“I went to the window and wanted to draw the earth” – a note on Christopher Knowles
I feel the earth moveI feel the sky tumbling downI feel my heart start to tremblingWhenever you’re around(Carole King)
1979: a stylus descends on a gramophone record. “I feel the earth move under my feet. Ifeel tumbling down tumbling down”. As time passes it is more and more evidently not Carole King: “I feel it Some ostriches are a like into a satchel. Some like them. I went to the window and wanted to draw the earth”. It is in fact Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, incorporating texts such as this by Christopher Knowles, active as a poet, librettist and artist since the 1970s. Decidedly sidelined at that time, it was sometimes said that he was ‘brain-damaged’; more recently the term ‘autistic’ has been employed. In this light it is I think more productive to think of his work not as some language analogue of the (fascinating) paintings done by gorillas and chimpanzees, but as the product of a different way of being human, of making sense of the world, from that of the statistical majority of this audience - the "Neurologically Typical". ‘Our’ way of processing data and making sense is just one of a range of options; just as autism has a ’spectrum’, is a range of conditions rather than one single state.
Knowles is, if autistic, certainly high-functioning, and his texts seem to me (I’m no expert) to work in two ways. There are attempts to make sense of a heavily impinging world – the “earth” outside the “window” - by finding in its barrage of stimuli patterns, which reassure by proposing regularity and predictability; as in the short piece that runs “WE SING A SONG // WE SANG A SONG // WE SUNG A SONG // BREAKFAST”. Hence John Ashbery could write of Knowles becoming a major avant-garde figure “without exactly meaning to”.
Contrariwise there are attempts to make satisfying patterns oneself, as in the ‘Sundance Kid’ material, which works with incrementally tiny fragments of the actual. Chris Goode’s performances of this have entirely satisfied me that these lingusistic amino acids can recombine; life made outside a language-lab. Another high-functioning autist, Temple Grandin, writes that “lots of little details, pieced together, make a concept”. Certainly there’s a poetry in Knowles’s recombining RNA from Labelle, David Cassidy, or Barry White, which it is hard to credit their lyricists with intending. “I feel the earth move.” I’m not sure there’s any point in trying to discriminate between attempts to reassure oneself or activities with a higher quotient of the evidently ‘aesthetic’. It has been argued by fundamentalist Freudian art-critics that we delude ourselves; we deal here, too, with points on a scale, not radically differing states of affairs. If this line of Knowles’s, “Voulez cuves deliu moussa cutswa cera”, looks at first sight like Schwitters or Isidore Isou, it isn’t any less fascinating viewed as an attempt by a non-Francophone to take Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir from the radio. Much of Knowles’ work is directly comparable; not English as a foreign language, but his world, despite being English-speaking, being evidently foreign. Whereas – to cite another gramophone record - Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room is intended by its composer to “s-s-s-sssmooth out” the irregularities of his speech, Knowles, more radically, presents the enormities of ours back to us. Whether or not one finds ‘art’ therein is almost beside the point; Christopher Knowles is a visiting anthropologist, whose reports we are lucky enough to be able to see and hear.
Harry Gilonis is a poet, editor, publisher and occasional critic writing on art, poetry and music. He has been published widely, including on the lawn of the Serpentine Gallery.
