Those Strange Movements of the Mouth and Throat:
Merging Fields of Inscription in the Work of Amanda Stewart
Amanda Stewart’s poetry collection I/T Selected Poems 1980-1996 comprises two parts: a disc with readings and performances of the poems, and a book of text and visual poems. The disjunction and potential for dialogue between these forms of inscription is a concern that constantly informs Stewart’s practice. Her aural inscription uses distinctive, extended vocal techniques and looped, multiple tracks. It is a vocabulary which values stutters, utterances, half-swallowed sounds and breaths, as much as words. On the page, vocal acrobatics are exchanged for visual poetry. Her graphic poems are thick with punctuation; words scatter and intersect pages, they are cut off, overwritten and allowed to bleed into each other. To view her aural poems as mere readings of text, or equally, the text as something akin to dutifully inserted lyrics in the liner notes of a record, is to make simplistic reductions. Together both fields function as expansions of possibility, rather than guides to either experience. Neither exists to make perfect sense of the other, yet they make sense together in a ‘parallel, integrally related but also distinct’ manner (Stewart 1998b, liner notes para.1).
Anne Carson traces a consciousness of the way aural and textual fields differently shape linguistic experiences to Greek lyric poets writing as the Greek alphabet system first developed. These classical writers witnessed the transition of their society from an ‘audio tactile world of oral culture’ to ‘a world of words on paper where vision is the principal conveyor of information’ (Carson 2003, p.g.43). The writing and poetry of this time records the changes to perceptual abilities that the development of alphabetic systems triggered. The Greek lyricists, like Stewart, are ‘…poets exploring the edge between oral and literal procedure, probing forward to see what kind of thing writing is, reading is, poetry can be’ (Carson 2003, p.g.78). The space Stewart creates for aural and visual poetic inscription to interact draws attention to the materiality of language, which we perceive both visually and sonically. In calling attention to the varied forms of language inscription Stewart reminds us that our modes and methods of communication were born of process, interaction and development, and are not arbitrary or inherent to human experience. I/T strives for synthesis and expression of the relations between multiple poetic fields, demonstrating concerns for distinctions and disjunctions of form, performance, sound, text, speech, meaning and transmitted message. It is this complexity of opposing forces, inscribed beside and within each other, and possibly brought into some loose harmony, which creates such an interesting discursive space around Stewart’s work.
Concrete poetry is one useful touchstone for Stewart. This post World War II movement aimed to emphasise the materiality of language, with poets producing graphic, sound and kinetic poems under the banner of concrete poetry. These different approaches for finding new ways to move through language produced variable results and triggered debates around the composition and form of poetry, as much as content. Visual poetry of the movement was underpinned by an easily discerned, sharp materialist, structural agenda and was, at times, in contrast to concrete sound poems composed with a more organic sensibility. Stewart’s work across multiple registers of poetic inscription moves in the space left between different approaches to composition in concrete poetry.
Concrete poetry remains a nebulous term, but can be seen to refer to poetry that sought to ‘clean up language’ (Solt 1968, para.2) using reduction and simplification. Meaning is transferred through form and structure rather than expressive language. Words are concrete because abstracted meanings conveyed through poetic metaphor cease to function. Language is employed for its sound and shape. Beaulieu mentions Mary Ellen Solt and Eugen Gomringer as figures whose work encapsulates the almost purist underpinnings of modernist concrete poetry from the 1950s. Solt and Gomringer ‘sought simplicity & clarity in their materialist use of semantic particles’ (Beaulieu online, p.g.2). Solt, in her 1966 ‘Flowers in Concrete’ series used typography to emphasise and experiment with the aesthetic qualities written language. The poems are pictograms of the flowers they take their name, and graphic appearance from. Gomringer’s 1954 ‘Silencio’ similarly embeds the central motif of the poem in a material, graphic way:
(Gomringer 1954, online)
The visual effect of the space in the poem, the absence of the word, becomes the primary way the idea of silence is suggested, just as Solt cultivates her flowers and branches with the curves and slants of alphabetic forms.
For Gomringer the re-introduction of an awareness of the visual in language contained the potential for ‘realizing the idea of a universal poetry’, uniting different languages, as well as different concepts of language. Concrete poetry could ‘unite the view of the world expressed in the mother tongue with physical reality’ (Gomringer 1968, para.4). Beaulieu finds the early ‘tightly modernist clean concrete’ poems limiting, suggesting they rely on ‘a dictatorial author-function’ that ‘limits & sanctions the role of the reader according to strict formulations’ (Beaulieu online, p.g.2).
