The introduction by Lee Beckworth to 'in dim forgotte(n)'/ Incunabula Media

 

Negtropics of Imaginary Cruising/

A genealogy of flows of intensity In Dim Forgotte[n] by Michael Mc Aloran

Michael Mc Aloran/s latest text has discovered and excavated a landscape of interminable desire/of excessive imaginary fields/a place where no reader has been and certainly no writer has documented before/this figural dimension/with such subversive textual skill and discipline as Mc Aloran/ Contemporary existential ideology tells the subject to pay attention and take control of their life to learn from the past and look to the future with its sprawling information freeways of algorithmic meaning/Mc Aloran defies this process with a work that defines a future without implicit meaning or narrative direction organising his world to his advantage with a style[less] fucking with the systems of written exchanges/ overwhelming the classical notions of univocal truth and eternal essences as limits on discourse/It is difficult to write about his work because many of the words and metaphors needed to do so haven/t been invented yet/He has revolutionised and re-inscribed what combinations of words and their potential meanings can be defined as to one beyond more than that of current/unchanging/ cognitive limits/that tedious repertory of reified transcendent values posturing as the “text”/always in a state of maintaining privileged signifiers and narrative reliability/ downtown emptiness and elegant inanity/]In Dim Forgotte[n] Mc Aloran shoulders the burden of representation and re-creates a form of literary innovation that seems in its brevity to leave out more than it retains while actually immersing the reader in a proliferation of possible meanings/Unfolding fragments in one voice and then the next and the next without resorting to the banality of a central character or aspiring to traditions of social realism or heroic post mondernism/Mc Aloran evades isms imaginary cruising around dissonant violence and breaking through boundaries and stoppages each paragraph shifts desires and social fluxes constantly producing and creating appropriating coagulated with the endless flux of other desiring machines/all the codes are floating in a opaque miasma of birth pangs of breaking down and reforming perceptions/For those whose reading has been polluted by the codex engaging with this text is all the more difficult/He puts his work in a place where he is not identified as the the primary generator of the text as errant/erratic/multi faceted author creating order out of what appears at first as mind blowing disorder/locating literature as the site of a new aesthetic struggle started by the likes of Samuel Beckett/James Joyce and William Burroughs/There is no longer a cosmos of rigid reductive fictional forms/the algorithm of formulaic dogma is confronted with a vigorous defiance/meaning originates in the imagination of the reader as an epiphany of discovery/all interpretive logic can only focus on structures and systems both analogue and digital/coding and totalizing operations of thought/......sudden from artefact razor fingers trace the asylum tears of what bled till next...words burn as of shit in wax paper where to rat is to nothing ever closure lung a neck snapped in the silent darkness of tidal oceanic...The text is an instantiation of the metaphysics of shock sentences which at the start are limited to a few words but which grow to lengthy passages replete with the primal waters of the life of each word in itself in its own world and as part of a state of apprehension Avital Ronel explores in her seminal book Finitudes Score/The reader must prepare for what they might become after reading and absorbing this nomadic/highly successful attempt to redefine the future task of both reading writing and understanding not yet conjugated/there are no prohibitions in this world and meaning is dependent on the contingent and the aleatory combination of the fractured corpse of humanity bloody and deranged and the ghostly presence of the unheimlichkeit /One must prepare for alterity/......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 rhythm all sunk devour as of where belittle...blood is out of focus nocturne of drought/The work de-totalises words as signs with a set of significations that a community has agreed upon and usurps this process with the absolute reign of his own impersonal unique ideology/One not engaged with by the usual academic definitions and critiques/Not locked in a disjunctive synthesis/Sliding past all expectations of homogeneous mannerisms refusing a identificatory presence using brute force and blunt instrument quotidian intentions that of detourning producing a work that is antagonistic or antithetical to all previous texts/cracking open textual integrity and that of bringing to an end the cult of literal suicide unchosen and unspoken systems of word/sign equivalences with their ontological manifestations and implications//A torrent of data tracers illuminates the void of surgical precision of random individuality the reader takes on the task of a forensic team drifting to low resolution velocity disarmed as literary terrorist suspect slow wave of neural passes through the reader arrested by flux of images rogue spelling and [lack of] punctuation/there are few pronouns just a couple of [you] and one or two [their] the subject being is apparently eviscerated self mutilating corpse of the child [not at the centre which remains occupied by the word] under orders to ...strip meat from memory fresh meat...human