ZwO

I don't want to say my Zukofsky without Organs is getting out of control (not that, on a conceptual-level, this would be a bad thing; yet, perhaps on the corporate-level...er, oh excuse me, I mean academic-level, it is), but today I picked up a bound copy of The Field Museum of Natural History's leaflets (volumes 21-29) from 1927. If you click the image on to the right, you will see that tonight I will be reading a piece entitled "Insect-Musicians and Cricket Champions of China." The 2 crickets are locked in some sort of ritual death-grip on the cover. It seems rather vicious, but the images inside, as well as the text, seem a hell of a lot less violent.

Section 16 of Zukofsky's "29 Songs" (the old "Crickets'/ thickets" poem) seems to fit right in with BwOs & becoming-animal: "the principal problem concerning the new threshold of deterritoiralization of the voice is no longer that of a proper vocal becoming-woman or becoming-child, but that of becoming-molecular in which the voice itself is instrumentalized...The child and the woman are now inseparable from the sea and the water molecule...This becomes even clearer if we think of becoming-animal: birds are still just as important, yet the reign of birds seems to have been replaced by the age of insects, with its much more molecular vibrations, chirring, rustling, buzzing, clicking, scratching, and scraping. Birds are vocal, but insects are instrumental: drums and violins, guitars and cymbals. A becoming-insect has replaced becoming-bird, or forms a block with it. The insect is closer, better able to make audible the truth that all becomings are molecular" (Deleuze & Guattari Thousand 308).