Öyvind Fahlström offers the notion of concrete poems as processes of ‘magic with linguistic means’ (1952 -55, para.26), where words are arranged according to ‘the intuitive logic of likeness’ (1952 -55 para.22). For him the best tool for for reconstructing language is wordplay, which offers a deceptively simple, instinctive way to initiate complex and even radical changes in language structure. Fahlström proposes a broader scope for concrete poetry than the strict, ruled lines of clean-language concrete poetry. Concrete poems as zones of play can be experienced as enjoyable moments of interruption, or interjection into typical language structures. This connects well to Beaulieu’s view of contemporary concrete poetry as a poetic without direct one-to-one signification (Beaulieu online, p.g.3), which ‘distances itself from a universal language of sloganeering’ and instead aims to disrupt the capitalist structure of language; where the close reading of texts is driven by the desire for the reward of a hidden, or signified meaning through ‘dis-assembly & re-assembly of the mark & the grapheme’ (Beaulieu online, p.g.10).
Beaulieu suggests that contemporary concrete poetry is writing that maps connections, rather than signifies meaning. He borrows the idea of writing as mapping through motion from Deleuze & Guattari, where written works become ‘…a momentarily non-signifying map [that] is an always impossible system of inarticulation, caught in double bind of the creation of meaning’ (Beaulieu p.g.10). Such a statement, alongside Fahlström’s concept of concrete poetry as an instance of play, which disrupts typical linguistic encounters, clouds the original, ‘clean’ intentions of visual, concrete poetry. Beaulieu prefers to view new developments in concrete poetry as ‘inarticulate marks’, (Beaulieu online, p.g.1) where language cannot be entirely reduced to sound and form. Concrete poetry composed with a regard for sonic structure and a view to performance, as well a graphic sensibility, can be seen to offer avenues of expression beyond the materiality of language. The use of a vocal register, even one of arbitrary utterance such as breath and murmur, is unavoidably implicated in codified registers of communication. There may be attempts to ‘clean’ or reduce words on a page, but it remains far more difficult to strip speech into pure sound, even a mute silence is an expressive zone in performance. The question of how strictly materialist concrete poetry can truly be, and whether graphic and aural modes of inscription have an effect on this, are concerns at the heart of the movement. They are also encapsulated in Stewart’s work, which positions visual and sonic poetry in parallel and promotes an awareness of how communication is structured by our experience of language.
The work of Stéphane Mallarmé is central in tracing the concrete poetry movement. His 1897 work Un Coup de Dés, clearly demonstrates an aesthetic approach to poetic composition, but he also links his work to music, noting in the preface, ‘Music, as it is heard at a concert; several of its methods, which seemed to me to apply to literature, are to be found here’ (Bessa online, para.10). Mallarmé’s notion of the constellation of words is extremely pervasive, particularly in visual/structural poems, so-called constellations in space (Solt 1968, para.7). Bense views a constellation as an arrangement, or (word)play-area dictated by the poet, where something is brought into the world, ‘the constellation is an invitation’ (Bense 1965, para.5). Stewart takes up this invitation, both prescriptively in terms of graphic structure, but also in a more ambiguous sense through an active awareness of the way poetry brings things to the world. Her poem ‘The Thing of It’ (Stewart 1998a, p.g.53-58) is a good example, making extensive use of space on the page, gaps and columns and different densities of textual placement. The poem concerns, amongst other things, notions of gender and identity and offers something of a post-colonial and feminist critique of white male gaze through history: 
(Stewart 1998a, p.g.54)
Stewart creates a constellation which enacts a Heideggarian notion of poetry imbued with an ability to name things, calling them into ‘thinging’ and through this ‘thinging’ to carry out the world (Heidegger 1971, p.g.200). At the same time she introduces certain feminist concerns to this line of thought. Her own identity as a female poet with a philosophical/intellectual bent is a challenge to the historical dominance of countless, white men like Heidegger in the canon of celebrated academics and writers. Stewart engages with archetypal poetic and philosophical concerns using an authority-questioning female voice. ‘The Thing of It’ is an offhand acknowledgement of Heidegger’s concern with the abilities (and inabilities) of language to express and create lived experience. The words of the poem are split on the page, the world of action and people, dealing with words and experience - ‘White the Dad’ and ‘mother’ are positioned on one side of the page. On the other floats ‘things’, the objects they are engaged in bringing into being. Between there is space, perhaps an evocation of the distance between word and thing which language constantly grapples with. Stewart has also capitalised White and Dad, the syntax of the sentence they appear in is definite and not problematic. It is only as she starts to speak of mother that we encounter absence and uncertain words. She introduces a stutter when talking about female experience in language, history and lived experience. The section that follows the above excerpt presents a gridlock arrangement of words: primitive, mystic, dark, feminine, exotic, emotional, intuitive, irrational, inarticulate, contradictory. Visually they are tangled, tripping the eye and confusing our understanding of these terms and their general use in relation to characterising women. Stewart allows the page, and her placement of certain words, to demonstrate the paradoxes of the real and projected female experience.
