The Ecstatic Silence: 9
Where there’s nothing to carve out then there’s an absence to fill in.
His dreams are mold fantasies. His oozing liquids fill voids to survey their internal geometry. By pouring and filling he takes the measure of his uncalibrated absence. Each are death masks of irresistible seamless production of form. Each are vexed by liquid mischief and alchemical inscrutability. There are no standards. Le Corbusier’s gravitational intelligence applied to the submarine world of psychosis, trauma, frenzied inventiveness and moth fades. Each dank excavation led to somnabulent velvet-lined boxes shaped in dust and coffin mantles of biological briquette. The material did the work. The nights flowed like concrete. Chutes and formwork needed minimum prompts. He became skilled at the invasive evasion. Holidays became journeys to sea harbours in Cornwall and West Wales. He perfected the determined opacity of destined floods. From the medical to the forensic, the domestic to the industrial, he was someone who walked into every room as the barium swallow, the labyrinthine ant nest. Gazing into the deep interiority of eyes, his was the killer look of brutal interrogation and spatial confessions. His extractions were legendary. And hollow. Unwittingly. Seductions take the form of slip-casts wanting to be solid, dumbly so. And his flickering stare into space is a translucent resin. He hopes to verify the uniformity of the fill. Catching his eye was a kind of tamping.
The usual relationship was a form of goofy slap-stick admitting gravity and the desired fall. After all, you fall in love, not rise to it. Love is a liquid metaphor, a pouring, a dangerous mold. All fall down. His lovers were of a certain range. They sloped their promises and threats so interiority registered a certain emotional viscosity, plasticity and opacity. Yet their attempts to distribute whatever was found in such outpourings was his strange sort of undoing. Repeatably. The moments were fertilely automatic, poured out as a continuous flow of promiscuity manipulating batch constraints.
‘I find I can fill all kinds. Depressions, deep and shallow, is the intelligence my imagery attempts to harness’, he explained to the eager readers of V*** way back in the early eighties. In this phase he was eager to find, and so saw his work as a species of the immaculate wither. Writing occurs and in that instant obtains a quasi-religious authority, as if arriving from above. It’s a matter of strategically abdicating the weighty burdens of explaining. The engineered neutrality attempts to find an ecology free of conflict.
When H.G. Wells talked of ‘the trammels of precision’ he had no idea.
