'The architecture and ambience of the maze'

Let’s find our way out of this maze, the title of the opening poem in Marie Buck’s Amazing Weapons, draws an etymological fact to our attention, the relation in English between the noun maze and the verb amaze. All the maze words stem from old Germanic words referring to labor. So to be in a maze or to be amazed are similarly to undergo occupation, to recognize the inhibitions and prohibitions that condition one’s autonomy.

You know how they put mice in mazes in those scary labs so we can have better shampoo and cancer drugs? Those mice are supposed to get out. Amazing Weapons thematizes the recognition of political distress and jussive plea for solidarity as a means of “solving the problems” that distress produces. And yet I think that what’s at stake is a countervailing argument against finding the “way out” at all. What the book attends instead is the architecture and ambience of the maze itself. The contemporary subject represented in these poems includes the optimistic, positive desire of altering current conditions and an affirmation of the glamorous objects that keep us amazed.

Or, in other words, there is no way “out” of the maze, but there is a lot of way through it. It occurs to me that so much of the contemporary writing I’m most excited about, and this absolutely includes Marie Buck’s work and Amazing Weapons, is the particular affective orientation it occupies vis-a-vis catastrophic current conditions. And what I mean is that this writing tends to refuse stable, coherent modes of affective relation — including the stable, coherent modes that the avant-garde appropriates as its own. Instead, this writing articulates the nightmare of contemporary ecstasy (especially as it cathects to pop culture) and likewise the glee adjacent to the most abject, its comfort zone for paradox is vast.

And, fittingly, the comfort zone includes a lot of discomforting material. Did you ever hear about the bugonia? It’s one of the nastiest things ever. Virgil goes on at length to describe the process in his didactic poem called Fourth Georgic. Basically, ancient apiculture formulated that bees were born in the rotting carcass of a cow. So if you’re a beekeeper and all your bees die, you go get a cow, you put it in a little shed, beat it to death, and then in a few months you have a ton of bees. Ew. But I mention the bugonia because it seems to me an apt image for the relational economy of Amazing Weapons: the sense that getting as close as possible to the most abject conditions is where you find a way through it — if not free of it. So in “Scope of Emotions,” Buck brings this ancient association of decay and flourish to bear, “all of my oceans’ dead and wounded / Brilliantly executed, several kinds of touch / In the warmth of the freshly-deceased.”

I guess this means for Buck’s book to achieve its maximal effect we’d have to be living in the most debased time in history and “luckily,” we are! It’s a time in which “terror strikes / in the home of my dead sisters.” It’s a time in which all previous systems of transcendent relief have gone Darth Vader at best. Here’s the entirety of “God In Heaven”:

What is the watchful eye upon you? The glitter-covered father
slashing and burning across the North American continent?

Amazing Weapons confronts its speaker paratactically with the objects of this ruined landscape. Parataxis, though, isn’t just a rhetorical figure in this book. The poet “herself” (I use the pronoun “her” although the gender of the speaking subject in the book is under extreme, sublime duress) emerges in an array of times and spaces in the world of the poems. Throughout, her orientation is marked by patiency. Rob Halpern defines patiency as “agency’s inversion and complement. Located in a situation of suspended action, patiency nevertheless contests impotent privacy and docile quietude.” The lyric speaker of Amazing Weapons manifests agency’s inversion by the stoic, hyper-bored way in which her body becomes the object of consumption by others.

This encounter of the patient subject and the hungry other inside the maze (the “situation of suspended action”) is often shown in terms of sexuality and power — which speaks to the sense of patiency as that state which “contests impotent privacy and docile quietude.” This contest is nuanced in Buck’s book: the subject drifts between poles of power in the encounter and assumes many forms of perspective. For instance, in “Underwear,” Buck writes, “I make you mount me / I am a boutique owner.” This represents an awfully complex picture of dom play inflected by the assumed agency pertinent to small business capitalism. On the other hand, the patient subject who appears and reappears in Amazing Weapons is under something like attack, which it confronts in the language of sexual pleasure and, simultaneously, the language of contesting docile quietude, “there is something rubbing my clit / it is the army of unalterable law.”

The spatial adjacency appears in the many landscapes that populate the poems. No individual object is ever allowed to survive the degradation and intricacy of the amazing present. Gestures of penetration recur throughout the poems, also emphasizing the essential patiency of the speaker, “yet another guy / inside you / a detailed view.” And finally, in this scene of “inescapable” parataxes, rational scale is ruptured, so “the small stretch of the cat … confronts the police state.”

Indeed, the police state is the dominant key governing all the spaces of Amazing Weapons. Tempting as it might be to simply read this book, though, as a response to the spectacular violence perpetrated by police regimes around the United States, time is subject to a similar juxtapositional pressure. The temporal adjacencies are emphasized by the insistent “ands” that dominate the book’s composition.

Like any great paratactic writing, the side-by-side propositions point to the breach between them. Buck exults in those breaches, inside of which are the real broadcasts from amazed life, from life enduring regimented mazeness. And part of the reality of that life, the everydayness of that life, is the articulation of “minor” desires and needs at the same time as major demonstrations by capital’s army attempt to crush formations towards autonomy, “I anticipate complete and utter destruction / And I want a maxi pad and I need a maxi pad.”

The economy of vacillation and ambivalence in this book is often articulated in terms of “emotions” and “feelings.” What I wanted to finally figure out about Amazing Weapons is whether these poems suggest that our condition is imminent by their juxtapositions, paradoxes, rhetorics of affective jouissance as well as malaise. Whether the law really is “unalterable.” I mean I want to figure out how hopeful the poet is, or how ruined is her optimism, or how unbelievably charged is her despair. But then, to have an “answer” to those questions, to “finally figure it out” would be, after all, a getting out of the maze, not getting through it.

Getting through it, all of those registers collapse into a desperate, fucked-up, hilarious, beautiful world populated by Hitler-fighting kittens. A spectacular expression of an effort “to bring the heart of the uncertain future.” The disenchanted ambivalence that completes the composition refers back to the forces of dominion and situates the poem in sight of an unsolvable world “prettily snowing on the police as they are.”