INTERVIEW: Jared Daniel Fagen and Author Mike Corrao on Being Towards Death

"...when we press our ear against the walls of the structure, we can hear the voices of those who are stuck here with us—other people forced into the same divine torture mechanism..."

In October, New York–based publisher Crop Circle Press released its debut title, Being Towards Death by Mike Corrao. In this conversation, writer Jared Daniel Fagan speaks with Corrao about the themes explored in this genre-resistant work: the garden and its violence, the weaving of nature and artifice in language and imagery, and French influences ranging from Collobert to Lautréamont.

Jared Daniel Fagan: In Being Towards Death, we seem to have moved from The Book of Mallarmé to something like Blanchot’s The Book to Come: one that refuses any known generic boundaries. Poetry and criticism weld seamlessly with melos and opsis, visual patterns with verbal design. Can you talk about these alchemic enactments, as well as their stakes?

Mike Corrao: There is often a tension between text and image that is hard to reconcile. Text can easily fall into the trap of appearing like the caption of an image. An image can easily fall into the trap of appearing as the supplemental figure to a passage. I’m particularly interested in the ways in which the text and the image can exist on the same plane, with the same importance and emphasis. Where the text feels visual and the image feels linguistic. It allows each mode to speak in a way that is not often accessible. The core of BTD comes from the tension between these elements. The spiky limbs of the illustrations and the text’s attempts to navigate through the space that remains. In some ways, these structures create an order, maybe even lodging, for the text. But at the same time, they confine it. There is a comfort that can be found, if only as a silver lining, in what hurts us. If it was not for the garden—the setting of the book—the narrator might have nowhere to live. But that same garden mocks us, attempts to possess us, scars our flesh. It plays with its food, and in that, we only put off being eaten for a little bit longer. This is maybe a melodramatic reading. Better put, the encroaching design is intended to emulate or evoke the way these structures of power are willing to help us and comfort us in the pursuit of a greater, more thorough pain.

JDF: I’m interested in this idea that the garden both initiates a sense of delay/anticipation and serves also as a site of translation: “money into pain […] pain into property.” Could you elaborate more on the paths that pain takes us toward, that I’m presuming maneuver a more metaphysical kind of “wound”? In what way is the power structure of the garden one by which we are already designed, and in what are we taking comfort, if not a relief from what afflicts us?

MC: There are very physical manifestations of the garden’s violence. It carves a sigil into the hand of the occupant (a ‘you’ which the narrator addresses throughout the text). It floods the body with seawater, drags us through halls. But there are other, more psychological forms of violence as well. It taunts us, mocks us, it blames us for our circumstances, as if it is a decision one makes to be poor. It creates a relentless, linguistic environment, in which every surface tells us that this violence is our own doing. That this is either a self-inflicted wound—either through the choices we’ve made, or through our inability to game the system of capitalism. But sometimes, this antagonism lapses, and the garden will briefly sympathize with us. It will recognize the pain it causes, and in that, the wound grows larger. Because in that sympathy, the guise of this wound being self-inflicted becomes stronger, more believable. This entity / place / institution pities us. It recognizes the harsh landscape that we’ve become trapped in, but never in that pity does it concede that this is the fault of the landscape. And I find this the most interesting form of capitalist violence. Even when there is some semblance of understanding, that understanding is not about the cruelty of the apparatus, it is about our inability to navigate it proficiently. The wound cannot close, because it cannot heal without the right treatment. This comes through in the design of the text as well. The illustrations begin as these stark, otherworldly structures, but as we progress, they become increasingly familiar. But right as we settle into the setting, it changes, it becomes something different, still angular, but flat and moving in ways that have a totally different relationship to the narrator and the text arrangement. And as this form becomes familiar, we again shift. Now back to the original structures. There is never enough downtime for the wound to close.

JDF: The garden carries multiple symbolic significance of capitalistic assimilation: a plot of land in which mankind performs its violence—mows, prunes, tills, sows its own diabolical seeds—to raise a glorified image of itself (an optical illusion of artificial/unreachable beauty), and a psychogeography of blame in the façade of compassion where “the contours of the veil” outline less a recognition than a belonging in “the throes [ ! ] / [cont.] of the self-immolation rodeo.”

MC: Yes, and through this image, this psychogeography, it creates a system where the larger apparatus is incapable of being at fault. We can blame ourselves or the landlord, but never the frame that creates that relationship.

JDF: I wonder what relationship may or may not exist between BTD’s formal echoes—the etc., ellipses, use of repetition/anaphora—and the eco-critical/poetic?

