Anomalous Press - Sarah Kruse - These Things I Have Not Seen Have Become Me - Nonfiction

These Things I Have Not Seen Have Become Me

Sarah Kruse

Author's Note

A deck of cards and ransom chance. There is something even in the misspelling, this mistyping. Maybe mistakes matter more because there is no matter to the idea of sense. Breakdown becomes everything.

8) “Jump or  Jumping primarily refers to the physical action of jumping, that is, propelling oneself rapidly upward such that momentum causes the body to become airborne.”

Threads form out of gossamer chance. Language is listening. I am playing jump rope upward. Signs are given to me. A form and a gift. Momentum is thrilling, beginning propelling.

10) “Heavily distributed concentrations of melanin may cause freckles to multiply and cover an entire area of skin, such as the face. Freckles are rare on infants, and more commonly found on children before puberty.”

A blemish or mark, I have always had them. More prominent in the sun only those close enough to kiss me ever really notice them. Flaws seen close up disappear with distance. Keep everything and everyone at bay, and they will always think you are perfect. Only those who know you see the imperfections in everything. Disappearance is an effect closeness removes.

6) Fifteen studies found that unwarranted multi-way stops actually increased speed away from intersections as motorists try to make up lost time spent at "unnecessary" stop signs. Multi-way stop signs impose high vehicle operating costs, longer than needed travel times, excessive fuel consumption and increased vehicle emissions. Researchers also found that safety of pedestrians (especially small children) may sometimes be actually decreased. Pedestrians expect vehicles to stop, but many drivers run the ‘unnecessary’ signs.”

We need rules for order, but, again, I have come against my limits. What I don’t know cannot be made up through new language. The old sign must suffice. I ask a store clerk for an item; he asks if he can help me. The speed of listening increases without comprehension, in other words, we can no longer hear. I seem unable to make myself clear today. The safety of language is a no longer listening. What I think I know to be true may actually have the opposite effect.

4) Traffic on the public Internet grew by 100 percent per year, while the mean annual growth in the number of Internet users was thought to be between 20% and 50%. This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary open nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over the network. As of 31 March 20 world population).

The expansion of knowledge and information floods through everything. News spreads like fire, and misinformation. Is all knowledge innocent? I ask my students to reflect on how fast the news of the Boston bombings spread and what was reported. Internet sources repeated the violence, headlines touting repetition of blood. The repetition of difference maybe in the surface of poetry. Change of use may produce an actual change, but language is not yet action. Those without a network wait. While there is a march in Paris, 2,000 are dead in Nigeria due to Boko Haram, but this news arrives rather late, and fairly quietly.

9) “Measures of output/function in Computer Science, Physics/ Chemistry, Earth Science, Production/manufacturing, and Finance. Also see, Yield (college admissions), a statistic describing what percent of applicants choose to enroll; Yield (engineering), the plastic deformation of a material; Yield surface; Yield (album), by Pearl Jam; Yield sign, a traffic sign; Terminal yield, a sequence of leaves in a tree data structure; Yield, a feature of a corouktine in computer programming; Yield, an element of the TV series The Amazing Race.”

To give way, and surrender by following what I am told. Abundance and a giving. Pop culture creeps in in the end. The plastics of surface already seems a given. Give the sign that will yield meaning, but already the structure is failing inside of the play. All are ready before anything is said. Physics is a game too, just different from chess. Ludwig knew games by playing them. Already subject to culture, and I cannot give anything without the other contexts coming along. This is also language.

3)Insurgent groups have often employed assassination as a tool to further their causes. Assassinations provide several functions for such groups, namely the removal of specific enemies and as propaganda tools to focus the attention of media and politics on their cause.”

To close to the present to comment? What is lost and what is gained in media exposure? Is the reverberation and exposure part of the plan? What is the function of ideology, and where is the beginning and ending of language? But what is the cause of something that seems causeless? How does violence impact language? And how does language impact violence? Is the thing I’m seeing reported ever the cause or only the effect? What if there really is no causal nexus, Ludwig?

