Ulrich Jesse K Baer/ Jessica Baer,
Midwestern
Infinity Doctrine, Apocalypse Party, 2021
http://ulrich-baer.space/
Midwestern Infinity
Doctrine is about the diabolical pact with analogies within language
as an endlessly proliferating series of artificially derived
re-semblances, halving & splitting and re-joining themselves. The
affective currency of disastered bodies where the brain’s automatic
hyper-completions run crunching errant timelines together into
singularities that transgress homogenized social time in the
neurodivergent cptsd text embodied. It’s about the (im)possibility
of intimacy after violence and its fulfillment within my relationship
to my 2005 maroon Ford Taurus. In a Super Walmart parking lot where I
met myself in an identical car; the sinuous-duplicitous doubling that
powers drives through the immaterial of language textures. A paean to
Ivan Ooze, it’s about my decision to reunify my abusers out of the
world of my life and into the cosmic everything-nothing faraway. It’s
about the specters that stay behind anyway. It’s about the
paranoia-machine of alienated desire; the perpetual inauguration of
the uncanny-familiar in time as indexicality. It’s about the line
in The Who’s “teenage waste/land” where he sings “I don’t
need / to be forgiven.”
"Jessica Baer’s
philosophical and entropic Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is more of a
backward sermon than a doctrine, a sermon that sits on the edge of
science and time, giving quenched counsels on existence, on survival,
on livelihood, on the search within the JessicaBaerself: where the
birth of the protagonist meets the birth of the author. Here language
battlecrawls as a paranormal dual citizen of reality and lexical
electrostatics. Everything in Baer’s penultimate world is
comodulated for depth of chaos and for depth of furtive estrangements
between logic and beauty. A place where language could experience
post-traumatic disorder in science with some order and some chaos.
Here the linear lives within the subliminal sequencing of itself,
breaking out a kind of disco of sorrow, hypervigilant texts that hope
to dance into bijections by abandoning itself to lexical chance. Here
the abyss of Baer’s prosaic, cryogenic world does not thaw, but
hyperventilate from insularity and significant enigma. The speaker is
a surgeon of the nascent. A machine or an aperture that ejects
snowclouds of lucid ambivalence. Of course, in the rhetorical
exploration of the self, there is the reader, the cyborg, the
villain, Ivan Ooze, then Paul Newman, and then Clarice Inspector who
show up for Baer’s inexact mathematical party dressed like bullets
out of an experimental pistol, all hoping to miss us softly, a few
inches, from our true literary artery. Be colossal and enter with
cosmic form." — Vi Khi Nao
The haunted speaker
of Midwestern Infinity Doctrine, self-reflexively invoked on the page
as “Jessica Baer,” offers a philosophical-poetical treatise on
the liminality of life, death, and memory—where the in-betweenness
of living becomes rupture from which other, alternate timelines
emerge. Like science fiction/fantasy author Gene Wolfe’s seminal
Peace (1975), a highly poetic and unsettling novel which recalls
scenes from the life of the possibly deceased Alden Dennis Weer,
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine enigmatically traces how “[s]pace is
haunted” in the post-pastoral Midwest. Here, lost dreams of a
peaceful landscape belie a reality wherein “[t]he difference
between living and dying is fuzzy logic” (Baer). Consciousness
spreads across pages, spilling forth maladies, quandaries, and
contradictions—such that life is—and it is within the life of the
imagination that the reader finds themselves on a journey into and
beyond the self in ways that breach the unknown.
Baer’s world is
the world of the “wobbling putrescent,” where the flesh has gone
immaterial and is revived again, shocked out of the grave in an
endless circuitry. It is the body trying to make sense of the world
through a kind of private language that often eludes sense: “I go
backwards in time and find myself in bed with you, suddenly, we’re
floating inside the open air, begin to drop Contemporary Me throws
their arms around the pastmyself as we’re falling and I murmur, in
a steady voice, into my own hair, ‘it made sense. It made sense it
made sense.’” The “you,” that threshold between selves, is an
alluring space that can also be painful. At times the speaker is
pained by the intimacies of being surrounded by other bodies in the
wherewithal, this whelm world. As Baer writes, “you try to tell me
what you’ve done, gone & died again, in your head . . . I
hesitate to speak, a threshold where your heart should be / learning
to cross itself.” The heart crosses itself with the knowledge that
we are here, right now, and now is kind of like forever when one
lives in a moment for so long they never leave—(“He leaves the
room and I do not move. I have always been here). We remain in
multiple places and memories at once.
Baer’s world also
conscripts the reader into its building, performing the page as a
portal and simultaneous a zone of revelation where sharp and
brilliant insights come to surface—“Time is in a sense only
affective investment which serves as the delineating force (cosmic
law) between the bios and the dead/undead of object-matter, where we
live at this ledge of spilling cascade-time.” Timelines are broken
apart and reconstituted through intuitive logic, and intuition leads
the reader toward an infinity as much illusory as real—if we could
only reach beyond ourselves so far to see it, we might have some
knowledge to share. Baer’s speaker is filled with wisdom emptying
from pockets of time, the hard-won wisdom of a speaker contemplating
living and dying alongside joyrides through intersecting texts and
philosophies, what it means to live out our words and the worlds they
spin. This threaded text bears significance in relation to stars and
sky and cosmos which continually loop back to remind us of the point
of puncture/rupture. What pains one is the prick of time. But it is
also revelation. It helps us “carve back to the core, if you can
find it,” as when the speaker says, “Jessica Baer, the pain is as
bad as it is recalibrating.” Baer is not only interested in scar
tissue but goes deep into bone to realize the why and what for.
There are other
why’s and what for’s that concern me in this text, for instance
when Baer writes, “[w]hen you crossover thresholds to pass between
universes, rounding the arch of the portal to the midwestern heart,
a bell rings—its an apex.” I find myself taken back to a
fantastical, almost supernatural Midwest, where I come to know the
landscape as a universe once spoken and so twice lived by myself and
the speaker—it is a Midwest embedded at the heart of a vortex, and
I ask why I am here and if “I” even exist. The Midwest becomes a
pause, a “caesura of sense” where we ask ourselves “did what
you find what you were a searching for and/or are you actually not
there, at all?” Baer writes, “[y]r mouth collapse into a tractor
beam as tachyons filterback from the future past through the voices,
singing in the dusky bar, smoke crags, and the melody repeats because
the needle is broken can’t find its groove.” These fleeting
impressions provide solace amidst, amongst, and against the troubling
vortex of experience.
