Blaser's "Image-Nation 8 (morphe" as a poem of faciality, becoming-imperceptible and transversals

Only across the wall of the signifier can you run lines of asignifiance that void all memory, all return, all possible signification and interpretation. Only in the black hole of subjective consciousness and passion do you discover the transformed, heated, captured particles you must relaunch for a nonsubjective, living love in which each party connects with unknown tracts in the other without entering or conquering them, in which the lines composed are broken lines. (Deleuze and Guattari, ATP, 189)

A white wall/black hole poetry. If the poem could be regarded as itself only and the meanings scattered throughout as visible 'black' points, the text's obviously become a face: and Blaser's verses an abstract 'faciality' or this particular poem "a single substance of expression", perhaps outwardly recognizable at first only by the "Image-Nation" title (ATP, 179) And if the face is punctuated primarily by black holes, then we are also dealing with a type of landscape since subjects ("subjectification") and what they propose as meanings ("signifiance") have to appear somewhere in the poem. And what a poem says can appear not in just one place but anywhere on the body and its surrounding landscape.

And if they occasionally don't and linear senses that love binary truths become transversals that don't, taking a turn towards polyvocality (multidimensionality), then we have a case of landscape with imperceptible markers of meaning. What a place! It's in transit to one of a "thousand plateaus" of other accompanying "subjacent" meanings that the textual face, and its signifying streams, change course and even topography. Intensities of flight, caught always at mid-point, cannot be registered at the spots where they first appeared; they remain both elusive and always devastatingly on the go. And so a semiotics of white wall/black hole making the poem into something that's essentially bodiless.

We do have to read a poem's "holey surface" now. And more significantly that perpetuum mobile of signifier and subject whereby the poem reinvests its former assemblages with numerous new reconfigurations (deterritorializations). We read the "morphe" into faciality that Blaser's poem now is (this or any in his "Image-Nation" series) as both a fate ("destiny") and choice. It's initially perhaps "as a politics" (ATP, 181) that we understand the changing faces of the text and the need to overthrow sovereign organizations that initially try to define it. And we see as the poet's greatest option the radical ease with which the "silver thread" running through Blaser's poem takes any assemblage it wants and moves it towards radically different (and at times divergent) destinies.

Image-Nation 8 (morphe

And now for the poem. "8" is not just a serial marker, to begin with, but a meaning about to be swallowed whole. Perhaps it's best to see Blaser's title as the residue of an initial "star-collapse", signified only now weakly as the trace of an original sign regime and whose fragments lie visible as real black holes throughout the text. The title is the eighth in a flight of possible assemblages that can be read only against the amorphous 'sameness' of signifiance in general (such as "Image-Nation" and even "The Truth is Laughter"). And the errant vector of every subject of poetic discourse with a penchant for "morphe" is its strength and vitality .

Nomadic, open-ended, the Blaserian subject that can't keep still and makes the poem go, beginning now in the middle of something like (of all things!) tea-coloured beads 

my beads are the colour of the tea

in the cup

                 I lean forward
to let them hang free
and watch the light run
in and out

and ending, up to the first visible 'black hole', in a morphing of spectacular dimensions. A colour's weightiness as tea-coloured beads "hang[ing] free" and the speed at which light carries "the colour of the tea/in the cup" along a single flight towards origins, a place in China and reminiscences of youthful days that seem to have occasioned the poem itself: both these forming a first composite-image, reterritorialized on some original impetus, that takes shape as a figurative representation ("like a sparkling jade tree") he thought, wrongly, was the poem's primary meaning ("a gift"). The poem has so much more potential than that.

resin of pine or fir
washed from the riverbanks
of China

                      as the tree was,
of green needles,    it seems the friend
is left in the bead resin    there is

a suddenness    these days    startles,
young and handsome    fragments
of what he thought,    he stands

like a sparkling jade tree
in the west wind    I thought

a gift    •

A black hole swallows intentions since it is no respecter of objects—"all out/of one's self"— nearing its fatal horizon. Perhaps the poet intuits the necessity to release a more passional ("nonsubjective") side of things in order to create forms not "of [our] own doing", the "relaunched particles" of a new meaning assemblage, minus the clinging ego-poet, that won't just signify and subject us to perpetual origins. Resins, refracted teacup light and perhaps "fragments" of an early memory now regroup into newer, more "broken" lines of flight

                    I know nothing of form
that is my own doing    all out
of one's self    our words were
the form we entered,    turning intelligible
and strange    at the point of
a pencil

the words were the attributes
of what we were out there
watching    the sun swim

●

   

                a black hole is the name
given a star-remnant    out of
the idea that a star may collapse
into a dense object,    what is left
over,    and from it no light escapes
because, The New York Times explains,
the waves of 'the struggle' you named
lengthen infinitely,    and become
invisible

●

If black holes on the text's white page form a faciality, morphed initially into an assemblage of tea-coloured beads, Chinese riverbanks and a final unsatisfying "jade tree" image, eventually the signifying poem will disappear. How? Black hole is not a metaphor nor a typographical feature but rather a becoming-imperceptible of the poem itself, radically asignifying, memoryless and, as Blaser says in the poem "Anecdote" (274), "pull[ing] me into/and out-of, upwards-of/and downwards-of, the/side-by-side, serpentine friendship" til everything disappears in language itself. And perhaps he says it even better in the poem, "Pain-fountain"(301) where the mind is said to be indistinguishable from space, becoming a "dangerous freedom", and where like the tea-coloured beads in "Image-Nation 8 the light "let[s]the gathering heart splash/on a glittery pavement".

The interchanges between words and the collapsing star the text is, always somewhere between the "visible and the invisible",whether locked within the tree or suddenly loosening from the poet's hand—it's there that "the intricate movement of events" , a poetry, happens. 

it is the interchange the form took
like walking in and out of a star
the words are left over    collapsed
into themselves    in the movement

between visible and invisible
I like to tell the story of the man
with a heart in each hand    the
intricate movement of events,    the
startling    outwardness    of where
they were    would give you the key
to what he took    and what
he gave away    but these are
invisible words:

for a moment he stood within
the tree    startled

when he came to the gate,    he bathed
his face

when he lifted his cup,    he let the sky
go free    out of his hands