Identity, Perception, and the Shapes of Writing

As soon as I pulled Tom Beckett’s Vanishing Points of Resemblance out of the mail, my mind automatically began making connections.

I first saw the movie Vanishing Point—dubbed in French—in a theater in Tangier, Morocco, in 1977. This was six years after the release of the film in America, and I was learning French for the first time, having spent the majority of my life with English, Portuguese, Spanish, and German (in that order of importance). I can’t remember if there were Arabic subtitles in the film, but it would not have mattered. I couldn’t follow much of the French dialog, yet I could still follow the story of Kowalski as he drove on a tight deadline across the western United States, chased by the highway patrol, pursued by helicopters, running across a naked woman on a motorcycle. The movie is one of those that haunts my memories (I’ve seen it since then in English), and its vanishing point is absolute.

In drawing, we learn of the most common vanishing point, that point where the ostensibly parallel lines of traditional perspective meet.

The concept of the invisible artist—one who creates in obscurity, who works in little-known or little-appreciated arts, who passes for a real person—is another vanishing point.

I respond first to books as physical objects. Beckett’s copper-colored book immediately draws me in with its photograph of the spun copper ceiling of the Rock Church in Helsinki, Finland, which is repeated on the back cover. When I drag my thumb across the cover, allowing my thumbnail to touch its face, the book sings as if the grooves of the copper ceiling on the cover were actual grooves on the book. Yet the pads of my fingers inform me that the cover stock is smooth. Surprisingly, this is the thinnest perfect-bound book I’ve ever seen, coming in at a mere 24 pages.

Tom Beckett, Vanishing Points of Resemblance
The book seems much larger, since it fills my imagination.

The book announces its intention with its epigraph from Dickinson:

Oneself behind ourself, concealed—
Should startle most—
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror’s least

Beckett’s is a book about identity, perception, and writing. We learn that writing is a way (maybe the way) to create the world, to set down our perception of what a slice of reality might be, a reality that we cannot count on—our fingers being but a fiction we tell ourselves to believe so that we can pretend we can feel the world. The book’s pose is autobiography: the poet tells us shards of his life. Since it is autobiographical, we cannot believe the stories, we can only believe the words.

The book opens with prose, and this generally “unpoetic” prose predominates. We are told scraps of stories—something along the lines of Evan S. Connell’s Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel or his Points for a Compass Rose, but without being pedantic. More personal. We need to put the tesserae from the pages together to devise our own reality of this book, just as we must construct reality out of isolated bits of perception.

So how can this fairly unpoetic prose be poetry? Because its structure tells us it is through its fragmentary manner, its horripilating epiphanies scattered everywhere, its sudden changes in tone, in narrative voice, in visual aspect.

The visual aspect fluctuates with the page. Each paragraph of text sits so distant from its cousins that we understand—through visible placement before verbal revelation—that these are Sapphic fragments rather than Whitmanesque wholes. On a couple of pages, the poem switches to poetry: lineation, meter, condensed language. As a counterpoint to the austere sans-serif typeface of the preponderance of the book, a single quoted sentence appears with serifs and italicized to identify it as the effluence of an external voice.

The most visualized of the pages of the book is the sixth. Where the typeface and the size of the text change for emphasis, only to be covered by strikeouts. Where a space appears in a line to force a caesura. Where we see an interplay between single lines of text and larger one-sentence paragraphs.


Tom Beckett, Vanishing Points of Resemblance, Sixth Page
Beckett claims, “I am a poet. I think in fragments, feel in waves.” This book provides us both the fragments and the waves.

Fragments loosely threaded together can be emotively powerful. Harmony Korine’s film Gummo—a quasi-story of the psychologically devastating after-effects of a tornado (one that we never see) on the town of Xenia, Ohio—remains one of the most compelling movies I have ever seen. The movie was filmed in one of my many hometowns: Nashville, Tennessee, in this case. The tornado that served as Korine’s inspiration must have been the one that hit Xenia on April 3, 1974 (thirty years ago this year) and devastated much of the town. One of my friends in Tangier, Morocco, lived through that tornado, and his home was one of the few in his neighborhood that wasn’t damaged. All around his family, there were flattened houses, devastated lives, but all that landed on my friend’s doorstep was the embarrassment of not being a victim too.

Almost half-way into the book, a new narrator appears. Not Beckett, this speaker is a clinician watching “The Subject,” who must be Beckett himself. The gestalt of the book changes with this little addition. A spookiness sets in as this new narrator watches and contradicts the perceptions of the first.

“The Subject,” the new narrator tells us, “is stepping carefully through an environment which is full of holes.”

One story (not from the book) goes like this: When the fiction writer Paul Bowles’ wife, Jane Bowles, was suffering the years-long effects of a stroke, he invented a new genre of writing, one that was a little less demanding than writing his own books. He would transcribe—and certainly enhance—the autobiographical oral recollections of the men of Tangier and produce novel-length narratives. When I lived in Tangier—while Bowles still lived there, but I never met him—I used to carry around a paperback copy of one of these books: A Life Full of Holes. The epigraph, from the book’s narrator himself, is burned in my memory:

A life full of holes, a life full of nothing but waiting, is better than no life at all.

Let’s hope my memory burns correctly.

Beckett’s own Vanishing Points, his own series of holes, is filled with little maxims like this. It is a pedagogical work. We need to learn something about the world and the word. We learn that “Writing and sex are inseparable.” We learn, in a final line that Beckett builds up into a stunning coda, that “All words are misspelled.”

We learn that narrative chaos is beauty. That an abbreviated Faulknerian narrative arbitrarily switching narrative voices still tells us a story. That “Translation is a form of empathy” and that “Empathy is a distorting mirror.” That humor is a tool of the serious poet. That random connections are reality. And, maybe, that Tom Beckett became a poet because he smashed his head against the dashboard of a car when he was five years old.

That this book is so addictive that we cannot read it only once.

In this book, there is one biographical fact that may certainly be true. Beckett mentions that a photographer named Judy Dater told him “that when she takes a picture she looks away.” And there exists a photographer who goes by this name. Maybe this is her portrait of Imogen Cunningham with the nude motorcyclist from Vanishing Point.

_____

Beckett, Tom. Vanishing Points of Resemblance. Cleveland, Oh.: Generator Press, 2004.

This book is available for $7 from Generator Press, 3503 Virginia Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44109 USA; or contact the publisher John Byrum via email for details.

ecr. l’inf.