t thilleman on jj hastain

I was taken by j/j hastain’s use of ellipses as a means to explore the voice.

Upon first hearing j/j’s voice, I saw the image of an angel. Right in front of my eyes. Part of the reason for this was the way the cadence bit into my hearing. Each phrase was a full-stop, then the fullness of the note, heard.

Over time those phrases built a story out of my own, then put my own aside in favor of a larger canvas on which to display everything within and without. I grew as a writer because I leaned into the ductus, the push and flow of the music, the drag of it, the clarity as well as complicated blare of it, at times. Everything—as if the incoming sound was meant for more than simply an ear.

j/j’s approach to writing in a musical splurge, in a full welling of the voice as instrument, brought me to the image the initial sound of the voice evoked in me. Not the kind of angel that would be pictured in a church, but one that vibrated the fleshy and transubstantial weight of knowledge passed “from above.”

Direction, in space and time, took the world of words back and forth, so that I was riding on a wave of pleasure, at the same time I was aware the thematic apparition of j/j’s poem was part shadow as well as living, breathing human being.

To be both in this world and out of it radiated in my skeleton. Each articulation of muscle to bone crawled up out of the primordial ooze of self, searching barren land for a place to start a civilization from the bottom up. j/j’s cadence and care truly restarted me.

In fact, the sense of “above” and “below” materialized in my work because of j/j’s use of the word “heaven.” Heaven, in hastain’s work Priest/ess, means to call out all the pleasures that we see and cannot see, at work in our many received notions of the poem. Gender is an aspect of hastain’s heaven, and not in any kind of limited way. Instead grounding of many variant genders to give space to the world. This also gave me space.

This was certainly the first call of love toward another, and the adamic use of first sex was also at work in the roots of the tongue coincident to the meaning of j/j’s words. The roots intertwined, the writing emerged, the world changed.

Now, in this love and “shared myopia,” we were both able to tell one another how we felt. The simultaneity of opening to another person, while composing, changed the writing from an academic exercise into a full-on longing to be heard at every change—light to dark and dark into its opposite, color.

Red was the first color imparted to me. Then, by j/j, I was handed the entire rainbow, after each rainstorm.

j/j’s “Unseen Beings,” entities who transliterate the material world and light paths thru its darkness, now come to my vocabulary in an organic discovery of thought long held from me by my very own person.

In other words, the word, freed from my logical brain, has enabled itself within the realization of its message, its own “angelization.”

I use the word angel next to angelization to illustrate a difference embedded in each of us—and in this encounter between j/j and myself. To have gotten far from the self was not so much a bad thing, an alienation, rather it was the full on opportunity for action, the place from which to rightly write, to enact the self anew, to rewrite the writing act.

We transform the world by giving voice to the voiceless. Engaging in this activity, in tandem with my writing guru, j/j hastain has proven to be a lasting and a vigorous, mothering influence.

t thilleman is the author of Three Sea Monsters (Our History of Whose Image) in which journal entries and poetic sequences investigate the legacy of Pound’s redactions to Fenollosa’s original manuscript version of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry; Onönyxa & Therseyn (opening for an extended work, Anatomical Sketches, of which Keystone Standstill is the eighth book); Snailhorn (fragments), a 360 poem cycle utilizing vedic transitions in celestial to allegorical articulation; and a novel Gowanus Canal, Hans Knudsen. His literary essay/memoir, Blasted Tower, was issued by Shakespeare & Co./Toad Suck in 2013. The Special Body, a second work of literary comment is available from Rain Mountain Press. Aura Lifetime (volume one), a selection of his poetry, is currently available. tt’s pastel drawings and readings are archived at conchwoman.com.