HELEN KELLER OR ARAKAWA

(Burning Books, California, 1994)

Association and memory supposedly stain each object with the hue belonging to it. I am inclined to want to verify this, but wonder how I ever could. The experience of the deafblind person, in a world of seeing, hearing people, is like that of a sailor on an island where the inhabitants speak a language unknown to him, whose life is unlike the one he has lived.

– Madeline Gins; Helen Keller or Arakawa (Santa Fe: Burning Books, 1994) p. 47

PRAISE FOR HELEN KELLER OR ARAKAWA

“Autogenous, sui generis … and all that implies inventive. I would even say autogamous, for it has very much its own sex.”
Roger L. Conover, MIT Press

“Unprecedented … entails a state of constant beginning. A do-it-yourself manual for existence.”
Stacy Doris, Writer

“A kinaesthetic universe whose tactual presence is sizeless.”
Mark Amerika, American Book Review

“Regeneration is actually the topic, and all of it leading to the vanquishing of mortality, in the exploratory and celebratory sense this book is so perfectly aimed at, that ‘initial sense of ubiquitous site…’”
Mary Ann Caws, JPVA

“Unlike/like every other book, it moves forward/retreats; holds/release; absorbs/rejects; is /is not; s/he/visible-invisble. It is fundamentally a question. Make of Madeline Gins what she makes of her Self (her): playful, thoughtful, arbitrary, arrows suspended in mid-air going where arrows goo, yet unpredictable in their trajectories (on the canvas/page).”
Serge Gavronsky, WITZ: A Journal of Contemporary Poetics

Table of Contents

I. THINKING FIELD / 1

II. “PERCEPTION HAS GOT TO HAVE A BODY!” / 9

III. THE FIRST LITTLE BRICK OF SUBSTANCE / 17

IV. DRAW ME A DIAGRAM / 25

V. THE MASK OF FIGURE OR INTERMITTENS CHASMS / 33

VI. I TO I OR EAST TO EAST / 37

VII. SEE-THROUGH LANDSCAPE / 47

VIII. DON’T TAKE ME LITERALLY / 59

IX. EVERY MILLENIUM IS AN INFANT / 71

X. WHAT IS SPACETIME? / 79

XI. THE GAZING OTHER / 87

XII. ERROR / 103

XIII. FIGURES OR CORRIDORS OVERHEAD / 111

XIV. ARAKWA’S LINE IN HELEN KELLER’S SIGNATURE / 125

XV. MISTAKE ON WHAT SCALE? / 133

XVI. OR MOUNTAINS OR LINES / 139

XVII. A LINE IS A CRACK / 155

XVIII. OFF THE MOUNTAIN ONTO CROWDED VACANCIES THAT DID NOT SUPPORT HIM AS HE THOUGHT THEY WOULD / 165

XIX. THE TEXTURE OF DISTANCE AT POINT BLANK / 171

XX. DIFFERENCE / 179

XXI. BIRDS / 191

XXII. TISSUES OF DENSITY / 205

XXIII. NEUTER GRAPHOS JUNIOR OR THE DINOSAURAL FACTOR / 217

XXIV. THE SHARING OF NAMELESS / 229

XXV. BRAVE LIGHT / 239

XXVI. THE MARCH OF THE TRANSITIVE / 255

XXVII. WHAT HAPPENED WHERE? / 271

XXVIII. FORMING PLANET FORMING / 279

XXIX. CRITICAL BEACH / 289

SOURCES / 304

INDEX TO TITLES OF ARAKAWA’S WORKS / 306

Writings About

Amerika, Mark. ”Astrophysical Grammatology – Helen Keller or Arakawa.” American Book Review, Vol. 17, No. 3, p. 18.February-March 1996,

Caws,Mary Ann. ed. Andrew E Benjamin“Madeline Gins: Helen Keller or Arakawa”. Complexity.No. 6. London : Academy Group, 1995