APART FROMM KITCHELL

APART FROM

M KITCHELL

What sort of question would involve no reply? It would not divide the world in two: the enquiry, the reply. It would be directly in between them, ablaze with their contradiction, yet closed to the discontinuity the contradiction generates. That same question would know what it is, for denying its nature and itself, it would be content just to be what it is.” —Bernard Noël

“

apart from the irrevocable night the wavering disquietude the dust the verticality

I

THE INTRODUCTIONOF MYTH

In the black of that night, the man found the other. Together they walked dark paths: earth-worn trails, alleys, hallways. The other pulled the man close to him, reached down his pants and caught his hole. “This is where the outside is; outside of the future, outside of the past. No chance of the present.” The man was unsure what the other was getting at, but in the intoxication of the dark he relaxed the hole open. Fingers rimmed the cavity. Later, he pulled his pants back up.

“Let’s go,” the other said.

The two men walked further along a repeating path until a door was opened, violated by their dark bodies. Inside the room there was nothing but space. Space and the vessel. The vessel wasn’t complicated. Smooth oak, a hollow for holding. A slot flanking the right. The other removed the man’s clothes and admired the skin. Solid curves, matted-hair. The man felt the other touch his body. It could only be night.

The other put the man inside of the vessel, the slot in the side opening beneath the left of the man’s ribcage. “It’s here,” the other pointed, rubbing the flesh exposed through the slot, “that we can enter into the elsewhere.” The man’s vision dimmed. In the black, silence carried a new message.

The anechoic murk pushed exteroceptive limits. The other gripped a knife, dug into exposed flesh. A new wound to mark the passage. The man caught scent of his blood. The other rubbed the edges of the laceration, then penetrated. One finger, then two. Staccato gasps, the man’s howls absented by the oppressiveness of the hour.

He refused the pain & let skin carry meaning. Encountering the void of loss, the man reeled at the edge of knowledge. Did he enter the space of dream, or in the sanctity of the empty room did imagery find itself heightened? This was how the elsewhere touched upon the attendant.

The other dug into the ground and raised a small white snake toward the sky, form glinting in the dim. The snake’s head butted flesh and pushed into the wound . . . offering in supplication . . . snake was naught but worm: the slime of viscera and blood sluiced by motion to salve . . . worm leaving hole . . . new substance pooled at the vessel’s base, bottled, left in spot-lit glow . . . liquid pull of elsewhere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lightning-strike like the push of profaned light.

The story ends with the breaking of dawn, the bloodstained clothes of the man, and the absence of the other.

The mystery always posits itself as to why.

II

CORPSTEXT

01 That man, standing in the door, his face slides. In and out of the light. He’s familiar. He’s spoken before, to me maybe, or just another. Somewhere his body can be positioned in such a way that the stone table refuses to shake. The night is like nudity.”

“

02 The sexual appetite of quicksand.

The tenacity of an escape route.

...a domain of neutrality, indifference.

03 In the deferral of space, the sight of another. There can be no mirror for the last man. Listening to the wind blow through trees, foliage. Metal banging against the walls of the house. Next to, above, the space situates itself outside of any temporal memory. Next to, above.

04 He told me his name, once, but the reverberation in the hall refused to let sound carry. He grabbed my hand and touched it to his side. As if to poke a hole, alleviate doubt. I could never bring myself to speak to him, I could only look.”

“

05 Watching, out the window. Feigned omnipotence, god-speak. Perimeter bordered by stones, colors. The second rock pushing the fugue between the first and the third. Empty geometry.

(Awaiting the disaster.)

06 Void toss: the stone sphere beneath the table. Configured as if the sphere could be a secret, or at least unknown. Light defining volume, dim.

There was such a way that the man’s body fit into mine. I could incorporate him entirely.” Whispered, as if lost.

“

07 Wind’s insistence. A putting to death of language. A presence of midnight.

08 The man spoke of the incident. I found it hard to listen, to pay attention, in the way that the narrative touched upon such abjection. The violation of the wound, the first time. Penetrated silence. But this silence will always return, overwhelm. Nevertheless, the story has held like myth, pushing toward something, perhaps a new sacred. There’s a place for all bodies.”

“

09 The shake of the stars at night. Dense clarity. Rocks align and configuration echoes the land. Movement only from left to right, right to left. The vertical cannot be staged.

An unnameable, silent object.

10 The frame the window provides to the landscape. Mirror.

11 Body emptied into wind. Shivering invisibly, unquiet.

12 The telling of the form.

Black mirror, the gaze.

13 Always at the center.

(Light defining form.)

an escape from the last gasp of speech.(silence)

14 enunciation of a body

15 landscaping stones of desire

16 Positioned acuity; the sight of the man in the doorway. “He’s familiar.” The sun starts to come out and nudity fades.

They walk to the backroom after ordering a drink.

