Louis Armand
Interior, night. The sublime, Burke thought, is kindled by the threat of nothing further happening. As when some terrible G.O.D. waved His symbolic knife above a child's putative genitals & laughed. Beauty, on the other hand, flowed from a warm compensating reprieve: the punishment cld always be repeated, & go on being repeated.
Exhibit A.
Child pissing in the Franciscan Gardens / an allegorical conch held brazenly to its lips. Bronze mounted on stone.
Evidence available to the eye of any beholder. Like a finger pointing at the moon. Events as yet deprived of consequence. Repetition takes the place of History.
A second child—a bemused doppelgänger—stands at its feet giggling.
Exhibit B.
Plastic flower in a plastic bowl filled w/ water upon a gravestone in the nondenominational cemetery at X. Like someone who'd drowned in a cheap raincoat. Does the whole succeed the fragment or vice versa?
The superstition that pleasure kills or deals only w/ the dead.
In the architectural description of the cemetery, the trees* are represented by figures drawn using a protractor.
Exhibit C.
Child (2nd) wandering through the Anthropological Museum in X. Rooms, vitrines. A mosaic of jagged hammers in process of excavation (labelled**: "Biography of an Event"). Animatronic waxworks dummies rehearsing the old question,
Where did it all start?
Time the Destroyer, etc.—as once upon, an infant's skull under the Minotaur's double-axe. Regard the crimson thread of allegory running through the labyrinth of unadulterated fact. Dye & cross section. The cortex in a bath of silver nitrate. One fine day a photograph of the Original Idea. Hubble's telescope into the G.O.D.-mind. An axehead of white nephrite.
"But it didn't start anywhere, there was no beginning."
Turn the page: a reproduction of a reproduction of the palace at Knossus. Where is the hand that rocked civilisation in its cradle? Persuasion wasn't their first choice: already they knew, at the End of History is an authoritarian state.
Not once but over & over again, like a false turn in a mirror maze. Look, there where the labyrinth opens out onto a square of dimmed light. . .
a blue monkey
picking white crocuses
in a vase
Later the child (no longer a child) wld unwittingly write: I grew up w/ a setsquare in one hand & a clutch-pencil in the other.
Trying to remember the name of the cinematographer who fell off the bridge in X & drowned. The visual meaning of spacelessness & timelessness. A neophyte to the end, they said.
"It was always Wednesday, the hands of the clock at right angles, in the technical drawing workshop, seated on a bench facing the windows, an unmowed field, treetops churning in the wind, bottlegreen sky darkening before the storm, hailstones like golf balls pelting the tin roof in a diagram of pandemonium."
The individual letters in the word vivisection.
Life begins w/ a scrupulous brute force
or faintly & darkly
arising from the hidden mycelium.
A chronology of first thoughts—each instant establishes its own coherence. "The outer space of the temporal lobe." For example, a window has no perspective. (What use did psychology have of an unremembered dream?) QED: there are facts of which it's possible to say nothing.
Exhibit D.
Child (as previous) contemplates the possibility of saying nothing.
"Given 1 is a number, A = A if A is a number."***
Relative key: F sharp minor. Parallel: A minor. Dominant: E major. Subdominant: D major.
The piano keyboard typically has between 85 & 88 keys. Sometimes as many as 108.
But what if, instead of a particle of Hindu-Arabic, one were to make "a number" out of a neutron instead?
n + n + n. . . ∞.
The principle of succession in a critical mass. Novus Ordo Missae. In 6 days G.O.D. counts to infinity & on the 7th disappears behind the event horizon.
The test was to draw a logarithmic curve w/ only a ruler & a pencil.
Certain occurrences: the average pitch of a humming fuse. Peine forte et durée, hahaha. . . Penitence, in other words. (Statistics is what time is, in other words.)
"I'm sitting at that window w/ eyes as if gnarled by hunger, the world inside a vitrine, a bisected temporal lobe, turning upon an axis—superior gyrus, middle gyrus, inferior gyrus—like the report of an obscure feeling held only by the inadequacy of its description, deep & dull & flat & overly brilliant, rending the sky in livid blue flame."
but who, if I cried out,
cld tell the observer from the observed?
Exterior. Dusk is a brain bursting its capillary wall. On such a day, Ludwig Boltzmann hanged himself with a cord tied to the crossbars of a window casement. Chronology, that old bearded matriarch.
—Listen, what they want is atoms of simplicity. Y'll never convince them you really talk to yrself this way.
—They wldn't know the first thing about simplicity. You pour yr guts onto the floor, what more is there to say?
Exhibit E.
Blue-haired child teetering in a pair of black high heels. The psychopathology of the colour spectrum. Black equals sphinx. A veil of ultramarine. The child pisses on its sheets but fears drowning. A uterine hydropath. To float upon the void as the void floats in the mind's eye.
The unsignified part of meaning.
An excavation site folded up inside its shadows. Black eyes, black machetes, black blood. The child who's no longer a child came here to find where History's corpse lies buried. 40,000 years of misattributions. A line in the dust. A littoral. A circumference. A ratio.
By reason of not two integers.
They said, We do not live in a time of beautiful sentiments.
On the contrary, you can't betray what's impossible to remember.
Exhibit F.
Child boiling a potion in a jar, ink & black ants & kerosene. It burns blue, an eye in the sky under a massacred fringe of light. This dream of impermanence is / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / a sunshower.
Plan, elevation & section thereof.
* Plane trees.
** Museum labels, also referred to as a “caption” or “tombstone.”
*** Giuseppe Peano