Techno Lamentations

Technologies/Installations is a book of conflicts. The binary set up in the title presages others to follow: “Technologies” suggesting notions of progress, alienation, science and the modern age; “Installations” implying the static. What we have put there remains and cannot be undone. It is installed. While not all the binaries of this text are oppositional, all are problematic. The space between them is where Kim Maltman writes the lament of modern man.

The book’s structure pivots around the central binary identified by the tide. A long series of “Technology” poems are cut by “Installation” poems, which are numbered. Movement/stasis. However, the poems do not organize themselves neatly under these two categories. The speaking voice shifts from first to second to third person, from narrative to lyric, from upper-crust archaisms to humorous colloquialisms. Juxtapose this passage from “INSTALLATION #27”:

Let’s drink to solitude.
That’s it, down to the last drop!
To solitude!
One puts the glass down,
a little sadness spills over the rim.
Bees swarm out from the hollyhocks.
O morose one!
Bzzz.
To solitude!

with this one from “THE TECHNOLOGY OF THE DAY OF THE DEAD”:

…Nonetheless, in the immortal words of Red Riding Hood, caught between the poles of existential innocence and a large hairy creature about to gobble her down—eek!

Despite this bit of self-referential humour, the overall text privileges a highly contemplative, omniscient voice which resists locating itself in any particular body, place or moment. Much of Technologies/Installations comes to us as a philosophical tract and assumes its authority by virtue of several ‘objective’ generalizations (and numerous run-on sentences):

Sad fate indeed for (speaking here probability-wise) so singular a happenstance, especially given those whose secretmost allegiances are to such somewhat-cruel-in-the-particular, and yet amusing, even humbling, on the broader scale, serendipities as one is apt to stumble on only at night, nestled in a big old armchair with a good stiff brandy or a shot of scotch working up a grand nostalgia for the old spiritual chestnuts, Truth, Beauty, Etc., now so thoroughly and heartlessly shorn of their capital letters. (From the”TECHNOLOGY OF ALCHEMY.”)

This is a dense book. A writerly exercise in conceptual acrobatics, at times it left me out in the verbial cold. Where was I supposed to enter? Or was this the machined continuum of technology itself, proceeding regardless of me, the brief and mortal reader of the Text? (More on that later.)

Central to the system of binaries here is the classic nature/culture dichotomy. Maltman plays them against each other: “There is that colour to the sky, still strangely blue and luminous after dark. The warm yellow of the city’s benches, empty, under the tungsten lamps” (“INSTALLATION #21”). The play of nature/culture usually is found in descriptive passages which offer a break from his philosophical ruminations. However, they also function as springboards for further meditation. As in the Romantic poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, nature is sublime and inspirational:

Spring and the mountains which, to me, seem awesome and godless; and against which, what?
the twin strands of faith and terror, inextricable,
which choke the larger life.
(“INSTALLATION #19 [DISQUIET AND DISTANCE”])

Culture, on the other hand, is often base and corrupt: “The streaming protoplasmic mass of humanity to be entered!/Workers! how they hate the word—/even the ones with moustaches./They’re going to be rich,/every last one of them,/rich!” In the classic nature/culture dichotomy, nature represents pure or absolute truth, whereas culture represents falsehood and deception. Under the general category of culture, Maltman includes modern man and his creation—technology. At some points they appear to be one and the same: “The machine of the soul lies idle.”

In this model, culture is also suspect because of its capacity to generate language. Language that ultimately fails to express reality. Language that lies. Nature, however, possesses some innate truth which transcends culture and constitutes the only ‘real’ knowledge. Maltman writes: “But now that there’s so much history and writing, so much hard-wired into ‘common knowledge’, that the individual brain is like a parasite attached by language and biology to the larger weltanschauung…” (“THE TECHNOLOGY OF GOD”). But Maltman goes beyond the struggle between nature and culture and makes it read nature and culture/technology. Within his extended dichotomy lies the conflict which defines the text (and our own time, for that matter). However, Maltman’s handling of it is problematic. The speaking subject is prone to almost ludicrous archaisms (…”thou who art cruel and beautiful—/speak to me in thine own language”). The poems are marked by a sterility which results from awkward syntactical arrangements, run-on sentences and overly formal language (“What is it one imagines one desires?”). This, combined with an unbridled propensity to wax philosophical, leaves little space for nuance, mystery or multiplicity.

Although there is an overbearing sense of civilization in these poems, this is not a peopled city-scape. It is barren. Certain people are named occasionally, but rarely addressed. Even when the text attempts eroticism, we are only told, “I was close to someone,” referring of course to “somebody I cared for.” This “somebody” is completely objectified and silent (not to mention less interesting than a real person).

Having read Technologies/Installations, I realize it was not written for me. The language is stiff and unrelenting. Although it announces its claims to “seriousness” at the beginning with a quote from Thomas Bernhard, the speaking subject takes itself too seriously. It is preoccupied with its own death (“I have been thinking lately too much of death”) and its own being. It is sexist (“…like a mask I’ve gotten used to, the way a woman might get used to make-up, for instance, and feel naked without it. At least I can take it off if I want to…”) and patriarchal. It knows best.

The irony is, of course, that the text has transformed itself inadvertently into an emblem of the very system it sought to critique. Technologies/Installations sings the Lament of the Modem Man, alone. ♦

Lisa Gabrielle Mark is the Program Director of The Floating Gallery, a photography gallery in Winnipeg.

Technologies/Installations by Kim Maltman London, Ontario: Brick Books, 1990 Paperback, 86 pp., $9.95