Throughout Stewart’s poems there are many such occurrences of visual poems that use ‘graphic space as structural agent’ (De Campos et al 1958, para.1). This is consistent with ideas of the Brazilian concrete poets the Noigandres Group, who created poems that dwelled exclusively on the page. The structural power the Noigrandres poets ascribed to language, and their belief that graphic, constructed words were the most direct way of representing their contemporary experience, is strongly linked to new ideas of modernist architecture and urban planning which were emerging in Brazil in the 1950s and 60s. The most significant example of this was the construction of Brazil’s capital Brasília. The city was designed and built from scratch between 1956 and 1960 following a directive from Brazil’s president Juscelino Kubitschek, who hoped to develop the interior of the country and ‘integrate the sprawling country into a modern industrial nation’ (Cornish 1991, p.g.29) by constructing a capital that was geographically central. Brasília was the project of urban planner Lúcio Costa and architect Oscar Niemeyer, both of whom were aligned with Le Corbusier and the burgeoning, modernist architecture ideals that were developing at this time. Buildings were of uniform design and zoned to encourage efficient car travel and the city was navigated by numbers and letters in a grid system, rather than named streets. Brasília was underpinned by a belief that ‘…a city should be an exemplar or blueprint of changes and could produce a new society on the base of the values motivating the city’s design’ (Cornish 1991, p.g.30). This faith in structures and planned, urban environments, as a means to develop a society is supported by the preference of Noigandres group for visual design on the page, as a way of emphasising the materiality of language and using it to re-construct society.
Bessa locates some echoes between the Noigandres poet’s structuralist language values and Heidegger’s notions of dwelling as a state of being, located and built with language, where ‘it is language that tells us about the nature of a thing, provided that we respect language’s own nature’ (Heidegger 1971, p.g.146). Bessa, however, also acknowledges the rigidity of structuralist poems, something which Stewart, in emphasising sound as much as structure, seeks to manoeuvre away from. I/T finds more parallels with the concrete poetry manifesto of Fahlström, who ties the movement to music and acknowledges the necessity of voice in poetry. Stewart’s aural poetic inscription is a strong, autonomous element in her work. Her audio poetry is not an echo of the graphic or a creaking girder in a written construction. Sound is entwined within her work as a new field for language to flex itself in and a simultaneous enrichment of her expression.
Her recordings suggest the physicality, as well as the temporality of poetry, a nod to Rothenberg’s view of poetry as ‘the domain of the body and breath, voice and gesture, time and place’ (Rothenberg 2005. p.g.8). For John Cage the potential for introduction of musical elements, such as sound and time, within a world of words, is the very definition of a poem (Rothenberg 2005, p.g.1). Stewart’s use of sound and breath and her exploration of expression of phonemes, the sounds not words that constitute our communication framework, indicate a ‘…recapturing of a more primitive form of language…when the voice was richer in vibrations, more mightily physical’ (Cobbing 1978, para.1). I/T enacts Fahlström’s call for the ‘kneading’ of language material, starting with the smallest elements (Fahlström 1952 -55, para.33). The result is an architectural structure infused with life ‘pulsating, secretory, always evolving’ (Bessa 1997, para.18). This moves towards a forgotten, ancient or essential sense of language, when ‘the poem was truly carried by the voice and only by the voice’ (Rothenberg 2005. p.g.1).