MC: This is a really interesting point. And I love what it’s approaching, whether I had intended for it or not. I think part of the fun of these kinds of conversations is that we get to attempt to understand the book together. I of course had ideas that I wanted to convey / explore when I wrote it, but sometimes that comes through in ways that I had not done consciously. These formal echoes, the gaps in language, the waiting that’s alluded to in these grammatical structures, I originally thought of as a fracturing of the otherwise grandiose, malicious voice of the text. Perhaps other voices slipping into its place, lapses in time, moments for it to extract more material to use against you. There is a way that, when we talk about ecological disaster, it is not really about the facts. It is not really about what you say. For the most part, we already know what’s happening and who is doing it. There is no impact in my saying that a certain species has gone extinct due to the human impact on the climate, or that a handful of companies are primarily responsible for what will likely be irreversible devastation. Saying these things only creates a sense of powerlessness and frustration. It makes language feel even more inadequate than it already is. There are parts of the text that speak of an increasingly desperate ecological state, but these lapses feel more damning. It is in the gaps between language, the shortcomings—when language cannot properly convey what’s happening—that these disasters persist.

JDF: BTD is magnificently decadent. Maybe later on we can discuss the appearance of Lautréamont in the book. For now, it seems BTD’s typography clues us in to its topographical operation: the weaving of nature and artifice. The images: there’s something atomic and hazardous about them; they also at times read like neurological frays and firings, labyrinths of the unconscious, blueprints for a virus of the body; at other times the harsh precision of codification, the programmatic.

MC: Much of the book’s imagery takes the form of these sometimes elaborate, often messy black spiky structures. At first they might seem like they are a very direct representation of the book’s setting, but as the reader moves through the text, they begin to appear more flexible. Sometimes as odd threads, at other times as alien glyphs. I very much wanted them to exist in this gray area between the animate and the inanimate. It gives them the ability to function both structurally and linguistically. Across my work, I’ve been fixated on the idea of a book that feels alive. When I started publishing, this took the form of the book speaking to you, trying to convince you that it was real—essentially by creating a very convincing character out of the text itself. But with Being Towards Death, I wanted that feeling to come through in the design. Often, these structures muddle the process of reading. They disrupt the conventional directionality of the page (from the top left to the bottom right). It asks the reader to not just read it, but to first look at it, to make eye contact, before discerning how you’d like to move through. And because that disruption is often caused by this tangle of spiky limbs, the reader begins to question whose limbs these are, what movements, choices they are trying to influence. BTD is often a very distrustful text. And the more it doesn’t trust you, the more you don’t trust it.

JDF: And elsewhere, text and tentacle coalesce. How are we to read the infiltration of language into the corpse of your dark geometries? It’s almost like deciphering a film negative.

MC: There is a particular section around the center of the book where the relationship between the text and the image changes. For the majority of the BTD, the narrator is confident and has full control over the text. But for a moment, when we press our ear against the walls of the structure, we can hear the voices of those who are stuck here with us—other people forced into the same divine torture mechanism as us. And there is a kind of relief in this. Not in any sadistic way, but in knowing that our circumstances are not isolated. There are, if you believe the occupancy numbers at the beginning of the book, tens of thousands of people in these structures presumably inflicted with the same hellish conditions as us. But through the walls we can witness the echoes of their joy, annoyance, pain, the mundanity of their lives. It is a voice counter to that of the garden, which only knows how to hurt and manipulate. And one that might question the control of the narrator. Perhaps its influence is less ubiquitous than we might think. Inside the corpse, the bacteria is doing its best to thrive.

JDF: Related to glyphs, BTD’s scripts—e.g. “yr”—conveys speed and agility, the embeddedness of language and its cognitive imprint, as well as coding. A kind of post-humanism enshrined by the book’s prophetic tone.

