LIMITED EDITION
three markations to ward her figure

Language as the fluid potential for communication. Where does this/it come from? H.D., in Thought and Vision (1919): "… when the center of consciousness shifts [from the brain] and the jellyfish is in the body… we have vision of the womb or love-vision."  In these interwoven {animaistic[al]} Three Volumes, this womb-body is soma and stoma—love made real by its penetration into myth and its fertilization of language. That copulation which gives birth to word-image (ideogram and neo-ideogram), that blank age which fills with wildly tamed linga in many forms, in parti-typogrophies.

This visually adventurous collection of thilleman’s texts is foundational work—transporting us into beginningless origins—creation, evolution, myth, language and thus culture. A critique of post-modern capitalism here achieves its cure in obliterating the isolating poison of the “rationalist” individual. With no philosophical escape into absence, here the pronoun of preference is "we" "us" "is" "are" and “it”. As singular plurality is presence. As place not in the imagination abandoned in mind alone, but in mind’s communion with the womb of love-vision a "syllogism… whose… /… exegesis… /… was in learning the inner soul / divining the edge of all.…"

In an ingathering of sources & resources—Jung, Freud, Yeats, Shakespeare, Pound, Fenollosa, Anne Waldman, Rebecca Goodman, Wittgenstein, Kant, Sutras, Popol Vuh, Vedas, Upanishad, color shape & forms—thilleman—in an outpouring of poetry, prose, prosepoem, drama, ideogram, neo-ideogram, bold typography, painting and watercolor rolls out an alchemical treatise of faith in the nothingness that is poesia.

A vision-quest that will not end, this foundational complex (not just text; more than book) opens an entrance (stoma) into the body (soma) of our whole, read to be perused, to wander within. Then you turn the page…..and….and there it is……yet another astonishment…..
—Martin Nakell


Each page is a carefully constructed map “illuminated by many overlays/ each a specific/ color-code in the warm hand moves to shade my life.” The book design is beautiful. It makes reading a game of parsing and pacing—“sliding window brake slowly breaks pace.” Scale shifts (the chaos of shape repeating itself as fractals) create a rush as well as a comfort. Patterns slip from microcosm to macrocosm at variable wind speeds.

thilleman toys with the ratio of thought and sensation, tweaking our ration page by page to make sure the whole creative process (the branching of our entire neural net) is engaged in incubation, illumination, and verification. This book activates what scientists Menon and Bressler call “dynamic interactions of distributed brain areas operating in large-scale networks.”

In the way we cannot, according to neuroscientists, accurately partition a brain into right and left activities, we cannot parse thilleman’s organisms/orgasms into mind and body. All dualities dissolve. Language becomes the permeable membrane blurring human and non-human, up and down, then and now. We get a dense, “mess chamber of making.” Atoms shift. No, readers slip between.
—Lori Anderson Moseman, from the intro to Three Shadow Inventions

it actually reminds me of the Maitraya rooms at Naropa. each its own color but a space infusion offering holding. I also experience hope in this. perhaps a kind of hope that is somehow an opposite to dogma. like the person who walked their path (self-awareness) continuing to walk their path. their hands leak their stature caressing cherry blossoms gently. someone else looking on notices the love in the season because of the agent the hand of another is. something so peaceful in the overall tone/shape here, a traveller travelling simply, breath moving through chambers—not counted too closely but also not overlooked.

the instant "overcoming" of futures is important. as if time can truly melt into non-distinct presence (no binaries, no lines, no structures) and be a kind of holding (lover) when this certain contemplative tone is held over a long period.  somehow time becomes space!
—j/j hastain

With formal deftness and intellectual brio, t thilleman’s poems work the magic of the spell-maker engaged in patterns of meaning that exceed the properties of any single language or discourse. In a rush of writing that invokes Hindu, Greek and Egyptian figures, thilleman’s meditations on Eros and constructions of the Beloved seek consolations and incitements of “Nuit,” both alembic gift-bearer and soul’s companion.  In so doing, the poems trace a Dionysian ritual of ekstasis (standing outside of oneself) and sparagmos (the tearing apart of a living creature), bearing within them the unfolding disturbance of experiences that incorporate the dream-like and incorporeal through the eyes of a ludic wanderer.

thilleman’s great accomplishment in this work is to set before us again the fault lines of identity, as he enacts—artfully, perceptually, ardently—a Deleuzian folding of One into Other, of I into You, in poetry written under the sign of she who “persists in activations to sound / voice-box of angelic things.”
—Andrew Mossin

Just as Duncan follows “the soul's journey in an evolution from the shell fish ... to the woman with her child, her Christ-child” in The H.D. Book, so too does Thilleman discover a “morphological” way to link the image of Jellyfish with “a continuity of spirit in the universe.” Here, “in the mirror of the water,” thilleman feels “the anatomies of these creatures real or imagined, phantastical or dumb and brutish ... providing sustenance for the broken and starving human.”
—Kenneth Warren

three markations to ward her figure
by t thilleman
Casebound, 660 pp
ISBN-13:  978-1-952335-20-4

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