Fahlström connects rhythm and repetition with organic functions; ‘the pulsation of breathing, the blood, ejaculation’ (Fahlström 1952-55, para.19). The repetitive structure of Stewart’s ‘Sound and Sense’ evokes this organic repetition as well as tying acts of poetic inscription into creation of cognitive and perceptual systems:
(Stewart 1998 p.g. 40, trk 15)
The successive tunings are realised in performance of the poem. Stewart chants these monosyllabic pairs of carefully juxtaposed words, gradually increasing the vocal tracks so that the aural impact of the words is as significant as the word themselves. It is the sounding of sound, as a word, concept and experience – sound and sense. The way these different modes of understanding combine in the experience of the poem is not stable and Stewart acknowledges this, concluding:
(Stewart 1998 p.g. 41, trk 15)
Her performance is fortified in echoes, making use of multiple tracks, overlapping rhythmically and becoming incomprehensible. The poem is also an instance of technology allowing for allusion to a primordial language. Solt mentions the way in which technologies such as the tape recorder allow for the rediscovery of the human voice, (1968, para.4) while Rothenberg advances the case for a merging of poetic methods where, ‘…neither advanced technology (electronically produced sound and image, etc) nor hypothetically primitive devices (pulse and breath, the sound of rock on rock, of hand on water) are closed to the artist willing to employ them’ (Rothenberg 2005, p.g. 10). An understanding of the possibilities of technologies in innovative composition is well articulated in ‘Sound and Sense’ and informs Stewart’s general approach to her work.
Stewart positions the most elemental and significant human communication within the voice, enacting Dadaist Tristan Tzara’s idea that thought is ‘made in the mouth’ (Rothenberg 2005. p.g.8). The voice and the modes of address and registers of intention it expresses, even before a word is uttered, represent an ‘ability to synthesise semantic, musical, analytical and emotional structures’ (Stewart 2004, para.2). The poem ‘Absence’ starts with an extended movement of phonetic sounds, pointing to the idea that we create and are created not through signifying words but with something more elemental and all together bodily. They are sounds that we express ourselves with before our word-forming apparatus has, itself, formed:
(Stewart 1998, p.g. 65, trk 21)
These sounds represent our most elemental sense of self-conception and our sounding of them can serve as an enactment of this moment:
(Stewart 1998, p.g. 67, trk 21)
As well as the pre-speech significance of sound, as a bodily communication not grounded in words, we can also consider the historical link to oral cultures and the development of alphabetic systems which symbolised ‘…not objects in the real world but the very process in which sounds act to construct speech’ (Carson 2003, p.g.61). Carson ascribes a state of ‘openness’ to existence in oral cultures, which is necessary to link people to the world (Carson 2003, p.g.43). Literacy requires restraint of the senses, so that thought may be trained to concentrate on written words, while an individual in an oral society functions with ‘…continual fluent interchange of sensual impressions and responses between the environment and himself’ (Carson 2003, p.g.43-44). This perpetual receptiveness to the vibrations of the world can be likened to breathing, an analogy derived from pre-Socratic philosopher Empedokles’ doctrine of emanations. The doctrine constructs the universe through the idea that everything within it is constantly inhaling and exhaling small particles (aporrhoai), which are mediators of perception and allow everything in the universe to be in touch everything else (Carson 2003, p.g.50).
In her sound poem ‘First Verb’ (Stewart 1998b, trk.20) Stewart delivers a constant stream of half-discernable, whispered words beneath the amplified sound of distorted breathing and throat contractions. The gasps and inhalations are breath of the body as well as the world, a breath in the ear or wind echoing amongst rocks. The words in ‘First Verb’ follow and blend with breath, evoking Carson’s idea of breath in oral cultures being ‘…primary insofar as the spoken word is’ (2003, p.g.49). The sound environment is necessarily open, ‘breath is everywhere. There are no edges’ (Carson 2003, p.g.49) and, as in ‘First Verb’, spoken and heard words are breathable, they ‘…may have no edges, or varying edges’ (Carson 2003, p.g.50). The introduction of a visualisation of speech then, introduces edges to sonorous openness. Stewart’s poetic inscriptions, which operate simultaneously in different fields of inscription, bring us to the point where edges are conceived. Her poems are on the ‘edge of distinction’ (Stewart 2004, para.2). They occur in a zone where, to borrow from Jean Luc Nancy and his notions of sensing through touch, modes of perception touch one another, touch the world and ‘in touching, in all the touches of touching that do not touch each other…the two sides of the one sense do not cease to come towards each other, acceding without access, touching on the untouchable, intact, spacing of sense’ (Nancy 1997, p.g.83).
