Customer Reviews

Helen Keller or Arakawa

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In her most recent work of "speculative prose" to date, Helen Keller or Arakawa, Madeline Gins weaves a spectrum of philosophical complications and molecular complexities that somehow exceeds the limits of her own unmistakable brand of "multidimensional" discourse. The language is abrasive, porous, corrugated, witty and visionary, lucid and opaque, visceral and analytical, alternately solid and protoplasmic. All this makes for a new form of "post-generic" prose, a search for a new consciousness whose contours Gins sets out to delineate on the basis of Helen Keller's life, the art of New York-based painter and architect Arakawa and the Kirlian vectors of her own prose. Gins' reflections on the trajectories of thought and feeling often result in a kind of verbal choreography--interrupted and complemented by various kinds of typographical and intertextual directions--which seeks to combine the thread of memory with an awareness of the unnamed movements of the waking mind in relation to its physical environment. Physical and metaphysical uncertainty, the dialectics of blindness and insight, the West's misunderstanding of the non-West, transcontinental culture shock, postmodern aesthetics and architectural contigency are themes that compete and combine in Gins' investigation of the mechanisms of meaning and consciousness. Perhaps the best way of approaching Helen Keller or Arakawa is to read it the light of her definition of the poet as "a juggler of microdistinctions." Gins displays a huge intellectual and visionary faculty, both profound and witty, as she sets the terms for a "thinking field" that does justice, among many other things, to the manifold transitivity of her interconnected lines of thought and belief.