Midwestern Infinity
Doctrine will make one want to transgress the boundaries of
themselves, staying up late on a journey past the edge of day and
into something more beyond than beyond. - Julia Madsen
https://annuletpoeticsjournal.com/Julia-Madsen-Time-Transgression-and-the-Vortex-of-Experience
Jesse Baer’s
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is a novel undoing the genre by
unstitching time in both its form and content. Structurally, the book
begins with “Final New Jersey Transcript” and “The Cosmic
Dirge: Finale,” which sound more like titles for endings, and ends
with “*Addendum: Subducted Time” and “Epilogue: Reversing
Time,” seemingly flipping conventional order around. The reader
enters the text as a detective embarks on a case, starting from
sparse and ex post facto evidence and culminating in a fuller, though
still incomplete, backstory. Suggesting a narrative reluctance to
accept an(y) ending as conclusive due to time’s actual slippery
dimensions, the chapter titles buck linearity. Within these nonlinear
units, dominant concepts emerge around time, violence, and definition
of the self. Baer’s approach to form ruffles those concepts, pets
their fur backward, and recreates the experience of losing time,
which can be one manifestation of trauma.
The Midwest gets a
bad reputation sometimes, and I am from a part of it in between
recognizable places. I can attest to the landscape’s potential for
an outside-of-timeness, to how driving its highways feels a bit
apocalyptic, particularly in the winter, particularly when it seems
you’re the only one who sees anything out of the ordinary. Walk
into a rest area and observe the families eating fast food or
whatever and squabbling as if the landscape outside isn’t devoid of
even rudimentary signs of life, lacking a color palette beyond shades
of gray. The twilight zone. It is alien and alienating, a plausible
setting for a novel imbued with UFO sightings and abduction reports.
On the road, Baer
invokes the seasonally omnipresent deer in the woods and alongside
highways, which brings with it a sense of unease. Baer writes, “A
deer skins itself, because you were the math, inside velocity.”
Hitting a deer, or any animal, with a car is unpleasant and
dangerous. Deer are large and innocent. We empathize with them when
we see them killed, perhaps because as roadkill they can look a
little bit human. If a deer skins itself, that suggests you’re not
at fault. Outside of hunting you really can’t control deer, which
is itself a humbling reminder of individual frailty.
In the chapter “The
Cesarean Scar,” time seems to run backward through two threads
alternating in short sections. First, in a dreamlike scene a cesarean
scar is untaped and the wound opened up. The last line: “Then, I
break into my car.” And in between, a variety of quick scenes of
confrontation take place, some with the narrator speaking from inside
their car, contributing to the sense of reversed time. Amid the same
chapter, the deer reappears in a new form. Baer writes: “My mother
is weeping on the floor, a deer collapsed into its soft hind legs, an
accordion cataracting within its mythological song, it won’t play,
now.” Like the first scene of the chapter, this follows dream-like
logic in which disparate common elements mash together. But it’s
also true that trauma can cause fracturing of narrative, as we see
frequently in film storytelling. When the accordion of your mother’s
body no longer plays, breaking into your own car might be the most
reasonable decision you can make.
The narrator tries
on many different roles, often signaled by formal changes from one
chapter to another, as they attempt to break time with language to
access hidden truths from their own experience. Formal variations
include radio transmission, abduction report, transcript. Most
chapters bear titles or subtitles with familiar language that belies
complex unexplained phenomena; just now, entering “time halos”
into an online search engine, I find some video game instructions
that tell me to “jump through the wall.” Irrelevant but apt. Like
light halos that people with low vision see when driving at night,
time halos would be experienced as pinches or radials of time.
Variations in speed of time are impossible to prove since felt time
is relative anyway.
These attempts
succeed in breaking time. Baer writes: “this gesture expulsed what
we were, waves attenuated. Slower than that. Carve back to the core,
if you can find it.” Here we are, subject to time fluctuations. “In
the spaceship, we just kinda float around.” No one knows how long
it’s been and we are powerless. Further, in the chapter “Interlude:
Time Mirages,” the narrator shapeshifts and “become[s] a
paranormal investigator to save you from the human parameters.” In
this role they perform competence amidst chaos and disrupt
otherwise-inevitable harmful events. Human parameters might be
self-destructive instincts, like the horror film lead who runs to the
basement to hide. Suggesting that time manipulation is not uncommon,
Baer writes: “Beneath the surface of the midwestern plains,
thousands of women are burrowing wormholes in time. Their bodies
crush through geological history.”
There’s a
laundromat in my neighborhood with floodlights as bright as the World
Trade Center memorial. I imagine mischief took place in this parking
lot and the owners increased the wattage until it was no longer a fun
place to be. How would you explain the vibe of a laundromat to an
alien? “After solemnity enmeshed you within the liminal space of
empty laundromats,” Baer writes: “you pursue yr precision in its
opposite.” The laundromat is a difficult, even vulnerable, place, a
place to get caught up in grim emotions. The scene quietly depicts a
breakthrough: to “pursue yr precision” is a liberatory venture,
and if one can turn toward it from a rock-bottom moment, then perhaps
the laundromat is a site of great potential.
Midwestern Infinity
Doctrine requires deep engagement as an intellectual exercise; it is
a challenging read and an interdimensional adventure. To read a book
like this one, the reader must slow down, stop reading for
information and read instead for mood, atmosphere. Baer has crafted
an homage to science fiction literature and media through this
novel’s amalgamation of forms. The X-Files mantra “the truth is
out there” is not just a TV catchphrase, but a resonant touchstone
for the narrator, for abductees, and for anyone estranged from their
own past. The same can be said of this novel. - Krystal Languell
https://bigother.com/2022/03/14/review-of-jesse-baers-midwestern-infinity-doctrine/
Excerpts:
My abilities were
bleeding
This gearshift
linguistics as Blanche Dubois spins her web and Telemachus eyes the
suitors all things come to suspension. I reside here with my
ambivalence as the propulsive force of the sumptuary absence which
animates my line, dangled to catch what? Until we catch the light,
her haunted music, and I want magic—to be revisited by the language
of the sphere’s harmonies. The felt revolution which unties the
thread to perforate my speaking throughout-time.
I will myself
forwards into the slipstream rendering a chasm between my feeling
self and the desire to say it is texture. This antinomy does not
resolve it does provide decoys in the form of internal tensions
perceived as absolute ends I refuse my own promises. Once one was to
love to love dearly and truly and absolutely, my own polestar and to
guide be guided by light I lay down my instrument having woven the
tune from which I can imagine no escape. This lingering marrow leaks
out fulfilling my absence in the root of my being, to be weeded
interminably struck out and erased radically from the ledger of all
botany. I dismember myself because forgetting is a caesura. The
mythics of an endless sentence and its intervals deployed ludically,
without remorse. If it was an imposture to supersede myself in
secession to the chase itself, then I am a counterfeit symbol, lay it
to rest.
He hides in the
orchard, removing his face from my vision like sloughing a mask. I
find the porcelain artifice of his betrayal strung against the tree
bark, where all masks cast down light and I castigated beneath its
unseeing vision. It replicates interminably.
Eye holes.
Here is the
architecture for the artifice you were sewing and molding, kneaded
with hands, the pressure lingers in the material: a dull heat throbs.
As necromantics refrain from the living we cascade like water simply
dazzling and without recourse to scission I carry my wound at my
side, its hemorrhage makes the stakes made of our passing through
each other, relinquished its autumn which dawn wound began.
Dehiscence splinters the parcels where you packaged your fruiting,
effloresce, its nimble occupation to fulfill the destiny of all
plant’s nature, raggedly divulging the seeds of its wreckage to the
impartial observer who held heaven with his shoulder. Staggering dust
stirred throughout the vista. Did I summon him here? To look down.
All masks are their
own desideratum to look out, and this contracts with infinity whose
hilt I applied to your sign and the contours forgiven with my fingers
parsing silences that rounded the gate, to chase quixotically from
the crushed music of pastures. Its wreckage surmounted me where I
watched the passing of light upon the ruins of a world that forgot me
before I began to molder.
I came here to rust,
I tell you with my gesture. It’s slower than patina, slower than
the creeps of our own gardened delirium. How do I honor the dead who
speak through my hearing them.
It was never yours?
This injunction to compose it is music.
& we were dawn’s
last word.
The radiation turns
inwards toward the core dragged bed sky tug your claws out from me.
Ousted in time’s jostling tracks. Shunted with Triassic chronology
between us, escapes. Granular knowing your exit exit reason.
Strategic deployments of mythology to luster through time. Scoured in
the interior surfaces without losing reception. The cloud buzzed with
cloud thoughts, overdrawn at the memory banks.
I wake up in the
stall between times, in another ether body. On the table looking up
eyes could not escape from mine. My mother says no, fractals. You
were untethered when you spread your legs beneath space. The thermal
pressure encodes when the crust reveals your secret weather. Its
secret brain
You drag your memory
out of me like an enclosed space for time capsules buried in the
ground. We built a genital monstrosity out of earth. Shaft of dark
antimatter and the revolving's soundless.
It’s so hard to
keep going once you’ve left the continental shelves behind you must
speak from the top of your head, cortices scramble for it, and click
your heels once not again. You’re trying to freeze time and this
doesn’t make you prehistoric, molasses, the screamcrushed insect
means what? Your segments—busted.
Cleave to god cleave
to rage cleave to rhythms in yr body Kristeva says I wreck ostracized
death by turning. Swerves inside the body, dendrites bang to. The
living around persona, in absentia, in a cigarette. You mashed your
hand trying to.
I know you love me
you sonofabitch just look at all these circles on your arm terminate
in mud you burned holes through to dig your way out back in dirt. I
ask you another question.
How long have I been
waiting. To hear it ricochets echoes disclose nothingofthemselves. I
have to creak, floor boards be reburied in earth, the tremors were
subsiding mountains between you.
You came once if you
ever came, come again and we all fall away.
The ladder stretches
into in visibility, octaves lapse in the root, of what you were when
vanishing.
http://www.americanmicroreviews.com/jessica-baer-interview
+
Purple hinges the
sky together. When electrical towers volt, we park our cars beside
the end the end of time.
I.
In the midwest,
bodies are guided by a preternatural internal magnet. At the center
of the vanishing point of the horizon we converge: the Super Walmart.
In the dream, you disclothed beneath the fluorescent lights, on the
talkshow yr culpabilities were revealing.
“Do you have an
individual reading light like, uh, a clip? For a book.”
I frame the
employee’s face between thumb and index finger, at the crux of an
alright angle. See, a square. Where’s its edges
Lately I’ve
noticed myself making theatrical gestures that borrowed motifs from
the movies. I like to wiggle my fingers into the itch after triggers,
raising my hand towards You. You can lift mostlyanything.
Behind the
supercenter, its immortal gloaming a refinery pumps slowmagma against
the purple-contour ripped sky. Outloud, colors I cry My God, My God.
No one has the one
product I need. So flatten space, you try again and mists strangle
the possibility of depth the light contained. I hesitate before the
solid blooming blocks of Indiana industrialnight. My Ford Taurus is
parked across from another ford taurus they both smell like a fire
hazard. When you have to magnify everything to get to the truth,
shifting scales, I turn my head back, lower my body into its center,
rocked away and carried forward, running at that improbable night
II. Indiana
Abandoned
My weeds my weeds my
weeds my weeds, my weeds rapture the air and hunk the concrete.
Pacing
nurseshoewhite, and terminal. The abandoned hospital ahead of us
finds the wedge in yr heart and finality dislodges it. What did you
need this for
A red brick facade.
We enter through an
improbable door. https://tskymag.com/2019/06/jessica-k-baer/
VKN: I have never
interviewed someone semi-rum(my)? before so thank you for giving me
an opportunity to be a little bit buzzed. Speaking of buzzness (is
that even a word?), your prose reads to me like a motorcycle swerving
in and out of European cities indeterminately. How do you describe
how words exit your consciousness onto the page? Do they move like a
motorbike? Or something else entirely?
JB: Haha. Thank you
so much for that beautiful image. Sometimes when I feel dislocated in
spacetime, I find myself running up alley stairways in the Balkans
but I never realized I was on a motorcycle until now. When I write I
think of fluid dynamics, so like the eddies and suspensions of silt
in a river and the breathless vertigo of the grace of being able to
speak with myself fluently. I also definitely try to remain in
proximity to death, like a stunt worker driving a motor bike.
VKN: Should your
readers wear protective helmets or latex gloves when they read your
work? What clothes should they wear when they open your prose?
JB: A hazmat suit
would be sufficient, but better yet, an antique cosmonaut suit with
an old diving helmet. Sometimes the air gets sucked out of the room
of my body, is given to the movement of the piece and I want my
reader and me to have a cosmic tether while we submerse and
cyclically resurface. I wonder if the cosmonaut tether is tied to
anything at all.
VKN: Cyclically
resurface? Cyclically resurface makes me think of bicycle wheels
drowning in ice, thawing out by spring, and then resurfacing for the
summer seasons. Partly deflated, but ready to spin again if someone
has the courage to re-pump.
JB: I like the
quirkiness of this indomitable bicycle. If consciousness spins like a
wheel then sometimes when you're moving fast, skids must be
inevitable. I wonder if the bicycle ever changes positions or if it’s
spinning in place, posthumous and subject to the mediation of the
seasons. By cyclical resurfacing I think I’m describing
sublimation, like the spaces where everything coheres and
cocontaminates together so that it can be transformed. I think this
piece passes through turbulence but is wrought into something that
exceeds it.
VKN: How long did it
take you to write the experimental piece “Mother Issues”? And
where did you write it? Was it in sea-induced Providence or
pre-slushy Chicago?
