'[unspoken]'
drags the reader--wary or not, no difference--through pathless scapes
of abandoned rooms and ruptured anatomies, through dead light and undead
words. Though in appearance this text seems to be a patchwork of
prose-poetic fragments and dramaturgical scraps, literary form is, as
ever, a formality at best for Mc Aloran and, more often, even less than
that. The relentless flux of decaying bodies and dubious voices stares
between the pages' blank spaces as if they were hemorrhaged eyes gazing
through Ed Gein's dead skin-masks: to further the already-great distance
always separating the idiotic pageant of Appearance and whatever
assumptions one would like to make of the impersonal, ineffable "real."
Still,
there is always plenty of room for "hyenic laughter"--that somatic
signification of a communication-limit having been reached--and the
voices which appear more frequently in the book's latter half provide
occasions for such laughter. These voices, even though presumably
disembodied, stutter and stumble just as much as if their breath were
still mounted in meat. The dialogue in itself, of course, amounts to
nothing, so much so that its presentation as a "play" might remind one
of an intentionally bad puppet-show in which it almost seems as if these
fragments of voices were sheer babble echoing from the depths of some
ontic asylum (far from that word's etymological sense of "refuge"). And
the parrying among the disembodied voices moves along with such anguish
and futility, leavened with glimpses of meta-mockery, as to suggest that
the inadequacy of language has always been at least as much a problem
of consciousness as it is of mere anatomy. And should a return of the
voice to the body be possible after such severe displacement, it bears
the cruel gift of "ventriloquist illuminations...".
As it seems
Mc Aloran has been finding new ways to alienate the "I" via language in
his other, more recent books, this text is no exception. Whenever that
battered pronoun appears, it is always, according to traditional
grammar, verbally mismatched: "'I' asks, breaking through the teeth of
sudden disavowal...". The pronoun and verb is in as much disagreement as
all of the miserable traces of beings spreading throughout this text
appear to harshly disagree with the illusory, though no less onerous,
business of selfhood. And, of course, Mc Aloran sometimes states the
matter as frankly as anyone could: "'I' is a dour cunt...fluctuating...obsolete, an assault..."; "I" could just as well be "it" for how much of
subjective experience remains unspoken and, most likely, unspeakable.
While
perhaps not so consistently potent as the also recently-released 'All
Null Having', this is yet another example of a feverishly-active poet
who is thoroughly unwilling to let the reader rest on the well-cushioned
though long since-abscessed assumptions regarding meaning, language and
selfhood; a perhaps not-so-generally-welcome alternative to whatever
trifles any given laureate might be writing any given moment...
New book by Dr Arthur Broomfield (gentleman and scholar) 'The New Poetics' - a short but perceptive take on the current position o...
"surface of silence. dead distance of in-tread. null of what till extent of breath of logger-held. known of in touch of echo trace. ...
coil turn the rip of seedless blood & the ache of exposed actual turning in the rip of endless into of in the which non- known collect...
"It needs qualification to claim Michael Mc Aloran is a post-Beckett writer, which he is, no mean achievement and rare itself in an a...
A revised edition of the 2023 release, 'the once what being', is now available from Incunabula Media . Artwork & design by Dav...