Time, what is it? Present time proclaimed over.

Carl began his most recent Weekly asking “What time is it?” and continuing with the permutation “Time, what is it?” This way of playing with words was another one of the ways cut-up pioneer Brion Gysin messed with language to break something down in order to allow for more freedom of movement so new things could transpire. As today is Brion Gysin’s death anniversary, it seemed the perfect time to delve into this further.

Just this weekend, I had the continuation of my Introduction to Psychoanalysis course, which has been meeting monthly since September. In this class, we reviewed some ideas of French Psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. One of Lacan’s theories was that we live within 3 overlapping realms (in this society), the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real. I’m not going to go into the details of that too much here, if you’d like to learn more you can check out the class, but for our purposes here: the Symbolic realm is the realm of language (and also social structures, law and order, etc). So when messing with the structure of language, like when we use the cut-up method or permutate a poem, we are also messing with the larger social order. To take this a step further, we have internalised this social order or Symbolic realm. We are actually born into it, as it precedes us and will continue on after we are gone. But as we have internalised the Symbolic, language, etc., messing with language in this way, breaking it up, breaking it down, can help to break down those systems we have internalised as well. In that way, working with the cut-up method or other iterations as outlined in Burroughs and Gysin’s book The Third Mind (1978), – elaborated and expanded upon by other artists, including Genesis and Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, and Carl and I – we are not only creating art, poetry, etc., we are addressing those power structures, both external and internalised, and breaking them down.

So try it for yourself!