BRADLEY J. FEST / POSTROCK

^{These decibels
Are a kind of flagellation, an entity of sound
Into which being enters, and is apart.
          —John Ashbery, “The Skaters”}

^{Dans ses mille alvéoles l’espace tient du temps comprimé. L’espace sert à ça.
          —Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l’espace}

^{Écrire, c’est se livrer à la fascination de l’absence de temps.
          —Maurice Blanchot, L’espace littéraire}

Things show restraint. The guitar’s evening light, the decades, at least three ways of space running on, spilling over from us no matter the font of being’s omissions. It, that: here. Here. Let’s walk, reconnoiter the threshold of the poetry office while memory edits our keyboard, that postrock jukebox: driverless mountains and landmines, alveolate searchers in the morning mist. Ah, and perhaps now the page’s anxious boundaries cannot help being over-porous, vaccinated athenaeum sensibly refusing conceptualism, comedic concrescences interfacing unanticipated upheaval and reinhabiting the day: rhythms and hallways. Together (again, at last) we can be here; look what is happening: there is something, a bit, you there where you are, and now a little more; here I am as well, steering, clearly a beneficiary though only now postrocking that pandemicwave. So hard. Please come in. We offer ourselves felicity, language put into a state of emergence. Germinal. Harmonic reading. Pianissimo beginnings. Overfilling all. Welcome. I envisioned the reverberation differently, once—no matter: I knew then this house wouldn’t just echo; and now: the freshness of absence. Let’s map. Sound tintinnabulation, auscultate the world’s glissades, let sonority return the intensities and outlines in which we shelter. Our essays and syntax aim for topophilia, our archives anagogy. This variational program, our immensity, appears easy enough. Here. Here, others’ appetitive fragments already suggest intimacy. And though our motionless childhoods linger, nonetheless we’ve deconstructed their original shell. Don’t worry about being cast out, thrown; our becoming is lodged. Fixate on anything: the plunderphonics, the full shred thrash of my lists, the doorknobs, drop ceiling transfers—it’s all here and done, made, said, thought; your attention can’t be ill spent. I can’t be quite silent—you’ve already perceived that well enough; nonetheless, know the value of your locale, your tonalized solitude—that’s what this is about, anyway. The stone matrix of desert horizontality is protasis, the concrete fettle is fine, a current repose, and an approaching abode tropes evvivas. Contradicting all: anxiety and melancholy among the ruins; “the archive is no solution”; my self-reflexive hilltop scriptorium is just a doubting “workshop of abyss,” lyric apoptosis. (Not surprising, another apologia:) What audacity to plumb the silent stretches. But also, curtains, softened geometry, virtualized anatomy, discrepant vulnerability washing the sky’s spread and casting zeugma for all available parts, embracing rust too, “worn and imperfect things,” our wonderful domestic residue interpreting what follows initial moorings. Emphasis on instantaneousness. No matter can coalesce a privet for the mistakes of chairs and trains, terpsichorean shapes, the ovations of other spheres, all that iterative spanning. We just moment. And then another day to see what congeals from again being inside, remembering that previous ones can reasonably fade when we’re here. Here, stone’s daydreams excite the intelligence of filing cabinets in the poetry office, a box of consubstantial flexibility which, contrariwise, contained more after I opened the door this morning, drawers swollen with well-being. We cherish the shelves and awakened desks, let their issue expand from our hands, the computer speakers recapturing the quality of impermanent midday light, the USB oratorio. We can also cheerfully retreat from this magnificent chrysalis, arch other reaches, let the library’s brick and mortar duration cradle our slumbering heads. This simplicity. Outside: a green folding rondo-nebula, dynamic patterns, diastolic forests breathing cosmicity, you or your ancestors somewhere; inside: books and screens and phones and crossed legs; in between, down the hall: amiable summer coworkers. You too are doing, making, saying, thinking, though your soundtrack and spatial magnetization might vary, acousmêtre. You too we invite to dream. Here. Here, as before, we’ll leaf back through the afternoon’s friendly books so we can really proceed, excogitate our submergence in satin one-dimensionality, that voluminous singular substance, happy “space reach[ing] from us [. . .] constru[ing] the world.” We may be here awhile (though feel free to exit wherever), actualizing what we are amidst. Our digital descent through yet more “clamor-filled shells” and the multiplication of the possibilities of attending to the construction of vast and dear alterity enlarges and displaces hushed interiors, dimmed fluorescents, catastrophic sands, the shade of nucleized horizons, corners of pulverized dust. It would be surreal, but it isn’t. Matter’s glottal caparisons nominate high E strings bent for honorific soundings, joshing asphaltic slime from the murk of their chugging brethren, charting another flow. The present tense encourages more amfalula trees than the inscriptionologists can plumb, aleatory joys, novel immediacies. Here. Now-here in stereophonic fidelity to voices outside this room . . . they aren’t the same: concrete, misplaced, an aching collective. Not a situation of dashing, no contest. Words. Washing along, packed under fingernails, feathering calves, lettering fragmentary light borrowers. Dimensions of atomic luminosity. Non-optical possessorexxes of untumultuous ever-presentness, oneiric and declivitous. No since. Outrageous surface singularity, secular elenctics, believable tenderness, certain quiet. To junction, our disconnected rendezvouses strain toward unexpurgation and face aggregate flare, standing separate amidst the onrushing, unwilling to cross the manifold guaranteed seisms. Little bits of underglot in the music. A hesitancy. Desire for new bread. Or else, linger instant, stretch systolic envelopes with latency and fricative multithetic commands, and, going just a little further, no matter absolutely requires minimalistic midnight pantomimes under duress unless the toxicity just overwhelms. So, less. Try. Sitting means misgiving means just total stoppage before drafts that dwell on sea and land grow cretonne rainbows and reflective surfaces stacking ever higher as the pioneering edge betrays sanctions peered and weathered, left in bolted apologies, cleaved fast and bound contronyms, before staggering amongst the generosity, the generosity of places in osmotic soaring, suspensions of floccinaucinihilipilification, embouchures of light and auratic credences while authority and reputation ebb and flow and generally keep going, which is really another experiment entirely (so see?). A few short words. And then elsewhere, still at ease in the poetry office, melody yomps out of the static sky’s painting, fading, rattling clandestine and raged, an inserted comma where it doesn’t belong, many missing entirely, ducking the low clouds of crystal semaphore dissipating into the offing, crawling bookshelves and wandering thought’s spatial fancies. So: fields of more. Which, I mean, pick up the pace, but is something already lost in the metathetic timber upon which rests the clanking? And then now two, more might imply navel-gazing—but that’s where we are: in the discipline. Back. A lone and soon-interrupted cymbal crash. Dread might be more accurate and forest references in the noise dirigible of verb forms to their . . . can’t say certain things [whisper whisper]. We could cut, open, swim—do action. But then we’d be there and moment’s dilating halo would threaten overextension by simple conjunction, a multivolume condition, a boundary and a boundary to revisit. Things become less obvious. Terrifying ongoingness. Qualms: self-indulgence. Justifications: not really. We’re already bored and more won’t help. The cup’s almost empty and other critiques. To the haruspex, well: neo-tilefish. We don’t really care for some forms of imprudent warbling. Nothing else will come to mind right here, here where the sound again pings, cricket and cicada dronerock, and our ears give up. Obscuring the genre of chamber music, distant beaches stir what no camera-eye captures, the enmeshed traces of tense and hope, formulations unpermitted despite