On “On Lionel Kearns,” Jim Andrews, and Comsimplexcity

There are but two choices. Alive and dead. On and off. Always and never. Yet each choice has many names. Presence and absence. One and zero.

Much of our world we reduce to these simplicities, especially in the realm of media where the hegemony of the digital world of ones and zeros is nearly absolute. Whatever you see on your computer screen is digital. (The double bends of the s, which you see right here, can be reduced to digits—a series of nothings and barely somethings equaling a particular something, and a set of pixels upon a field that carve out a certain shape.) Whatever you see on any screen has probably existed in a digital form before it arrives at the back of your eyes as an image. Even today’s books are analog manifestations that appear only after a digital gestation.

Out of this hypermodern world of ours—a world of increasing complexity built upon a foundation of absolute simplicity—poets have begun to create digital poetries, forms of poetry that exist only in the digital realm and depend on movement and interactivity for their effects. One poet working most deeply in this field is Jim Andrews, proprietor of Vispo ~ langu(im)age. Yesterday, he released a digital work he has been developing for a while based on the proto-digital poetry of Canadian poet Lionel Kearns. He calls the piece, simply, “On Lionel Kearns.”

Ever since Andrews introduced me to the poetry of Lionel Kearns via earlier “drafts” of this work, I have had to wonder why I’d never run across this poet before. In the narrow hallway of visual poetry, I am always surprised when someone has escaped my notice, especially a person who has created one of the most expressive minimalist visual poems ever, "Birth of God/uniVerse,” which Kearns often simplifies to “BoG.”

Lionel Kearns, "The Birth of God/uniVerse" (1965)
At its core, this poem consists of nothing more than two digits, a 1 and a 0—but the 1 is made out of zeros whose central holes are 1’s, and the 0 is made whole by a pattern of 1’s. The central simplicity of this poem is created via a complex series of visual puns that engender a concatenated series of possible interpretations.

Andrews begins “On Lionel Kearns”—which he calls a “binary meditation on the work of a pioneering Canadian poet contemplating digital poetics from the early sixties to the present”—with this simple poem by Kearns. It is a wonderful opening. We usually navigate Andrews’ meditation by clicking an arrow, and the first time we do this we find ourselves upon a quotation about the binary system from Marshall McLuhan. Clicking on this quotation brings us to a fluttering series of shards of Kearns’ poem. Later, we discover that this quotation served as the inspiration for the poem.

The following screen is another visual representation of BoG. If we click on this image, the number of copies of the image increases as their size of each reduces, leaving us with the vision of BoG as the repeating element of an infinite fractal. At one point, we arrive at the film version of BoG, an amazing psychedelic re-presentation of the original. The film is raw and pulsates with black and white before adding some color. As images flash on and off, white zeros become black ones. The effect is so intense that Andrews warns it “Could induce epileptic seizures.” (The film also includes sound, but my computer has suddenly lost its ability to play sounds, so I cannot report on that aspect of the film.)

Much of Andrews’ meditation consists of quotations or poems from Kearns and entire emails sent to or by Kearns. This piece has a documentary quality to it, working both as an anthology of Kearns’ work and a sideways assessment of the work. In almost every case, on almost every screen, we are allowed the opportunity to interact with the text on the screen, to distort it as a means of insight into the unstable nature of language and meaning. One of the quotations, for instance, appears first as a jumble of jigsaw pieces, and we much put the nine-piece puzzle together before we can read the quotation, before we can gain insight.

At one point another proto-digital film-poem appears within the sequence, Not Negotiating a New Canadian Constitution (originally titled Negotiating a New Canadian Constitution). Working again with two characters (this time the O—which is almost a 0—and an N), this poem works with a series of puns: “on” (which is both the English “on” and the French word for “one,” meaning a person), “no” (which is the opposite, visually and conceptually of “on”), “non” (French for “no,” but created out of a natural extension of the n-o sequence), and “ono” (meaning “oh, no,” but also suggesting “know”). This second film-poem is more controlled than the first, so its effects are subtler and less profound. Something about the unified zero/one dichotomy (the zerone) in the first poem produces a deep meditative trance, and the BoG film-poem is a true mesmerism.

To enhance the documentary quality of this piece, Andrews opens it with a useful biography of Kearns and ends it with a hypertextual bibliography of Kearns' work.

This sequence keeps me wondering about digital poetry, and Andrews has left us in a quandary. Is his work itself—this amassment of poems and quotations from Lionel Kearns, this series of visual and interactive movements, this particular sequencing of words and images—a digital poem? Or is it, rather, an essay—as visual poet Nico Vassilakis has baptized it—on the work of a poet who preceded the digital poets but whose concerns he shared?

I’m not sure that I care. I see this work as a wonderful introduction to a poet’s work, but it is not merely that. Andrews’ intelligence and presence suffuses this piece; he is the person who has created this particular universe; he is the god and artist responsible for this particular object of contemplation. For that, we give him thanks.

ecr. l’inf.