Monday 18 March 2019

The Introduction By Aad de Gids to 'Till Claimed', Veer Books 2019


There is a kind of meticulous nihilism going around and we're born with it, it is spooned in. This, then, 'organogramme', supersphere, hypersphere, antiesthetics, punksensibilities, are made possible by the continuous onslaught on our retinas of nothing but a turn for the worse the world had taken say, since the 60s. From out of this there came a reaction then of postmodernism, let us call it that. After 11 sep 2001 postirony and hypercomplexisation, psychotic societal derangement and dissociationism became consolidated. The art acting and mirroring against this were born. Mc Aloran's writings were never in another tradition. Positivity doesn't seem an exhaustive clarification method anymore. Elucidation is gone, the need for it gone, everyone walks with their smartphone to the street nowhere expecting amelioration. Just raw existence, survival as in a chimpanzee war. “I take from the dogs what will/ what will//feeding/[//]feeding//fucking the life//from the idle light’s//indifference”. To just call this as etherial as crass poetry 'nihilism' would be a reductive approach to it. It seems more an affirmation of 'what is', 'what it is'. And it is all not so nice. “I lack//I lack the colourings//I spit the dew//from an un-harvested mouth//scattered //ablaze with nothing” Here we see where our interventionism is, if still possible, allotted to. Secundarity and contingency. Here we have poetry as sublime as it is irreversibly constative. The nights are 'read' as 'nights on earth'. We're hostages of what we're surrounded by. Here we see what is left for us, as non-space, spaces as non-descript as indecisive, starkly associating with bleakness and stupor nevertheless. All 'actions' are redundant and the world is chaotic, cosmic, chemified and fraxated to mere pumice, even our deaths are buried (not: 'our deads') within unceremony and masscalculatoric machinations. At the same time Mc Aloran describes the groundscape, psychoscape of the diagrammatic contours of the space we die in, live in, not so much difference anymore. Actually, it seems in the reading of TILL CLAIMED I seem to now have stumbled upon a central axiom of this collection of concisely and superpreciously worded poems that, to live almost means to be dead nowadays. There is no difference anymore. But as Mc Aloran indirectly yet with exactitude presses a knifing diagnosis upon it it appears that, all 'communication' now is directed toward oneself; here a systemic unglossiness incorporated with the eyes of the dead, still longing to fulfill an organic deep seated functionality, yet there was not much to see or rather: there was so much to see it swamped the whole vista, perspectivist glaciality unto chill. “fluidity of death/[//]nocturne//I-skinned of breath/ aligned//& the knock turns//to the close of//the fist unsung where teeth obscene//glint in the absence//none less to follow on from//split///surface//unbridled nothing//ripping the cull from the bones of I/eye//where the winds//scattering//breath of the solace of/[//]no solace/[//]merely the silence of/…” Again, a central as acentral passus with heady content. Solace = silence. A microscript of a decomposition. Viscerality as metaphor for death = life. This point-for-point description of a decomposition at once comprises the diagnostics of our psychotic sociuses. While Mc Aloran's poetics has a rather becoming elegance this particular form of poetry runs the risk of being deemed 'hermetic'. As does my personal style of poetry so different from Mc Aloran's yet weighed with the same infusion of punk-esthetics. And where this also could suggest explosiveness and blunt aplomb it is rather contextual and semantical that we have not so much chosen, but were chosen by the language steered from trauma and posttrauma, worldparticipation and being witnesses of threatening and bleak times, that suffuses our writing skills with radical choices. In Mc Aloran's poetry there is certainly a leaning towards death but as we've seen, this at once also means an inclination towards life. Adorno in citing another: “life doesn't live”. Perhaps with new generational shifts upcoming will there be another literature possible although it is hard to see how this shall crystallize. “vague the silence//(collapsed/[//]nothing…)//vertigo breath//& the//jarring breath(en)//dead stone//vacuous I die/ I//laughterling caress//sweet night of bloody earth/ waste//& the drip-feed sun//& the night//balancing on a//crescendo//of subtle apocalyptic”. The red wavely line beneath the word “laughterling” already says it all. We have to invent new words to stay accurately skintight to the surfaces of the world. The surfaces of the words and of language are on the move. Not alone seismic shift they but glacial and uncomfortable polar...



--Aad de Gids, 16/ 09/ 2018

The book itself is available here







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