JB: That piece was
written in feverish bursts of painful energy across about eight
months in Chicago. I was intermittently soft homeless, so falling
through space, so perpetually redefining and then losing the
possibility of domesticity. For much of the time I was living in a
diy space in Chicago converted from a gutted grocery store into a
sort of curioso type open floor plan filled with Hammond organs,
skeletons, and music equipment. It was also written in the
vacillating sometimes painful interference zones of interpersonal
intimacy.
VKN: I am sorry to
hear the pain you endured. Livelihood hardship is one of the most
terrifying conditions to exist in psychologically and physically.
It’s a kind of unspoken torture and it seems endless. It warps our
relationship to humanity and makes survival a perversity and not an
adversity worthy of conquering. I understand and know what you mean.
How were you able to shift out of it? What changed? What is your
recent residence like now? Are you happy with your roof?
JB: Thank you for
your very kind response; this is why I have so much difficulty with
Bachelard’s poetics of space—it posits, like, a universalized
unconsciousness of space defined without dispossession. I’ve spent
my entire life rapidly transitioning between locations and I think
this informs my work. Dislocation is a major issue for so many people
and it’s important not to stigmatize the person who experiences its
effects. I have privilege still in the spaces I’ve been given that
might be wrested from others. I’m certainly still tempering my
resultantly engrained wanderlust but for the next few months, am
settled in a brick house in north Chicago. I think that my sense of
temporality in my writing is reciprocally shaped by the velocity of
my personal movements.
VKN: Would you like
to accelerate the force of your velocity? What kind of temporality
would you most desire for your work? What is the perfect piece of
writing that doesn’t hope to take the shape of a tornado? Your
thesis adviser, Carole Maso, talks about vortices in her classes a
lot. Do you share her vision of vortices? And, what is your
relationship to them, if any?
JB: I’m actually
trying to paradoxically dilate and crystallize time because I am
afraid of it, so I want to collect it in the ground and slow it down
like amber. I think of pain as magnetic remanence that might shape a
durable pattern in the materials we have. Often I feel a piece is
finished only once I’ve reached the resonant frequency of my own
body. If I set a vortex into motion, I would sound its eye.
VKN: What are you
working on now, Jessica? Can you describe your project to us a
little? Are you working on a novel? A poetry collection?
JB: I’m working on
a piece called “Midwestern Infinity Doctrine” which is a
psychogeographical study of the relationship between the flatness of
the Midwest and different articulations of infinity, shifting between
macro and microcosmic infinities. It’s about time and UFOs and
conspiracy theories, sanctioned and unsanctioned knowledge,
rhetorical paradigms, interpersonal violence, and what constitutes a
“plausible” self. It shifts between numbers station broadcasts,
manifestos, and auto fiction. I want it to be like a haunted radio
for the drowning.
VKN: Your MID sounds
majestic and scientifically enigmatic. We are in different
geographical radio stations, transmitting rhetorical materials that
look like an interview. Speaking of the Midwest—I am in Brooklyn
right now and you are in the Windy City. I hope by conversing with a
soul sitting in a red-curtained bedroom in Brooklyn doesn’t deform
or skew your infinity doctrine. What was your experience in
Providence like? Did you love it? I love its easy access to the
ocean.
JB: What’s it like
in Brooklyn right now? How does the weather feel inside you? When we
met, we all talked about visiting the coastline. I like to pause
before impossibly large elements. I constantly drove to Beavertail
beach to find an immensity capable of more-than holding my feelings.
I thought pvd was like the movie The Fog and I was Adrienne Barbeau
in the lighthouse watching out for the flash of an ice pick through
the mist. So, complicated impressions, haha.
I love this
interview because right now I get to interact with you like a phantom
typewriter. Infinity is definitely lurking behind the red curtain;
you can find it mostly anywhere, I like to think.
VKN: Brooklyn is
chilly, and so un-rumlike. I took three train stops and the weather
inside me is tropical. I am a pineapple that has been roasting too
long on a space heater, so to speak, though there is no space heater
in this room. There is St. Germain inside me too, not the sofa but
the elderflowers. What is inside you? I hope a bookcase or two and a
fancy, silver wastebasket. I love wastebaskets. I am addicted to them
the way one gets addicted to lollipops.
JB: My wastebasket
is certainly unlined and small objects pass easily through. Thank you
so much for transmitting your rich vitamin c to Chicago! In
Mississippi, as a child, I would receive lollipops through what I
called a spacetube at the bank, that peristaltic plastic tube that
sucks up ur personal checks and delivers candy. How do you feel about
banks with tubes? Did you ever go to the dive bar on Jewel Street in
Providence with the juke boxes?
VKN: I love taking
large and small bills to outer space. I think money is a better time
and space traveler than Doritos. I think I may have given the bank
tellers some by accident. I think so, yes. I didn’t dive very much
and I didn’t bring any gold bars to the bar. I am not very good at
listening to American music, Jessica. You must miss Providence very
much? Did you ever walk on Wickenden? I used to live on that street.
JB: I used to
chainsmoke in an alley off Wickenden and read Bataille a lot. I am so
self-similar despite (because of) my viscousness. Oh wait! Also I was
obsessed with the neon sign for the aquarium supply store on
Wickendon which perfectly evokes slushiness. I took pictures of it
everyeveryday. Have you ever taken a photograph of the same object
repetitively and systematically over the course of time?
You really have to
keep multiple denominations with you when you’re performing space
travel. I miss everywhere; I’m a nostalgia machine, woof. Let me
know if you need me to go get those Doritos back for you.
VKN: How many
umbrellas do you own?
JB: 0. I have to
borrow them. My car possesses two but it’s practically its own
autonomous entity now, maybe my most enduring relationship. How many
do you own and what color?
VKN: I own 1
beautiful armpit-held canopy, gifted to me by fiction writer Ali Raz.
It is yellow and egg-colored and slightly psychedelic. Like most
umbrellas, it’s inefficient—like it was designed for humans to
frighten the rain or entertain the clouds or something and not to
clothe our clothes from the rain, but I love it because it was gifted
with thoughtfulness. This leads me to ask: what is your favorite
piece of writing you’ve written? What do you love about it? And,
has your writing ever clothed you from snow? From slushiness? From
infrared light? From solar radiation? From indeterminate discourse
with Foucault?
JB: That sounds like
a beautiful gift and I hope that you have spooked the rain
consummately. I want the record to show that I lol’d at being
clothed from indeterminate Foucault discourses—what force could
possibly protect us from him. Can I ask if you have a favorite book
you’ve written? My favorite thing I’ve ever written is a poem
called “Foreclosure Rodeo” which features many repressions which
are done and undone by volcanic lava horses. Do you think writing can
be protective or that it’s a conceit like an umbrella, or that the
answer is both/and? I work through antiphasis a lot now so it’s
hard to see writing as a stabilizing structure because I think as
soon as I build something I unbuild it again? However I want as much
infrared light to come in as possible.
