Red Ant Society

By Greg Macon:

• Bad Dreamers
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There's a place -- I think it's the final passage of Mystery Man -- where it begins in the middle of a sentence and a very important action one at that. Someting like "crash headlong . . ." Thinking about this and then about the final passage of the book, and about the arc of the book, there is something the book does as a kind of brushstroke overall, that you probably wouldn't even see if you were only thinking about story or plot. The book is of course trying to tell you this. The very title is trying to tell you this. But if you can't see the forest for the trees . . . The radio noise at the end -- think of that in the leitmotif of the twilight scenes, and night light scenes throughout and it all starts with Candice searching for something. It's basically saying that if you're looking for all this to be solved like a puzzle, as if all this has some one meaning behind it, then you're not paying attention to it all. And all this, even the mystery of it, is the stuff. The noise of it all. The play of the words, the figures, the passages, the characters, the segments, rather than some overarching proclamation. This is exactly what people do with dreams, look for one meaning like a code, instead of see the play of meaning. And it can be summed up this way: it's not what does it mean, it's how does it mean. Thus, bad dreamers. If you see it really as a gloss, a tone poem for all that, even the "action" or plot or what happens, then it's very different. That's what is even foiled, mucked up, played with. The expectation. By things like that passage starting in the middle of things.
• The Bright Lights of Sin
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Without being expressly in the "story," as well as what is there even as figure about the biblical version of sacrifice, there's a way that this is another version of playing with the same symbols and figures referred to by Derrida and Bataille, the latter in both The Story of the Eye and The Accursed Share: sun, eye, egg, sacrifice. In Accursed Share there is the Sahagún account of Aztec rituals and the origin of the sun story. There is a conflation of god symbols going on in Bright Lights already. Fish, the sun, the whole god-puppet thread, the author, the I and the eye, the eye melding with the world, the egg and the cell, division, and of course incorporation and re-incorporation. Then, after reading the part about the origin of the sun in Accursed Share, there followed an account of one of the sacrifices that reminded me of the party scene, the violence segment, everyone gouging and killing each other. A comic blood orgy that is both cartoon and ritual. Also, the smudging of fact in the mythologizing of war, an abstracting as well, but there is an inverse development also. Memorization by dating follows a lineage of the memorial by an attempt at more exacting tribute to ancestry, or at least predecessors (selective, too).
• Wishing Madness
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The figure eight or double loop (the infinity symbol) of the fish (from Bright Lights of Sin) goes through Aditi and Daksa and the suggestion of the quadrille of Roustang to something like the quartet proposed by Lacan, operating on different levels, also in a diagram with "x": the "I" and the "you" and the crossed idealizations of them. The position of the account is always "compromised," or at least qualified, by this relay of perspective and position. The narrator (subject) is projecting, forward or backward, but is also a projected version.
• Monster
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Try putting "formication" together with Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel), or for that matter Leviathan by Hobbes, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, then throw in a quote by Beckett about scale -- god, man and termites -- the freakish reincarnation scale of Plato in which social insects are "higher" forms than women, Claude Levi-Strauss's anecdote about the little girls of the Nambikwara playing war games and him stealing their secret names, and a quote by Derrida about how man has always defined himself with opposites, producing a chain which includes: machine, animal, woman, monster.
What would it mean to have a work, narrative or dramatic, that had the opposite of a protagonist, such as understood in the history of man? A protagonist that would be machine, animal, woman, monster, god, insect, but also, not one, not singular, which in effect means, not protagonist. A monster city of women, like a termite mound? But, then, neither a drama nor narrative, if not a protagonist. Could such a "story" be? As the Beckett quote would suggest, it might be like observing termites, or an ant colony, from the remote perspective of a different scale.
• XS
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× 395. Declamation v. figure – poetry and dictionary confounded.

This was the kind of writing that trying to avoid others led to the eventual form: dictionary-poetic-aphoristic. Gloss.

Too much, too little, profuse in skirting, too many folds and darts, allusions. This is not for the faint of heart, or perhaps better to say, anyone for whom the heart is a pat symbol. It’s extremely convoluted, avoiding the trite deep. In order to follow the heart, the uncountable, ungraspable, unfathomable convolutions of the heart.
• Memories of Unproduction
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The sense of fellowship, excitement, or mere agitation, whatever the liminal response to the barest social factor of the circumstance, was just as soon about dispersal. Like all dreams, wish and want and hope were also their opposite, haunted by regret and longing, undone plans and missed paths, deadbeats and ghosts. We are together still apart, all apart together. We are coming together and never get there.
• Pieces
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Thoughts along the baseboard, this baseboard right here, singular and anonymous, as if lint collected, thrown just so.
• Film / Script
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Nietzsche wrote: "I do not know any other way of associating with great tasks than play: as a sign of greatness, this is an essential presupposition" (as translated by Walter Kaufman). Le Million is the pinnacle of this in the movies, the experience of it and the expression or realization of it at once, because of this factor – very important, the very important one, because for the notion of importance – the realization of artifice itself. Le Million is a celebration of artifice. It's a celebration of how artifice invokes things, evokes the feelings for anything, the feelings we are most serious about, but in the overriding joy which is that thrill of this motion of artifice itself.

[Includes reprints of reviews originally published in The Oklahoma Daily from 1980 to 1984.]
• slits slats slots . . .
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How then to achieve the assurance of a chapbook, a guide, a collection of wisdom to pass on, when so much of this thought is "accomplished," comes about, on the run? So to speak. In the cracks. Slits slats slots.
• Dying Acts and Other Plays
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Contains:

Dying Acts
The Planter's Soil
The Shade of the Oak
Men, Words, Ghosts
Mystery, Broom and Cat
One Man Play
Sketches: 1
Sketches: 2

The first is a three-act play, the rest are one-act. The first three had productions in Norman, OK.

Contact: ljlife@fixionsytes.net