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| base materialism louis armand (poetry) new york: x-poezie, 2001 if one thinks of a particular object, it is easy to distinguish matter from form, & an analogous distinction can be made with regard to organic beings, with form taking on the value of the unity of being & of individual existence. but if things as a whole are taken into account, transposed distinctions of this kind become arbitrary & even unintelligible. two verbal entities are thus formed, explicable only through their constructive value in the social order--georges bataille ('base materialism & gnosticism') |
| TWO POEMS from BASE MATERIALISM TOWARDS A GEOMETRY OF PANCREATIC ISLETS 1. two mouths, two cut fingers--l'experience des faux amis (out of sight of the mind's eye) ... the dignified & paternal figure, razed / from hidden storage: "by an un- seen hand"--left, with no forwarding address, eyes rolling on the page-a defective instrument, until the truth can be explained, spoiling the view ... the engines have been watchful--it would be a "good" night rivers of old hair gushing between bed-posts--the ataxic, vile body of one so-called archimedes (volume & mass): or the prodigal filled to overflowing / like a derailed train? 2. a less obvious approach, the sum of what parts? a common thread starts to take shape: "the habit of using written symbols to represent speech [...]" &c., the phrase itself has come to identify movement as a metonymy of strangeness (the roman a clef?)--to elude many futile sayings / the shape of things to come is sitting on the black chair: its quiet & fecund offering laid out as in a white neglig�e--& denoted only by the ex- posed hairline fracture ("bone- brittle"): an incitement, to cast the first or second stone, before the impulse is snuffed out 3. without further notice, in order to avoid disper- sal, cacophony? (an imaginary museum arranged as it were in several rooms / out of prior consideration-not to be mistaken for the antique clock & china cabinet he secretly admired (though how to explain one's presence at any event?): running as one drowns, unfolding without arms, without hands-something desperate yet to be attempted: in the final analysis, a conduit, not without meaning (but can it appraise itself?) CRAFT MORPHOLOGY FLOW CHART so long as capitalist economy remained undisputed there could be no question of anything more than purely philanthropic mitigation of its abuses --arnold hauser since that field itself is spread rug-like on the floor--it seems to begin by fixing the pole of lowness within a stable op- position, of high/low, & thus "functioning" as a personal absolute--beneath it could be anything, the uncontrolled libidos of obscure lumps--the stuffed animals of infantile psychosis in which some dirty, hand-crafted succubus glamorises itself (which is to say, the operation of transgression from beneath)--the evidence dug up & laid out on so many uni- form tables, in an arrangement reminiscent of an archaeological pre-life: each piece is photographed separately beside a ruler, thereby establishing it as individual within a statistical set, "classed" by means of measurement--in order to produce a norm (c) louis armand, 2001 |