Les heures importantes sont les heures immobiles. Ces fractures du temps arretées, minutes quasi mortes sont ce que tu as de plus vrai, ce que tu es de plus vrai, ne les possédant pas, n’étant pas par elles possédé, sans attributs, et que tu ne pourrais “rendre”, étendue horizontale par-dessus des puits sans fond.
Henri Michaux
Approach with the reverence that aura demands, the aura of departure that still clings to these frail skeins, these shedding skins of light, harder to see in the original prints than the Turin shroud,
letters whose kisses are sucked away by phantoms before they can arrive
cicatrice intérieure - berceau de crystal
a double bill you may never finish paying, a dance of terminal redundancies
this time tomorrow
inner scar of an outside thrown away
where will we be
bleached and blasted lunar desert
the same face stares back from all his canvases
a far-gone fata morgana, taking flight into medieval dreams
the sense of distance lacks, time lags behind seeing
ashen limbo of broken and bewildered light, the harmonium’s asthmatic wheeze
I can’t breathe
’68 jet-trash fall-out, born under the exit-sign, half-life to live in the fragile hold of the body’s lantern parchment, naked honour of a future never to be baptised.
Nothing to remember, nothing but what keeps repeating in the aftermath, pale knight armoured in skin, white horse, circle of flame, black sheep on a dirt track regathered to the fold, black ship on the horizon awaiting a last unmooring
orphaned emblems scattered to the four elements,
props for a dilysergic Norse saga, autistic meanderings of the eternal déménage à trois, aphasic knight, belle damnée, infant joy, infant sorrow, infant rage
close to the frozen borderline
disputed sovereignty of the central region
deranged in red leather trousers, the devil stepped outside, death valet parking for an end-of-the-road movie, keeper of the car keys, flayer of the carcass…
And if he left off dreaming about you…
Lewis Carroll
the baby whose bathwater turned to ice
that crystallized into a cradle
dollhouse anhedonia of Pre-Raphaelite interiors, the Langlois museum, in every dream palace a host of dead souls
leaving the Factory
faces of imploded stars sink back to the tallowy glooms of Caravaggio, De la Tour, the paint-it-blacker school, proofs of an after-light, the endless procession of plans fix, white powder candour of Nico’s face, tarnished ambassadress, dreamy and languorous as she reads, sleeps, smokes, recites abysmal poetry, a Holbein anamorphosis in reverse, a bloat of skull set adrift on a dark river
and Garrel the uninvited ghost, slinking in corridors, strung out in velvet like a rive gauche Joey Ramone.
Sure, the drugs don’t work, but then they’re not supposed to: quite the contrary, they open to the worklessness of pure time. Or whatever.
While outside it’s ’75, late-surrealist dredgings of the psyche that launched a thousand prog-rock bands on the Lethe, sun-dappled kitsch of jeune fille en fleur steeling themselves for a future of stained raincoats, all this somehow redoomed by the camera in looking too long, past all longing or desire, waiting it out to the face’s desertion,
the desert to come,
gun to the temple
trop tôt trop tard
and for the devout it’s back to the “dross” of youtube and 4th degeneration dvx, circular ruin of a pixelate Hamlet endlessly treading his weary coil out on the silicon flats of laptop insomnia. Until the next resurrection, though there is hope the shroud will be too stoned (immaculate) to show up.
Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni