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AARON KUNINFOLDING RULER STARFence Books / 2005Folding Ruler Star is a book-length perversionof the renaissance blaison form, anepistemology of shame incanted throughthe organ not of voice but of self-touch.From the author’s preface: “A body hasfive parts, each part is alarmed.Descriptions of the parts set off thealarms.” Favorite targets of a sixteenthcentury blaison’s praise might have beena beloved’s cheeks (flush as a... ), neck(slender as the... ), lips (flush as... ), breasts(flush as... ). Kunin’s alarmed targets,however, describe a perimeter defensesystem. They are emphatically the humanextremities—fingers, nails, hair and skin,with cameos by the mouth and eyes, butonly in roles as exogenous organs of outwardand averted touch.We need to talk. It’s about Aaron Kunin’sfingers and Aaron Kunin’s hair. On theone hand, the hair. The book features anepigraph from Silvan Tomkins, on thelowering of the head as a shame response.Tomkins’ description cues up the followingimplicit detail. When you lower yourhead in shame to another, your face isreplaced by your hair. Hair is the face ofshame. And if you’ve met Aaron Kunin,you know that his shame wears a majesterialface, a ceilingless vault of red curls—cue the electric harps! Folding Ruler Star isargued in the preface to be a value-neutralParadise Lost, whose tree of knowledge ishere reimagined as the tree of shame.And thus in the Kunin imaginary as wellas the Kunin real, hair performs that treeof shame. The book’s first poem, “TheShame Tree,” sets this analogue inmotion: “eyes tree looked thicker /reflected in your / hair ah in the shape- //less mask of your hair / your additional /hair your living hair.” Nor is this the firstinstance of such a conceit in the author’sextensive unpublished erotic catalogue.The Sore Throat, ostensibly a translation ofMaurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisandeinto a two-hundred word vocabulary,commences with the following illustration:“The Maeterlinck play is full ofextravagant gestures: perhaps the mostfamous scene is one in which Pelléas tiesstrands of Mélisande’s hair to a tree andthen climbs into the tree, thus creating,out of a projection from his lover’s head,an environment that he can inhabit.”Hand over fist, the tree of hair is analmost cinematic projection, immersiveand sensational.It reminds me of an anecdote from earlycinema history which, given that Kunin issomething of a film scholar, seems usefulin embarrassing him with. The year 1891saw the first exhibition of ThomasEdison’s kinetoscope, promised as anearly model of a synchronous imagesoundprojector. Edison touted in aninterview, “Yes, it’s true, you can sit inyour parlor and look at a big screen andsee... [the actor] walk up to the front stageand bow and smile and take a drink ofwater and start off with his oration. Everytime your eyes see him open his mouthyour ears will hear what he says.” Quiteto the contrary, Edison’s inaugural kinetoscopefilm depicted nothing more than asilent young man waving his hands andtouching his hat. Edison wouldn’t deliveron his trumpeted promise—the kinetoscopenever so much as squawked. Itsyoung gentleman, touching himself andunable to speak, must surely be known tothe Folding Ruler Star author, who is keenlyattuned to, or rather bent on his crisis.“His problem—subjection to sensation forwhich he has no language,” writes Kuninof the Goulaud character in his Sore Throatpreface. It is a crisis which animates notonly the brute Goulaud and our mutehand-waver, but Kunin himself.This brings us to the next alarmedextremity in both Folding Ruler Star’s blaisonand Kunin’s larger body of work: thehands. Ever since mesmerists developed abattery of dramatic hand gestures as visualaids, the hands and fingers have beenemployed as the conduits for extraordinarymental power. In fiction, film andeveryday conversation, what’s the mostcommonly recognized gesture for exertingmagical force? The extension of theforearms, hands out, fingers spread andconvulsing. A strange chip off the block ofmesmeric tradition, Aaron Kunin’s ownconvulsing hands are primary organs notjust of writing but of raw linguistic power.Over the years he has developed (andbecome subject to) a system of nervousfinger twitches which he consciously orunconsciously interprets as letters, wordsand phrases. The system, which Kunindescribes as a “binary hand-alphabet,” isdetailed in an essay, “Knowledge Blobs”:“‘I wasn’t thinking anything that I wasAPRIL/MAY 2006 29