Ian Dreiblatt Reviews Lewis Freedman's Residual Synonyms for the Name of God

Poet, critic, and translator Ian Dreiblatt reviews Lewis Freedman's Residual Synonyms for the Name of God (Ugly Duckling, 2016) for Music & Literature. "Faced with the instability of self wrought by our crisis of infinite screens, Synonyms offers to replace it not with stability, but with a different instability, a holy one." More:

Hyperactivated and unencumbered by received divisions between regimes of thought, it proceeds by echo, resemblance, accident, adjacency, rhyme, kinship, intuition. It seems to flash between a reality swamped with unworldings and an imaginary studded with makeshift actualizations — in other words, an apocalypse, a crisis of orders. “So we may miss the sign with positive enthusiasm . . . excited by the incomprehensible fluke . . . and with no reservations about logical inconsistencies in the continuous truth convictions of the continuous book.”

In thinking through a discontinuous present, Synonyms is part of a tradition that celebrates writing’s power to force continuities, to remake the world by assembling it again, and again, in different configuration. Every reconfiguration is also an undoing, every forced continuity the eradication of a lacuna or synapse. The entire regime of literacy, a technology that was born in the union of irrigation, history, and praise, is now culpable for the invention of a backwards world in which language is accountable to power, rather than the other way around. Sunlight still hits a wall, but the fact of it has been hollowed out, its polarity inverted. It’s worth saying that six thousand years is an instant in the life of a species, and writing may be the technology ours didn’t survive. I think the book identifies its lineage early on.

You know, it’s a genre convention, like surfers’ hair. Enlightenment is to be thought . . . it’s safer that way. Imagine an impressive ever-deepening awareness as long as it’s not inferior to any other. Thanks . . . thanks to the naked advancements of Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Origen, and Augustine . . . we cab our way to social functions on paved roads under the Big Scribe. Heathendom and idolatry as weapons . . . this is a teaching used by a priestly clan to restrain a lower class, assimilated by parable at the manifold points around skin.

When I talk about bustle and frenzy, I mean that the book flings its insurgent associativities in all directions, creates a space that churns with them. At the same time, in an ancient way, Synonyms feels like a consecration into community of the audience it invites to hear it. A radical body awakens to a morning of plurality. A scholar is whatever speaks to its neighbor and listens.

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