thickening the stickum, the arpeggios of being. If we argue about blips, metronomic methods, it’s probably because an ancient gripe won’t resolve by our efforts; we’ll meet agonistically elsewhere. Drawing hard on that low C, then B flat. Awhereness. Add: dictionary. If the area is a rhizome and a monad and a singularity and a set, we move across through under over the whereabouts of huh, of spacemattering. If the uxorious terroir is crept, shadowed, its in around with behind grasps handwriting-as-“symphonic-wallpaper-paste,” a really wonderful family portrait, no need to look at the comments. Doubt. Pendulating toward nonchalance about stuff’s darting ties, expression coagulates along seams of wood and paper, dust motes and oxygen. Viola, cello, keytar. Minor aharmonia. (Some ambition too, perhaps [now that now is the now of now now]?) Grains of metaphors dangle molecularly, dropping accumulatory particles stuck in carpet, the need of a dragon tree, crepuscular rays, an advertising self, its essays. One’s bell. The mistaken notion of place defining intuition, form. The rigging groans geometrical analyses sawing vacation decrees, swaying extensity’s ambit, the “cancerization of the linguistic tissue.” Revelation. Proper names. All of them. Endow all that we can compass with the last page and the next; stitch features and striving with aquaporin and case-hardened hyacinths, verbs and nouns with adjectives and prepositions. Here, here. Unfulfilled shadows agglutinate further down, digesting unuttered absence, disturbed exteriors: they threaten gravity. The surface of the region is the region’s surface filled with exquisitely various details supplicated before the aperture of a liberated house, a sun buzzing its nuclear solitude, its protective inner hive. We exist. Admirably. Not lapsing. Helping our rooms live, withdraw. Nails drag pianos, scrape violins. Glorious. Feel. Images without historicity obscure flashing organic solitude. Round. Calm. Preliminary remarks. They’re chapters in an important tree while distant rumbling tolls the hour and we rest near each other thinking the sea. In the library we set off down a familiar if interminable seasonal path. There were reasons. Now we have space for it. Almost to the bottom of this one. But we need much more. Shift and rock. Set up a helicon to pluck new rhythms, make sure to tune it with the minnesingers who refuse crescendo and avoid frisson zones infructuous and overly rapid. Or not. Such places are probably fine, don’t exist, are scripturient, hyphenated. As we know, the mode gathers, doesn’t advise, performs accordingly. Close now. There. The procedures turn the procedures turning, paper obeying rules of which we and it are unaware. The planet. To dangle. And then revise your vellichor, moving around in the light, the illuminated district of residence, brilliancy sectors. Our best. If quantitative affect could destress the approaching heat lunes, their virology would just scorn the world’s garboards and suggest monothetic outcomes anyhow. Nope. If we could puncture the sky, the sky would be punctured. We know an amount and at least two things about scale if rock after itself about itself is merely itself addressing its own itselfness. But if anyway. Moving on here to here. Mezzo forte. Shift away from the news and our continuing failures. This, this will require as a regular task breathing around anxiety’s tremulant restraints. Adjective the verbed noun. Insert something and take it out again. For example: singing; for example: marginal dashes surreptitiously derealizing possibility. Dictionary: add. Open, for now. Closed, at some point. And but so now, through the archway, let’s dwell, establish something about objects, spatiocognize concentrated assemblies, create. Unconditioned if purring hard house. Nothing uncaused, remixes, groundwork; or, the antinomies. My ears worry in full stereo, following from their definition. The croft issues from its various entries. Metrophobia thirsts the unspaced chrysalism. Statements linger, proliferate, reappear, imply unity. Peruse. Still only among the introductions, yes. Hum instauration. Not as opinion, hmm. Geologize a few concepts, deduce the ’cenes but quarantine the imperatives: this lockdown art. Strange results: aibohphobia, comedy, nameless DJs. More entries descend the lists, however, which may be formal rules but not exclusive extirpations. Beat is not logic. Oh well. Against the sialogogues, we can whine. Those who pursue different workbooks—such remembering befits clastic tendencies; here, instead, here we’re craftrocking: we were neither the conclusion people nor the plagiarism folks; we’ll leave those activities to those in cities, classrooms. An attempt. The nature of things shouldn’t have been our object but understanding. Welp, begin again, serially and with apodictic inclination. Amplify nothing empirical beyond the circle of experience. We can think whatever we like, as long as we contradict ourselves. Here. Here now with the smoke and the light and too many large volumes: we’ve put language to work on space: hear the forms, speak the intuitions, realize the infrastructure of imitation—pure externality before effluvium. Phenoms and travel, babes, cousins, advertising firms, islands, contests sporting and otherwise—important asides, yes, but all elsewhere, suspensions and not quite this, not really it. So, return. Again, re-return again, here, now, to hear, once again, now, here from traversals whence places passed droning, driving, and now here I move amaryllis down the page—pouring, to pour once more. Continuation opens the editions and finds the em dashes. Let’s see. Solar olfactories, planetary concern, my head going out to meet the emergency. But let’s come back. Where some talked about multiplying images, there were others who stressed: all appearance. The representations. Not nouns but foundations. And thence: language toward . . . (that[?]). We are. This, this manifold; from our standpoint. With writing. The possibility of things becoming objects (for us). And we hear it. Soundspace. (The other soundsource treated elsewhere, of course.) And after a few thousand marks: that’s it, that’s the project. Continue. Without you and I, without our conjoining without, outside—nothing nothing nothing nothing. We’ve stressed image, but it’s in us. Thus, the confusion and occhiolism. So suspend meta. If temperature adjusts the inside and outside to itself while crunching down into my seamlessness, a feeling and quickening, we’ll still be still with our regrets, catalyzing the air and walls in which we move, rooms of guilt that grow larger through blinkingly steady space signatures. But they might also become rounded nubs in the aether, soft bulbs cushioning us a night or two rather than inviolate spears of remorse and loss that turn and turn us about, piercing you, me, everyone, the familiar grooves those pestiferous catastrophists exhort. Meanwhere, uncontrollable registers quantify sensation, constricting capillary breakdowns into yet another fold that could be otherwise—realizing sarongs, wraps, cardigans, blankets, vibes multiplying—away. Hold. Breath. Come back. A moment more and agnostic titles for works speculative and potential. How we impose and avoid the ukases of our ambitious perturbations. Ideate here, somewhere. Else. Inserted in words are words and pieces of words, which obviously imply reams of paper as plastrons for the truly authentic simulacra upon which we depend for craters of meaning. If we pluck some letters discovered in the branches of our various digital arbors, won’t they conspire to multiply, making doomy pronouncements mere squibs in the foolish matinee of our idyllic atmosphere? We could try again, knowing each line to be mere autoschediasm, all click and clack, turning into place and jigsawing together an alimentative alphabet, working our way through, imprinting the universe with every letter. Inevitable repeating meta(so probably again too)huh. Familiarity with the mode and all that has passed, however, is . . . insufficient wizard motor. Generate. It’s organon. And continue. Doubt of course. But at a certain point, look. Some. Then more. The flight through method plays across bones, rolled and determinate, chance striking out between such thoroughness that we might sit and read a little longer before worrying the favorite colors of youth into new spectra, deciding differently the proper length of light to devote to these brief rooms, thinking about the yield of such investigations, drums inaudibly beating on the