The sunlight reflects off glass shards on the ground. They would bend to pick up light but fail to notice what’s gone. Dust light.

Silent object shoved inside.

17 When he told me the story I found it impossible to separate the physicality of the incident from any sort of narrative momentum. Like his words were flat. Desert-like, arid. His impressions seemed to make reality a fault. I couldn’t stop staring at his jaw.”

“

18 the echo of holes

19 Figuratively sprightly, the shake of branches against the window. Ecstatic wormhole; pullulating isolation. Daybreak.

20 When I talked to him, or if I talked to him, it was as if he was telling me the story of his own death. Either the story of his own death, or a story of murder. Whether he himself was the subject wasn’t clear. His voice pushed into the dark and I couldn’t remember where I was. I understood that I wanted to touch him, but I couldn’t because he was god. The access his body simultaneously demanded and refused became a vortex I found myself inside of. And this, now, is why I have to tell you, why I have to point to the man standing in the doorway. I can’t be sure.”

“

21 The sphere slides into the earth. It stands next to the pile building up at the base of the roll.

22 A quick cut.

The system tries to understand death from the outside.

(the lead role is to die without dying)

racked in and out of focus

23 What matters is that there’s a focus, a center. When a center can be found, one can step aside from it and reconsider the site. Off-center one can turn & focus on the center, foisting the conclusive violence upon the whole.”

“

24 When they touch the stone, the stone touches back.

25 to pursue the noiseenclosed in opaque glass

body cleansed in sweat

the obscenity of night (the body)

remnants of a forgotten death

object thrown against a wall head always wrapped in gauze

26 a fear& nothing else

27 He told me, ‘The first beginning presents a hand buried in dirt.’ Asking him to continue would have violated a solemnity. I could only stare, forgetting how language forms. Language is always sacrifice, but conversation swallows meaning.

He told me, ‘The cipher is an inherent wind.’ But I could hear only the wind, the pull of earth; the desire to refuse what he was telling me.”

“

“

28 The figural mutilation expanding the text. Corporeal push.

29 the tomb where each noise refuses its space (vertiginous nothing, abyssal shape)

30 He speaks of a story that no one can remember. I touch my temple before seeing my fingers covered in blood. He makes no comment, or doesn’t notice. The wind is always inherent.”

“

31 They speak of neither pure light nor pure night.

Abyssal dark, nude form. Desire for excess captivating shadows. One in front of another. They put their flesh into the dirt. Chthonic remedies for absent thought. Chimera’d elasticity when a body cannot make sense. They ask for an objective sensuality, at a loss toward what it is they’re asking for.

Figure-ground relationships.The landscape reassembles.The landscape reassembles.The landscape reassembles.

32 They gesture pain to one another.

What they heard in sleep—the oblivion of touch.

33 The stairs at the end of the hallway eclipsed by the light of the sun. Shadows decline in weakness.

Intoxication.

34 Effusively figural. Language in place of the body. The absence of the outside. Outside of the absence. Desiring the body as a singular beginning.

35 Reflective altitude, wavering night.

36 Sidereal topography. Finitude.

The trace, voice trapped in echo: static

37 His lips are chapped, you can tell from across the room. The dryness of the desert that never sets him completely free. Walking toward the mountain’s summit, like the sky could be above and below in the same moment. If I had been able to follow him, it’s truth that would have been revealed to me.”

“

38 The garnet betrays the platonic permanence it hints at. Behind every closed door one finds the ghost of sex.

The violence of volition. Sovereignty.

The message at a loss to define the rupture

nightmare’d telepathy where the horizon carries the dark

39 (the ghost of the sun in lens-flare)

But if I were to approach him now, recollection would dim. These words are already culled from the inaccessible outside. There’s nowhere left to go.”

“

40 Appurtenant locale. Blind spots on the map. Hidden or lost like the man’s forgotten myth. Hidden in silence. What can be seen directly in front of the eyes. Passages wandered without intent. The suppurating speech act. The formless night.

41 To say, if secrecy sanctions sleepthe place would be lost to the night, this outside

the circle shifted in the room’s light pushing against volume;

sphere

42 I want to say that he spoke of a destructive violence, an emptiness that felt like the desert I understood him to hold. To perforate the fabric would be as insidious as the wound. A suggestion lost. I want to think about his body, but the effluvia of melancholy keeps my attention disturbed.”

“

43 the body pushing against the wall

he closes the book

44 the move the body made toward drip

or

(the hour)

45 the color blue (the sky, the sea) horizontality subsuming erection (night, the nudity)

And still it’s the lust I held for the jaw, the body, the shape. No desire, in the desert, only lust.”

