Context
From “Talking at Pomona”
David Antin
David Antin’s “talk poems” may be an
odd choice for a Cultural Memory piece, since the author is still very
much alive and writing. But we feel that this excerpt, first published
in 1972, is a particularly clear statement of the view that art is,
above all else, a form of meaningful “making.” supposing
art making is like a kind of knot making if youre a knot maker
youve got an idea about what is a knot and what is a mess a legal
way of proceeding what is a legal knot and what is a snarl? all
knots involve some kind of double reversal you start out going
somewhere go back and take some of the past with you to wherever
you were going to go and you find a way to mark off some memorial to
where youve been a node well there are two kinds at
least of knot makers one knot maker knows how to
proceed making his knots and watches himself proceeding in the end
he arrives at a knot he approves for some reason if he’s been
watching the way he has been knotting all this time he wont be
surprised at the outcome and though he may be satisfied he will
walk away and forget it then he’s a process knot maker or he
might not walk away but place it in front of you in the hope that you
will be bettered thereby in which case he’s a therapeutic or
didactic knot maker or say he is a forgetful knot maker as soon as
he finishes a loop he forgets it because all the time he is only
attending to the node he is working on at any given moment at some
time when he’s tired or interrupted by a phone call he will look up and
he’ll be surprised by his knot because he’ll have no idea how he got
there he’s a kind of magical knot maker but with all of this and I
think we should not underestimate the pleasures and surprises of
knot making why in the world should we bother making knots who
cares about rope? in a way this is a lot like playing chess and you
can say someone has played it well or played poorly but why should
you care about this game? it seems ridiculous to spend all this
time pushing little pieces of wood about on a board havent you got
better things to do? but it was not always this way with
chess chess is a depraved game it represents the world as a
struggle for dominance between two sides that have no choice but
conflict there is no clear demarcation or boundary that cuts off
one side from the others hostilities and there is no bound to human
abilities it is an arrogant fantasy of war in which the greater
ability will surely win by annihilating his opponent what sort
of paradigm is this? no experience on earth corresponds to
it so it is a game of no relevance it is a fundamentally
trivial representation of reality but it wasnt always like
that according to most authorities chess derived from an indian
game called shatrandji which was supposed to represent the
state of the world the social classes into which people were
arbitrarily divided and it was a game invaded by chance the
best player the best plan could as easily be defeated as the
worst by luck and this was thought to teach humility to rulers shatrandji was the game of which chess is the trivial example and it doesnt seem that we have to be especially impressed with shatrandji either but as shatrandji was a game built up out of the human experiences of its
time arbitrary inequities among people the facts of unavoidable
war and the absurd circumstances of luck lying under the feet of
ability it is possible to construct make our art out of
something more meaningful than the arbitrary rules of knot
making out of the character of human experience in our world
