Visualities: The Shape of Openings Space, Buildings Invitation, Connection Guide Space

The substrate. The plane -- or more elaborately the virtual plane -- the arena: where the words come together. Not Olson's grid, but a continuum. (Or, on the screen, still a grid perhaps, but so fine-grained the dots nearly elude the eye: it looks like a continuum.) The stage on which words may be mounted on top of one another. (The word processor does not allow this.) And why not on top of one another: the painters put pigments atop one another, the composers play sounds at the same time, why shouldn't poets put words in the same space as well: juxtaposition, structural zero. A visuality where the juxtaposition becomes an interference pattern: grapheme jumble of full to partial unintelligibility: the lexical is annulled by multiplicity. Word cluster as a visual artifact, only partially or dimly lexical. But then: invitation: a marked spot of entry to the layers where lexicality is recovered, the words may be read as usual, the juxtaposition created lexically as well as visually. Annulment of the lexical is only the outer appearance before the cluster's opening, before the act, the dive, the tactile hand motion within the faceted word forest to that individual word tree no longer obscured by the mass of other trees -- the word-part mass is a construction, what appeared from a distance as annulment of the lexical is a built simultaneity, a conjunction, phrase on phrase, a differences-music resonance chord.

The relationship between a purely visual poetry and and a not at all visual poetry: where you haven't been yet. Openings not yet taken. The cluster not yet entered. Or: the construction made: resonance invoked -- the after-lexicality, like an after-image, the multiplicity of phrases in the same place. The having-achieved simultaneous thought.

The supplemental channel. Where the lexicalities of different planes join, an explicit marker of structure: a syntax of making the connection direct, part to the whole if need be, folded back on itself if need be, the direct joining. Visual but a guide channel, lexicality to lexicality: a joining allowing juxtapositions equally with plain lexicalities: syntax with all slots open. The line of sight to relation mesh: visual to adjoin any achievable resonance dance, a connection guide for construction space, a pointing to the verb, a visual hand. The arrowscape skeleton latticework: arrow with all ends pointing inward: relation guide shape, thought structure trellis, skeleton of the combination act. Word combination bones, elastic, the map-stuff. The loop.