Robustiousness, Elusive Grace, and Harsh Lyricism: Re-fusing Refuse

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

If there's anyone else who does dirty better and dirtier than David-Baptiste Chirot, I don't know who it is.

Chirot walks through the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with paper and lumber crayon* in hand, making visual poems through the ancient and childlike process of frottage†. He finds a water meter or a manhole cover or any other number of sources of text and image and he rubs part of it onto a sheet of paper. Then he walks a bit farther and finds something else to add to the page. In this way, he creates a kind of collage-by-frottage (we won't go with "frollage" despite the temptation) that is rough-and-ready, dark, blurred, surprising, and often sublime. He calls these creations rubBEings.

In an email Chirot wrote to me on May 22nd, he explained his techniques (expanding beyond the realm of his rubBEings), and his Celan-like prose--written (he explained) with the sun straight in his eyes as he wrote--reads like a rubBEing: fragmented, messy, palpitating, insistent, and compelling.

in the last ten days or so i have made abt 100-150 rubBEings to send out to two journlas/wbe sites here n usa and the rest to zines around the world--i slowed abit in my paintings and wi have to get back to them--i make clay impressions of words, leterngs,objects, the spray pait them and rub onto paper--very prmitie form of press, just as rubBEings aa sort of proto-copy machine--

At home, I have a large package of his rubBEings (some with traditional collage elements), and the smudges and overall "dirtiness" of the sheets--some a bit wrinkled by the excited process of creating them--almost vibrate with activity. And we are now lucky that an entire book of his work from the streets of Milwaukee is available as rubBEings, which is also Xerolage # 32, one in a series of single-artist issues that Xexoxial Endarchy has been putting out for twenty years.

It seems almost impossible to me that these rubBEings are even possible to create. How--I wonder over and over again--does he find the source texts for these pieces? Take the piece I'm calling "TRANCE."


David-Baptiste Chirot, "TRANCE" (2005)
I assume that Chirot found a war monument somewhere with a metal plaque extolling the virtues or, at least, the triumphs of battle. From this he weaves a tale that appears to be about the American Revolutionary War and its Civil War. Bits of texts pop out at us in this list poem. But the story isn't clear just as a battle isn't always clear during the fighting of it. Working with only these few underwords, we might assume that this is just a panegyric to Lafayette and other great military men, but the overtext (that haunting "TRANCE" laid out in a two-by-three-letter grid) is the telling part of the poem.

Chirot has explained his poetics to me a couple of times, but I have to admit that I cannot quite tell the difference between two of the three qualities he strives for in his work. They seem to boil down to "rough beauty" for me. Chirot explained these qualities in an interview with Kevin Thurston for the narrow house recordings website:

i also value two qualities very much: what bob cobbing called 'robustiousness' and what i feel also is something elusive, at the periphery of vision, of being--a sense of grace--an arc of beauty across the field of being, seeing, feeling, hearing--this is something very elusive yet which i feel very often and i hope in some pieces makes an appearance.

these two qualities, and another which i would call a 'harsh lyricism'--at once something with a jagged edge to it and something of a lyrical quality--it sings from out of what may appear to be broken strings, vocal chords--it has that sing to it, harsh and cracked, yet signing, lyrical--so with these three in mind, i find that yes, some pieces do present this more that others, with more clarity, strength. . .'temperment' as cezanne called it.

David-Baptiste Chirot, "In Memory of Memory" (2005)
The book rubBEings opens with the poem "In Memory of Memory," which is a great opening, just as the book has great closing.‡ The poet imagines a past and attempts to open up his memory of it, allowing a flood of memories to follow. And that is what does follow: a book of fragments pieced almost back together--a self-portrait presented as shards of a mirror cupped in a pair of hands--and a book that flows one piece into the next suggesting not progress, or forward movement, but the process of water pooling in a hollow eroded out of rock.

Tonight, I'm sitting in an Adirondack camp (what in most other parts of the country would be a cabin), a camp that gets its name from a poem by T.S. Eliot, and I spent the night here throwing ink against pages with a new set of metal brushes. As I look back at the night's work slowly drying into solids, I'm amazed at how neat it is. The only thing dirty are my ink-stained fingers. Reviewing Chirot's work again makes me want to take the pages into the rain or rub dirt into them; Chirot's example makes me want to make these pieces of paper as much a part of the world (or of some particular world) as are his rubBEings.

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You can procure a copy of David-Baptiste Chirot's rubBEings (Xerolage # 32) for only $6 from Xexoxial Editions, 10375 County Highway A, LaFarge WI 54639 USA.

*Essentially, a large grease pencil (China marker) used to write on lumber and designed not to wash off in the rain.

†The process of rubbing a soft and usually pigmented material (pencil, crayon, chalk) against a sheet of paper or cloth held against a textured surface in order to capture the raised or incised image or text on that surface. Gravestone rubbings are created through the process of frottage.

‡If you read the David-Baptiste Chirot interview at narrow house, you will see that the choice of what rubBEings to use and how to use them was a joint endeavor with mIEKAL aND, the proprietor of Xexoxial Endarchy and the person who may actually have served as the Maxwell Perkins to Chirot's Thomas Wolfe, paring down a tumultuous mass of creativity into a cohesive esthetic whole.

ecr. l'inf.