philoSOPHIA

Sight is as much an event (which qualitatively changes the event seen) as is ‘original’ event.

—Leslie Scalapino, Objects in the Terrifying Tense Longing from Taking Place

In 1999, Edge Books published a new collaboration by Bay Area poets Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino titled Sight. The long form poetic work is a series of exchanges by letter and fax machine between the two poets, and the project is prefaced by both poets in “Experience/‘On’ Sight”:

In the broadest sense, we were interested in a joint investigation into the workings of experience: how experience happens, what it consists of, how the experiencing (perceiving, feeling, thinking) of it occurs, what the sensation of sensing tells us…. But it seems as if our emphasis was not on the thing seen but on the coming to see. As I see it, this book argues that the moment of coming to see is active and dialogic.

(LH)¹ [End Page 113]

And indeed, this collaborative work is not only an essay into the poetics of perception and experience, but a demonstration of relation, of friendship, as poetic and dialectical event:

I dreamt while we were collaborating that I spat in a donkey’s eye (in the future but already known) and rushed up (before this) to tell you that ‘all of life was void,’ which I knew in the dream you would want to hear. Because I was indicating that to spit in the donkey’s eye (not to have to be accommodating) was the gesture, being done; that gesture also being the act of friendship and apprehension.

(LS)

The space created then is resolutely and importantly non sentimental, not reconciled to agreement in any unifying sense, rather it is a dismantling of any conventional relationship to experience in “real” “time.” And in being/doing such, is itself an event illuminating the transformative nature of our (physical, intellectual, psychological) processes of apprehension.

from Sight    It’s receptive as solely dependent on one  (There was a study on the water leech’s movement that took fifteen years)    ‘social’ actions    seem to be what are events  I am now awake, so analysis is the elation itself, action  being submitted to it    (‘from who’s point of view?’)—is itself the light blue  One is the water buffalo not being felled in the morning; myeffort is of trying to hit the rhino who afterwards enters one.

(LS)

    In such watching we are setting to work    I wake to see the arrangement (or flotation) whoseplenitude might be called “light blue”    A play of sounds emitting birds    They are hits    But the arbitrary itself is boundless (which is why it isfaultless—incorrigible)  The immigration agent in the dream represents the guard ofboundaries  We can experience anything—but we don’t, because we set to work(committed to ‘social’ action)  The work precipitates birds—an organization of phantoms [End Page 114]

  The action of phantoms (the stiffening of my position)determines my sensations on hearing the birds which I can’t see but imagineto be yellow or scarlet  One song is now obliterated by construction—“felled in the morning”

(LH)

  Actions is they’re being sole per se.  That’s just my scrutiny, so it’s not existing.  The greyhound (has to be ‘in’ my ocular memory) ran ‘over’ the yellowfield which was dark. It doesn’t have to exist in my memory thus.  The round bulb moon being far forward (not over the dog, and behindme) floated then (: the border guard itself; the immigration agent floats as one,and from any event being ‘then’).Discouraged, I slip away (out of) from work from my being small.  Being felled ‘has to’ be no order. A colon is that even.  The light blue doesn’t have weight on that dark. Or the darkon it. A dream doesn’t in it.  Not working doesn’t have any weight. Working sees it though.  A dream has greater weight than my activities when (one’s)washed over not existing at...