Avant-Garde Journalism: Hannah Weiner's Early and Clairvoyant Journals

That Weiner is other to herself - "amused" - indicates that her impersonation of herself enables a sort of transparency - clairvoyance - which is constituted visually according to iconography - "a face smoking a pipe" / "a drawing on the wall" - perhaps traceable to Magritte's.[2] Everywhere in The Fast, hints accumulate, pass-words of a sort, as to the person-al power of placing orders. But the fact of retrospection bears on visuality, "placing orders" as processural poetic form, when state functions bare their opacity aurally. Hence the fast ends;

My eyes were sticking out a little. Standing by the sink I could feel the energy moving up my head, up the blocked channel by the ear and I thought, oh great, I'm finally going to get that blood vessel or nerve or whatever opened up and I'm going to be able to hear, for as much as I could see, I could never hear, and I was just beginning to hear a voice and I thought, great, communication will be so much easier. I won't have to guess what all the signs mean. Then I heard a knock on the door open up police. (41)

As we've seen, the reflexive debates - largely pre-lingual - constitute the conformity Weiner calls "reality" (temporally), a conformity not matched in "words," especially the standard narrative form of The Fast. Clairvoyance is a material ability (as "spirits" are, for Weiner, "so-called" and linguistic functions), and the fast comes to a close just as much because, if not essentially, as Weiner says, "I was nearing the end of my resources" (40). In all, the first two journals are a far cry, on the page, from the tri-vocal verse form, effecting aural simultaneity through visuality, of the Clairvoyant Journal - but the necessities are elaborated in hindsight, that is, critically. Simultaneity will rather "appear" as the double-movement of limitative and expansive statement. In other words, clairvoyance is the textual condition or "information"; while Weiner has not yet undertaken clairvoyant writing, it is presupposed in the intersecting aural and visual realities of her experience.

1971's "Country Girl" - the second journal - shuttles between narrative tenses, but as such provides more meta-narrative passages on the complexity of lyric intention. "I am in the country," it begins,

... I am now trying to be guided by my experience in what I've learned from the spirit, instead of just following advise. It is now I who make the decisions and the spirit gives a yes or no on all things. He, she, it, is so active. I do not always listen. (1)