This antholgy of Weiner's works was edited by Patrick F. Durgen who also wrote the introduction. Hannah Weiner's Early and Clairvoyant Journals by Patrick Durgin is also on http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/m504/index.html. "Typing to you a thoug[h]t is seen cartridge script machine." Hannah Weiner, letter to Bernadette Mayer, April 19, 1975. It is an extremely rare thing in any field to invent a new form. Invention, as such, momentarily collapses the frontier between theory and practice. This is why it not only invariably widens the scope of that field's potential acheivements, but it appears to us, in hindsight, as an event, a phenomenon, a content through which to bring the overall form of that field into historical relief. Although largely unknown and practically unread, Hannah Weiner accomplished such an invention. She called it "large-sheet poetry" - I call it "avant-garde journalism." With the publication of Weiner's major works of the 1970s, we come a long way toward filling in the missing links between the so-called "New York School" and "Language Writing," while we witness another literary-critical incursion: the mingling demands of a formalist and phenomenological approach indicative of the larger "radical modernist" tradition in USAmerican poetry. This tradition accounts for the ascedence of the anomalies, the formative strangeness, of our most vibrant tradition, stemming from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Gertrude Stein's radical narrative theories, through the intermedial arts of Jackson Mac Low, John Cage, and later in the auto-ethnography of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Nathaniel Mackey. No lesser figure than Bruce Andrews has described the publishing environment for his own, formative work of the early 1970s as split between a "radical formalist fringe" and "performance kind of things" (6-7). Weiner bridged this divide with the Clairvoyant Journal. This introduction aims to orient the reader's way through these texts by way of the intersection of formalism and phenomenology entailed by Weiner's signature tropes: "clairvoyance" and "large-sheet poetry." Durgin WEB essay reproduced below: Weiner was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1928 where she graduated from Classical High School, graduating from Radcliffe College in 1950. She subsequently worked as a lingerie designer in New York City. In the early 1960s she began giving performances, one of which - "Hannah Weiner at Her Job" - consisted of a sort of open house hosted by her employer, A.H. Schreiber Co., Inc. Other similar works ("Street Works" and "World Works")mixed new poetic and narrative forms with recent work in conceptual art, and, as with Weiner's friend and co-conspirator Bernadette Mayer's watershed installation piece "Memory," questioned the museum and book alike, as a storehouse of cultural memory. Most significantly, after studying poetry with Bill Berkson and Kenneth Koch at the New School for Social Research in 1963, and through working friendships with 2nd generation New York School poets such as Mayer and Ted Berrigan, Weiner composed and performed a series of Code Poems, collected as such for her second published book of poetry in 1982. Utilizing a 19th century system of visual signals for communication at sea, these works, along with similar early works by Jackson Mac Low, brought avant-garde forms of translation to bear upon contemporary socio-political issues, particularly 70's American feminism and the American Indian Movement (AIM). These works were contextually and methodologically identical to coterminus "translation" and "eventual verse" works of Mac Low's - so much the case that Mac Low and Weiner open Douglas Messerli's anthology for New Directions, "Language" Poetries. Weiner's first book of poetry, however, was basically a New York School attempt to write verse in response to the paintings of Rene Magritte; The Magritte Poems was published in 1970. By the end of the 60's, all the hallmarks of Weiner's later work were in place. It was then that she found a way to syncretize them: the mundane, everyday experiences in her personal life; playful and personal responses to high and official cultural artefacts; and theoretical and practical forms of ideological critique. It was both the formal and the performative (phenomenological) that would be reunited under the rubric of "clairvoyance." In his Poetry Project Newsletter review of Code Poems in 1983, John Perrealt writes, Many were trying to do it; few could. For various reasons we wanted to get poetry off the page ... media crossover ... Off the page and into the dustbin of history. It was the 60s, so everything seemed possible. The poetry reading became the poetry event became the performance. And Hannah Weiner was in the middle of it ... And what is left of these works? Hannah Weiner burned all her documentation and became a clairvoyant poet. 1980's Little Books / Indians lived quite literally by its name. The "large-sheet" poems were organized into "little books," while the sentences were more often cut short so as to resemble verse. Weiner's interest in the AIM became the focus of the ideological theme of the collection, moreover providing a more easily recognized narrative thrust. Spoke (1984), Silent Teachers / Remembered Sequel (1993), and We Speak Silent (1997) are closer to the Clairvoyant Journal in form and theme, but