OF BEINGS ALONE
LISSA WOLSAK
ISBN 978-0-9891861-7-9
Special Edition
Tinfish Press, 2016
$20.00
Reviewed by Katie Hibner
You’ve likely heard all the hullabaloo about facial symmetry determining sexual attractiveness (although The Wall Street Journal recently debunked that myth). You’ve also probably watched many procedural dramas in which facial recognition software identifies suspects. Lissa Wolsak’s new collection, Of Beings Alone, centers on the basis of these concepts: the “Eigenface,” or the supposed average human face created by what Wolsak deems, “the complex and dynamical use of vectors.”
The dissonant idea of a computer manufacturing a completely generic, impersonal image of the face, the most personal and emotive feature of the body, may rattle you. It’s supposed to. Wolsak’s speaker characterizes the Eigenface as “the mean / face”… pun intended. It seals off “our / sense-face with its / efforting little mask,” blocking our highly-receptive facial skin from detecting (or appreciating) nuance. Within a fragment early in the collection, “What thin partitions,” the speaker disdains the perfectionism of Eigenface culture, lamenting:
one of us assumes a
face appropriate
to material things
to the openly
‘imperfect’
things
we remain aloof
The very first piece in Of Beings Alone disparages its populace as mimicking cookie-cutter mannequins, as “numberless artificeurs / in posture.” Unlike their plastic counterparts, however, they are sentient, blindly clutching “their belief in / ubiquity = profundity.” The numbed citizens adhere to this creed even though they detect the gaps it causes them to miss, spurring them to feebly plug its holes with “twee simulacra.”
The speaker bristles against the manipulation of nature and its restrictiveness, deriding exploiters as “globe-girdling / pissants” who “finger-tip / our entire / earth.” She crafts a counterargument for Polixenes’s claim in the art vs. nature debate of The Winter’s Tale: while Polixenes asserts that human intervention expands our world, enhancing it with hybrids like the gillyflowers, Wolsak’s speaker contends that it does just the opposite, clipping our global perspective by eliminating rich variation.
She also attests that the imposition of our imaginations on the real world actually stunts our abilities to imagine more. In the piece, “If not always succinct grass and,” the speaker dreams of inspiration shocking humankind’s ragged creative capacity back to life:
an inutterable virtuosity
spectacularized our being
to vivify
the inured vessel and its
wombchair
The other human fantasy the speaker depicts in this segment is “elevation / as gazingstock.” With their productive faculties suppressed, the populace of Wolsak’s collection ravenously consumes visual stimulation. They are relentless voyeurs, a “binocular public.” The speaker’s brethren differ from many scopophiliacs, however, in that their gaze is an act of reverence: they ogle objects with the nuance they crave. In fact, they desire to be ogled themselves.
They wish to exhibit what meager “white-red ipseity” they have. The Eigenface absorbs the citizens’ individuality; their selfhoods are sucked into the collective digital consciousness. In “Lost in impercipience,” Wolsak’s speaker likens them to rebellious perversions of Emerson’s transparent eyeball, depicting them as:
the wind’s eye…
with flowing ties
in germinal free-fall
wishing and
trespassing onto
ineffaceable
character
“Ineffaceable / character,” or distinct personality, is forbidden fruit for the speaker and her kinsmen. They must “trespass” to reach it. Their lack of variation pools all of their identities together in a hellish melting pot; they became amorphous when “physicalness and gesture / began to flee.” These abstractions steal the embodiment of the humans that created them. Along with “gesture,” precise language abandons the collection’s populace, so they are clouded by “stratospheric amphiboly.” Wolsak’s enjambment and joltingly-unconventional syntax manifest this. This excerpt from “Gorgeous emphatic chasms” epitomizes the Merwin-esque, haunting ambiguity of her speaker’s voice:
Gorgeous empathic chasms
gave and took away
the oaks
once consummate
instance this piteous
lamp of mind
Wolsak’s style echoes not only Merwin’s, but also Cathy Park Hong’s, particularly in Dance Dance Revolution. In that collection, Hong concocts the language “Desert Creole,” the ultimate linguistic mishmash combining 300 language groups such as Spanish Caribbean patois, Latin, and German. This composite language is the lingua franca of the Desert, a post-apocalyptic resort city powered by its workforce of political refugees. Similarly, the diction of Wolsak’s cataclysmic work is extremely heterogeneous, compiling technical, colloquial, and archaic English with Latin, French, and her own colorful neologisms. Ellipses frequently stopper the verse in Dance Dance Revolution and Of Beings Alone, but Hong employs the standard three marks to convey gaps in the interviews in her collection, whereas Wolsak only applies two. Her work is not a dialogue like Hong’s; it’s an isolated howl to shatter the silence. The two dots are just enough to indicate a pause, but not enough to congregate; they repel off of one another, mimicking the paradoxical title.
