Friday 9 October 2020

'in dim forgotte(n)', (Infinity Land Press), reviewed by Aad de Gids

 






MICHAEL MCALORAN LATEST BOOK
(he would gladly say 'last') is quite the thing. reading Michael's texts requires the right mindset beforehand. not a (as a queer moronic Grande English Poet had concocted before one could even read his frêle poems) mandatory listing of 'thou shalt not' and 'thou shalteth' [a 'CAVEAT', I suddenly remember*], but rather is it better to be prepared for a dense poetic form and content A/FRIVOLOUS and particularly NON/HEIDI/ESQUE. content is specifically black, bleak, offered with sharp beaks of relevant than shocking and heinously beautifully worded content regarding the Endworld, escatologic nonplaces and dead worlds, teratologic graphic scenographies for 'everyone to read' eagerly !
[*a warning or proviso of specific stipulations, conditions, or limitations.
"there are a number of caveats which concern the validity of the assessment results"
in LAW: "a notice, especially in a probate, that certain actions may not be taken without informing the person who gave the notice."]
'in dim forgotte(n)', already with the title Michael leaps into a kind of artificial or, what mayeth I know, real Victoriana of lexicology, of malformations and dreamy reminiscences of the old English, Irish, language. (I am the Dutch European.) (I am VERY VERY tolerant.) within the book we find more words maltreated, modernised while antiquated, adding to the strange etherspheres and concrete inframural morgues that are described with as explicite as poetic descriptions. funerary 'cavates', excavations, but in the End-Now world. we're already living in a dead world. the manifestations amass but this is no sign of vivacity. (I am also a devolved complexisized nihilist.) Michael gives text to empty corridors, where you don't know if you're in- or out, up- or down, before- or after, above- or beneath. this affirmative displacement is this status (stasis) texted within thousand formulas.
"an eruption of lung in a roomscape devoid of presence but one...silence otherwise...". "a vague amass of soundless emptiness...". "where to elected to this there was no question put forth nor ever yet asked of...voidal as...struck out...". (19)*
[*within regular double quotationmarks I cite out of Michaels 'in dim forgotte(n)'. pagenumber added.]
the language used here gives reminiscence to Adorno's notorious 'acribia', a dense, tightly cryptic and or undecipherable codex of sentences, within which he spoke in a contradictory and with double negations complex affirmative content with ominous cling. Michael still goes further. where Adorno's last 2 books: Negative Dialektik and Ästhetische Theorie still hoped for new lines, after horrific times, Michael just gives a mimic of 'what there is', the artificial, hegemonial, monomaniacal, hysteric and corporate infantilistic jargons. with Adorno the contradictions gave off meaning of a 'World not living', it was fired by WWII and 'after Auschwitz'. we have experienced hyperevents even heinous after that Horror and thus the texts, in anywhichway Michaels text, give expression almost sideways, if he describes exactly what has happened, what will happen, and even the expectations to those vistas have become obsolete.
"...all manner of sounds to collect the unknown absence a-breathe burns of in sickly vibrant air...blackened the bones collect the rejection of time...ice as...the walls peel slowly revealing a vague texture of nothing...". "bled stone a collapse into what once never was...". (20) "breakage collision stealth of acute dissolve...". (21)
the text gets form after postmodernism. if we follow the sentences in conformatist, conservative, classic ways we stutter upon 'breakages', slits, discontinuities. the sentence, begun in conformative manner, suddenly seems more of an associationist manifesto slice. neologisms document the situation as it has evolved 'in situ'.
I have to reconsider my strategy to review Michaels book. if I continue with this format, it becomes a book about a book. I will find the contoured citations and my comments made then and there. the review will be finished today, to make Michael happy, no ? (a KarlLagerfeldism I picked up on.)
an arrival of Tomorrows targets more the senselessness of it than the 'modern' adage 'this Tomorrow is smoother than that one'. "moth wings aglow in cavity of gait sharp shut...".(22)