MC: I’m very drawn to errors. I think there is something beautiful about how language can bend and mutate. Even after it breaks apart, we can still understand it. BTD is riddled with errors. The ‘yr’ you mentioned (alongside other misspellings), but also strange and repetitive enjambment like ‘shap-/-pe’ or ‘c-/-an’ these cuts that feel harsh and fragile, but that still function. There’s a way these errors feel like a computation glitch, like you accidentally hit enter or fat-fingered a key, but they also have a sonic quality to them. As if lingering on a consonant too long or pausing awkwardly. Throughout the text, there’s also a handful of filler words, bracketed and injected into lines. Things like ‘[uh]’ or ‘[um]’ that sometimes interrupt a thought and other times replace a word. I wanted the text to feel like it was being generated in real-time. Like it was dictated, even if what dictated it wasn’t necessarily human. There’s a certain way that it feels truer to speak with velocity than to linger on a thought, to be careful and precise. The text is summoning something demonic. Something powerful and controlling, but not careful. It acts with sweeping gestures and feverish emotionality. I wanted it to have a momentum that felt powerful in what it wanted to convey, but fragile in the sense that if it stopped, it might suddenly fall apart. Maybe this is a vital quality to the prophetic / prophetic tone—it must be said the moment it surfaces.

JDF: The sonorous quality, in addition to the “stutter” of the short lines, also give the book a ritual, incantatory element. When to conjure is to resurrect, and prophecy is to peer ahead, what is the temporal residence of BDS? I’m not sure I’m totally convinced that it starts and ends in the dystopic, neither is it simply liminal. It seems, rather, to pull everything into its reverberations.

MC: I envision BTD as a book deeply rooted in the present tense. It is always marching forward, but it is never really moving towards any singular destination. Like rolling down an endless hill, gathering more and more debris. An eternal avalanche. Which is not dystopic, because it has not arrived at its shit-future, and maybe not liminal, because although it is moving, it is not moving / lingering between states. There is no future to collapse into. There is no dystopia to arrive at. And in this present tense there is an intense fragility. While I was writing BTD I always had this sense that if I stopped, everything would fall to pieces. That the book could not sustain itself in my imagination over long breaks or if I stepped away. Not that the book was written in some manic one-take, but I felt that it always had to be present in my mind. If I was not working on it, I had to be thinking about it. There was an obsessive quality to the book’s assembly. Not a conjuring or a prophecy but an evocation, maybe a possession. A willingness to give yourself over to the text and let it take up residence in your head until it fully manifested.

JDF: If BTD dwells in the time of writing and the event of presence, and the “you” represents the occupant of the garden—a “character” in the book, so to speak—what is the status of the “I”? Its position seems to exceed that of mere narration/observation, as it stands, casts, tethers, desires, dreams, and, at times, fails. Is the first-person as alive as the book itself, or some other utterance of entanglement?

MC: I very much think so. While I was writing, this ‘I’ kept growing. At first, I thought it was the landlord—whoever owned the garden—then the garden itself, but eventually that felt too small as well. It felt to me as if this voice was coming from somewhere more abstract. A vocalization of the kinds of power structures and economic systems that would create something like the garden. Whatever demon would come of that. But there was never an entirely clear picture in my head of who that was. And in that sense, the voice felt very alive to me. There was no character to fall into, no role for it to obligate itself to. It was unstable and malleable; it always had the potential to change and adapt. Even the garden and the landlord exists within a system—have rules they must abide to. I wanted this voice to feel like it was creating our oppression before our eyes. Not as an agent of, but as the head of the apparatus. And in some ways I think the narrator exists in a middle ground between the two options you’ve presented. I see the voice as alive, as its own entity (however blurred), but that entity is still forming. It’s assembling its speech from the environment around it, collaging these fragments together in order to communicate with us.

JDF: Speaking of tenuous pronouns voiced by indeterminacy, I was delighted to see BTD dedicated/partially indebted to Danielle Collobert. What do you love about her work and how does it inform your own?

MC: Collobert’s It Then has maybe had the strongest impact on my work of anything I’ve read in the last ten years. Her writing feels so infinitely dense. It’s able to convey these moments that feel so massive through so few words. And the few words that are there are cut up in ways that never quite form a full sentence. They are only fragments, the inklings of a thought, the surface tension above a feeling. I dedicated Being Towards Death to her because of how dependent I was on that book while I was writing. Every time I couldn’t figure out where to go, I would find myself going back to It Then, opening to a random page, and finding a passage that would help me reset and come back to the project excited about how I could twist / re-orient / subvert the language to regain that momentum.

JDF: On the other hand, there is a sort of Maldororian mythology of (hyperbolic) excess in BDS, yet the song of the “bomb” that lands “outside” is already shattered. What is this outside? In what way does the book engage and disengage with everybody’s favorite Comte?