VKN: My favorite is
the one on its way to being born. I don’t think writing can protect
anyone from anything. I used to think it could—that its
gravitational center leaps outward and places you inside of a period,
for X amount of time, and when the paragraphs walk away to take a
shower or use the bathroom to leak, it sneaks back out to end a
run-on sentence or two. I think writing, in this sense, is really
lame. But practical. How do I stop my students from being writers,
Jessica? What did you love about “Foreclosure rodeo?”—love
those two words as a couple that shouldn’t ever get divorced.
Please don’t divorce them even if you find excellent lawyers for
them. All of those “e’s” and “o’s” in such tight
vowel-inducing space and the “r’s” to disrupt them. Where did
you write it? And, when? Were you young?
JB: I just saw Kim
Hyesoon read in Chicago, which was a devastating eviscerating
ecstasy, and I asked her about the sort of impossible geometries I
think she animates in her work, where infinity hides in the corners
(Derrida is digging it out) and the contamination between inside and
outside, and she mentioned the eye as I think an interface that
problematizes the in/out determination in a beautiful way, as well as
her hope that the field of vision women are trapped in by
reciprocating eyes will open and expand through her poetry. Like
Alice in Wonderland style but much better than Carroll, I hope that
writing will cause us to fall through portals that never cease
opening out, which is not safe but unsafe and trans-safe. I want all
bb students to be writers because I am gauche and sentimental. I want
the erotics of confused diary entries and excessive revelation. I
wrote it when I was a dreamy 20-something swimming in a pool of soupy
infatuation. I like the idea of writing inserting pauses where you
can rest from the world—a caesura to end time.
VKN: Your
description of Hyesoon makes me want to read her—“eviscerating
ecstasy.” How gauche are you?
JB: I know you’re
not finished writing this question but omg South Bend. Gauche enough
that I spend a lot of time in Hammond IN. (You can even dock your
boat at the Hammond Horseshoe Casino on the lake). - Vi Khi Nao
http://www.americanmicroreviews.com/jessica-baer-interview
Jessica Baer’s new
book Midwestern Infinity Doctrine, out from Apocalypse Party, might
fuck you up. A revelatory cosmic kick from punk Chicago, with
breakneck quantum leaps and time collapses. Dense, grief-ridden, but
also loving: maybe you didn’t think a book could hold this much,
but turns out MID is a portal.
Writes Vi Khi Nao,
“Here the linear lives within the subliminal sequencing of itself,
breaking out a kind of disco of sorrow, hypervigilant texts that hope
to dance into bijections by abandoning itself to lexical chance. Here
the abyss of Baer’s prosaic, cryogenic world does not thaw, but
hyperventilates from insularity and significant enigma.”
I chatted through
the virtual ether with Baer about the midwest, aliens, dreams, and
time.~ ~ ~
Noah Fields: How did
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine begin as a project?
Jessica Baer: It
began because I emailed a friend of mine and asked them if they had
ever had the experience of being in multiple places in time
simultaneously, and they asked me to elaborate on that sensation. And
then they said that I should write a project about it.
NF: If you had to
summarize it, how would you describe your “midwestern infinity
doctrine” as a thesis?
JB: I have been
continually trying to summarize Midwestern Infinity Doctrine. The
work lives on in my own attempts to understand what that work is for
me personally as it’s continuously redefined. But if I had to give
a doctrine for what it’s about, there’s like two dimensions that
are interlocked.
On one dimension is
what we could conceive of as the political real. So in that dimension
I am trying to talk about conspiracy theories, social paranoia,
alienation from desire, toxic masculinity and how that relates to
those things. So like, depictions of violence in masculinity and
violence perpetuated through toxic masculinity — where does it come
from? how does it relate to alienated desire? and how do we disrupt
what is perceived as the linear flow of time? It’s partially to
make a new space, like an anomalous or autonomous space for —
thinking about [Michel] Foucault too, some sort of like heterotopic
space — for time to exist in a different way, so that people who
don’t relate to time in the way that it’s presented to us by
capitalism have a space to perceive time how they experience it.
So that’s the top
dimension. The bottom dimension, underlying that is a comment on
literature and feeling trapped by literature, and wanting to create
some kind of writing that does something else or that escapes the
expectations of literature and trying to figure out if the literary
project itself can be a transgressive act or is more like a trap.
NF: I’m curious
about where the Midwest specifically enters into that. Or maybe more
broadly, what the Midwest means for you?
JB: One of the
important aspects of this work is thinking about infinity. I am not a
mathematician or physicist, and so I probably have a poor
mathematical conception of infinity, but I do know that there are
multiple infinities. And there’s different proofs for that, but
there are uncountable sets that show that there’s more than one
infinity.
When I think about
the Midwest, I think of this optical illusion of endlessness —
because the Midwest is so flat, that you can see for miles in any
direction. Like Lake Michigan: Lake Michigan seems like a massive
ocean-like presence, because it’s so flattened and endless looking.
That sort of horizon of perspective draws you to the idea of infinity
as something that I think you experience in the Midwest because of
the landscape.
But I also have a
lot of nostalgia about Chicago because it’s a place that I love.
Because I feel like it’s an incubation chamber for weirdness, in a
very warm way. But also post-industrial America? That is the Midwest
— like these decaying, rusting cities, super Walmarts, just
stereotypical American culture that is sold to you in terms of
ideologies and American narratives.
NF: Sure, a place
becomes more than a place. It’s like a vacuum sucking in all these
ideological underpinnings. Let’s talk about those dreams! How do
dreams play out in MID?
JB: I mean, the
Midwest is sort of a dreamy space. Chicago, for example, has a veneer
of nostalgia and sentimentality. Have you felt that? Like the
personality of Chicago, how it’s spread all over the architecture
and the neighborhoods, and this idea of what it means for a place to
be Midwestern in the United States. So it’s sort of like a dream
space of this nation that we partake in producing and reproducing
together, because of course Chicago doesn’t exist — it’s
occupied land. The United States doesn’t exist. The Midwest kind of
exists, it’s kind of in the Midwest of the country, but relative to
what?
NF: In your book,
you write about becoming a “paranormal investigator to save you
from the human parameters.” Can you tell me about what it means to
be a paranormal investigator?
JB: Paranormal
investigator for me is a useful way of conceptualizing the fact of
being a poet. So it’s this sense of investigating the zones that
exceed the normal or the accepted as empirically or ontologically
given. So, existing in and putting a stethoscope to these fringe
realms outside of what is accepted social reality.
For me personally, I
feel that writing poetry is like being a person on the beach with a
metal detector. Paranormal investigation is a similar thing — like
if you imagine someone investigating a haunted house and moving
through the rooms, knocking on walls listening for ghosts. It’s not
that different from the way Jack Spicer conceives of it, I think when
he talks about his poetry as coming from martian voices on the radio.