"...bled out where to final is to breath's lack of absolve...underwater skull of what once was...". (23) we certainly have here a diagnosis of our time. I have remarked this before but Michael reaches here a pure 'listing' of texted events where they lost almost an informative value but constituate more of a postmetaphysical status of stasis. then to list what there is to [sense] gives an accurate cinematic image of the abandoned, postTschernobyl-Fukushima plazas of irreversible damage. "...carrion equations of silt scuttling across light's streak of tidal unknown" "suffocation of lack...star shadowing...limbs burn in chemical absolve as the blood it courses...".(24) this all isn't journalistic report. doesn't add to the informational warfare. rather than decryptisation, decipherability and even intelligibility these texts are more instinctive, more connected with the senses. in long associationist hauls they leave an impressum on the earth and on the retina. "...semblance shadows cold electric lights that never cease...". "...child wanders the nightscapes of the forever lost...". "...Child forgets all it seethe...barred the windows of a lifeless room from which to view there never should have been...".(25)
'child forgets all it seethe' can be read as 'all it sees' as also 'all it seeths'. an indifference given in by the vulgar times we live in. in the interview preceding the text of the book 'in dim forgotte(n)' the interviewer mentions this child as a new 'character' in Michaels Œuvre, but as I noticed this child is a human remnant in the 'Postworld', sec. the book is edited in four parts with vivid graphic illustrations by artist Martin Bladh. a shorter Ouverture to get to the taste of it; a long, junglist and almost inimpenetrable (yet if there is want, there is result) incessant stream of wordweave and sinister as macabre mise-en-scenes, leaving one not so much tired but surprised by the catascopic catatonic catharsis all exflected in one Haul. UHaul. to finalise still the 'preface' '(i)', there is presented a forbodening eventplaza of becoming.
"...walls everywhere...cigarettes extinguished in the flesh of dawning...yet dawn is nothing ever ever...the screaming never ends....it rocks back & forth in sequence...distances from which unknown...where black is the colour & none is the number...trace of liquid burning..." (28).
(I)
is the thirty page outburst of textual furor, stupor, dolor, noir, torpor, the magmaic chiasms of inintermittent wordstreams and diagnosis infaustus. it never abandons its poetic roots: "..as if were fallen/a candelabra of crystal bone dice turn in grip of ashen sun light gripped by longing spat out upon what once was shadowing/". (33) the speak is of corridors, rooms suddenly awoken to, a scent trail, the Deleuze-Guattarian 'CorpsSansOrganes', a substrate. linguistics bump into it: "/as if to say that/", "till words cascade into void of vacant nullity/". (33) linguistics, either linguistics, lexicology, textLab is as ridicule as radical. we are in the realm of postText. in this stretch of text, in which I had the pleasure of tracking through in my les Tropéziennes purple mules, toenails lacquered in Sally Hansens, Hollywood, acrid acryl yellow, language is the material in exhaustive similarity with what is written, is viscosity, viscerality, visciousness, bijoux boutique visagiste expenditure.
a Postmortem forms an Incidency of what emerges. "/bites it once till regalia of castrated purpose/fingers of dead long rot of all that turned throughout a shadow a minced heart cleft by nullity/". "laughter yes but no/on but no/nothing of on into/static stasis/wrists to slash in psychosial flames/".(37) adverbs gained the power here. their fractuality pythons with what the hell is going on much more acute than the 'Grande Political Words'. language as Necropsy of ourbpostneo tribesociuses: "-speak spells it all out as if to wound stitch shut to burst revealing sinew/". (38) 'Dawn' subsided to a diMethylVinyloid Dawn: "/stone to taste as if to bled mock dawn what light colours of like of which were never claim hereafter solace of one dead tide what secrets to unravel in dim forgot solace nectar of blade bite skinned tide of mercury asphyxiation". (40) 'some sun' catapults us from geocentrism-->antropomorfism---> heliotropism---->alldirectional zonosporo trancedimensional lavaflight. "to eradicate all sound from which foetus echoing bled flays bankrupt necessary an open parameter in some sun". (40)
the Cogito of Michael has its place in a landscape Necroplaza. "into some landscape where to never have never knowing of never being". (41) [Cogito, ergo sum is a philosophical statement that was made in Latin by René Descartes, usually translated into English as "I think, therefore I am". ... The dictum is also sometimes referred to as the cogito.] I have to skip tranches of the text while I could with the same aim cite the whole thirty pages of this Monologue Expulseur. it is part Wordheap, in the most modern way: that it doesn't matter anymore what to say, yet notwithstandingly formulated in an exquise way. intent and content are obvious but possibly not to everybodies liking. it is to mine. that it doesn't anymore matter what to say, to the background of our era. to expulse this, therefor we need this textform. no other would suffice.