margins, the wake of unliftable tomes, an undergirding laugh and dance through the points sketched beyond the sky, headphones lifting off because of pipers and stairways, impossibilities. Ah. It could always be shorter, though; here it’s, um, difficult here. Destination found without any journey, the sonder we’re both imagine-feeling as we look back across the pages already read and at each other toward those ahead, an opia of too few eyes, rubatosis in the silence of your locative tense, a monochromatic narrative reconstruction dredging inexplicable emotions from the plastic-lined riverbeds, styles guiding our hands toward always bigger books, combinations, searching keystrokes—all this inscribed in and by the sign’s light cone. Fragment. Piece. Scrap. Longer utterances arise from the communiques of collectives studying the scriptorium’s stiller volumes. Judgments become goals become liberosis as the clouds find their bordering phases, subliminal accents and automythologies, metaphysical jugglery, statements above all, repeated sentences agglutinating from the general space of compelling speech. Someone says something definitively. We might prefer the emanations from the looming hyperphysical materializations transpiring off the surface of steam, the gushing tissue of appearance’s proceedings, an egress of development, a dawning issuance showing a moment’s derivations. But we’re already lost (again) and then immediately found before we’re right back into the purities of logic and mimesis surrendered before even asking who our confessional formations are supporting and for what do they extemporize reason’s few founding untranslated terms. Another statement. A discovery amongst the exegetes can become a nominalist protrusion if the fashions of previous locations become optimistic arguments about the relevance of the unwritten biographies of the too famous, as if the more we need to know about ourselves and others—the essayistic serialism we’re in, this unsuccessively reiterative space that gets rearranged by quantum stagehands—declares fluctuating bass just litigious énouement, limpid grace notes in the quiet falls of decoherence. Color might be something else to discuss, an angry rumination in the backwoods of theater’s slow permanence in pace and stride, striving about that very specific enunciation, not bibble-babble but mellifluous exulansis, which may very well be the limit case of words written and uttered, a quietude sung and returned to quiescence for unresonant nonsequential unintelligibility, words patterning into words into chaosmostic canterburying glond pastferrier. Depart and return the unheard amplitudes, the possibilities we couldn’t leave behind. The swells. The thin metallic scrapes of electronic noise, brittle decrescendos and pulsing summoning in reverse the not forever. Arrive here by way of staying with an unessential, different here. And don’t pretend blindness toward what does communicate, even if just the exhausted dieffenbachia of speech. Look at the constructions, edifices of terraqueous sense, afternoon and radiant throughout. Page through potential references and inspiration, spontaneous founts of direct simplicity, actually executable work orders. Elsewhere, the tic of unnecessary imperatives clatters unheeded, so attend to that or not, but without names we know kenopsia to circumscribe the territory. Other ways. Catalogues of usage, choice. Diverging routes reconfigure the endspaces every agglomerated point withholds in its quilted impermanence throughout the matrices of sallying convergence. Visitations from the temporary specters of quivering sway the nervousness, the compassed relations of hands, live. From a ballroom. As if performance could justify this or that decision, waking in manifold presence to the sighing amplifiers, the ambassadorial explanations of what music actually is in the tingling immediacy of pizzicato, searching the ellipsisms for overuse, something else, something else, and then late-night messages, shimmering ride cymbals, disparity. Beat. Fit another subject object verb with adjectives. Statement, command. Snap. Tick. The burden of production, plans. Match. Between one awn and a joining, a contemplation. Continuance. Small variations. Loaded to bursting with anhedonia of some kind. Bang. Old sentences, really. No patience or virtuosity. This particular unit? Measurement, number? Nowhere a fraction of available material. The editors of the senses desire verification by method and rhyme, to decide bodies in the effects, flows and darkness. Perhaps let’s suggest the world do things. Air: permeate perambulation. Sky: shine and overarch. Place: Be and be and be. There. Light’s dissertation. There’s a point through each here where the partitions footnote and then where we go onward, not unsettled beginning or unglimpsed end, really, and so line, line, we keep making—reminiscence epochal and so slow, negative spaces, silhouettes. Indirection accedes the birdsong of the hallway, somewhere, perhaps. It’s why I don’t try to explain much; you might just rather talk about my present compulsions, evident in the morning’s call; my favorite flower is not of interest to your more pressing concerns and wanderings. Ah, yes. But did you linger on my books? Did you ask if I’d read them all? Heh. If radical here, it might also be elsewhere. Meter can be safety and hands running across the walls and images we haven’t even really tried to construct (don’t really foresee any kind of effort in that direction), so press play again on the full temperature of darkness after the last old road light cutting the metal hearts and drums of artemisia cold. Allergies maybe, promotional efforts, phone calls regarding services, changing the points at which correspondence branches—all signal a forthcoming abode. Its imminence has multiplied the worry, though—such a thing has only until now appeared ever-withdrawing, withheld by some universal equation about how much satisfaction might transpire across any given set of sequenced spaces. I guess after all these sittings—generally with coffee and at first on a patio and then on wooden benches and then a third floor and another and a second with a window and a laptop and now—I’m always trying to find a different way of saying something than the different way of saying it that initially occurred to me so that that ideal antagonist out there won’t say, heh, wow, look at this obvious rubbish, but then readers . . . hmm, and face it, if you’ve gotten this far you’re in for a longer haul than like a fabulous amount of other people and maybe I shouldn’t question it (thanks), and it occurs to me that the self-reflexivity of this sentence may be producing the very thing I discuss worrying about previously in this sentence or else the gesture toward the mirror might actually be the thing I fear and even that gesture of gesturing has been well trod (and heck, I’ve spilled some ink about that too) but then I continue anyway and I know I have a lot more to produce in this space and so then you’ll be lost forward into those subsequent pages rather than lingering on this somewhat unpunctuated one (or two), so what do I really have to lose if I quickly generate a few ars poetic lines rather than agonize the morning away trying to say it all differently, probably everything actually, right, this one moment giving the lie to all those others, not putting even close to it all in nor leaving everything out, every single letter that has ever pinged off the end of a finger a mistake, and oh it multiplies and feeds back and we’re getting carried away into ourselves being ourselves in the inside/outside of the space of space inscribed here trying to spatialize language’s space with language but knowing that it is just language and space and they aren’t overlapping phenomena necessarily even though the page smashes them together into its own space of a priori intuitions of represented space which is definitely not what I’ve been trying to access so far, heh, is it. Pause. Turn. Not a new sentence: delete this one. Back down. Grind another turn away from itself turning in another language than that of turning; another shard in the eye of how the world sees itself becomes yet another multivolume epic of the mundane. A blast of rhythmic noise might suggest another burst—and then it comes, sound implying. Its other still raises questions of rhythm, modulation, tone, and I know that simultaneously this volume has just, well, a pretty sustained dirge of initially unanticipated monotony. Drone. Superdrone. Sorry. Logophilia, I