further develop the aspect of clairvoyance pertaining to inter-personal relations mediated by language the author called "silent teaching." This theme is essentially a means of inquiry into global, holistic politics inspired by avant-garde art in the West and Eastern religious practices often alluded to in the Clairvoyant Journal.Weiner's last major work, PAGE (2002), is a deeply complex series of poems closer to normative lyric verse yet highly disjunctive in terms of grammatical forms. It is also a deeply personal work in which the deaths of her aunt and mother become an allegory in an intra-personal take on silent teaching.Weiner is, as Mac Low notes in his jacket blurb to the Angel Hair edition of Clairvoyant Journal, both a "remarkable case" and a remarkable artist; "Her acheivement -- & it is a considerable one - lies in her having developed a specific literary form through which to convey her remarkable experience." Mac Low's blurb calls (in the least) for a study of how this "specific literary form" came to be, specifically, "literary." Doing so requires us to understand clairvoyance as a synaesthetic ability / capacity of our own, and incorporate this into our reading practices: according to current institutional prescriptions, this would be tantamount to critical synaesthesia. And this is not the synaesthesia taught in college guidebooks. That is, it is not a descriptive technique, evoking categorical ambiguities (in the tradition of William Empson). In her reading copy of the Clairvoyant Journal, Weiner had written in the title of A. R. Luria's famous study, The Mind of a Mnemonist. Luria's case study of the synaesthete and mnemonyst "S" speaks eloquently of a "form of extended reference" based on clairvoyant phenomena uncannily like those Weiner documents in the early journals, which consist, simultaneously, of a documentation of the development of "large-sheet poetry." In his transcription of S's testimony:I was ill with scarlatina ... I had come back from Hebrew school with a headache and my mother had said: "He has heets [Yiddish: "fever"]. True enough! Heets is intense, like lightning ... and I had such a sharp orange light coming out of my head. So that word's right for sure! Mac Low recognizes what Luria sees in "S" - that there is a literal sense "beyond belief" where the "case" and the "artist" forge contexts in which new forms become inevitable. Through Luria, S himself is a kind of avant-garde journalist; Luria's case study endures largely because it falls, formally, somewhere between the prescriptions of that genre and those of memoir and even eulogy. It is a synaesthetic work.Most recently, poet-critic Judith Goldman has elaborated the ethical link between the "case" and the "artist." In an exemplary reading of Weiner's so-called "clair-style," Goldman analyzes the metalinguistic political interventions the formal attributes of Weiner's clairvoyant writings made. Goldman's analysis of the tri-vocality of the Clairvoyant Journal is especially brilliant for its discussion of the overdetermination of the expression of one's motives in or as language, recalling post-structuralist paradigms via Lacan, Lyotard, Barthes, and other theorists; "In staging the author's compelling and reader's compulsion through a trope that solicits credibility yet remains beyond belief, i.e., clairvoyance, Weiner aims not at representational accuracy, but at ethical adequacy; not the authority of experience, but the experience of alterity as an alternate and indefinite authority." Indefinite as it may be, such authority is either ability in potentia or a choral address which diversifies the ontological basis of any ethical adequacy, where the body becomes the staging of forces only tangentially literary, religious, or corporeal. The interlocutions make this evident, if not definite; "this year you don't believe in reincarnation foolish in fact / when you don't believe in it it seems otherwise dont interrupt dont scold" ("Dec 27 Sat p2," Clairvoyant Journal). Writing the body for Weiner is performing it to and with itself. Poet-critic Maria Damon's recent article on Weiner's work uses theories of trauma to argue along the sort of lines debates over writing the body have tended to follow. That is, the performance is invariably psychopathologized. Neither critic, therefore, escapes the confines of the tropical; neither points to clairvoyance as an ability underpinning Weiner's "acheivement." Goldman is too much a formalist, Damon too much a phenomenologist, for Weiner's peculiar syncretism. When I see words I am also able to know, by reading or handling a book, as example, if an author is a friend, what her illness is, what books she prefers, whether she knows what to do for herself, whether to read her at all. ... clairvoyantly I am the other to myself ... In my nonclairvoyant work there is no person. (Weiner, "Other Person")Taking Weiner's work literarily, one must take these words literally. Two claims are made here. First, Weiner claims that clairvoyance enables a diagnostic ability, echoed in the observation that "clairvoyantly I am other to myself." This claim also appears in Weiner's major statement of poetics, "Mostly About the Sentence," with the glass half full this time: "In reference to healing, i.e. the diagnosis of illness which is or was one of my psychic powers, naming the individual is obviously essential." The second claim is critical or evaluative (having to do with a prognosis / prophesy): "I am also able to know ... whether to read her at all." Clearly this extraordinary ability is not on par with Cartesian occularcentrism, whose reason comes by way of "spontaneous assent" to trascendence through the mind-body split suggesting that to see (words) is to know. To take these claims "literally" one needen't adopt an Adamic view of language with respect to the "person" - Weiner admits that she "sometimes destroyed the real name ... giving into writing's political pressure to de-personalize or perhaps just admitting to myself people don't like healing diagnosis, especially free from a psychic" ("Mostly..."). But perhaps we presume too much regarding the nature of clairvoyance for Weiner, and thereby miss the predicate: "When I see words I am also able to know ..." These claims appear to concern an ability to, literally, see transparence, which would repopulate the specular "vis-à-vis" of occularcentrism with the specific reality of language (a reality including language's notorious opacity). So that, the mechanism of belief is trumped by the literal in the fact that, counter-intuitively, clairvoyance introduces the person into the event of literary production (including but not limited to the "reception" of works). The ultimate claim is one for literariness: "In my nonclairvoyant work there is no person." The issue of "the person" is clearly essential to Weiner's evolution of clairvoyance as a textual condition before it attains the retrospective, determined nature of "clair-style."The question of linguistic opacity as critical indeterminacy was, however incohately, at stake in the "Symposium on the Person" published in the ninth issue of Poetics Journal in 1991, to which Weiner contributed "Other Person." Co-editor Lyn Hejinian's contribution to the event from which several of the articles published in "The Person" edition of Poetics Journal were taken distinguishes between the self as self-same entity and "the person" - "The Person ... is a mobile (and mobilized) reference point, or, to put it another way, subjectivity is not an entity but a dynamic. There is no self undefiled by experience, no self unmediated in the perceptual situation; instead there is a world and the person is in it" (Language of Inquiry). The terms of this symposium, then, are to be seen as positing personhood not as a mediated "subject," but as a pre-linguistic figure of immanence whose very determination is the indeterminacy of "the world." In other words, intention is indeterminacy insofar as mediation is, not just worldly, but in the world. Nothing less than the event of the world can be called a textual condition in this case. This is not to point to a transcendence of the category of "subjectivity," but rather a problematizing of it that Hejinian identifies with gender and post-colonial theories' motivations with respect to putting "pressure" on that category; "everyone's actual experience is of being a person" ("A Talk to the MA Poetics Class ..."). In Weiner's case the literary claim dovetails with a claim for the confluence, or "simultaneity," of voice and visuality.A good reference point for this confluence, beyond her earliest, "non-seen poems describing Magritte paintings in a normal poetic form," is her contribution to 1974's premier issue of the New York avant-garde journal Assembling, "Sign Language of the American Indian" ("Mostly..."). The piece consists of captioned graphic examples of terms - Brother, Man, Fond, Love - with a running commentary / poem by Weiner beneath, spanning four pages: "Breathed from the Great Spirit, / one, an example, I, / cross my heart, / love you" (unpaginated). It's important to note that, while this piece is both seen and "non-seen" - as are the Magritte Poems which I discuss below - the following year Weiner contributed a brief piece written in the tri-vocal "clair-style" of the Clairvoyant Journal to Margins' column on Assembling, "Criticism of my Hannah Fool long page" (38). To do so is to catch a glimpse of the development of clairvoyance beyond the primary source texts of the early journals discussed below. Whereas, Weiner would later note that "in the Magritte Poems, [I] use a response to the verse, printed at the back of the poems, giving it a second 'voice'" ("Mostly..."). So that, the second voice of "Sign Language..." is seen but not simultaneous, indicating that visuality and "Breathed" voice are inherently linked in formal terms, i.e., if placement of text or other graphic features sufficiently distance the voices visually. This clearly pits Weiner's work of the period in the tradition of New American Poetry as it moved from the law of the breath to the politics of the event. "Clair-style" would in fact require typesetting to be so intricate and determinately scored that, in the Magritte Poems, what was separated by pages would now be separated by graphic elements. It is worth noting, as well, that the Magritte Poems' second voice takes the form of endnotes, a standard feature of critical writing, but far less of "normal poetic form."In this context Weiner's brief statement, "Other Person," provides a unique reference point for retrospectively reading the development of clairvoyance hand-in-hand with "clair-style," "large-sheet poetry." "Qualities not in the content of a text can be felt by a reader if the author has power. These qualities include