He was born Isidore Goldstein in Romania but decided he
would rather be called Isidore Isou and live in France. So at the end of World
War II that’s where he went and that's what he called himself. He had it in mind to be
a poet and artist. A filmmaker, too. He was very ambitious.
The way he figured it, the art-form hadn’t been invented yet
that could accommodate his vision. So he’d have to invent it himself.
He thought words were like cages in zoos. The letters were
imprisoned inside them and no one really looked at them anymore. So he snuck
inside the zoo one moonlit night and unlocked all the cages. The wild beautiful
letters went galloping, slithering, and flying from their former prisons,
wandering wherever they wanted. You could find them sometimes gathered together
at a watering hole in the lower left-hand corner of the page.
Like many handsome men, Isidore liked to walk the streets of
Paris showing off his handsome mug. He made a hard-to-watch film where you can
see him doing just that, looking sexy and surly and walking around spouting his
theories of art and literature and life. He called his new movement Letterism.
He was its only member. He could be pretty arrogant.
Even when he wasn’t acting, he looked exactly like an actor
in a French movie playing a romantic pimp or a drug dealer who wants to be an
actor or a poet. I wonder if, when he was eighty and housebound by illness and
no longer handsome, like many people who were once beautiful but who are old
now and not beautiful anymore, he regretted not being ordinary-looking when he
was young so he wouldn’t have anything to mourn when he looked in the mirror or
at old photographs of his beautiful former self.
The crux of the problem was that for a long time now nothing
new was being said. How could there be? There weren’t enough letters and words,
as far as Isidore was concerned, to say what now needed to be said. Which was?
No one knew until it could be said. So he invented some new letters and words. They
didn’t mean any one thing, the letters and words he invented, because that was
the problem with those that already existed. They could never convey everything
you wanted them to convey. Isidore wanted something better. He wanted instead to
invent a kind of infinite language of signs and symbols that could communicate
desire. “All delirium is expansive,” he said by way of explanation, proving the
inadequacy of all explanations.
He scribbled over photographs and called them poems. He
scribbled over poems and called them new poems. He scribbled over walls,
advertisements, political posters and called them poems. It was a lot of fun.
Anyone with a pair of working eyeballs could see that.
Other people joined him as Letterists. It became an
international movement. But it soon became apparent that everyone had a
different idea of what they had joined. Some people said that Isidore himself
didn’t know what Letterism was, even though he invented it.
Still, he continued to speak and write about Letterism and
also about himself, often in the third-person and with a lot of exclamation
points. “Letterism is not a poetic school,” he exclaimed, “but a solitary
attitude. Isou is awaiting his successors in poetry!”
“Come on,” he said, inviting everyone to join a party when
he’d already declared Letterism to be a solitary attitude, a party of one, that
no one could even define. But that was okay. That was part of the delirium. The
party is everywhere and it is going on all the time and it is come as you are. It’s
even okay if you have nothing to write with. “No problem,” Isidore suggested. “Let us write the
nothingness!”
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