Starting from Richard Feynman’s ideas on the meaning of it all and the notions of enthalpy and entropy, this paper discusses the question of an identity negative construction – an unweaving and unsaying of the self – in the works of poet Robert Duncan and his life-companion, the Chemistry graduate, and painter, Jess (Collins). In a political and sexual poetics, both artists deal with the violence of language in the construction of a model of representation that has no option but to confront the hegemonic discourse (as a way of struggling “with forms to liberate Form”, as Duncan would put it). Both artists deal with the catching of light (beauty/knowledge/wisdom) in the darkness, catching the fragments of a Whole (be it nation, community, love, or the Cosmos itself) that is permanently unreachable, and, yet, they know they are participating in its movement, in “It”. Their joint project of a grand collage composes a radical consciousness of alterity and performativity that takes a metonymic all-inclusive language as a democratic construction of the real.
Utopian Gossip: “The Homosexual in Society” from Robert Duncan to New Narrative