anger, sexuality, intelligence, wealth, leisure, whether she lives in a quiet or busy place and included" (97). Power is evidently not understood by Weiner to be an ability to imbue a text with aesthetic ("felt") representations of the self-same entity of the typical subject of journal-writing ("content"), rather "qualities" take place - as words are subject to literary form - "qualities" "include ... and included" sightings and sense. Moreover, according to Weiner, "a reader" feels, while a clairvoyant is "able to know." Weiner resolves feeling into knowledge, without establishing a hierarchy between the two, which affords her the ability to make specific aesthetic interventions into epistemological questions which assume the world is pure immanence, not a content upon which to fix one's motivated regard or upon which one might speculate in Cartesian fashion. For Weiner, clairvoyance is a way into the world - with the person in it. But Wiener also asserts that "[s]ometimes just power or even bliss is felt, without any attribute of person" (97-8). It is here that one must admit that Hejinian's terminology is especially apt for what may be ordinary, if not necessarily normative, experiences of vision; but Weiner's also include extraordinary senses pertinent to her unique experiences of clairvoyance, hence her claim that only in clairvoyant writings does "the person" emerge, and therein as normally "other to myself." This "also" abolishes any hierarchy between what is felt and known (also what is heard and seen), levels the intentional field between author and reader (in a shared temporal condition), yet the "also" comprehends that clairvoyance is an ability that is, vis-à-vis "the world," extraordinary or unique.When I see words I am also able to know, by reading or handling a book, as example, if an author is a friend, what her illness is, what books she prefers, whether she knows what to do for herself, whether to read her at all. So there is, perhaps, no way out of the person, not everyone is clairvoyant. It would seem a goal to reduce the presence of person in a work so that power comes through without content, as an energizing force, not inducing imitation.The extraordinary and the utterly mundane coexist "as an energizing force." What is extraodinary here is that clairvoyance, applied to literary objects, enables evaluations in terms of motives without the mediation of aesthetic representation Weiner dubs "imitation." If this is an insight, so to speak, into the author's intention, "intention" must be understood not as what the author sets out to do as author (i.e., "motive") but in terms of such messy concepts as friendship, illness, personal preference, self-esteem, but finally the author's worth as "person." Clairvoyance is a pre-eminently pragmatic facility; the subject is a sign (motive), the person an enunciation (intention). The event of literary production is a lived hermeneutic time shared with the reader's roving through the large-sheets, performance scores which, as such, radically question the ontological status of the work in the world per se. Hence, insofar as the journals are written in a "clair-style," they can strictly be called a new form of avant-garde journalism. "Other Person" was published thirteen years after the Clairvoyant Journal, well into Weiner's later works (discussed in Goldman and Damon). In order to understand its claims regarding the relations between formal and phenomenal poesis, Weiner's sense of authorial function vis-à-vis "words" must be located, then the work of intention which brought clairvoyance to the point where "I see words," and further to the placing of said words on the page. The work of intention can then be better understood as methodical and deliberate while indeterminate all the same - and Weiner's "indeterminacy" a unique pathway to the lived hermeneutic time of the "poetry event bec[o]me the performance." Moreoever, Weiner's peculiar "indeterminacy" is not a form of semantic ambiguity but a practical labor on behalf of shrinking the distance between pragmatics and linguistics, a distance staunchly held, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle points out, by dominant paradigms of linguistic research. Lecercle's pioneering exposition of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of language characterizes such a task as an adjoining of "competence and performance" (160). Weiner's formal invention is just such an conjunctive event. Weiner activates form within phenomena and vice versa.In this regard we will find the most useful concept is that of the illocutionary "order-word," as theorized by Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their "Postulates of Linguistics" (A Thousand Plateaus 75-110). Therese Grisham's brilliant reading of this concept characterizes Deleuzian linguistics as an "indiscipline," providing ways "to deterritorialize state functions," and not linguistic models or methodologies which invariably subjectify "the specific reality of language" we seek in Weiner's work. As Grisham explains, Language is neither communicated nor informational. On the one hand, communication presupposes subjectivities prior to it, when it is language redefined in terms of sociopolitical fields that subjectifies; on the other, language transmits messages containing orders ... and while information is necessary for the transmission of an order, it is only the minimum necessary for it ... as a