Psicofonía, by Edwin Reyes Zamora (Havana, 1971), is a work that unfolds like a lyrical machine and spectral thought: a book conceived over more than fifteen years that resists linear reading and instead proposes an architecture of fractured signs, a dialectic between two notebooks —“Umbral” and “Impregnaciones”—where language becomes event and crack. In this interview, the author shares the keys to this poetic device that draws on pre-Socratic philosophy, fractal geometry, Gnostic thought, and the aphoristic tradition, and where each fragment is a living particle, a residue of speech stretched to the threshold of silence.
How did you conceive the poetic device of Psicofonía?
Psicofonía is a book that was thought out at length and took a long and arduous period of time to complete (around 15 years). It aims to be a thinking machine that inclines the reader toward third and fourth planes of reading or understanding. It is executed on the vision of the palindrome; that is, a linear reading is impossible or ineffective, since the two sections or notebooks that divide it are closely related (even numerically). Impregnaciones, the second notebook, is derived from umbral, which is the first. As the result already suggests, the second is an impregnation, a derivative that could be seen as a footnote, but at the same time it has a radical independence (it entails a dissidence) so that—I believe—a struggle of opposites (a kind of dialectic) is established between them, which encourages the movement of thought. It can also be seen as the clash between two opposing planes or as a kind of palimpsest (one writing veiled by another or counterposed… the spectral aesthetics and references to the paranormal contribute greatly to this, although in this case it is only a play on words).
The book seems to move forward as a rhythmic invocation and at the same time a decomposition of meaning. What role do broken syntax, interrupted punctuation, and the fragment as a form play for you?
For some time now, I have been studying the structure of the fragment as a behavioral aesthetic, within what could be seen as a system, where each of the parts is a particle revolving around a central axis. I am not interested in publishing collections of poems. My working method is based on a specific fiction in terms of a book. In the specific case of the texts, fragments, exercises (whatever you want to call these little capsules) that make up or attempt to advance the concepts in Psicofonía, they could not, in any way, be compatible with an extended or hedonistic rhetoric (to which Cuban tradition has accustomed us so much), since the very fiction it seeks to displace contradicts that rhetoric. So, they are texts (as far as possible) devoid of all ornamentation or filigree. To articulate them, it was necessary to constrain the syntax almost to the point of impossibility… in the same way, the particular system of punctuation obeys that syntax and specific ways of placing silences and phantasmagoria. In short, all human understanding always starts from fragments; history itself is nothing more than a succession of pericopes strung together with the aim of establishing results that are not always reliable and, at best, questionable. Remember that my first book is titled Catalepsia (suspension of vital signs, ergo a dead life), in which I left some traces of what later developed into psychophony (texts that foreshadow this fiction). In the same way, I do the same in psychophony with specific texts that pave the way for the next book I hope to publish, Caballos de Fuerza (Horses of Strength).
Based perhaps on Saussure’s criteria “on the arbitrariness of linguistic signs” and Derrida’s “there is no outside of the text,” among other assumptions, of course, I was able to introduce this small door of descent into the hells of language (where impossibility is the worst punishment). The next book (“Caballos de fuerza”) aims to be a walk through the seven circles of hell of language… but it obeys another syntax, another rhetoric, in short, another fiction.
What is a psychophony for you? A defective file, a sound presence, or a written event…?
Psychophonies or paraphonies are, or claim to be (through recording devices), phenomena that record voices, sounds, emissions from animals or beings in another dimension, whose deformity and distortion are destined to freeze the blood.
Thresholds are the places where these psychophonics usually manifest themselves: spaces with such a thin and fragile layer of reality that they enable communication between planes that are generally antagonistic.
Finally, impregnations are records of traumatic and emotionally extreme events that, due to their singular force, remain recorded in a material space, a specific location, a closed space that persistently replicates the event. For this to happen, the presence of hectoplasm is not necessary.
The first concept gives the book its name, and the next two define the inner notebooks into which it is subdivided.
As you will have understood, in this specific case it is only a play on words (perhaps this function of language is best explained by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations, where he points out that the relationships between words exceed the meaning of each word in itself). So the title of the book can only be defined by its relationship to the titles of the inner notebooks and to the overarching fiction of the texts that participate in them.
In essence, it is a book from and to language (since only through language is it possible to achieve the logical-illogical, temporal-timeless events). All the terror, all the tension is sustained on the tightrope that must be crossed to go from one point of the discourse to another.
Seen in this light, Psicofonía is both an anticipation and a postponement of the writing event itself (or so I intended when I articulated this type of mechanism, whose effectiveness depends on a more mathematical becoming). Psicofonía is destined to be a fracture, a break in the rhetorical wall, the crack through which concepts flow (by inertia).
