot more than you other of her exploiters—forgive) maybe, or maybe because I am just really blessed enough to feel her influence over me so much more than (you) others that I don't, or can't, feel ashamed of exposing her as the one saying to and through me what is said here under my own authority and responsibility for it alone. She is out there for me, I can hear her through the medium of her texts -- plus I do what she says to do, as such, more than most of you ever have yet.

2.

"I AMS CHARLES"
---H. Weiner, Little Book  Virgin  Feb. 78

Because Hannah's face (or "phenomenology") absurdly/profoundly confuse-s/-ed almost everything she grasp-s/-ed at with(in) it, as is perhaps altogether too-redolent of (an unmedicated) psychotic delusion to feel very "safe" or "non-clinical" about (—see also: the "fatal" immaturity of Hannah's [and perhaps also her historical age's] non-compliance with her [/their] psychiatric state-apparatuses)---yes, somehow because of this uttermost confusion, everything in Hannah's texts also become far more wonderfully legible and sincere (than is so in "normal poetics"). There is absolutely no nonsense about her, further—only direct transpositions from her senses (i.e., her “face”) into her grasp/s (i.e., her direct and very endearingly basic and almost too-obviously predominant repertoire of direct statement-forms), provided only that her reader is at least a little familiar with the characteristics of these senses's in their condition-of/generation-into psychotic abnormality.

1.

Hannah Weiner never publicly admitted her madness, at least, as of yet, for the historical record. I believe she was too socio-psychically repressed to do so. I also believe the legendary indeterminacy of her madness results precisely from its even more absolute repression. Her madness, if she alone was responsible for it, was thus left indeterminate by her own insincerity about it. And she was insincere, or did repress herself—if only because she was also afar and away more mercilessly repressed by others. To anymore uncritically affirm the indeterminacy of Weiner’s madness is perhaps therefore also to continue her same self-repression, as an enabler of its same injustice. Justice for Weiner therefore now consists in undoing this repression, in the beautiful goodness of affirming and expressing her madness as so. 

0.

“The contemporary world makes schizophrenia possible, not because its events render it inhuman and abstract, but because our culture reads the world in such a way that man himself cannot recognize himself in it. Only the real conflict of the conditions of existence may serve as a structural model for the paradoxes of the schizophrenic world.”

                                                               

—Foucault, Madness: The Invention of an Idea

The background world decipherable in the foreground of Hannah Weiner’s writings, however many otherwise redeemable and goodly aspects it may also have contained, was a world very much inhospitable to her madness.  Or, it was a world that rigorously hospitalized and therein attempted to neutralize (to “cure”) such forms of madness as hers; both in the sense of her “inhospitable” clinical incarcerations (of which I have no actual evidence) and of her thereafter stigmatic exclusion away from an otherwise normal society. She was incessantly being forced, directly or indirectly—peacefully or violently, to reform her behavior and psyche and reintegrate into the then hegemonic forms of social normalcy. Madness was barely, if at all, permitted to be itself then (as now).

Her world’s inhospitality to madness had not always been the case in its somewhat recent past, however, as already both Shakespeare’s King Lear and Cervantes’ Don Quixote attest quite eminently. Hannah Weiner’s backdrop, more precisely then, was already long a world of statistical norms, i.e. a late form of industrialism—perhaps already hastily veering off into postindustrialism.

                If Hannah’s writings and performances, or the traces of these works, developed within a definitely delimitable and describable historical period, i.e. “a late industrialism of statistical norms”, as such it may seem so far in this, the intricacies of this history already present an inexhaustible distraction from her, or the remnants of her we have left, and must, as such, most of all cherish herein. Or, these remnants themselves, with as much or as little backgrounding context we do (if ever also inconsistently) bring to bear on them, these are the objects are themselves “what” (as herself is who) I seek to venerate and cherish. In fact, it is in the very measure that Hannah Weiner’s texts transcend their historical background, and thereby participate in that ideally immortal world of our all too mortal desiring, that their value or valor is, perhaps, best recognized.

                This transcendent valor of Hannah’s text, if indeed it has such a valor (as I believe it, more or less, does), must always remain a transcendence from “...”, or from some historically objective formation, as it were, however. The things of her world she transcends inform the quality of her transcendence beyond them. Thus I posit, on the methodological register of this reading, a tension between Hannah’s foreground and background, or form and content, as it were. The peculiar variety of forms that this tension takes in my reading practices take I do not intend to foretell. Suffice it to affirm that anything I can possibly do within the bounds of my respect for Hannah and her memory will likely betray this bipartite structure, this “back” and “fore” (or forth). Indeed, were I a law-abiding formalist (as I may well be), I might go so far as to “observe” (beforehand) how all readings participate in a kind of whirligig structuring-process, ever flipping, as it were, “back and forth”, between texts and contexts. This is really not a necessary contribution the understanding of Hannah Weiner, however, except perhaps as a testimony to the fecundity of her inspiration upon myself, and thus also potentially upon others.

5.

Excuse me if I cannot write this in the way each of you find best. I can only write for you as who I am. Or, I can only write of you as myself. But you are not even reading me. You are alone and are reading only yourself. I am separate from you. I am not there inside your reading of this. I belong only outside of you. This, or however society actually works, I never know. Or I wish I never knew. I know I never know how you wish me to write this. I never know who or if you are at all. I am just me. You are, if you are, outside of me. So that I am also not writing about Hannah Weiner except as she is separate and outside of me, unknown to me, and just not me. I am writing of her without her being in my writing of her. I write of myself as I am alone and as she is apart from me. Weiner is nowhere present herein. I tell you this, but again not as from inside your reading of this. Weiner, you, and myself each are apart from each other. Apart, not as herein, but as outside of this and apart, as unique individuals. Also, I myself do not read Weiner’s presence in her writings. I read her writings as I am alone in reading them. But she is different from me. Therefore I read the absence of Weiner from her writings instead.