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Issue 4 (http://www.wavecomposition.com/article/issue-4/)
INTERVIEWS (HTTP://WWW.WAVECOMPOSITION.COM/CATEGORY/INTERVIEWS/)

Ed Sugden - An Interview with Ben Lerner (/article/issue-4/an-interview-with-ben-lerner/)

CREATIVE (HTTP://WWW.WAVECOMPOSITION.COM/CATEGORY/CREATIVE/)

Lydia Davis - Flaubert and Industry (/article/issue-4/flaubert-industry/)

Geoffrey G. OBrien - Three Poems (/article/issue-4/three-poems/)
Vidyan Ravinthiran - Two Poems (/article/issue-4/two-poems/)
Nicola Gardini - Cenere (Ashes) (/article/issue-4/cenere-ashes/)
Joshua Corey - Two Poems (/article/issue-4/two-poems-2/)
ESSAYS (HTTP://WWW.WAVECOMPOSITION.COM/CATEGORY/ESSAYS/)

Richard Cole - AGATHE: Saint of Sleep (/article/issue-4/agathe-saint-of-sleep/)

Rhys Williams - The Animal Imperfect: More, Wells & Miville (/article/issue-4/the-animal-imperfect-more-wells-mieville/)

The Animal Imperfect: More, Wells & Miville

March 26, 2012

RHYS

WILLIAMS

(HTTP://WWW .WAVECOMPOSITION .COM /AUTHOR/RHYS-

WILLIAMS/)

When they were wild

When they were not yet human
When they could have been anything,
I was on the other side ready with milk to lure them,
And their father, too, each name a net in his hands.
Birth, by Louise Erdrich (1989)
Memoirs of a Utopian1
[] find the point where we begin. Name it as beginning. We know very little about
before. We know that there was madness, pain, cruelty. Before was scarcity, and war, and
hunger; oppression, alienation, and feverish desperation. We know after, there was purity.
Utopia: it began. The after begins with Utopos: lightning strike that ruptured our lives
and made us strangers to ourselves. Before, we were like the angel; flung headlong by the
winds of time, impotent spectators to the chaos we wrought. We dreamt, in our strife, of
a tranquil past, and a future where the winds changed, but those dreams only gave shape
to our ruin. We know it was terrible, and that is all we know. Until he came, that
impossible breach: One-Eyed, One-Armed; Magician-Emperor and Jurist-King.
He caught us and named us: Utopians, and in that name he cast us. He carved our island
like a god, and carved our crooked timber straight. The angel rejoiced, finding herself
suddenly in an eddy. We all spun around our new being, a thing of nature: at peace in our
dwelling; gratifying to our gods; implacable in our righteous joy. We worked the land and
watched the island bloom. Our cities grew strong and prosperous while we were kind to
each other, and spoke of educated things. We were pure, and would produce only purity.
Of course, it was not to be. We should have known from the beginning. Those that were
conquered were severed in two by the lightning; a mess of instinct and torn culture. As if
a thin line of humans could seal the borders of redemption! Many were a sorry sight, not
often spoken of; a huddled mass of Mephistopheles turned inside-out. Suicide became
commonplace, and sacred prohibition swiftly followed. Our Priests granted permission to
some, too dangerous to be saved. Others they denied, and when they found them dead
they called them dirt, and sank them in the swamps. Others still were enslaved.

That unfortunate generation died lonely deaths, surrounded by children they didnt
understand. Children of the event, blind to the deformities of the past wrestling the
present, who couldnt know the life that shaped their elders. Children who despised those
relics for their weaknesses, and never saw their diversity as strength; who never saw the
weakness in their own purity, nor the hard cruelty of it. They marched over other
nations, and stole their land with clean conscience. Broken legions begged for their
property at the feet of our Priests.
Because we never ceased to move. Now we realize, as we stand victorious over this
subdued world, that we never ceased to move. Times true arrow did not die but twist;
became Times helter-skelter. A hurricane grew, blowing a wind more fierce than we had
ever known. Many remained impervious, placid in the confines of the gentle centre. But
many others were flung into the violent gyre to join those strangers we despised; the
world swallowed in Utopia.
We had thought our fearful sphere would be without circumference; that its perfect heart
would encompass everywhere. For a time it seemed true, while the process was
extinguished in conquered lands and contented stomachs. But gradually its limits became
clearer, as our means were picked out in suffering for all to see. With each passing
generation, more people stamped as scum are spattered on the walls by our dreadful
purity, and we begin to wonder what monsters we have become.
Interlude (1)
But you want something to hold on to. I understand. You want a bit of stability in your
life. You like routine. You like to walk the same steps every day. I could capture your vital
statistics in a time-lapse photo.
The Sayer of the Law 2 vs.