We all know the range of possibilities, but also the impossibilities that emanate from language… Therein lies the true terror, the cruel advent of ghosts: how to practice writing from the realm of possible impossibility?
Reading Psicofonía refers to a philosophical-poetic tradition that ranges from the pre-Socratic to the spectral. With which authors or languages does this writing dialogue, even if secretly?
Indeed, the book weaves a range of references that starts with Thales’ Arche and ends with Baudrillard’s simulation. The text that serves as a prologue (the only one that remains outside the two compartments of intention) traces a segment from the beginning or divorce of myth (Thales) to absolute phenomenological knowledge (Hegel). As for the pre-Socratic period, there is a chapter that deserves special attention: that of sophistry and its concern for the functionality of language. I say it deserves special attention because it gives meaning to questions (for language) that, although they have evolved or mutated, have not yet found a definitive answer. So, for example (although disguised as postmodernity), what already seems like an eternal debate between linguistic conventionalism and naturalism resurfaces every century with renewed vigor.
My writing is generally a complex web of references that have found their logical meaning in their proximity to each other. I include not only literary or philosophical texts, but also anthropological, mathematical, Gnostic, and other texts. All of this is done in a rhizomatic and natural way (apparently the result of my voracious reading). There is nothing secret; everyone has the influences they deserve.
Where would you place this book in terms of genre?
I will answer this question with several questions, which in turn will help me follow up on the previous question.
Where would you place, in terms of genre, The Fragments of Teplice by Novalis; Detritus and Rumbo a Peor by Beckett; The Writing of Disaster by Blanchot; The Corner Posts by Michaux; or Patterson by Williams? Where would you place the work of Walter Benjamin and The Gay Science by Nietzsche?
Any effort that drags the rock uphill brings a reward, which is, without a doubt, unease.
I like to think of Psicofonía (like everything I do) simply as writing, without putting it in a straitjacket. The texts included here are poems, aphorisms, maxims, or all of those things at once.
There is an obvious meta-narrative where each of the fragments fits together. There are at least four levels of reading: the source text, its impregnation, the third result when they are brought together, and the final outcome that each fusion occupies within the thesis of the book; another kind of allusion, in this case, to the Pythagorean tetraktys (the perfect triangle); that is, one is two, which is three, which is four, which is ten.
It is, I believe, a micro-labyrinth where every part, every twist and turn, has a similar importance in pursuit of the goal.
There is a rejection of linearity, of classical representation, of narrative in your text. Do you think poetry should disobey discursive structures in order to touch the real?
In anticipation of Psicofonía, I can identify three volumes of vital importance:
- El libro de las curvas, by Pablo and Alfonso Olalquiaha.
- The Fractal Geometry of Nature, by Benoît Mandelbrot.
- Non-Places, by Marc Augé.
The first is a book on engineering, the second on geometry, and the third on anthropology. The sum of these works—the seemingly linear sinuosity, the undefined or amorphous contours, recursion not understood as simple anaphora, the non-place or misplaced place—conditioned a kind of style that prefigured the death of style, the process itself as the goal.
Of course, the translation of these phenomena and their flight into literature resulted in a kind of stripped-down discourse, where any allusion to pathos or hedonistic filigree was out of place.
Paradoxically, however, there is a story: the struggle of language, flagellated by its functions and its incapacity. The species (higher hominids) survives within a structure that involves a multiplicity of abstractions. Existence outside that structure is not possible; every event is contingent upon it. That structure, of course, is language. Everything else is of secondary or lesser importance. It is generated by, and resolved from, language itself.
We are now, together with a small group of friends, trying to launch a magazine that deals with these and other issues. We have called it “Fractura” (Fracture) and, as its name suggests, it will attempt to summarize this way of remaining or belonging to language.
If Psicofonía is an attempt to capture what cannot be heard—the rest, the echo, the crack—would you say that writing is, for you, a form of exorcism or radical listening?
I think I’ve already answered that question along the way.
Although, as I said at the beginning, Psicofonía is just fiction. I don’t plan to write another book like this, or even anything similar. I don’t trust the consolidation of a style. Every “renewing” impulse starts with destruction, with ruin. It is necessary to deconstruct in order to build on the rot that remains. When I can no longer do that, I think I will stop; my writing will then fade away (if I can call it mine).
I finished Psicofonía eight years ago. Since then, I have been working on two other projects of “poetry?” that are now in their final stages: Caballos de Fuerza and Horizonte Vertical. They carry a different kind of radicalism.
The very impossibility of writing opens up unlimited possibilities, ways of confronting a monstrous phenomenon.
I would like to end with a couple of lines from the book that has generated this conversation and that perhaps illustrate this point:
(18)
Is it the concept of stillness that overwhelms us or the elemental stillness beyond judgment?
What is superfluous and should not be named?
What is missing and cannot be written?
