A Semic Rosetta Stone? On A Re-discovered Collab by John M. Bennett & Jim Leftwich

 

Collab by John M. Bennett (Ohio, USA) & Jim Leftwich (Virginia, USA) 

(August 2018) (Images courtesy of John M. Bennett)

Thanks to John M. Bennett's (JMB) excellent documentation, I came across this eye-catching vispo collab by JMB & Jim Leftwich made in August of 2018. 

I think it is of some interest to the Asemic Front 2 audience. The poets combine "semic" (a go-to jargon descriptor that has emerged in asemics to identify signs that communicate "meaning" & that can be read as conventional text) with abstract calligraphy, deconstructed text & linear associations between the various signs. The work suggests relationships between the symbols, words (& sometimes the unintelligible).

Asemics & pansemics have wide-ranging, often contradictory, interpretive possibilities. Sometimes I've been known to engage in these reader-response based "interpretations" of asemic writing. 

This piece by Bennett & Leftwich, I think, deserves this kind of reflection. For instance, I frequently receive questions & mail art about the relationship of the Rosetta Stone to asemics. 

I believe it is safe to generalize that when "readers" first encounter asemics they most likely assume there is surely a meaning that can be decoded or - in an even greater nod to the power of imagination - that the asemic text (somehow) communicates complex concepts & emotional nuances - that other cultural forms cannot express adequately.   

I hope we find a new poetics & a reconstituted language in asemics, I do. Early L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing initially promised the literal collapse of capitalism if its methods could be widely applied, but the rhetoric deflated quickly.

I believe in the piece above Bennett & Leftwich do illuminate the linguistic-philosophical core of the asemic text, which I can best explain through an allusion to one of the great, pervasive popcult metaphors in The Wizard of Oz: "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" 

The old pop myth - adequate for the despairing 20th century - reveals a charlatan behind the spectacle, a skeletal signification of the patriarchy controlling the machinations of economy & kultur. That is still a narrative; the asemic text is incapable of narrative.

When the curtain is pulled aside in the asemic text, which is what Bennett & Leftwich do here, we find ................ no thing, nothing meaning less.

- De Villo Sloan