2) “Sure decorative laminates. A new type of HPDL is produced using real  wood veneer or multilaminar veneer as top surface. Woodlam Realwood, Alpikord produced by Alpi spa and Veneer-Art, produced by Lamin-Art are examples of these types of laminate. High-pressure laminates consists of laminates "molded and cured at pressures not lower than 1,000 lb per sq in.(70 kg per sq cm) and more commonly in the range of 1,20

Pressure and measure. No one ever looks into the process, only the meaning. Building up and stripping down. File and fill. Is this really nonfiction? Somewhat like geology. Formed in depth under heat and pressure, crystals are larger the difference between basalt and granite. Only marble is metamorphic. I liked geology for all the wrong reasons. Rocks and poetics. I liked Law for the same wrong reason. Embedded psychoanalysis and ideology found in “truth.” These things are not laminate, but maybe formed under pressure. Veneer and surface. I have been warned against the variance and dichotomy of surface and depth. Stein preferred the surface of language. Compression is a new substance I am only learning to read.

5) “Studies have shown that young females that read fashion magazines tend to have more bulimic symptoms than those females who do not. This further demonstrates the impact of media on the likelihood of developing the disorder. Individuals first accept and ‘buy into’ the ideals, and then attempt to transform themselves in order to reflect the societal ideals of attractiveness.”

We are what we read. Everything I see I want to take at face value, but repetition thins out the nouns. Names are used up and lose their meaning. The trap of ideology is laid, and at every turn the world repeats it to us. It is not the inability to escape language’s cage, as Ludwig might have it, but it is the inability to escape the thought. Before someone speaks, I already assume what I think they know. I fit the world to what I see, but what I see is colored by what has already happened before. Newness is always a reinterpretation.

1) “The pumice stone. Seeing her perfectly shaped nails, it instantly became the latest female trend in the French Court of Versailles. The pumice stone was carved into a pencil like shape, which was used to trim and shape the edges of the nail. This tool would not be disposed after use, but would be hand washed by the maids and placed by the bathtub to be used again.

The pencil and the point that wears things down. I have been to Versailles. Of course it was the French. Refinery of the simple. But I cannot refine what has been worn down already. Glass, stone, and diamond. The everyday cuts through a veneer of language used again and again. Existing in a different past, a self that had not become what I am now. Wear the word down, it begins again and again says Stein. Instantly the new becomes trend and fashion and an old repetition carved to fit anticipations. The weight and shape of the stone is lost. Only recently have I decided to take care of my nails myself.

7)His ideas have been influential in the shaping of postmodern ideas of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, and recent intellectuals such as David Hollinger have written extensively on Bourne's ideology. John Dos Passos, an influential American modernist writer, eulogized Bourne in the chapter "Randolph Bourne" of his novel 1919 and drew heavily on the ideas presented in War Is The Health of the State in the novel.”

R. B. is Randolph Bourne not Roland Barthes. Changing anticipation in lettering somewhat familiar. Some things are so well known while others are not. A flip of chance? What we come to know through history is only what didn’t fall away in a different version of the story. We begin to see more by seeing what wasn’t there. Somethings have always been there. Maybe everything is always there. The ideology we can’t see is the real one. Class struggle is not a construct but exists through real tension, something I am reminded of, when on my way to the airport, the cab driver separating himself from others refers to “those people,” assuming it is the truth of things as they are.


Sarah Kruse is a PhD candidate and graduate fellow at the University of Rhode Island, working on a dissertation on avant-garde poetics, the color of grammar, and philosophy of language. She has creative nonfiction forthcoming in Hotel Amerika and has had critical work in The International Journal of Žižek Studies. She is a staff writer for Propeller Quarterly and also serves as managing editor for Barrow Street Press. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.