performative statement [the order-word] accomplishes the act by speaking ... the event of speech [is] decisive. ... the order word has two modes - limitative and expansive. As the "expressed" of the statement, the order-word either orders death (capture in forms), or flight. In other words, it does not just reterritorialie, but can also give a message to flee. (45-6)One reason the conceptual tool of the order-word does not become a model for reading Weiner's clairvoyance is that such a reading demands we read how, visually, she places her orders (no matter their provenance). Clairvoyance is this double-movement of limitative and expansive statement, and our reading concerns the evolutionary "flight" of the writing, not the development of a "clair-style" in which the literary event is "captured in forms" and reified. Grisham notes that "the order-word as pass-word pushes language to its limits while bodies are in metamorphosis." "Pass-words" appear to Deleuze and Guattari "beneath" order-words, representing (so to speak) orders to flee that imply bodily metamorphosis, what I would call Weiner's lyric embodiment or impersonation (ibid.). This occurs for Weiner as words on her forehead, seen from within. The words seen are printed words, but the body imprints them as body through sight (in the special sense of "body" found in Meleau-Ponty's work discussed below; "the working, actual body - not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement") ("Eye and Mind"). Hence, a sort of metamorphosis takes place, and a kind of formal passage captures this as the aesthetic object, the tri-vocal, choral lyric "score" or verse narrative that would become the Clairvoyant Journal. As Deleuze and Guattari write, What is called style can be the most natural thing in the world; it is nothing other than the procedure of a continuous variation. Of the dualisms established by linguistics, there are few with a more shaky foundation than the separation between linguistics and stylistics: Because a style is not an individual psychological creation but an assemblage of enunciation, it unavoidably produces a language within a language. (A Thousand Plateaus)This "language within a language" is the hallmark of what Deleuze and Guattari call a "minor literature." "Clair-style" (in this sense significantly revised from Goldman's representation) is that language within a language. Clairvoyance is that "most natural thing in the world," synonymous with the problem of the "person" and its taking place - nothing less than the "procedure of a continuous variation." And insofar as it is an ability or "power," extraordinary yet mundane, it is a kind of literary capital.The notion of clairvoyance actually precedes the experience or "procedure of a continuous variation" in Weiner's work, so that we may ask if, with 1970's The Magritte Poems, the author doesn't impersonate the artist's "perspective." After all, one way to fabricate pass-words - to deterritorialize "state functions," "state" taken to mean a state of mind - is through oxymorons, such as those applied to categorize Magritte's work: magical realism and surrealism. Weiner's book contains eight poems, each titled after iconic paintings by Magritte, and each end-noted by Weiner with wry comments or puns based on the corresponding poem. Magritte's famous self-portrait, entitled "Clairvoyance," is not addressed in the book. However, Weiner does recognize the expansive order-word that is the peculiarity of Magritte's evocative, koan-like practice of ascribing titles which often hardly even pun on the iconic structure painted as if, as she wrote in a late work entitled Spoke, "the secrets are information" (unpaginated). For instance, "Dangerous Acquaintances" asks, "Would you rather / I turned my ass / to you?" (unpaginated). The end-note, signaled at this midway point in the poem, refers to a single word: "Yes." The rest of the poem reads, "Well, say so, / don't stand there / holding a mirror." In the painting, a nude woman holds a gold-framed, beveled-edge mirror in front of her, which reflects the negative image of her "ass" as if seen from behind her. The body, as indetermination, is here represented by the banal but effective reverse image. But Weiner's "Yes" thickens the plot; she asks for the image, if not the dangerous acquaintance which is visuality itself, to respond - and the response is transformative: the order of assent. The mirror itself deflects (reverses) the representation; rather than reflection or even narcissistic contemplation we are given to flee, ass turned to walk or run away from our own gaze. In "The False Mirror," Weiner does little more than describe the painting that shares its title: "In your blue eye / the sky / has clouds / in it." But the end note, signaled at the end of the poem, reads "today and tomorrow. Precipitation probability: Tuesday 20%, Tuesday night and Wednesday 30%[.]" This evocation of the banal rain for tears metaphor is not itself banal. The limitative expansion of Magritte's quasi-koans are less ridiculed than "deterritorialized." In Magritte's work, particularly those works addressed by Weiner's poems, the painting provides the visual "information." The titles (words) provide "secrets" or "pass-words." It is the nonconformity of the two that inevitably reterritorializes as Magritte's "style" (aside from bodily metamorphoses apparent upon careful study of his works, including "Dangerous