I’ve often messed around with cut-ups, and I’ve been aware of this method since I was probably 15 and reading about William Burroughs. He had adopted the idea from Tristan Tzara1, and while it was often considered a parlor trick, Burroughs used it with an intensity of vision that hadn’t been seen before.
The thing about cut-ups is that they have source material and the actual method of construction raises some questions about rigor, but answering these can ruin the effect. I could explain how exactly I pieced this together and tell you where the passages came from, but I don’t know that that helps anything. Maybe I’ll change my mind on that later, but for now, I’m just gonna say that yes, it uses cut-ups but not exclusively.
No. 1
Everything appears in relations in which nothing is announced. We come home. The trees, dew on the trashcans. A source of organic compounds weaves new threads, notebook of September ‘23. And so. And through. It’s true this delving into life is only a way of evading other denser networks, contingency of found lanes, a tangle of extension cords, razorblades beneath an Amazon box. Other faces, bureaus of command. We form our panic like the solar system, just collecting samples from our varied interests. Sometimes one feels it still: birthing the neural polis the way a narrator strips time, increasingly beholden to threat technology, dents in the vinyl siding. Bulletins. A shoelace dragged through spilled coffee (in the Proustian sense: Osiris atomized). By contrast, Lockheed seeks America for an asteroid campaign, an eruption of grief between events, a near-Earth formation of dismay that once had mattered. In all senses. In a way we believed meaningful.
I’ve written about both Tzara and Burroughs on this blog. The above hyperlinks will take you there.