By Apostolis Artinos
In the revealing landscape of the wasteland, shapes are only recognisable by their own nostalgicfixation, an emotional return that reveals all memory-scapes in the haze of their perplexity, a subterranean movement of water that discourages any representational structure, any trace of self-control, a murky water that doesn’t regenerate the landscape, but strips it bare instead, exhausts it, absorbs it, makes it fluid in the end, merging it with the sea, the sea that exists under the roots of those dying trees, the desolation of the landscape, its rapture, its nakedness, its total availability within the edges that shape it, a subterranean movement of water, under the roots,where the latter do not swim, just making themselves available in this dim water, aninner space of death, a dark cavity which expands, acts on the underground, absorbs life by corroding it, a stony time which resists but is also available within its fluidity, its plunge into this worldly sea of oblivion, a hazy and arrogant daywhich shapes its nakedness, its frozen and imperceptible shadows, the trace of its own immobility, this static time of day which is more frightening than any night, because this can also happen in all the wastelands of the world.
A wasteland is the dusk that lasts, you said, the uniqueness of this dusk, its fixation on this void of time, on this perception of the void, an endless expectation of the night and as such a lasting insomnia,a sleepless hour of atypicalpain, and suddenly the stones, their sharpness, starting to loom like knives from the burned ground, making the steps all the more careful upon this sharpness which was rising inch by inch, slowly but steadily, obsidian slicingthe ground,as far as the eye could see, across the opposite hillside, and while your gaze wasabsorbed by this vision, your mind could not identify the scale of this catastrophe, a double movement where one of the two parts was short-circuiting the power of the other, as if the trace of this end has exhausted thought itself in its status of indifference.
The body is deserted in the humidity of its waiting, emitting a foul-smelling liquid, away from the paths of a destroyed forest, buried underneath the ashes of their disappearance, ashes that have effaced all traces of the forest, now its own upon these paths too, no words come from its mouth, just whispers, some vague syllables, it was distancing itself from language in a slow and quiet rhythm, not from its vocabulary but from its words, in a different stratagem of death now, with time opening up not to the possibility of its narration but the silence of its questioning, to this trace of waiting, a slow-paced time returning with its unsaid words, maybe words that would never be heard, maybe this tormenting deep rhythm of their silences, this ash, maybe nothing but this.
In the silence of the day, of thispeacefulwaiting, the sleepless bodyis notinert, in the sleepless cavity of the eye, a previously undreamt of duration is taking shape, whenexistence stretches out exhausted in this haziness, possessed by fragility,it is the moment, it is all the moments, within this penumbra of the world, when the gaze distinguishes only the density of this absence, when it is deserted, only when it is deserted, opposite those steaming branches, onlytheir immobility, their fixation on that spot which seems insurmountable, which cannot be discerned, nothing is discerned in that haze, all shadows of themselves, reflections of a weak suspended light, suspended at the opposite side, at the opposite side of the world, you said.
The text is the phantom of the world, its distanced shadow, the embodiment of its words, their transmission, the dissemination of their anonymity, a slow ecstatic sublimation that works in depth, bringing light, this sick and sleepless light, the hazy day of words, the undreamt of day, because words do no convey the dream, words convey life within its death, its linguistic plunge into the narrow space where words have been left alone, their echo, an echo that makes that space inaccessible, and the time a dead time, because this is what time is, that’s what it has always been, the insuperable, the loneliness of its waiting, a loneliness that gives back the words, their echo, words turning into each other in an invisible web of interconnections which grows, occupies your space, now becomes the haze of this very room -here are its naked branches!- holding this web, its duration, because here too -where else?- duration is the characteristic feature, an immobile, thick time, its defeat, the ultimate moment of its truth.
First published in the magazine “a glimpse of” #1
A wasteland is the dusk that lasts, you said, the uniqueness of this dusk, its fixation on this void of time, on this perception of the void, an endless expectation of the night and as such a lasting insomnia,a sleepless hour of atypicalpain, and suddenly the stones, their sharpness, starting to loom like knives from the burned ground, making the steps all the more careful upon this sharpness which was rising inch by inch, slowly but steadily, obsidian slicingthe ground,as far as the eye could see, across the opposite hillside, and while your gaze wasabsorbed by this vision, your mind could not identify the scale of this catastrophe, a double movement where one of the two parts was short-circuiting the power of the other, as if the trace of this end has exhausted thought itself in its status of indifference.
The body is deserted in the humidity of its waiting, emitting a foul-smelling liquid, away from the paths of a destroyed forest, buried underneath the ashes of their disappearance, ashes that have effaced all traces of the forest, now its own upon these paths too, no words come from its mouth, just whispers, some vague syllables, it was distancing itself from language in a slow and quiet rhythm, not from its vocabulary but from its words, in a different stratagem of death now, with time opening up not to the possibility of its narration but the silence of its questioning, to this trace of waiting, a slow-paced time returning with its unsaid words, maybe words that would never be heard, maybe this tormenting deep rhythm of their silences, this ash, maybe nothing but this.
In the silence of the day, of thispeacefulwaiting, the sleepless bodyis notinert, in the sleepless cavity of the eye, a previously undreamt of duration is taking shape, whenexistence stretches out exhausted in this haziness, possessed by fragility,it is the moment, it is all the moments, within this penumbra of the world, when the gaze distinguishes only the density of this absence, when it is deserted, only when it is deserted, opposite those steaming branches, onlytheir immobility, their fixation on that spot which seems insurmountable, which cannot be discerned, nothing is discerned in that haze, all shadows of themselves, reflections of a weak suspended light, suspended at the opposite side, at the opposite side of the world, you said.
The text is the phantom of the world, its distanced shadow, the embodiment of its words, their transmission, the dissemination of their anonymity, a slow ecstatic sublimation that works in depth, bringing light, this sick and sleepless light, the hazy day of words, the undreamt of day, because words do no convey the dream, words convey life within its death, its linguistic plunge into the narrow space where words have been left alone, their echo, an echo that makes that space inaccessible, and the time a dead time, because this is what time is, that’s what it has always been, the insuperable, the loneliness of its waiting, a loneliness that gives back the words, their echo, words turning into each other in an invisible web of interconnections which grows, occupies your space, now becomes the haze of this very room -here are its naked branches!- holding this web, its duration, because here too -where else?- duration is the characteristic feature, an immobile, thick time, its defeat, the ultimate moment of its truth.
First published in the magazine “a glimpse of” #1