MC: Outside of Lautréamont is a mystery to me as well. I am stuck inside too, so the outside remains somewhat hypothetical. It could be a utopian dream; it could be a barren wasteland. One of the garden’s structures is named Castle Lautréamont, so in a more pragmatic sense, the bombs in question might just be placed strategically—around the base of the building. A bomb that doesn’t impact the integrity of the target is only a gesture. And even then, the bombs of BTD feel futile. They don’t seem to accomplish much, even if they do go off (although it’s hard to say if they ever make it that far). The real Lautréamont was a big inspiration for the narrator’s cruelty. Maldoror has such a spite and often disregard for the reader. In terms of his tone, but also in the book’s frequent second person writing. He often addresses us directly, and this feels so effective to me. It lures us into the world of the text; it indicts us in crimes we’re sure we had nothing to do with. Often, it feels that books are very kind to us. They want to ask for our time, ask for our engagement, they create a comfortable space, or at least a space conducive for that interaction. But I’m very drawn to the confrontation. Or not even the confrontation, but the disdain. To treat the reader as if they are no more important than the book. I wanted BTD to feel like a book that does not exist for us as the reader.

JDF: Can we circle back to fragility for a quick moment, as it relates to the act of writing and the body of writing, gesture and address? The repetition of “mewing” often finds itself in proximity to mutilated body parts—tongues, ribs, nostrils, etc.—within the dismemberment of the text. To what or whom is the gesture of the cry addressed after the disdain for the reader has been announced? Or is it ventriloquism? Rhetorical effect? The narrator’s own surrender?

MC: I wanted to explore a very anachronistic lexicon with this project. Some very old, some very new. The use of ‘mew’ in the book came about because of the word’s resurgent popularity while I was writing. It was used to refer to a way of positioning your tongue in your mouth in order to have a more defined jawline. It was something I think devised for correcting oral posture, but it became associated with incels and whatever rot was on the internet at the time. I was really drawn to the way it was embodying this intense insecurity (having to create this temporary fake facial structure) but also the face that people make when trying to do this is always so strange. It’s almost like a smirk, or a blue steel. Like you’re posing. So I loved the idea of this narrator having the arrogance to tear you apart (or watch you get torn apart) and to strike a pose as it happens—to see you in pain and only be thinking of themselves, of how they look in that moment.

JDF: By the way, the book looks great. I’m infinitely impressed by Naomi Falk’s persistence and editorial vision. How did BTD land in her lap? What’s it like working with her, and how does it feel to be Crop Circle’s inaugural author? Do the aesthetics of the press—“esotericism and eeriness”—shift the book into a different context?

MC: Naomi is fantastic. It’s really been a pleasure to work with her. The book landed in her lap kind of by accident. I had a lot of trouble figuring out who to send it to. I wanted to work with someone new, but it was difficult to find a publisher who would be interested in this strange middle ground between an art book and a poetry collection. Eventually I sent it to POWERHOUSE books, who didn’t accept it, but recommended I send it to their imprint Archway Editions, which Naomi was a senior editor for. It wasn’t a great fit for them, but Naomi sent me this very passionate email about how drawn she was to the book and how it aligned with what she wanted out of literature. All of it culminated in her asking if I’d be open to her publishing as part of her revival of Crop Circle (which had originally published a monograph and an exhibition catalog). I immediately agreed. She had this enthusiasm that was really exciting for me. Being the inaugural release made everything feel new. There were no long-standing systems or workflows in place. The process was personal and hands on. And she’s really pulled through. The physical edition of the book is beautiful. The paper is great; the gloss insert is great. I feel like this answer almost reads like a testimonial, but really it was a joy to work with her. The “esotericism and eeriness” of the press’s aesthetic I think create a great entry point for the work. It gives you a good sense of what you might be getting into. I’m excited to see what they put out next.

JDF: The book ends with: “In this landscape of budding death-threats // Our icon dances [ ! ]” What’s on your artistic horizon? What other work are you developing? How does it correspond to the conceptual/linguistic methods of BDS, or can readers look forward to a more radical departure?

MC: I’ve written one book since BTD and am working on another now. Both are visually very different from this book and from each other, but pull from similar linguistic methods, albeit in not entirely overlapping ways. The one that’s already written, I’m shopping around now. It has a very sparse, rigid form and the text is more rooted in our own world than in the decadent hyperbole of the garden. Although there are these core concerns across my work, I’m trying to avoid retreading the same ideas, scenarios, approaches too much. I want every book to feel like its own microcosm of the moment I wrote it, of the ideas that I was obsessing over at that time. Of course, some of those ideas will always be present in some form or another, but it’s important to me that every book is a new book, and not just an iteration of the previous. And I think the jump between BTD and the next project will be a fun one.