waste bailing out these are the damned nothing of the sky to bite...all of in said of to reveal...razor splinters swallowed down...transparency flung to the dogs... as child dissolves the umbilical cord attaching it to ...snare bone bite havoc [of] close ...spasm of dredge of fist of some breakage point given to occlude dead haven of scatter words to barren fields where nothing ever ever marrow silence of accord/as drift shrift shift of sequence collide with sky bare meat hoping it can re-attach itself to dismembered words the migraine images of autopsy defuse into traumatic memory protocols of psycho surgery...mocks dawn’s collective absence of feel drags dead child bones through avenues of broken glass of scatter of rusty nails of cum of shit of blood of cascade of flesh to redeem in existentia.../ A new form of communicating using the cybernetics of rhizomic connections creating a text of improvisations on states of decay disorder and dismemberment of the very structure of the processes of cerebral thought/...self engaged night spots of the forever lost there never should have been no [thing] but word-less asked of yet never once asked for...Antonioni/s Zabriskie Point the exploding refrigerator of words disengaged from the power circuits of psycho sexual perversity/Meaning comes directly from inspiration through a maze of subversively threaded visions at first in single words slightly out of focus then clusters of words rush into view and finally paragraphs a new vocabulary of thought allowing for freedom of creation and fluidity of punctuation the reader is free to improvise and take themselves to places they never imagined existed...in labyrinth of bleak discord where shards are emblems of desire in ebb & flow of signature of meld through passage breathe where to/...fuck all sediment scatter words to barren fields...one of the many pools of lucidity that litter the text/The reader is sent to zones of occupation subjected to indefinite cruel and unusual containment under statutes pertaining to states of high mental Alert and Hysteria tortured relentlessly with heavy mental collision of word noise contamination ...denizen of excrement subtle as devour throughout where to exit from is to/ cannot exit...from as if to/ sound to fall to beg of it/ dead tide...electro-shock-therapy softening up for ambiguous interrogation by cerebral apparatus or extraction of fundamentalist genome by open brain surgery/Responses are expected and diplomatic immunity which gives respite is dead/...dog shit in the streets cannot wipe away the traces/ long turning of the breathe of it it clings to nasal/eye/ wipes away the reek it cannot/ nor ever/ aspire to it or ever lack of it...Every thing used to have its limit even the truth of Burroughs cutups sorrow death betrayal including desire for alphabetical entertainment/Mc Aloran takes the written word onto a higher platform maintaining an elegance of form and integrity of the chance for cognitive plenitude for the reader to engage with a plethora of floating signifiers/With post-human prosthetic servo word mechanism resentful perspective under immanence of deep and uneven phallic word-wars monitor self control codes blur/fluctuate/re-form .....as little by little child reveals burns in sands of night’s cavalcades where to drought is to of collision of dead waste speech fragrant as nothing ever was before cold ivory dice cast unto...../ Such passages are seeped in a deadly negtropics of melancholia and despair the words assert their strident meaning operating just below the surface of understanding yet anarchic enough to leave a critical impact on the reader/Creating a new way of writing and reading which alters the readers sense of an affinity with the sombre emotional aspects of conservative human nature/This book takes a crucial step invoking such primal emotions as fear/anxiety/dread and finally despair/Creating a sense of contemplation of a text that refuses to give up its meaning even after a second or third reading/It is a labor intensive activity/give it time to reveal itself reminding us of the human touch of genius/The words engulf the reader with a very complex structure of language stripping words back to a raw vital power avoiding the disease of our Age: that of Intertexuality/Mc Aloran inherits the powers of life and death the torso without limbs unsewn raised on dust veins full of oil the spectre of Phallic autonomy is a manipulated social conspiracy engaging with the paranoid and the skitzoid the artifice of intelligence grasps its own manufactured essences again/Mc Alorans work evades the urge to interpret corrupt reality transposing the work into a commentary which hopes to reveal many hidden meanings while at the same time offering nothing/in all its truth a decadent practice to say the least/Mc Aloran has widened the gap between literature and criticism and evades the arrogance that critics bring with their rigid attempts to snare the text within the limits of their own facile ideological aesthetics/The discomforting features of in dim forgotte[n] begin with the title and continue through to the last paragraphs.......silence then that cannot/ blood-stain upon skin/ turns the face aside a kiss of slaughterhouse/ strips denuded the carrion of vocal/ it all fall down/ time what of it to turn to utter waste/ irredeem of speechless/ speechless tones fades vibratory blood/ as it gathers as it set to light to burn down ever of to unbecome/ fade yes or no yes or no/ it echos... in the empty head oscillating between repulsion and attraction but never boredom/