suppose. But do listen above. The radio static of crewed space flights doesn’t anticipate the random possibilities of what we’ll hear when we give ourselves over to encyclopedic listening. A tad more speed despite the ubiquitous vemödalen permeating the voices at this location palimpsesting safety and casualty, distracting from the commonest editions we could acquire at unremarkable second-hand but no longer; we continue to desire what’s in the first line. Rules. But also: change occurs, takes place; being has no pause button. Here or here. An “if” construction whispers suggestions for some variety. As in: if this is a morass and a revelation and a gateway to caffeinated convulsions for these speakers in their just shuddering monadic variety, if increases in air pressure indicate the onset of noise and sludge, the silence at all horizons dear, if it can be equipment for adding a yod to punctuate one moment closed by generating another, palm-muting more universe, killer riffs, embarrassments in the first shaped stanza and how they nonetheless lead to new figures, real differences, stage-diving hype people now distinguished fellows, philologists of hardcore’s assorted ascendancies chairing serious romantic enclaves and banging the drop D, windmilling the floor with their pentameters, if the space of those kinds of memory can be plumbed on the supraliminal field of the neurosubsocius, the construction can end without medieval annoyance. Different structures. Sure. Maintaining the artist’s onism and the nodus tollens of observation. Typing. The sentience of the interface. Thinking annotated critical editions. Outside, smoke from afar, granular detail from which to glean distantly subsequent monographs, wildly speculative articles with quotations as titles, climate chronicles. We’ll see. The speakers, like the athlete and sculptor and everyone else, are workers. And are not themselves. But you: the addressee. The visible spectrum at once desires judgment, value, rank. The black t-shirts of the senior lecturer crew certainly do. To rebrand the avant-garde. A shelf with every style guide ordered by some unintelligible provision. Your complete works. We’re getting closer to the register’s exhaustion. Surely some lachesism approaches on the other side of this or that particular act of totalization. We should check the interview’s transcription. The split EPs. Cormorants of aftersome light. The putting together of questions about forms and idylls attempts to resist all these linguistic compulsions. Donate. The inescapability of influence, the first space in which you saw something, read something, listened to caterwauling immediacy unimaginable before breaking across the action lines of your brow. Remixes might sound exactly like the original. To review each individual issue in a journal’s run. To keep going, to let the discography accumulate with purpose, a catalogue someone might put in a box and ship for a reasonable price and finally experience fulfillment. But is this not a question asked in the style of certain thinkers about how things are in fact precisely the opposite of the obvious reading? Those under whose sway certain speaking parts can retire and others, names once unknown, might be eminently employable. See the reference. Heed the stacks. And then we’ll search documents for usage to distinguish one lens of understanding from another. The auditory swell. It comes. Metaphors: vibrational frequencies. Womp. Plush rock crying. PDFs, broken spines, lading anthologic leaves overtop the radioactive tombs of trying to communicate deeply. Obscure categories design upon your verse commission. Populations. Where we are is wandering is lost is space wandering from our original representation of not knowing where we are wandering where we are. Influence may not transpire and another measure is about to pass, making things seem, um, possible, artifacts of daily experience stretching across other somewhat grand programs for strategically letting go. Expedients in order—in order—in order, oder—digital gloom. Fit in just a bit more: contingency plans for interstellarity, fun in the outer reaches of gleaming transcendence into the very back of your right eye and listing ever so slightly and already forgotten, the fusible legato minerals of being’s pedal board, cities of echoes between headlights, walls, twisting streets that field balance in the bliss of broken aircraft, an ease of titles when every lyric can hesitate far off and stay there. Goodbye. Undersea fronds tickle the surface of the unseen, the count, the record, the trimming shifts in tense proscribed by the allowances of verge. A synonym becomes a synonym if and only if it can demonstrate difference sufficient enough to be confused with something else that cannot demonstrate anything even if the sentence alliance terminates riddling mortises: consolidation of the person in the radiator. The end of the album. House shows and just wow. Felling one impossibility after another. The right way of doing one thing. Only one thing. And so many others we ascertain, mooring and conclusion, glimmer and yes. Here here. The ephemeral hasn’t really been our objective (as if something can be both non-target and way of observing, a [non-]point outside [. . . none]). No need to tidy what isn’t a mess unless it’s the evening’s program that lists all the different iterations of the possible oeuvres we’re devoted to, the careers of letters passing across epochal declamation—our rabidity and patience for the mediocre track, the side that doesn’t go anywhere, the fallow MP3 of apathetic fuss—it’s all pulsed therapy, focused on the part of the hip that cradles our smartphones and their phantom affects. Against the story. Delimitations anticipate the striding sun showers, the early and late work, not this in between stuff but the desiccated trees climbing from a rising ocean here, here. Return and absence. Visitation: allow suggestible perusal and recombinant ease at midday’s flush, the annual rhythm window, frames of, could it . . . relaxation. A bit, a house, a storm. New rooms to apply sunscreen, assemble brightly colored puzzles. If to think. If the sorrow and the pain and the stress. If the carrots ahead of our wagon tread themselves to mulch before our arrival. If the viable conditionals of the contemporaries. If the sonal atoms deregister; if they receive radiation. Intensive magnitude and its measurement. If the absolutely correlational comprehension of compost’s cognizing our (other, new) office: synthetic under-generation of an apperceptive manifold. The jud jud jud jud jud. The image of a line. The image of continuance, revisiting, mining. Cutups from some avowedly bright place. Hotels of starting over, adding something in. Strictly limited availability. Where the voices. Grainlets and pulsars. If moment lets the ataraxia of accumulated arrivals sustain. If flipping through pages functions. Then might arrive as forthcoming zero-state dirigibles of antimatter’s imaginative promise inside, within, through the inner spaces of inner space. Or as reflection. The ends of clauses, other various microarcs. And what about megasonority, postextinction sonatas, obstreperous thunderings amongst the hyperspheres. Not here. Stepping back from what may have been left behind for another. Not us, where we are, here. It was a tentative space and then another before questions caught and clasped. Interruption key. But so too continuing (in) the aftermath of walking the fading disappearances into the trees. Nightly nonlocality. Some spaces. Points from which to again stitch through the distances of realization glamorous calmness and moment and reading. Another glance and a waiting. More made for making more, generating generation, bringing forth and carrying some illumination into the forthcoming. Sit and gaze upon the untopped acoustic cliffs, pixelated explorations of possibility and revelation, fraudulent chirplets of the real. Motivation, instrumentality, song? Touring bands, relentlessness, defiance: questions concerning any longer making certain kinds of gestures maybe. If moment releases what rests at its surround, small things really, glissons and trainlets, minibends of striving now tonebursts of inhabitation, become phase change at the limit of extensivity, become lived magnitudes, a finally, an at last, a gathered evening, dwell and dwell, audiblizing the tone pips, the wavelets, the strings of matter tinkling the quantum edges of your infolded ears gathering into themselves the jud jud jud screech jud screech from all havens