Paean

(For Samuel R. Delany)

John Keene, “In the Rhizome.”

                        — Flow wonders.

                                                    As words, the generative meat music of their materiality
and consonance of their inner contours. As worlds, his own, from Harlem and before and
after, as well as those drawn from those inexhaustible interior wellsprings, revealing new
ways of thinking and living.

                                                                                                                             Bars, bridges, Baruch
Spinoza, Babel; polymathy, phalluses, subtle patterns, prose; toilets, theories, Times
Square, tales; möbius-essays, piss-stained crotches, bitten nails. He pierces the sweat
flesh of the known and unknown, always witting, for there is no concept or idea that 
remains impermeable to him.

                                                                                                              What is speculation, one of
his fortes, but the capacity to raise one’s antennae to the invisible, to divine what hovers
on the other side of what’s near or far away? What are ideas, which he wields with a
magician’s legerdemain, but the thing seen or unseen, at the level of abstraction?

                            What is fiction, which he creates as an indelible art, but the conjuration
and extension of the metonymic beyond the limits of an individual life or experience?
What he gifts us with in his life and work is another set of eyes, multiple bodies, psyches,
desiring into and through the deepest subterranean veins of feeling.

                                           Following his paths through myth, memory, language, sex, affect,
something new always coloring into our vision. Critique, comics, Çiron, camp; Fiedler,
Foucault, foreskins and Yoni rings, fucking; Aptor, aporia; newels and stairwells,
Neveryóna; genius, the Georgia utopia of the Dump, generosity.

                                                                                                                               From his fingers —

 

John Keene, “In the Rhizome” (detail).