The book itself is available here

The Introduction by Dr. Arthur Broomfield to 'Obsidian Flowers', (selected writings/ 2010 - 2020)... Oneiros Books

Those who look for meaning in Obsidian Flowers may think in terms of Obsidian glass, the sharper than cut diamond material used in the manufacture of surgical instruments that is derived from emissions from the volcano. They could argue that Obsidian Flowers is the sharpened essence of a flawed tradition that has suffered its Shivaistic fate, the birth of a   literature built on the embers of one overtaken by events. Derek Attridge, referencing Jacques Derrida, in Jacques Derrida Acts of Literature, argues that ‘literary criticism has operated…within the bounds established by classical Greek thought, taking for granted the rules of syllogistic reason, the ultimate priority of meaning over its mode of articulation, and such fundamental and absolute oppositions as the intelligible and the sensible, form and matter, subject and object, nature and culture, presence and absence’ [Derrida 3]. If literary criticism for the most part is still beholden to  the Platonic and Aristotelean approach, and one can argue, in the light of Historicist and Post-Colonial theory, it is, then Michael Mc Aloran’s Selected will be to it as quantum physics would have been  to our Palaeolithic ancestors. Mc Aloran, rather than critique or quarrel with notions such as representation, meaning or the oppositions that so exercised Derrida’s thinking, gets on with the task that drives him, the creation of a masterful work of art that shows, rather than tells where literature now resides.

Mc Aloran confronts, not the failure to represent, in language, our perceptions [ often misinterpreted, especially in Beckett studies, by literary theory know-alls as the failure of language] but the failure to perceive. If words are ‘all words, there’s nothing else’ [Beckett  407], words cannot fail. Meaning and the impossible task set by philosophers of trying to apply words that mean, that represent perceptions, will inevitably fail. Words without meaning, freed of the context of subject and object, nature and culture, presence and absence will continue in the omnipresent where they are ‘all’. Cognisant of the situation in which the artist now finds him/herself, Mc Aloran, like Mondrian, disavowing futile attempts to re-present perceptions, presents. He presents unmediated, unrepresentative, form without content language. Language lies through its teeth ‘till din of the non-received’ non receivable perceptions awakens the narrative voice to the lying project that is exposed as such by the ‘surrogate of no purpose.’ His is a voice that proclaims itself in a world that is non- beginning, non-ending:

‘what word there was it is said in the beginning there was

nothing lying through the teeth…till din of the non-received in

the pissoir tide asking of the non-beginning the non-

ending.  

Like Samuel Beckett ‘words are all’ to Mc Aloran. Yet his work justifies the claim to be post-Beckett. Let’s look at this passage from Mc Aloran:

‘flesh/ spun silk of the night in the nothingness of having actualised the

sky/ and yet still/ absent/ wandering far from the here or there/ never

returning yet never having left it behind/ in a pageantry of silent

discourse’.

Like Beckett’s it can appear, on a shallow reading, to over-dwell on the nihilistic in e.g. the affirmation of nothingness in

 ‘flesh/spun silk of the night in the nothingness of having actualised the sky/’,

   but like Beckett he negates the affirmation in ‘never having left it behind’ only to invalidate the negation in

‘and yet still…never returning’.

So far so Beckett. Where Beckett’s texts are underscored through a rigorous logic that argues for the permanence of the word, in spite of  his insistence that the permanent  cannot be presented by the transient i.e. the body -  ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’  - even if that logic challenges basic tenets of grammar by reinventing the definite article and the neuter pronoun as  nouns; removing the implication of question in where, who and when, importantly, in the opening lines of The Unnamable,  Mc Aloran  ‘goes on’ from Beckett to defy logic itself through texts that in structure and syntax exceed Beckett’s. In his literature words are elevated to a state where they are all in their stress-free state of absolute equality:

 ‘the purity of none eye’s […] dark what dark what light.’ that often dismiss the distinction between the abstract and the concrete noun:

‘shadowless all spun in the absence of the word to grace the emptily of the meat’s futility’.

When Mc Aloran insists on the absoluteness of nothingness he turns his wrath on the illusion of the material world with an Aristotelian precision that excoriates  all apologies for the horrors of existence in grim detail.   A ‘vein [is]  a voice collapsed a tryst a-bleed sunk eye incapable of/ sense ‘The ‘nothing [is]  invisible [where] sense commenced from lack origin’, pure nothing is even ‘absent  dark’ and ‘none’ is abandoned.

 Mc Aloran’s works are not for Mills and Boon readers. Obsidian Flowers is for the mind that could spend hours divining short passages like

  ‘endless ever as if to detrace/ trace/ retrace following on from gathered onward/ eye lights it is un-skied to hilt drop sheen reflect non-speech vocal as collapse stillness,’

to marvel at an approach that goes beyond the Derridean trace, the ephemeral ‘skied’ world of the perceiver, and the staple diet that has sustained literature for two thousand years, to reflect non-speech in the endless ever, the absoluteness of nothingness..

Bibliography

Beckett, Samuel, Samuel Beckett, The Grove Centenary Edition, vol IV, New York, Grove Press, 2006.

Derrida, Jacques, Acts of literature, ed Derek Attridge, New York and London, Routledge, 1992.

The book itself is available from Amazon.co.uk & Amazon.com