astern, clomping massiveness, mosh pits geologic, stone slam dancing the molecular core of where we rest, that postrock. But don’t hesitate to also sit back and contemplate the imperative that follows a statement that descends an overstuffed shelf confusing its contents with its iterative embrasure. And already on, we cavort these unspaced data, ringing and clawing the blankness in whose stead light scatters and grains our voxel impulses, the imprescience of waking. Still. Hold. Break somehow so that flow can attend. Some programs hesitate, strain a discipline’s patience with itself while other departments cling to crystals set aside for their own special dominion but by accidental inattention dissolved into oozy mush alongside the rotten cardboard laminate of searching and finding and submitting and then somehow somewhere we could turn again and do and will here. Here. If nowhereness and elseness and possibility aren’t, if the prediction-space of moment—selected and created—its unlabeled matrices gooing the works with seizing static aren’t. If. Somewhere a muse is lonely; stay lonely, muse. (Be kind. They don’t have much longer.) To talk about what is arriving out of the ethereal nothing-space of elenctic belief, mugwort, mile-a-minute, and multiflora rose, invasive inflorescence—unlike the mayapple and its podophyllotoxins treating what will still most certainly persist among the postclimate remains—means to talk about what fish leather, stinging nettles, and hemp might discuss, given the chance, means lifedrumming, claimed vicissitudes, dapper spaces strung throughout the wrested feedback machine upon which we build at least some of the advanced research projects their agencies multiply the risk of beyond what can be submitted in a single grant cycle toward the wonderful paradoxes infinite runover lines stretch to everyday depth, the sludgy thresholds of differential underversal straining. See the strain. If we knew that the problem with space might be what we are trying to avoid discussing (it’s impossible!), might we have chosen something less trudging? A plodding with underserved moment between step and step and step. No. No, the desks are singing and the shelves gesture and gesture and the things to which we attend don’t stop inscribing their stuff all over these drives and their desperation and their repetition (which appears to have been excised, does it not?), and oh, plausible avatarial freedom! Some define expression as what occurs in some places to some, opining as others do, must. Somewhere there’s paper too, inhering. Breathe from there to here; things persist. The “light blue wood / of the mouth,” lacustrine narratives, recitations of infectious forlornness, locations of gentleness. To again return and encounter what is available and at hand. Smiles. Memories. More breath. Knowledge of certain tendencies, but refreshed, undimmed. Like: entwingle, spadix, hin. Continuance but ease now and nod smidgens of confidence. But let’s not signal yet what here we often signal. Ahead: plenty of travail, toil, work. Let it in, of course, but advise a deescalating entrance when preparing for bed, on evening walks, at the grocery store. Please. It just happens. Just breathe. So where to? Probably now, as always, reckoning with a purposefully limited number of things, the resistance of what desires vociferation and how to trap that unuttered potentiality in a neverwell while cranking-stomping the pedalboard of our yawpitude. If we introduce a virgule, are there lines with unavoidable pyrheliometric lyricism, a different tournamonde in the rondure of our minds considering variability ununique and sequelesque, engrossed in the reorganization of this or that northeastern product. Desert forever. Some tuneage lets human artifacts reliably cascade: “the interface of real difference”! at the shudderhorror of the alphabet. Miniatures, really. Some recording artist’s studio’s lineage’s territoriologist’s unpronounceable nowspace. Uh huh. So . . . lithographs documenting the development of transfinitude are on offer at the auctioneer’s arrondissements in exchange for a contemporary work of critical theory; or, for the price we all paid to the digital and the oceanic and, of course, the “continuous structure[s that may] not [be] irreducible,” we can rejoice in error-correcting codes’ originating pop, the angelic choirs deathgrowling monuments to dust, the notification that the system’s suggestions about how to carry inside and outside around our towns have been updated, and that there are guarantees certain receipts will be lost in some coming revolution or other. If someone desires a slightly different atlas of forgetting, a cataplasm inside the operatic dressing space salving our bibliographic scanning-hunger, then we’ll just continue abstracting our abstractions, I suppose, for they also liberate. Look. I like writing sentences and putting them together. Look. I put in other things too, things I’ve read, listened to, seen, you know, you, an invented darkness, an addressee that is not the person overhearing my utterances (which aren’t really heard at all)—they’re not so much inscribed as plucked into the discrete states of this computrix and then immediately multiplied and backed up, becoming ancestors and toggled switches on the wall of history’s support beams, whatever those might be—but rather, I guess, downloaded, right, you future jacked-in weirdos, you ignominious supporters of an existence now ceased yet still re-re-articulating itself, documenting turns of mind and going, going on toward new and different receivers who glance and sing and quote and then also die, as we do, or else, toward yinz, the multitude who have ignored it all and so whatever it may have been once is no more (it’s fine; really), molecules poured back into the universe. Flow. And a critique of flow. It allows changing our tune but also something like a global key signature, posturing, collapsing, reverberating. Many sopranos. It’s good to be back; I can be free somehow. Okay. Barely anywhere, but still here. The rarities of your catalogue were eventually found and collected. We let some authors out of the canon with merely a slap on the wrist. The sun’s weak rays a-winter morning deliquesce the room’s outlines—a bit more profound—and happily deny the absolute. More like these are forthcoming. And others, shuffle drones—racemes in one place, elegant stinkhorn in another—etherealize away different orchestralized databases, deconfliction platforms in the sky referencing every hyperlinked letter in the entire four-issue run of our little online magazine. As questioning, impassive grammar, clemency in the form of a shopping list, the clear-fell of our “permanent fallout sky” strides across even the strongest imaginations, cosmopolitically, multiplying alternatives to “tradition.” We stay in our rooms (at least right now) and sit gloomily on hills and rebuff it all anyway. Locust satellites in the opalesque tessitura. Reflective thinking and a refusal to consider something as it particularly is. Dervishish and filiform this contraband, these shifting grids of space, the nontelos of over there, across the room, through the door, facts hanging (I guess loosely?) around as we attempt briefly again (again) to lead some of these stragglers toward beginning to start to be able to conceive of potentially realizing the rough outlines of deciding they might want, in some place other than where they currently are, to prepare to commence an attempt to decipher a burgeoning, nascent interest in what might have a tendency to appear between some people’s only (really) acknowledged boundaries, a lesson, surely, in tempering expectation, ambition, the regime of the possible, what the shape of here might latterly resemble after the room’s construction concludes and the building’s plans are discarded and forgetting ensues, ensues, ensues. Decaffeinate the proscriptions hellboxing our ears with their limited-edition sets of rare B-sides and import-only bootlegs that all signal a lost edge, sounds of strata, superhigh-definition quantum acoustics beraying sound particles right at the Roche limit of genre. Spell-struck and anxious, imperate. Please? Okay, whatever. Pick up the instruments for the circling symphony’s slow burst narrowing toward the seiche of rückkehrunruhe, a seemingly unconquerable conversationalism permeating thought as if the weather weathered its own weathered whether-or-not. Yes. Squeak and oscillate. Sway and give up. Split apart. Then recommit, heal. Search another document for rehashed