It doesn’t matter if he believes in the martians or not, it’s
that he believes in the idea of receptivity to something that exceeds
what he knows.
NF: Hm. I’m
interested in what you said about the writer’s receptive role, and
in particular, I’m curious about the way your writing is maybe
receptive to time’s multiplicities? How do you receive time in your
writing practice?
JB: I’m glad you
asked that question because I would love to assert right now that
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is a failed project because I failed to
understand how to discursively reproduce nonlinear time. It’s built
so thoroughly into the trappings of prose fiction especially to
experience things in accordance to a linear conception of time that I
still don’t even understand how to break that.
In terms of how I
would ideally ideologically conceive of time? In this work I’m
resistant to positivism. Any conception of linear time seems to
depend upon a positivism like that things are building upon each
other, and usually that is premised in a Christian conception of time
or a capitalist conception of time, where everything is working
towards some good end. In this book I wanted to disrupt that idea and
argue that things aren’t moving towards some good end. And in many
ways, things are just trapped in like an ongoingness where they’re
not progressing at all.
NF: IDK, when I was
reading your book, I didn’t get a sense of linear time. I guess I’m
pushing back a little bit on this idea of your book being a failed
project. I mean, I acknowledge failure can be a goal, like in Bhanu
Kapil’s project [Ban en Banlieue]. I totally respect if failure is
part of how you want to frame your project, but I also think that
there is something that you are articulating that feels
anti-positivist and offers a different way of orienting to time and
poetry that feels vastly original and mind-boggling.
JB: That is the most
flattering thing you could say that you felt that my book did
reproduce a nonlinear time. Yeah, that is exactly what I wanted to
do. Bhanu Kapil is so exemplary in terms of thinking about this
beautiful carving of fragmentarity not really coalescing into some
monumental project or a project of like a “major language” (in
the Deleuzian sense) but like creating the minor works that are the
actually significant works because they transgress those
expectations.
NF: Who are your
interlocutors that you bring your discursive universe?
JB: So maybe the
most important interlocutor that I bring into it is Alvin Lucier
because of his album I Am Sitting In A Room, which is an album where,
because he has a stutter, he is trying to perfect the tone of his
voice by recording himself saying this whole speech, and then playing
it in the room and then recording it again, until his voice is lost
in the resonant frequency of the room. For me, I think of that as a
sort of creative praxis of the zone of art existing in this almost
impossible space between the idiosyncratic stutter of the individual
voice, and the universal — or supposedly universal — space of the
overall artistic practice and its given expectations. And so it’s
that interference zone when you’re moving between being Alvin
Lucier’s unique stuttering voice to being just the resonant
frequency of the room, and in my opinion that’s like a really good
allegory for their process of making art.
And then there’s
[Julia] Kristeva, the “Queen of Space” — so one thing that’s
happening in the book is that it’s also a space opera. [Laughter]
I’m like a cosmonaut, and I’m continually addressing this figure
of Kristeva who’s like this matriarchal, but then this matrixial
space, like a generative space — thinking about literature thinking
about building universes. As a cosmonaut, I’m constantly refining
her and trying to deliver some sort of message to her, which
continuously fails.
NF: Among these
semiotics and messages, perhaps: “alien hand prints.” You write,
“There’s a
parenthesis for what’s inside me. if you fillspace, it’s an
infinity
symbol.” I’m
glowing with the alien hand prints fanning across my chest,
patteddown from a fire. Who sets it, renews?
Can you tell me
about these alien hand prints?
JB: Oh, yeah, alien
hand prints. This is about interpersonal violence. And it is about
the experience of having a UFO visitation. This is something that
I’ve researched a lot and that I’m working on a project right now
about and planning to do more with in the future.
To conduct the
research for this book, I visited the Center for UFO Studies in
Chicago: one of the most important UFO research organizations, which
was run by this ultimately disgraced astrophysicist Dr. Hynek, who
because of his relationship to UFOs became a persona non grata in his
field. And so now, all of their records — which are first person
accounts from people who have seen or have been visited by aliens
etc. — are just housed in this person’s basement. And when I
interviewed the person who’s responsible for the archive now, he
said that the vast majority of the people that he was interviewing or
who wanted to make a report wanted to remain anonymous, because they
had so much shame about this experience of seeing something that
exceeds the space of the socially given real.
That is one of the
major themes of the book. Because we live in an incredibly gaslit
society where the real is very much calibrated by authoritative
forces. Like gender violence or even just the experience of
alternative genders. These are things that we are gaslit about
individually and locally, as well as more globally. So I was using
this idea of “alien hand prints” — people who’ve been visited
by aliens, people who experienced that or feel that they’ve
experienced that — to think about the hand prints that are left on
people who experienced violence. That violence leaves a hand print
that may be visible to you or that may be pertinent to your life that
may stay with you until you die, that other people may attempt to
convince you does not exist, could not exist.
NF: For me the
violence of gender as this orienting (or disorienting?) force or
bottomless gravity field hooks up with your description of how “space
is haunted.” And it makes me wonder, where in the hauntology of
violent space-time can you sort of just be in a non-threatening way?
JB: Yeah, and I
think that’s one of the primary tensions of the work, that
inter-relationality is what prevents that being, and also
accommodates or creates the possibility for that being. And so it’s
so difficult to find those interrelational or interpersonal spaces
where one can just be themselves, or become themselves, as a changing
singular selfhood in relationship with the selves around you.
In this work I
mostly focus on relationships that fail to accommodate that space or,
like, are incredibly antagonistic to that space, but I have a few
moments where I bring in those holding spaces, like people in your
life who radiate that sense of safety that allows one to finally come
to a sort of resting place, briefly.
NF: Absolutely. Do
you think that Midwest Infinity Doctrine in some ways a love poem?
JB: Yeah, I mean
this book is in many ways inspired by the aftermath of an abusive
relationship in which I was in love with the antagonist! And that is
a space that I also wanted to create in my literary work, because
that space is so fucking stereotyped and codified in all of these
very ridiculous and reductive ways that says you’re a bad subject
if you fall in love with someone who hurts you; you become a good
subject, if you leave them. And so this book is all about how you can
leave and your life is still fucked up; you can stay and experience
real meaningful happiness with them, even if it’s ephemeral. It’s
just so much more complex than that. But what I think is a shared
experience is the way that I felt frustrated by the fact that I
wanted to love this person and their orientation was so
anti-relational and destructive and violent and underscored by things
like toxic masculinity and paranoia that I couldn’t, even though I
desperately wanted to. And, as a result, they were able to inflict an
incredible amount of damage onto me which I still live with.
But it’s
definitely a love poem to the Midwest. It’s a love poem to
friendships, relationships, queer friendships. It’s a love poem to
science, which I think is also ambivalent.