There are, however, points in I/T where sonic and graphic do not seem to touch. James Stuart observes that a significant concern in Stewart’s work is a desire to ‘…engage with the materiality of language, itself, to crack open aural and visual signifiers and to make an intervention at the basis of our listening and reading processes and the cultural assumptions that they embody’ (2007, p.g.245). It is an intervention because these instances of broken or processed language and speech returned to atomic sounds are not brought into perfect correspondence across written and sonic registers. There are several sound poems, including ‘First Verb’, which are aural inscriptions without a text or graphic reference, and ‘The Photocopy Poem Series’ (Stewart 1998a, p.g.28-29, 42-43, 51-52, 61-62) function solely as visual forms. As has been emphasised, the various components of Stewart’s works, whilst being inextricably interrelated to one another, do not strive to make sense of the other. The poems that straddle graphic and sonic field of inscription do so in order for language, and our varied ways of experiencing it, to be interrogated. We also see though, that there are also discrete moments of linguistic experience in aural and written fields that are specific to the mode of inscription. Often in I/T the edges of sonic and graphic fields pull apart when language becomes less recognisably itself, existing as a memory or premonition, an inarticulate mark. Stewart’s ‘Photocopy Poems’ are the result of language that has been repeatedly processed through technology (the photocopier) so that the shapes we are left to examine can only be an imprint, a warped photogram that makes neat print into ambiguous light and dark forms. ‘The Photocopy Poems’ are the after-effects, the excess, of language in use.
Stewart’s sound poems like ‘Residue’ and ‘First Verb’, both recordings of live improvisation, are also documents of moments of linguistic experience. They suggest a mark of language, left after performance, as well as a pre-linguistic communication carried in sound and body alone. ‘First Verb’ reminds us that it is breath which ‘enables the act of speech and life’ (Stewart 1998a, liner notes para.7). The poem is a partial articulation of the realisation of speech; ‘the first distinction’ (Stewart 1998a, liner notes para.7). ‘Residue’ highlights the ability of voice to carry various tuning systems in speech whose use inform assumed, ‘particular musical and semantic structures’ (Stewart 1998a, liner notes para.3). The pitch, vibration and movement of the voice remains a powerful agent in the poem, even when speech is not present, has been lost in processing, or is in the process of becoming.
For Fahlström, witnessing the west’s cultural revolution, the voice in concrete poetry was a sensory tool and a powerful instrument to ‘analyse our wretched human condition’ (Bessa 1997, para.16). The human element is contained in language through its organic relation to lived reality, where words are ‘not at all in opposition to their surroundings’ (Bessa 1997, para.16). Fahlström conceives the systematic as organic and the organic as a system (Bessa 1997, para.17). Language is inextricably bound into the world, it is cognitive and experiential, graphic and sonorous – sound and sense. Nancy extends the idea of a world without a unity of sense, a world of touching edges that is a ‘…differential articulation of singularities that make sense in articulating themselves, along the edges of articulation’ (Nancy 1997, p.g.78). For Fahlström, words necessarily have the power to communicate something of the world they are of. Sound, as an organic experience and sound/speech as an act with a political intention are one and the same, and require a voice.
Stewart’s performances experiment with vocal delivery - exaggerated ocker accents or authorative voice-over styles - and intonation. She mixes in fragments of popular song, casual speech, adopted mannerisms and media jargon, with a critical sensibility. These linguistic fragments become presentations of pure sound and deliberately collected refractions of our codified registers of communication. Early into her performance of ‘Absence’ she asks ‘and whaddaya?’ (Stewart 1998b, trk.21). The colloquial phrase poses the same essential question as the entire poem, but does so incongruously and humorously. It is at odds with the proceeding movements of abstract stutters and conjoined words. Stewart plays on the typical, pejorative connotations of this common phrase, usually used to imply a lack of macho backbone, and turns the question back to the listener, with different motives. In everyday usage ‘whaddaya’ is a closed question, the answer comes in the asking, the phrase automatically evokes a perceived lack of ability and bravado. Stewart opens the question out so that we recognise it and are prompted to consider the implications of the phrase and the way it is used in common speech. She interrogates precisely how the Australian vernacular she employs in the poem constructs Australian identity. We begin to realise how Stewart’s ‘whaddaya’ speaks to the ontological and perceptual themes of the poem – the issue of how we speak and what we say constructs what we are. For Bessa the concession that even in a concrete poetic system words retain a power to influence or structure experience, as in Stewart’s poems, is what saves the poems from being mere ‘formalistic exercises’ (Bessa 1997, para.10).