dandelions (words) or some stoic toddler’s noncherished silverware (ideas). When a multivolume collected work sits near-at-hand, tremendous volcanic explosions occur with at least some degree of probabilistic certainty. Variants in the file cabinets and the airports. Office plans for when the shelves become overfull (they already are). A pause in the power of a moment’s ability to inarticulate its own epistaxis. Writing until some arbitrary requirement has been fulfilled leaves us at the bottom or top of the page. We are we, aren’t we? So much neosyntax. Remember the theory? The covert ink-and-dagger skrikes posing as something only slightly less confounding than seals on your favorite paving stones somehow strung throughout the moon’s apices while our neighboring telescopes denude every lush paragraph of a few pointless adjectives that bake, fast, gyrate, and multiply away, perhaps. So: veneration, pianoworks, the era of childhood and parenthood and minimalist wonder. We can probably do little more. Unless we have everything and indices for finding it all. Or else, impromptu on the oud nothing fearful, nothing symmetrical, but unthought gleanings underneath the beach. Something to research, at least. And here, here is really the place to do it. For the hard disks still contain the juvenilia—still poems, even after one place and another. The body sits and the language comes and makes mistakes and lives on and we’re people installed together over poetry, an underwater masquerade accidentally muttering tessellated asides at the mosaics, reciting our deep neglect of realizing what I guess should probably be considered writing over a few different lives. We’re betwixt but beginning and floundering even amidst. What kind of energy is something underway. The decisions. Editorial congeries palimpsesting lines tossed once more into the discrete sea of my iTerminal’s simulacral recycling facility discover once more my apodosis’s drift toward hip tech-lingo; or, why flowers are necessary—none in the record at this point, so more drusen, gavage, fuselage—the jouska of wildcat groping floral contemplation imperiling all nominalism. Every word has to come from somewhere without previous ownership and go. For if we just autocongregate the work and skirl at every wall, the work: it’s something else; it’ll be otherwise. So: frequencies. Uses and editions. Things to cut and ignore and flail toward. And then keep going because the bottom is still a plunge and not yet a hop, an accidental memory. Make a little, depart; make a lot, remain. Or else, record each new performance and measure the color of every odd book’s spine and despair at all the other(’s) words, what we could never provoke. And the familiar notes. That famous work of theory I haven’t read about that novel I haven’t read. Sitting here instead. Arpeggiating picayunity, the infinitesimal, an interval between Earth and world. Other synonymity melodies are rawky index-finger-typing of the trace. It’s like we’ve forgotten the use of jargon in the glade. And how the sign transforms. And the authors on syllabi planned too far in advance. But not that reference. Oh, many ambitions and projects but out of tune processes foreclose working much harder. You know that, and if you forget, reminders abound, swift and merciless. Okay. Depend on the location and the person while the statements drift spell-mongering, anatomizing, casting about at all the “forbidden trash.” They stop their imperative whirr for a moment (then resume, of course), termini for theft and credit, an investigation of what the dictionary adds: awe. A thread to pull all the way. Why not. It’s not pretentious (right) if I’m totally upfront: I don’t know these words either. A lateral exhaustion creases the session’s interstitial fabric. A statement about a condition or a situation or an activity. Tired now: so here, here “it is radical parataxis. Something droning. Nothing epitomizes another.” A concussive innocence and a lingering dimness in the etherealized noon-set of what we thought we were dawdling along for in our bemused insistence on individualism—deleteriously unpacking the states of various injuries along contingencies of bone and force, recalling progressively, past the boundaries of dream, of sleep, the missteps and heinousness, the bow scrapes and digital delay and roaring feedback, that old kayfabe majusculation—divagated [insert: each preposition in turn] screenvoid, textvoid. Intermezzo a spell. That was the state, is the state, the situation(s) of encountering the mind and its fragility, how easily poof and end. No reading, no watching. Darkness, voices, slow space. Plans for more poems about anxiety and its merrymaking tentacles pricking the blood from our torsos and calves. But no way to pursue the mounting ambition that accompanies not really doing anything, stagnant busyness, wheels hopelessly fractioning the muddy snow from our most cherished ideas about middle work. Torque. The current tenor of experiencing this point along the continuum of locales in which we might have found ourselves at one moment or another mistaking many for one and one for many for others for selves and others and selves—speakers, addressees: all—has the same gleaming computational sheen as the last couple atmospheres of affect. But there’s a bite to it all that’s a lack that’s a long book we know we’ll never get to but thought we once might, a missing filter that’s a sieve that’s a conveyor belt of product verbing across floors of overrun seas, a deluge exhausting our revendicatory and nearly empty word lists and improperly formatted discographies. How to syntax differently? Speak internet? All the fragments. Flowing lines splashing interminably. Wave my hands around and sorcer. Or else, the piratical adventures on the couch, with its brooms and treasure, those forewarnings regarding modes of travel so radical as to stagger the heart, might be for naught. The monocoque construction of this fantastic dirigible we project into the sureties of dwindling light and soft breezes make us consider the limits of theft. In my more observational mode I don’t write and I crawl to the runway. Some things may be unlistenable. And then there’s my general spurning of a pop group’s early work. If a reference is a note is a tie on a track across chasms is a mystification in the scad-strewn fields of the archive’s new side project, all those unearned scene points may well go unspent in the new reputational calculus of avant-garde middle age. Just keep going anyway because if we’re here, we may just as well be there, for some people got lucky starting from where we have only recently arrived panting the heat out of our bodies into the frigid air, a mélange of distorted cinematic projections and reality-encumbrances misting the vista’s revelatory morning clouds opaquesque and backlit by trembling sun, each exhalation sinking into the trees and loam and microorganic lives beyond the power of our preoccupied gaze. The shallow graves of matter gestalting the revenants and ancient unborn across the valley through the lines of distinction spacing this locality—with its tape-speed distortions of voices in silico distracting from translating things into words, an amalgamated groove of being in place and text with the swirl of light and oxygen—they dance fundamentally across the melting snow and brittle grass and laptop concerts worlds away without any discernible preferred vocational outcome. We can shudder at a line or recede from intimations of. These are the sorrows twisting around and inhering in the smoky remnants from long-snuffed candles still wispily tarrying through our gothic retreats. When I avoid a word or change one recently used for another momentarily less familiar or use tools to generate one I wouldn’t have otherwise thought of, an ensemble of tiny angels purr and squeak on my desk while retiring to the cupboard, for the limits of any system create reinforcing self-reflexivities, as here: books can come apart, their edges saddened by the inevitable; machines seize and spasmflicker with sovereign brusqueness our smallest hopes; shoes’ decay spreads and spreads my well-trodden path even to the species’ deepest and most long-forgotten adytums; nostalgia nostalgates. We’re the drums coming back with brushes and multi-rods after a track of solo acoustic guitar. We’re three copies of an infamously long novel in different states of disrepair. We’re waiting for the dining hall to be less viral. A collection is a predilection is a fetish is a research project is a scam is a worry is