"The language of 'internally fissured realities' ... is dense, sound-driven, and erudite. The territory being mined is somewhere between language and geography, but there is a stubborn (and tenaciously coherent) essay on the modern here, particularly modern art. The equally tenacious reader will be rewarded by a sober sensibility."
--Andrei Codrescu, EXQUISITE CORPSE
LAND PARTITION: 8 SECTIONS
by louis armand in regard to nature ... philosophy ought to know her as she is, that if the philosopher's stone is hidden anywhere, it must at any rate be within nature herself, that she contains her own reason within her --hegel 1. the landscape marks only the incessance of procedure-- the narrow band of a depthless field running out of contexts--shot-reverse- shot in relentless pursuit hunted by the lens-- a remote & fugitive line frozen in two- dimensional space sanitised for mass viewing, the failed escape reduced to forensic banality a cross-hatching of bodies "live flesh" simulated, almost in vitrinal tableaux mortes 2. the island ... is generally barren, being dry, as i said; & the best of it is but very indifferent soil not nostalgia that brought him here, then what? where the map indicates water it has been dry since before living memory (naming the delusion, however, will take him longer than diagnosis-- causality becoming more & more difficult to de- termine as the remoteness between signifier & land- scape increases--words under "mineral sedation" ... regarding their virtue, that which they assume the capacity for, as a power he alone now possesses) 3. it murmurs, from an abandoned (it seems to them) location--the light goes out: bodies ground vault--inertial square / squat walls, set on wooden piles rising white pale out of earth vertically / sheer--planes arbitrarily inter- secting / or the architecture, crouching, vulnerable is a hieroglyph of im- permanence / the pre- carious statement of (universal) truth-- "possession" being [a fraction] of "the law" 4. fearing a storm ... in a place where there was no shelter, & desiring at least to have sea-room: for the clouds began to grow thick on the western-board, & the wind was already there more often than not we cut our losses & move on-knowing that from elsewhere things appear differently an eye narrowing through the headlands cataracted synapse muscle & nerve depth-soundings charting the sub- aqueous humour-- paradox of inner perception not yet brought to consciousness foundering somewhere just off the point-- the shoals barely navigable & danger written in the undertow 5. surreptitiously it re- emerges, in blue veinless light-- crepuscular as un- structured stimulus & the cold remembering its way back in to the body at this latitude before the sun rises up to sear flesh, ghost walking at mid-day-- a shadow, barely re- semblant, of this place also 6. quoted from elsewhere, the place-names read like an inventory of absentees--& there are too many unexplained phenomena, static figures looming up from the plain like genital malformations & sabattier effect framing negativity in the sudden exposure--air resinous & heat waves shimmering upwards visible & tactile in lines of distorted transparency--synthesising space as projection of assumed attributes, the too-fertile screen concealing substrata leached by saline waters-- the distant shores beyond the sign, graphemic in red sacrificial ochre, salient-& monumental, dominating the horizon 7. cross to: dusk [broken hill] the abandoned mineshafts, concrete slabs like monoliths in a desert-- silhouettes of headframes & wracked stretch of earth-ore-crushers & conveyor belts spilling out of processing mills in sibilant ventriloquy or haemostasis miming declinations of surface structure, ground indicating subsidence the foundations "undermined" & condition terminal 8. the gesture doesn't require translation but remains un- equivocally apart, aberrant--a "landmark" transgressing an (otherwise) undifferentiated space, denial of underlying order-- erosion, the inescapable decline into desert regions, salt flats, entropy-- l'acte gratuit in accordance / with a universal law of averages-- at each point, the eerie continuation eyes empty as a vast plain / in the distance like celluloid / in the middle of (nowhere) totem figures, ossature half-buried in the scorched earth--a mute prostration (?)& the self anathematised, like something pestilent on the fringe of inoculated memory *Published in LAND PARTITION (Melbourne: Textbase, 2001) Copyright © Louis Armand, 2001 To order, contact: www.textbase.net
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