Acquaintances"). If this style comes to be seen and known by a generic appellation, it testifies to Dick Higgins' observation that the intermedial inevitably becomes "media with familiarity" (unpaginated). Furthermore, since these are nonclairvoyant works, Weiner's Magritte Poems include "no person." If the power of the bodily (i.e., teardrops) metaphor is reinscribed, or rather comment is made to the fabled link between clairvoyance and prediction / predication (i.e., weather forecasts), the "False Mirror" effect portrayed by Magritte's "Clairvoyance" self-portrait is not lost on Weiner. This falsified self is rendered a line of flight as a "second voice."In fact, looking to 1970's The Fast, the first of the four journals, one notes that Weiner's clairvoyance is first manifested as "seeing" and "feeling" colors, auras, and pictures; the first such "mental picture" is remarkably in style with Magritte's iconography. Of these mental pictures at this early stage, Weiner notes, "They were often weak, but as signals it was the information that counted." Weiner narrates metamorphoses of the body as well as "the person," but the problem of the subject is not constituted here by Cartesian universal doubt (regarding, for example, the status of the body). In The Fast, it is a matter of auto-suggestion, and as yet a fairly normative narration of becoming literate thereby. Here is Weiner's first attempt to place an order, the very first occurrence of clairvoyance; So we sat drinking tea. It was then I noticed a bright green triangular feather shape coming out of his right eye, a bright green feather shape with red and yellow streaks. It is remarkable to me now that I did not question the bright green feather shape. I simply got up and went shopping at the health food store. I bought Tiger's Milk, eyebright, fennel, fenugreek, rose hip teas, cashew nut butter, blueberry syrup and a little plastic bear full of honey. I had a large shopping bag full. What I didn't buy was a large bottle of thick pink liquid shampoo, which I could have used later to help the pain. I had in my refrigerator four gallons of spring water and goats milk. I had two vivid dreams about pollution that night.This will be a trend: a contiguity between specific episodes of clairvoyance and a listing, insistent fixation on placing orders in the retail sense. The above is from "FAST DAY 1," and "DAY 2" begins,I went out shopping for wooden spoons, forks, knives. ... I want to distinguish here my knowledge of wanting the spoons and knives and the strong intuition that expressed urgent need. The shopkeeper had a medium clear blue outlining his right side. Then I went to a men's cut-rate store where my mind and I had a few shopping differences. ... I had some spine and shoulder pain. I had some inkling that I was laying in for a siege, but I didn't know what kind. I just felt I would not shop again for ages.Weiner's narrative develops as a dramatization, through bodily metamorphoses, of the competing wills meant to represent the democratization afforded a society by capital exchange. But the "want to distinguish" is not a function of this state function, however foregrounded by these "states" of mind. This desire is to be understood as we understand Weiner's sense of authorial function vis-à-vis "words," since this is finally what is "seen." Nowhere, except in the first paragraph of the book, does the desire or even intuition to write come up, but as they do, the notion of a pre-lingual (i.e., "informational") "power" via the "Other Person" is nascent; I want to write but I am lazy. I would like to put my thoughts about the fast directly on tape without the medium of speech. California does psychic. It is unnecessary for us both to speak. Does she send her thoughts to me or I send my thoughts to her? When we both think it is 10 o'clock and it is 11:30 we are both not perceiving reality.Hence the book begins, and the rest is presumably mere reportage. But this is, of course, hardly the case. The narrative form is here developed as if this is a preface written as a meta-narrative once-removed (for, even in the journal, whose entries are dated, no writing is spoken of). The journal goes on to tell the tale of a nearly month-long fast, with developments in the seeing and feeling of auras, reflexive debates developing in several forms, and bodily metamorphoses centering on a hyper-sensitivity to metallic materials (hence long hours spent bathing in the ceramic kitchen sink, which washes away "bad energy" as well as unsightly visions). The reflexive debates mark the emergence of the "person" in the narrative, insofar as the "visions" are able to "tell" Weiner to do things and she is able to question them / herself. "Words" first occur three weeks into the fast as silent teaching (as the metanarratives twice-removed, such as jacket blurb and actual prefaces, are signed in the clairvoyant works and those published later, like The Fast, "Simple Teacher" or "Silent Teacher");I secured a detail watch over my body and then continued. In the groin area I saw a whole picture superimposed on my body. Red and green and black lines and dots going from one side down the urinary tract and the ovaries. It was a cartoon superimposition in the same place I months later saw the clock image which I interpreted as meaning this will take time. I was pretty impressed with that little diagram and kept asking the so-called I myself spi -