But also, for me
personally, this work was really terrifying, because in this book, I
accidentally predicted my mother’s death a few months before it
happened. Which, I don’t want to sound ridiculous but I think that
when you write, you’re open to intuition and perception, like
you’re especially open and receptive. And so it makes sense to me
actually that in this book, I was able to pick that up. But I guess
I’m grateful for that because it also means that in some ways this
work allowed me to start processing my mother’s death before it
occurred, you know? And if we’re thinking about mobius strip time,
my mother is like alive and dead simultaneously; she’s gonna die
again, she’s already died in the past, and she’s alive in the
future and dead in the past; and the same thing will happen to all of
us. And yeah, I like the idea of being able to experience that
relationship in this less linear way. - Noa/h Fields
https://medium.com/anomalyblog/paranormal-investigations-with-jessica-baer-d5a454c61466
Jessica K. Baer, At One End, Essay Press, 2020
AT ONE END collects
excerpts from a longer science fiction epic composed in a hybrid
autofiction style, a mediation or recuperation of traumatic memory:
the trans body, here, my trans body represents an attempted
topography, mouthing around shape-hood, which fails to resolve into
any ideal epistemological dimensions but, instead, like the syntax,
mutates within your looking at me.
At One End and
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine are two stunning new works by Jessica
Baer that explore mergings and transformations of yous and Is, pasts
and futures, trauma and its aftermaths. In the interstices of sound,
where words merge, the living world in Baer’s writing bursts
outward — an island ascending as foiled tectonic shift. This
linguistic merging is also a thaw evoking an apparition of identity,
haunted luminescence of self-in-mutation.
The writer
characterizes At One End as “excerpts from a long science fiction
epic.” In this collection of five titled segments, an unnamed time
traveler is the only narrative constant as they move through time,
affective spaces, and alternative endings. Through the sporing of
time, in the metamorphoses of living, the present has been rewound,
“No singularity, but repetition.” Assemblages of sense are made
and unmade; narrative arches drawn then demurred; and references to
characters (a mother, a lover) renewed across geographic signposts —
New Jersey, Providence, the Moon.
Baer’s
genre-bending text is an extended exploration of metaphors, such as
of overheated and melting bodies standing for psychic instability,
that survey the experience of being alive at a point in time
inhabiting a body-in-formation. It explores these metaphors to convey
the dissociative experience of the trans-body or the liquifying logic
of recombining embodiment. In the introduction, Baer writes “The
trans-body here, my trans body represents an attempted topography,
mouthing around shapehood, which fails to resolve into any ideal
epistemological dimensions but, instead, like the syntax, mutates
within your looking at me.”
Selfhood in Baer’s
universe does not parallel self-awareness or the ability to name
one’s affective states. It is rather a relational tension between
the speaking subject (which is multiple, engrained in oceanic
resilience) and what lurks adjacent to breath. The “I” is ever
dissolving itself so as to reemerge. And the “you” is an “I”
looking at itself, but never fully distinct from it. Baer’s writing
rips through the “you,” a redacted self, a grounded observational
fissure. It remakes the “you” in myriad guises: the fecund image
of a lover, a mother. The desiring and regretful “I” moves in the
shadow of interrupted speech and averted gaze, a disappearing and
estranged observer of one’s observing, whose “gendersmelt”
holds the slippery wave of its escaping.
Images of self keep
transforming and replicating. In the folds of time, phases ellipse
into phases, so “you phase transitioned, shifting between states of
solidity and fluency, slagging your neon green across the red
sheets.” The body melting into steel or elsewhere built “from
spare parts” beams with affective vibrations and object-knowledge.
It absorbs and emits a history of sensations. It has been inducted by
the implications of unilateral desire. At times, the body becomes
heat, a tungsten connectivity turned telepathic hotspot: “see my
body is burning all the time but no one else can see it so they can’t
avoid the flickering halo of flames and I never wanted to hurt
anybody.” Temperature unleashes the body’s travels thru
misunderstood connections between body and brain. The burning sways
in general invisibility.
At the end of this
text, an exchange occurs between two entities, a reconciliation
between the “I” and “NJMother.” Yet, the undergirding
conflict is not specified. The NJMother assuages the “I” of an
unspecified guilt: “It’s not your fault.” In this
reconciliation, things of the past are exchanged and shed — a
transaction that decides a future: “I just wanted to pick my things
and leave theirs in exchange.” Many questions remain. Do the things
of “theirs” belong to the lover in the first section? Or is the
“theirs” referring to an abandoned iteration of the self? Why
does NJMother appear here forming a kind of triangulation? The
indeterminacy here is perhaps the point. Which object or being is so
singular as to detach itself from its own mirror image? What is so
distant as to have no parallel or precedent? This hyperbolic quest to
fully inhabit one’s singularity lies at the heart of At One End.
The title itself indicates that the one is only one. Nothing exists
besides what is manifest in this iteration. Yet, the world repeats.
Repetition is everywhere and the alienation pleating Baer’s writing
dwells within a paradoxical tension. The pain (and forgiveness) the
you/I needs emits from the one end, one exit, one premise jutting
awkwardly against the “yet again.” Baer says it all
distinctively:
Back on the moon,
I remember my anti-quark, and wonder where it’s waiting for me.
Maybe it’s stuck in the charged vistoelasticity of the lunar dust.
Perhaps I was brought here to disturb the dust so that it plumes in
dense flurries of soft white. If I could loosen my disremembered
anti-quark from the lunar surface soil, which disintegrates to
itself, I could break this chirality. I would disengender the spin
that drives me away from you.
“To break this
chirality” is to create a new equation, to reestablish novel
relations of mass and perhaps also to recalibrate the psyche toward a
fresh order, but also to “disengender” the motions that frame
dialogical understandings within consciousness. Let me state the
obvious: there are many possible readings of the above passage. This
hermeneutical richness and density epitomizes the experience of
reading Baer’s work — the very reason it requires an almost
Weilian attention to unfurl its vibrant signifying range.
Midwestern Infinity
Doctrine is a cosmological interpretation of the posttraumatic
condition.