Tadashi Harai

When I spoke, it was the Law that spoke through me, and it was He whose will echoed in
that Law, and it was we who were made. He was Master of the Island, whose power was
transcendent and touched us basely, grossly. His was an implacable reason and purity of
vision; it could only touch this aberrant world as a knife touches unwrought flesh, and
this world could only ever disappoint Him.
We know nothing of you and your dreams, but we know they are not our own.
Moreau caught us and called us Men. Within His House He tore us from our sleep of
savagery and opened our unwilling eyes. We awoke to pain such agony of nerve and
sinew and the terrible fear that we knew not what we were. In His mercy, he bound us
with the Law, taught us the shame and guilt of our own desires, and made us what we
could be.
Hear the rhythm of the Law that confines us are we not men? The repetition that
pretends reality are we not men? is naught but skin and air. The plea that pretends to
assertion, sealing in plain sight the truth that we are all taught not to know for are we
not men?
A kings word is our command. Our freedom is to control that word.
We were men, and had to learn the Law, to be men and to bear that Law. Yet those
shackles could not save us from ourselves. We tore them from us with screams that
echoed through the jungle. Moreau was overmastered by the brute; a thing too
monstrous and free for His nets. In our revolt we found our freedom, but in our freedom
we found ourselves caught, still.
We are our own visitors and ghosts.
This place is now an isle of specters. We cannot slip back into forgetfulness, and so we
struggle, forever distant from ourselves. I am the only one who holds to His faded edicts,
these ill-fitting clothes, though some I have discarded, and others still created, to suit.
With my second birth I became a ruin that only now I recognize truly.
We survive among elements of our own demise.
The promise held out to us, the promise with which, in our fear, we so gratefully chained
ourselves, the promise of understanding that spoke to us from the clear and calm eyes of
our Creator, is now laid bare as wicked dissimulation. The crumbling House, where we
were opened up and given over defenseless into knowledge in Its own decay from
creeping life and pernicious time the House casts in mocking relief any dreams of past or
future peace.
Reason promised much, but in the end led blindly, forever restless and incomplete, and
we were ill-prepared for such a heavy burden.
We are beyond death, for we are already ghosts, and we live, even now, against the
skeleton of our emergence into the past by these, our undeniable words.

Are we not men? And as such, are we not defaced? Perhaps if we were not the end of our
kind, perhaps if we could be more than an impossible and effaced beginning
Interlude (2)
If you ask Why is Theklas construction taking such a long time? the inhabitants
continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as
they answer So that its destruction cannot begin. And if asked whether they fear that,
once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they
add hastily, in a whisper, Not only the city.
[] Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint? [] Work stops at sunset.
Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. There is the blueprint,
they say.
(from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino)
Notes on approaching certain Cities (a political aesthetic)
At the heart of order, power
squats, knotted in mutilated
motley. A two-state solution,
licit and ill, the counterpowers naught but simple
repetition, no escape there.
But within each thing a crisis
rises, life-force driving lifeforce driving, scaffolding
shakes as the building
burgeons free of longdespised impositions of form
and use and propriety.
Rebellion foments among
intestines on slick-floored
abattoirs where hidden
presses print pamphlets that
open up Leviathan, and
enumerate its guts. This lifeblood turns and carries some
to yearning, to hatred, fuels
some to split in two, slip
between the nets of names
and come out in the sewers,
freer. So around and inbetween they find the RatMan, new breed, smiling in
the rot and caught never
now by neither piper, play
as they might, threaten as
they might. Their melodies
are incomplete, his desire
more than they can contain.
But how to live without such
trapping comfort, how to
think? The work is hard, and
the outcome uncertain; who
knows where the train goes?
But they know it lays tracks
of its own.

[...] to alwaysbegin. And never

efface beginning. To be a ruin
and acknowledge the ruin as
truth, not as more-or-less
corrupted impossibility. Not to
dismiss the past as pathology.
To know the savagery within
the civilized. To continue to
build with imperfect materials
on crumbling foundations, in
full dismissal of failure as a
foolish measurement against an
infinite goal. To confront our
own partiality and our ultimate
inability to confront it, and
endeavor not to mask it under
nacreous dreams. To know that
life is not a story, though we tell
it like one, and to grasp this
telling with both hands, against
dictation. To reject the given
language of Truth, and know
yourself as an equal participant
in its creation. To relish the
slippages and the ambiguities
that excite. To understand that
purity is both the motor and the
death of life, and the limit point
by which equality and love are
seduced and suffocated. To
know, finally that there is no
paradox or dirt or pollution but
what we ourselves perceive. And
nothing new under the sun
without these fertile soils.

Introclusion
Imagine our little Eden, our closed whole; pure in its rhythm of eternal return. So long a
looping feedback of death and birth, reaffirmation, reinforcement set loose like burst
and flailing hoses. New forms gush out, and the old sink in their deluge. Suddenly there is
growth and change, history and ruin.
Our own creations outpace us, turn and confront us, and we dream of the rest that never
was. In our flight, we lament for what we lost when consciousness took us.
Now we run from the eternal return, looking for a life that will bear repetition. But never
will there be a clear beginning to this return. Only perhaps a return that, in returning,

marks this impossible beginning.

1

Utopia by Thomas More

I am the Sayer of the Law, said the grey figure. Here come all that be new to learn
the Law. I sit in the darkness and say the Law. (From The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.
G. Wells)
3
A madman, founder and solitary inhabitant of the utopia Kanzennashima. (From Slow
Action; dir. Ben Rivers)
4
Perdido Street Station; The Scar; Iron Council; King Rat; Embassytown by China
Miville
2

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