'light': "/blind by light's intone breakage film of reflect in mirror chase what of sickness of/" (43). where we can superimpose the text on profitist, sciencetheoretic rivalry: "mechanic broken of where to equate where numeral closure jack-knife upon some gilded crucifixion of malignant streak of blood upon/dead as dead sun dead/". (44) another Cogito summons "to be is reject following onwardly some silenced obsolete it skin of damned weight of pregnant pauses of razor psychosis spitting plumes of scalded flowers of lacerate of dead time of weight of lack/". (45) if there are grammatical, syncopal, omissions than we have to remind you that we bend the language as we like. now I have to edit/quasify, some more. "where to breathe is to vomit". (50) here is a good photography of what a Michaelean text comprises: "...waste attrition it all of less than ever breaks forth to collect of banquet skull teaming with nectar toothless toothed whore of broke jaw emptiness where spe/cial is to outstretch rhytm all sunk devour as of where belittle blood is out of focus nocturne of drought/". (52) 'heap of words', ingrammatical, spellingissues ['broken jaw'], vile content and postPolitic intent: for me this is the Post-Post text required to at least copy paste shards of a putrid social etnology. cataleptic extortionism [a physical condition characterized by a loss of sensation, muscular rigidity, flexity of posture, and often by a loss of contact with surroundings. Also catalepsis.]. "/ideation skins sky abandon of none bleak turning of throughout non-space as momentary corridors dissolve/text+2/not a/not of/nothing in this/fades laughter hilt expels dusts from gilded lung/sickness hunger avarice..." (56). this BLOCKTEXT mirrors Gertrude Steins The Making of Americans, Marguerite Duras l'Amant and Hiroshima mon Amour, Musils der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Kapielskis Mathematisierung des Todes, Rimbaud, Celan, Celine, Cioran. the Nouveau Roman with Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet with his 20 pages of description on how a seagull sat on a pole; Georges Pérec with his roman La Disparition, written entirely without the letter 'E'. the word in 'in dim forgotte(n)' (61) 'collideoscopic' we can compare with Guattari's 'chaosmose'. there are also glimpses of Dada and postNeoDada.
in (II) we find a 9 page tome of the same eruptive fumarole of untamed but micro edited texts. "...walls much the same are papers peeling are vellum traces an unintelligible child's drawings in heavy black crayon..." (67). "...eye speaks unknowing as what of till matter stripped of light calling forth where nectar of is the pissed upon from great heights as if there were ever any...meat to collapse into..." (68). the sentence has a knack. Deleuze wrote a book of the Crack-up. Deleuze-Guattari mentioned the geste: 'Connect-I-Cut'. so the sentence moves like a branch. journey = stasis. "...a long dead distance of through corridors of bleak surrender..." (71) which echoes Walter Benjamins Dialektik im Stillstand. a total expressionism, with streaks, smears and holes superimposed upon the text. "time burns deep through a colossus of endless night...cylindrical the breath is vacant...flesh to writhe to meat to bone to marrow turning in an absence of colour...static disclosure to when genuflect is the rot of being in as rat gathers...absentee pelts scattered across the floorboards stained with paint..." (75).if the text is stuttering it is the obstructive transitcongestion and the abstruse of tranceplaza flightlines plus no educational probabilities.
in (ii) the 'postscript', more aforistic than the previous texts, it becomes clear that, whichever definition is given to the text, it is uncalled for and noninstructive. there I found postreligiosity, insectoid prayers, affirmative areligiosity (Michael is born in Belfast), lemmata describing the void of whichever flights. "tendency to trace a given nocturne/absentia of/what once was never once/through the cracks in the sky come silhouettes of amber prayers returning to the host of it/insect sickness claims/" (87). moreover: absent postReligiosity, as religiosity has no weight, had no and will never have one. "...to erase of it/cold fragrance of artificial lights/burns of foreign sentience of/here the nothing there another of/bound bones in winter gutter/striation of what once was pulse/absent secrets of the/slashed out/all sung all to be sung for as if to gift the night its treasury/in the vicious air to taste of it/bleeding out the one once known...
I think this is another fantastic Irish poetic book by Michael Mc Aloran. he loathes such qualifications. let's say: I've read around his book philosophically, read his books and the ones with similarities. it is the genre that is my cup of tea... 

The book itself is available to purchase here


1 comment:

  1. one typo (mine): 'ourbpostneo'. the 'B' slipped in.
    it must have been my twinbrother Bas.

    ReplyDelete

from 'cold ash redeem'/ DM Mitchell & Michael Mc Aloran/ Incunabula 2023

    Some images from the book by DM Mitchell. You can get it  here