Here, Baer continues
to blend autofiction and science fiction to explore a repository of
personal history. Vampirism and alien abduction exist alongside the
distillation of quotidian life and memory. In this longer manuscript,
time travel becomes a state of consciousness, which represents the
experience of trauma and abuse; the narrative unravels in fractured
chrono-nuggets, from the future into an uncovered past back to some
uncategorizable time-spindle. The world moves backward into the sight
of grief and loss, into the autobiographical pressure of
meta-commentary:
The auditory
hallucination I’ve been experiencing since I left an
abusive person in
2016 is my brain’s attempt at a
hypercompletion
of ambient sounds it’s a PTSD-related
phenomenon in the
complicatedly intertwining zone between the
body and the mind
where my dysregulated autonomic nervous
system and my
hypervigilance device eachother together to
gather me away
from
what is
ruptured-time
and you’re not
here in the pause but the wreck in my body
keeps gathering
Time is a
socio-political relationship that permits the funnel tension of
desire — which in Baer’s text is the driving force of time
travel. Desire propels the time traveler who seeks to escape
traumatic pasts but yearns for different endings, for the elusive
variation of life. The past endures in the entanglement through which
mechanisms of surveillance turn biological life into a late
capitalist laboratory of institutional experimentation. So, Baer
writes, “To situate ourselves within the polis is to situate our
dreamful proximity to the idealism of linear time and it is in this
sense that time becomes the privileged site where bare life is
transformed into politicized life, reflexive with the coefficients of
slowness and speed accounted for in a normativizing gesture towards
homogenized time.” If norms spur forces of compliance and
categorization, Baer’s text instills a total disruption of
expectation through virtuosic linguistic and narrative inventiveness.
Notice, for example, how the analytic mode of the previous passage
shifts elsewhere toward an incomparable lyric register, one that
recreates the negative space between words to rephrase their
conceptual meanings:
We were
cryogenically frozen into the hillside, for a trilliontrillion years,
devoured by plantmatter. Here, We lose four hands making the shape of
what is only between them. The earth ruptures its belt and the
mountain buckled, drawing everything into the void pause before
matter evolves, a chemically evoked litany. Yr body is the wet shell
of a naked fetus this life feeds there, vibratile plasma. And the
stars run hyperchromatic scales furling the night further away, a
helix magnetizes: two ends that never meet. Repulsed because they
were the self-identical.
What destroys us is
also what releases an expansive perception of the pulsating chains of
connection between events, people, and the tiny links driving the
unimaginable. Yet, an inability to break with the re-experiencing of
traumatic memory undergirds the notion of infinity that grips the
attention of the subject. In the fold of an eye, the refracted light
revels in endlessness. Looking itself mimics the experience of
infinitude, and the multiple ruptures in the act of seeing mold the
possible iterations of becoming. In the chapter “Earth In
Memoriam,” we learn that “Jessica Baer,” the persona through
which we experience the text, has been admitted into a hospital ward.
The details of Baer’s life unfold under a scene of institutional
surveillance:
“Your patient
file mentions that you’re from the south.”
“Why don’t
you spend more time in the recreational hall? The nurses mentioned
that they never see you socializing with the other patients.”
“We need you to
provide an emergency contact. If we could just contact your family,
we could make arrangements to keep you here. Without insurance,
you’re likely to be transferred to the state hospital. I think you
will find our facilities significantly more comfortable.”
Under such
institutional scrutiny, Baer introduces the idea of infinity, here
inspired by Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, we encounter the idea of
infinity through our finite thought and the overwhelming sense of an
infinite content that can fill it. In looking at another, one finds
the plural singularity that each gaze returns — the Other is a face
looking at our unseen face. The “I” is a face shielded from
itself, that approaches itself only through what it mirrors for the
eyes of another: “He jots a few notes, in a jerky authoritative
hand. One last look through glass lenses, the light slips across,
blotting out his eyes: infinity. Levinas annotated this division
holding me closed.” The posttraumatic condition holds the subject
captive in a loop that the awareness of infinity alone may interrupt.
Infinity recognizes the irreplaceable singularity of each finite
being, a relation that precludes the possibility of repetition. -
Isabel Sobral Campos
https://www.full-stop.net/2021/05/13/reviews/isabel-sobral-campos/at-one-end-midwestern-infinity-doctrine-jessica-baer/
Jessica Baer, Holodeck One, Magic Helicopter,
2017
“Jessica Baer’s
devastatingly imaginative poems feel closer than any other
contemporary poetry written in English to neo-Baroque writing from
more southern regions of the hemisphere. IMHO at least. The norms
limiting the sayable are as pulverized in Baer’s hands as in the
poetry of Perlongher, Sarduy, Lezama Lima, Haroldo de Campos.
Witness language
acquiring a propulsive force shattering the time and space divide:
“we wind up / in two timezones of experiential / holodeck, I’m
ignition / here?” None of these cosmo-terrestrial phenomenologists
are part of the North American canon and yet it’d seem Baer has
absorbed them all.
Horses and holographs. Identity as orbit. A bricolage of
psychocartography, a prism in love, poems for when the aliens finally
come but only want to talk to the rocks. Holodeck One is Jessica
Baer's debut chapbook, and it's a mysterious new technology. One that
deweaponizes the language of self-constriction, one for all the
noises that noise leaves out.
“Aleatory
alterity” or astral projection? “Reentranced echolalia”? Sheer
verbal articulations at the limits of desire and expression, “full
of trans / verse wavenoise.”. - Mónica de la Torre
POEMS BY JESSICA BAER •
"Earth Wedging Light" in Pinwheel
"Deer Black Out" in Prelude
Two poems in Fruita Pulpa
Three poems in Horse Less Review (with audio!)
JOURNALS
• Gazing for yr heart, if we blew, Go by stars, and very august [The Tiny Mag]
• Harbor Lines [Baest Journal]
• Perception's Toxic [BathHouse Journal]
• Griefmouth and The Powers of Horror [Black Sun Lit] (Print)
• Kill/Switch and "Working Title" [The Boiler Journal]
• Mask Generators / Weather Machines [Bone Bouquet] (Print)
• Kintsugi Variations and After Mareshiver [Deluge Journal]
• Crystalmine [Dream Pop Journal]
• In Pilsen and We Crammed [Fog Machine]
• Deleuze Fucked My Mother and The Church of Cattle Entrails [Fruita Pulp]
• Pegasus My Mother and 'Mareshiver' and Foreclosure Rodeo [Horse Less Review]
• Mineral Mnemonics [Leveler]
• Earth Wedging Light and Mineralremitting::radioact [Pinwheel Journal]
• a lovely chord / it ends [Potluck Mag]
• Deer Black Out [Prelude Mag]
• The Cretaceous Periods [Pulpmouth]
• I was never more and misconstructed you and The angels the angels and & Don't You Miss the Dancehall [Reality Beach]
• My Quora and Desynch [Queen Mob's Teahouse]
• Antler Axile [Sugar Mule]
• Excerpt from shortlisted finalist manuscript Midwestern Infinity Doctrine [Tarpaulin Sky Magazine]
• We Begin To Tessellate [Voicemail Poems]
ART CRITICISM
• Time filling a room like water [The Collaborative Center for Storm, Space, & Seismic Research]
Jessica Baer received their MFA from Brown University in 2017. They have published a chapbook, Holodeck One (Magic Helicopter Press, 2017), and their work has been featured in journals such as Pinwheel, Prelude Mag, Horse Less Press, and Bone Bouquet. They live anywhere and they love horses.