a burden is a mass is an imposition is a blank is an index. Things that come to mind. Sonorities in the air. And yet—between the inspiration calisthenics are these fields of numbness, a distributed hive of superannuated sympathies becoming insensate to any notion of return or setting out. This desk and its windows are a mooring, a thematic variance in the different blossoming editions of the night. Again, things come to mind here and somewhere. If they drift off it may be because the spaces available for cradling light’s infundibuliform twist are limited to the refractions of thought on matter. If acting through the room’s dust motes’ sway revises previous erratic phenomenologies, it isn’t the lucent qualities of strawberries nestled in earth-covered hands that suggest the remix album by the latest ambient DJ to be assembled by machine learning and small beeps of faith but the leagues of optical fiber this message has traversed and its convolutes gathered by gantry crane from the shop floors, work benches, and outhouses of our remote hustling that take a group of songsters’ “original” conceptions and deoptimize the possible audible horizons toward the actual of their frequencies’ maximum parameters. The page. If the divans upon which we read philosophy in library-warmth are missing and nothing of import has even been skimmed of late, how return to this or that (critical) project? Well, (t)here’s another sentence becoming, effortlessly appended to those previous. We could acknowledge others’ preferences for something different, like someone (familiar) who disdains the nonclassical, but then the synthesizers and coughs of programmed drums right this poetrycore bateau upon the generational swell of being here, here among the antiquities of the present, and so continuance is happily rule and law. If we gather and lift our masks together all at once, our “twitching, mobile, human face[s]” aren’t a revelation, not truth by the handful. Nor are our unadorned visages confessions of past sins, like me drawing attention to a problematic and ill-advised list in a footnote near the back of a previous volume or an offensive term appended to a figure speaking in a dialogue and about whom atrocities cling like world-historical megakatamri, or, elsewhere, a base and embarrassing exotification as gender-bending the canon. They’re not (or no longer) us, me, you, I, them. And these bare faces are still somehow also veils, fresh, unexpected semblances through which the world flows back and forth, fronts for new kinds of listening, watching. Or rather, they’re further apologias, which, exhausted with it all in the way we now are, we should’ve known, always already should’ve known that our youthful predilections toward transgression, disaffection, unruliness, and eristism would require. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I can’t fix the past. I have been and will be better. I am sorry for what I wrote and said. I’ll try to revise it if I ever get the chance for reissue. And so our breaths beat back at us from whatever veneer we place in front of our mouths and we inhale all our poison, still. More moments arrive on their way to something slightly different yet again. It is also, of course, perhaps rare to remember things that aren’t sites of shame and regret, like the tour EPs we snagged off merch tables or a particular kind of quiet before sleep. The faces disguised themselves then too, but familiarity belied absence of a different sort. If we delete the resources, might such little narratives, little treatises on the current attractors and repulsers of pandemicity proliferate? Nah. Let’s continue on with this poesy of apoptosis and feel free to invite the requisite interregnums, welcoming whatever-being as we might welcome additional storage capacity or the flexible affordances of a newly endowed institutional arm focused on multiplying the poetics of poetics across the possibility-vault of new shininess (something I’ll never see; sigh). Here. Here, in the space of everydayness throughout and across which seemingly never-ending domestically verifiable ruptures boom and cauterize like 1,015-BPM hype-engines leaving the unnamable station at the dark speed now-throb and always-surge undulation-pulsation of anti-transcendent cyber-rapture-laser-flight, it’s been quarantinic, concussed, infected, just bloody aeurrythmia and ultrasonic panic deflating the instantspace of unsoundness here on the wrong side of the only falling action that matters in this hyperparticular concentrated encompassment upon which the universe’s focus cannot help but train its distended ocular anatomy, and which has started to revolve around beginning to explore the likelihood of a mayhaps, a potentiality, an anteriorotic traversal through disease and disease-mind toward beyond-state, nothing-being, limited beneficence about which some/every adjunct lecturer mistakenly withholds their utterance in the seminar room’s antechamber that’s not even halfway between one glamor and the next, that’s right at the edge of the sound of trauma hissing down the hallway because the alternative is the blink, trill, and lilting purl of imperia extending the logic cores of their medium-specific substrata to re-de-galvanize every betrayal the hinterlands couldn’t quite yet think up before the crashing ponderousness of one thought after another. Where we are: a just artless crescent situated between an instrumentality that lingers feeling about a backdrop of solitudinous despair park rides and the depot with its various troublesome suspensions. Don’t hyperbolize the ethereum. There is a wind and there is an unlocked room within a place of gentleness. Where we are: at the junkless adjustment of parabolic choristers lined up in row upon strigose row of doomcrooning anthropox. Okay: elsewhere; not here. So many places aren’t immediately present. Connection, sure. Inflection, context, radiation. Of course. But not hereness, nowness (poetry officeness). What responsibility? There might be a flow or rhythm or pattern. There might also be threnody, coronach. The light and its scatter (and the projects it discerns). But the limits, uncrossable borders between one room and the next, even with a door newly open (once more—finally!). They fixate. Various reading projects might get suspended, everyday needs prioritized. But this particular becoming-place rests quietly on the bottom shelf to be discovered, reentered, troubled, expanded once more, again. There are other books and I’m contemplating further additions. Sigh ambition. If the sky is a reservoir and a well is a destination and the orang-tinted photographs complicate the intricate droplets of imagination we trip from our fingers and mouths to communicate unanticipated and discrete insight-feelings, then there remain untapped lyric combinatorics. Not surreal, but let’s see. A conditional statement would suggest babies floating in the clouds, gigantic vessels pumping blood deep beneath asphaltic continental shelves, snowflakes becoming dust bunnies becoming near-viral matter becoming supernovae in the transcend. Try again. My black t-shirt is a soundtrack for telling it aslant through, let’s see, an image (hypocrite lecturer!), let’s see, a situation, perhaps a scene, an action at the tightest point of the bend of the institution’s demiurgic lunchmass. Not quite. If objectivism is the issue and the outcome and the allusion is the assignment of modernism’s bequeathment and the fragment is uninspiring solution and bath. We’re still not there. (Again, just not much to imitate around here, huh? Once more.) A slight pressure in the lower abdomen is anaerobic carpet, blue and green threads fraying and drenched by gallons of fossilized yolk while striated purple pond fronds tickle the oblivious children’s ankles because the afternoon’s sweaty light is oh so anxious. There. Reminiscent, refused. Which means difference, growth, study (relevance? purpose?). Like, I should be doing this because I used to do it differently. Onward. It’s a very short path that takes considerable resolution to impart upon each step the pains of movement and production. It’s how suggestible I’m feeling in the morning when the hands move about, pinchingly searching the backdoor of matter here in the ward where I am no doctor. As we move forward and return across whatever different pictures we might later co-create from the gasping, heated descents into the aesthetics of crisis and repair, let us recall that memory is mere electric zap in the fragilities and simply cannot suffice when the second-to-last