« Rogue Town Cryer, Cathedrals, FolkSong | Main | East Coast Gothick, Part II »
March 20, 2004
East Coast Gothick, part I
In Dunwich Wood, Time becomes Twisted
'I have always loathed flat and treeless country. Time there seems to dominate, it ticks remorselessly like a clock. But trees warp time, or rather create a variety of times: here dense and abrupt, there calm and sinuous - never plodding, mechanical, inescapably monotonous.' [John Fowles, The Tree]



Posted by robin at March 20, 2004 12:51 PM
Comments
Some maximalist remarks:
Jungle reveals the mural histories of telluric insurgency as both the Infested and Infected One, where earth claims “Am I not the kindest of parents, who feeds ten thousand children with its own tender meat?” Terrible Parents! What on earth can endure such a germinal inferno? A germinal space that imparts a new sense to Germinal Life; the term ‘Germinal Life’ represents a political repression, a cunning monopolization over a germinality whose epidemic bonds crack, lay and butcher open instead of merely functioning as an economical ‘being open to’ (affordance); they inexorably pervade from germinal life to death but since germinality constitutes the very plateaus of life, they bestow a pestilential life to death, giving birth to unlife; a germinal abomination which obscenely affirms all, and from the energies of this affirmation, it autonomously regenerates its own space. It does not stop when someone cries ‘there is always the danger of suicide (sui+caedere: ends one’s life)’ for it knows nothing of survival: it endures in germinal death, the unlife. Jungles visualize the zones of such germinal plagues where ‘Trees of Life’ are butchered open by blossoming energies of life. Neither time as a clock nor space as a capacity can live in such an (un)life. This is the principle that the White Man has already understood.
Outsiders usually define jungle with the color green but one who has trapped in knows well how jungle messes the chromacity, that name ‘verdant inferno’ makes sense at last.
However, Ibn Hamedani calls the desert, the Mother of all plagues. Desert diagrams the secret cult of the Earth as the Forgotten One, an unreported plague; it radically germinates plagues still to be experienced. My worst nightmare usually emerges from my encounter with the desert agitated by a red sand storm for two hours: I feel an angelic lightness approaching, a real pleasure; I surrender but as it draws near, I feel horrible; that’s irresistible, the lightness rattles like Arabian typhoons. The lightness is extinguishing me, my heart beat rises as if I’m undertaking some kind of evaporation without being liquidated first ... I always awake myself; intentionally, avoiding what comes out of this germinal lightness. This has happened many times.
In desert, one reaches total immanence with the communication engineered between the Sun and the Earth as a dust-spewing lump.
Posted by: Reza at March 21, 2004 04:36 PM
Desert: A spoiled plane of consistency?
Posted by: Reza at March 21, 2004 04:47 PM