"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
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