Barthes heralded the typographical agraphia of Mallarmé as the suicide of literary language (Bessa 1997, para.10). This notion when infused with organic sound structure becomes an opening of poetic fields of inscription. If words cease to signify their imposed meaning, perhaps we need to look to silences and pre-linguistic utterances, ‘the flux of complex oral and propositional codes that recombine at the edge of distinction’ (Stewart 2004, para.2) in order to re-connect our lived reality with language. Spaces on the page, glitches and stumbles in the voice are not sites that indicate communicative inability. They represent a different field of communication, where humans’ experience of being attempts to map a way to meet language, in an elemental, pre-linguistic and sometimes inexpressible way. I/T is an escape from empirical speech, where it is impossible to present and free ‘meaning captive in the thing’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964, pg. 44). Stewart’s poems are both of and about the world:
(Stewart 1998, p.g. 63, trk 21)
Expanding on the ability of poetry to speak through the absence between experience and language leads us to the ontological ideas of Merleau-Ponty. Like Fahlström, Merleau-Ponty understood language organically, so that ‘the thickness of the body, far from rivalling that of the world, is on the contrary the sole means I have to go unto the heart of the things, by making myself a world and by making them flesh’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968 p.g. 135). Speaking of the world and being of the world are concerns that encounter each other in Stewart’s work. Her use of voice is a clear reminder of the necessity of acknowledging our bodies when considering our way of being in the world. In the same way that seeing our world means we are possessed by it, movements of phonation and hearing make sonorous inscriptions, which contain their motor echo in the body. This reflexivity of listening and speaking experiences is the point where speech and thought enter the world of silence (Merleau-Ponty 1968 p.g. 144). Merleau-Ponty cites Malraux who writes elegantly and sensuously of the coming together of these bifurcated elements:
…those strange movements of the throat and mouth that form the cry and the voice. Those movements end in sounds and I hear them. Like crystal, like metal and many other substances, I am a sonorous being, but I hear my own vibration from within…I hear myself with my throat.
(Merleau-Ponty 1968 p.g.144)
The poetic flesh of our world is contained in the flesh of ourselves and speaking is yet another reflexive, inwardly doubled and externally opened way of re-communing with this constant connectivity. For Stewart, in ‘Absence’ this
(Stewart 1998, p.g. 66, trk 21)
She speaks and brings the world forward, from within herself, it is the matter in our mouth that in being made ‘makes ethos/us’ (Stewart 1998, p.g. 65, 67, trk 21). Nancy discusses way the sonorous register is at once the most interior and exterior of the senses. A body, even in a state of sensory deprivation will hear its own breath and blood, yet sound is the least incorporated matter in our environment, sound is pervasive, the totality of an open world, it ‘…resonates elsewhere, at a distance, in an exteriority that is spaced out in all the other directions and that the ear hears along with the sound, as the opening of the world’ (Nancy 1997, p.g.85). I/T shows modes of perception and multiple sense experience, sound and speech, listening and reading, in a state of constant flux – breathing. Stewart articulates these complex, intricately related concerns with a practice that is a ‘process of engagement with overlapping fields in notation’ (2004, para.4). The double identity of the poems in I/T, residing in text and sound, parallel the dualities of language and organic experience. To understand the way the two speak to one another can bring us closer to a deepened ontological understanding of ourselves. In sounding her ideas Stewart opens up what it is to speak and to speak with a voice that issues from a body that dwells in language and sense. She refuses to contain her work in singular fields of poetic inscription. I/T allows organic sound and systematic language, elements which perhaps are never truly separate, to emulsify. The viscous poetic field her work inhabits is not fully integrated, the elements exist to enrich, rather than subsume one another. We are left, enlightened, but only to our own bewilderment, at the cusp of function and able to examine
(Stewart 1998, p.g. 67, trk 21)
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