Hong appears to contribute to Wolsak’s writing style, but Yeats seems to inspire her vision of catastrophe. She echoes the prophecy he alludes to in “The Second Coming,” the belief that history cycles in interpenetrating rings; and that when the present reaches the end of one of the outer rings, apocalyptic revelation transpires. Wolsak peppers her collection with references to Yeats’s signature gyres; her speaker asserts that life is “based in” the “under-nuanced epiphanies / the might of gyro-rumbles.”
The speaker illustrates the carnage of the Eigenface devastation as “fevered carcasses” condemned to “wide open spiraling.” Her Armageddon takes the form of both a gyre and a void. The erasure of nuance reduces diverse culture to “dearths,” meaningful communication to “a sea of vacant / affect.” The populace is terrified of “free-falling” through the vastness, much as the text does on the page: by centering her pieces and restricting her line lengths, Wolsak carves out lacunae that help depict humankind’s lonely plummets through space.
Her speaker and her brethren often grapple for footholds such as “gravity clusters” in their vacuum. Religious belief, at least Judeo-Christian or pre-Christian, cannot anchor them. The speaker recalls the population posing as the idolatrous “molten calf” from the Book of Exodus, and she also admits, “Sybariticly / we went to the public bath / as Venus.” In “The one and the many,” the speaker portrays the people’s surrender to damnation:
revulsion
becomes the resolute
premise,
eschatologically
That resignation to doom also spurs the citizens to unabashedly fantasize about their lusts. Even though their physical “being evacuates” and renders them “insensate,” they dream about fondling “windfall pears” and “thighs prismatically / affuse with honey.” Their savage appetite for sensation drives them to masochism, for in the piece “Were it not for agency,” they aspire to:
excrete the dead eyes of
backward masking
hammer-blows
and other orgies
The populace is so depraved, they even hunger for such grotesque defilement like that found in Bosch paintings. Sexual satisfaction is a beloved but defunct vestige in their “post-coital eon.” Nostalgia is hollow smut: “time-porn” only taunts the citizens with apparitions of “the illusory body” that escapes them.
I laud Wolsak for concluding her collection with tonal nuance, transcending the bland polish of the Eigenface: her final piece counters such despair with hope. In “Our antecedents feigned too,” her speaker divines that the population will reverse the rotation of the gyres, commanding her descendants to “blur the silver-white Void / spatialize room in the / fire.” She foresees a future in which the people can orient themselves beyond their vacuum.
With the ability to technologically manicure and customize every element of our existence, from our profile pictures to our potential lovers, to maybe even our children in the near future, I fear that Wolsak’s dystopia will expand outside of her text and into reality. Of Beings Alone is a jolting reminder to surrender to imperfection: appreciate the bruises on your “windfall pears.”
Katie Hibner is a confetti canon studying at Bennington College. Her poetry and criticism has been published in Bone Bouquet, Entropy, glitterMOB, inter|rupture, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Vinyl, and Word for/Word. Katie has read for Salamander and Sixth Finch and dedicates all of her poetry to her mother, Laurie.