“

46 Generic destruction set before the voice.“a form a form of fear”the body astray, gone: as if missing with light (excess)—sun, not night

a fall toward the base“unquieted loss, untold”

Empty hour.

47 They walk closer to look at the detritus. They mouth syllabic intent, but no message can be carried in their specific silence.They question the sky with opened eyes, bestially dark.

They place their bodies in the light and let sun burn skin.

48 After, when the outside is reached. The ephemeral loses meaning: delineation muting all language dependent upon the temporal. Time not lost but abandoned, forgotten. The diagram sights the space between the lines, as if hallways had others parallel but out of sight. The man in the doorway has so little to say.

49 They have no reasons left. Nothing to pantomime: nothing to be said despite the impossibility of communication.

They return below.

Since everything has ended, nothing can no longer frighten them.

50 Not intent. Pushing beyond the injection. Penetrative wounds. The man in the doorway sways as if lost to drink, night, nudity. No sign of a gash. No one wants to know. Dirt left on the floor beneath the table. The wind outside, somewhere. Like words. Flatness. A push back to the other.

Silence.

III

VOICE(MUTE APPEARANCE)

we stand on this rockand it is to you I speakwhen I know the spaceis empty, towards the thoughtof the floorthe floor spilled wetI drink more becausespeech wants to cowerlike the dark beneaththe rockthe sound makes emphasiswith a wordthat leads to anotherand in that otherthere is the spaceof the questionwhich you must askthe questionwhich you mustconsider when it comesand what there is to do withthought

and yet and yetthe space surroundsin darknessto fugue to ideaor imagein retrospective defensethe cement ground coldthere is nothing to touchwhen I am heldonly idea’d echoformingto push the fleshmy ownmy glottispronunciation towardthe space where you can sayto me that there is nothingfor this is onlyan end but notthe end

worm’s tracethe path of wordsshape resembles sexbut still we standnext to you Istand next tomy blood putsthe cold of the floorinto the degree of night’s excesswhen the voice I speakof nothing onlythe voice I speakto you and youin responsewith the slight eye-raisescraping sound of throatthere is nothingwe feel togetheronly a push towardthe outsidewhen there is thoughtof this saidspeech to saythe outfrom wordsthe worm crawlsintoand outof apart

to live means nothingtogether we say yesthe ground drops beneath uswe are gone togetherand I pronounce lovewith my tonguegripping my palatethe sediment of rock taste likesalt and you pokethe wound of minethat you gavelike a gift of wordsthe echo of lover& over againthere’s something saidyou walk toward a lightand the door is gonewe are too farthere is no ground tofeet walk like a floatthere is the ideathat it is too lateto accept that deathcan speak to ustogether like a wordpushed into communitywith one anotheror a space of the answer

to see the rocksin the lightrotating in gravitytoward the openendless outsideotheragainst linearityrecollecting the sunor not or notand you look towardthe lightand the echo of my bodya vibrationmovement predicated byforceor just the same thoughtinside probed to thisbut life is gonefor thisis the othertogether we say yesthe ground far beneathinside this vesselthe flow of lifeerases the questionand replaces insidewith the hereand yet there is theidea of the word and yetand yet to speakwe speak togetherwords building like the force of violenceor penitent removalfrom the insidethere can be onlythe sight of the outside

to touch the stone and the voicethere is a bodywe float inside ofsay the word that needsto be saidI sayyou say to meand you walk toward the light eclipsingNIGHTbut inside thishere the body breaks downto the thoughtof a sluiced isolatepredicateoutside of the beneathelsewhere

dehors l’ombre dernière d’eux la poussière la nuit irrévocable

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Bernard Noël, “The Question” Bernard Noël, L’été langue morteBernard Noël, Les premiers motsClaude Royet-Journoud, Four Elemental BodiesGeorges Bataille, Inner ExperienceMallarmé, IgiturMaurice Blanchot, Thomas the ObscureRobert Greer Cohn, Mallarmé, Igitur

APART FROMSL033November, 2014ISBN: 978-1-940853-71-0

Text & Photographs © M Kitchell, 2014Written & Photographed in Santa Fe, NM & San Francisco, CA

Published by Solar▲LuxurianceSan Francisco, CAhttp://solarluxuriance.com

Printed at Edition One BooksBerkeley, CA

I. The Introduction of MythII. Corps/TextIII. Voice (Mute Appearance)

The man spoke of the incident. I found it hard to listen, to pay attention, in the way that the narrative touched upon such abjection. The violation of the wound, the first time. Penetrated silence. But this silence will always return, overwhelm. Nevertheless, the story has held like myth, pushing toward something, perhaps a new sacred. There’s a place for all bodies.

ISBN: 978-1-940853-71-0Solar▲Luxuriance, 2014