Onion Skin Onion Skin Roger Cook Ohio University
The prose/poetry piece entitled “Onion Skin” is intended to be presented on transparent sheets. The transparent sheets allow the reader to sample the writing in a random order. The reader is able to experience several pages simultaneously. The transparent sheets allow the reader to read one page while alternating lines with the pages behind—placing lines between lines in whatever order—in an integrative fashion. This work is to be different every time it is read—indeterminate and overdetermined. As the writer, I recommend that the work be copied onto transparent sheets. I feel the intent of the work can best be accessed in this manner. The pages are not numbered, there is no beginning or end. It defies perspectival, causal, and teleological interpretation. The work is an instance of the questions we ask of it influencing the answers we get, while the answers we get influence the questions we continue to ask. Different poets, philosophers, artists, novelists and musicians are nested in the work. Playing with intertextualism, I have some quotes that are not cited from sources, and fragments of conversations are reproduced as well. I was influenced by the works of Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, Albert Camus, Rainer Rilke, the list goes on and on. I was also very influenced by American popular and counter culture. Alice Cooper and James Joyce can be found in these pages with Zeno and John Lennon. As well as the obvious influence of Jean Gebser. Idealists and materialists are both like two children on a seesaw who have been teetering back and forth for two thousand years. Now one now the other is on top and shouts 'Hurrah!' while the other summons all his weight to be able to do the same; and thus the game goes on. Each thinks that his own weight and strength is decisive, and neither considers the fulcrum in the middle which, from it's point of rest, is what makes their movement and the game itself possible at all. Jean Gebser The Ever-present Origin p 237.
Total Aauntaorncohmyy. Nature, what kinds of things occur in nature Parent's kill children~children killing parents~ abandonment~lonely death
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