I made my computer read The Tapeworm Foundry without taking a breath (the computer, that is (I took several breaths (short breaths mostly))). Hear it HERE. I’ve never bothered to listen to the complete reading of the text. Andor you probably never will either. But know this: there’s something remarkable about how the synthetic voice’s mawkish delivery of what is (despite the absurd content) just an instruction manual never achieves the bathos that it aspires to. So then, does this make The Tapeworm Foundry anti-bathetic? I’d answer no. It’s not anti- so much as it is quasi-bathetic. Andor for me this is a little more satisfying than any full-on bathos (which by definition should’t be satisfying at all) because the intensity that it suspends in being only quasi-bathetic aborts its destiny as an “object” of art.
Typically I’m all for this business of “destiny” because destiny shows life from its seductive side; life, as Baudrillard says, as it is lived “according to the seductive rapports of form and[or] appearance.” But bathos is already our destiny, specifically one that we accomplish daily as we are surprised over andor over again that “Nothing is dead, nothing is inert, nothing is disconnected, uncorrelated or aleatory.” Chance andor causation, Baudrillard argues, is a modern myth perpetrated by the reduction of ritual and social forms—techniques for intensifying the rapport of things—to vestiges of superstition, or habit, or “just” art. Though seemingly opposed, chance andor causation both imply a world that is free of lures andor effectively indifferent to the relationships that transpire between things: Things “just happen” by design or by accident. Seduction, however, speaks to another order, an order of attraction that is indifferent to any rule or law but its own directive to lead things astray.
What intrigues me, then, about this rendering of The Tapeworm Foundry is the way it stages its destiny in advance to the effect that it never actually takes place. But this virtual destiny doesn’t exactly constitute a new destiny, a “non-destiny.” Instead, it turns its fate inside out, where it metastasizes in the experience of listening as the sense of infinite optionality, which is, so say, the perpetual draw of something else—distraction. The option of not listening to this work fail to achieve its bathos (which would itself be a formal failure) informs the listening that is or is not being done to it such that to listen to the work is also to listen away to it. In a sense, the work doesn’t seduce our ears to listen so much as it beguiles them, to listen un-listeningly when we listen to something.
Oh yes, the musical part of it… After I made the machine read the work I took the recorded voice andor passed it through a pitch-tracker that converted the tonal andor rhythmic variations of the speech into a spasmodic piano part that synchronized exactly with the reading.
THE TAPEWORM FOUNDRY (2000) is Darren Wershler‘s book andor a long sentence andor a poem giving instructions andor suggestions for creating new poetry andor not.
—Priest