revolution starts its nascence. Doubt. Pretty real, as the prospects for much more quixoticize toward zero kelvin inspiration. And of course worry, parentheses as honesty and rebirth and a lack of footnotes and an attempt to skirt cynicism and critique. If. Other constructions. Is it just the leaves, their pleasantness. Get outside. The declivity, bare hills, snowmelt puddles on the library’s slate roof, furtive bird calls, scales of perspective: clarity, abstraction. With a recording device I could just wander and describe, let off the romantic imperative and simply document—it is a late winter’s day, after all. That’d be one way to achieve greater fullness and to leave quite a few things out. But a thin obtruding filament of anxiety pierces the caffeine and assures whatever speakers might be present now and then that this is how the is is in this being because creations (create creation). Nothing. Something. So yes, outside. Awander. Errata. Spell checking reality. What ardent drum tracks, gradients of milky leaden sky, brief lists of livid punk acts that disbanded before playing a show, one more thing to prevent trinary. Space toward all havens athwartships. The pressures of mortality and the incompleteness oeuvre sung by each bookshelf. No. Not if. Here. Definitely here. It’s the it of the itness in and through which (this) other it(s) endogenously concresce(s). Singing on a postrock album is a betrayal and an elision of the provisionality which keeps bubbling up and out from between the waves of the afternoon’s cold front we glimpse briefly out of the window of some carbon-fiber bunker in which our mutual neutrality syndicate incorporates. We require a stool to look through it and out upon all those adjectives retreating to every arboreal and oceanic horizon. The different kinds of space are not evenly distributed in, out, such, between, through, beyond other spaces and the other words that bring those spaces into being and disallow others. Image. A passive construction is only as good as another; likelihood raps the venue’s support beams into place; writing a short sentence always has the potential to produce a longer; books have different covers depending on your location; this book contains few ill-considered marks; J. It’s not that a reference is a failure, an obscurantist prohibition on our drives forever underwhelming the radii’s affects, a foggy nestling in agricultural detritus, a machine for living; allusiveness quotes the stars and cycles their lifespans into the yods of differential fissionable peregrination. Not a plan but a form and a letting it go/pass while glossing the next weekend’s blockbuster and the antiquarian society who cannot stomach nor staunch its ubiquity. Do you even know. If a thread is a roll is a production of rolling on the floor and laughing along with others doing the same separately but no one can know or care what the joke is that probably means we are just over—yes, just—halfway there. (If I stopped beginning sentences with “if” this whole thing might fall apart.) Down the slope we go then, the hardest part now always already necessarily before/above. Okay. It’s now the space for a bit of flourish, tik tik—away now. Never mind. I’ll tell you: in constituting what you are reading we are of course already planning for its endless remix, for a couple more sestinas, seasonal archives, object studies, floral phenomenologies, shameless thievery, posthardcore discogrammatology . . . all that and more, next on. . . . Ah, I almost said it again, but hold back, control, find, delete; expunge all those reeling words because something like structuralism buried this verboten difference there too. If we use the resources correctly, we’ll have a thousand volumes, research material for the next twenty projects in here (and at least half a shelf of novels). In here. On the other hand, I suppose that we’ve removed some of the previous buttresses for locating and producing this paragraph and so for now perch upon the brittle ramparts of free-floating fancy until space becomes a bit more navigable (i.e., not this crunch of spring definition). We’re still in need, however, of apoieticgenesis from, to, around, of whatever underlying imaginary these hydrothermal vents pump in and out of. And somehow, it just keeps going. If morning light never brightens: autumn everywhere. At points, the available assets are disproportionate to the design’s multidirectional feelers and inroads. It can be a loss even if it doesn’t quite seem so. For example, the regime of unregistered, unwatched media can coat my papers in stoic beauty, eye black for the undersoul we still expect to appear crouching into the backyard some pleasant summer evening; or, the suspension of metadiscourse is illusory and even the most hypnagogic treachery of the common reaffirms what limits our world. And so of course the familiar and at hand expose new abutments, the anticipated looseleft of verse we forget is a dwelling place even as it undoes us. Occasionally I stop, extravagating what I undertake to compass. In other moments, the sublime openness of sadness (not despair) clings to my eyelashes, the backs of my knees, every effort within this prescribed infowhelm. This is the neighborhood, you know. (Four instances already today. Sheesh.) Transition words, transition words. Elsewhere/elsewise/nevertheless we have to keep transitioning, moving, metaphoring, carrying it all across these desolate fields to plant at a remove from here, little ones, because no sentence is new any longer and the weary clanking of a generation’s torsion we now know serves few political projects beyond the ones which we and others have already diagnosed pretty well, I’d say (parvum ludum). Yeah, verb it. Really a ton of music. “Tweet that.” And then what would the rest of the alphabet’s poetry have been like beyond that first letter. In the intimacies of space there’s always just a bit more. Our books are thick, but not like the novelists’. So yes, there are some stock strategies and some critiqued traditions and some ever-present apologia and some rowdy associations; there is unbridled giddiness in the overglot, fantastic terrain and mountainous atolls in the unconscious, no homes necessarily, but a poetics of the outdoors, the great slamming immensity of air’s struggle with gravity in which we find our zone to wander; or: on never really quite meeting the universe—even a bit. Where understanding reaches up out with of the rejected destinies of humanity, there is probably more upon which to gather information for an externally funded investigation into the networks of xylographic memoranda or at least a scene of fortuity turning the narcissists away to dissolve unobserved and unmourned into their solipsism. See, clarity is available; we don’t only move in the direction of unfreedom. Why do the algorithms bother suggesting anything when they can’t know the full details of our interpersonal squabbles? Upon the corrected mini-details of our works cited list we advance only those interests that serve the ultimate scholarly edition and the adulterated fluttering order of referents reproduced by the programmable hi-hat on the third-to-last track of your favorite extended playing polyvinyl acrylic acetate metonym-gauging typescript we found stumbling in the most unobtrusive cityscapes while the solo acoustic guitar found new accompaniment with at least two synthesizers. That snare isn’t real either. We listen. It’s just the right volume, explaining the room. Or we don’t hear anything and the walls resolve the silence. To start earlier is to miss this particular quality of light and hunger. Those mornings and the people we traveled nowhere with. Did we ever quite get it across the board and through its obstacles, around the second half of youth and its omissions, away from misunderstanding and in a perching fascination we could just let be for a bit. Here, here I guess. We did. And then the tines of my being’s dalliances, those pauses in the dehiscent woof of memory and that staggering continuity while reuniting with friends older than today’s dear void wardens, were serotinous convergences. Upon their opening, abstract points emerged autotelic and superpositional, the merest membranes of concepts barely sketched and inter-threaded through and around themselves and out toward a near complete melancholy from an orchestra pit without instrumentation. The words move elsewhere; when I step away: happening; the page sits and then, subauditur, the project resumes, sliding awry. Nearly impossible to establish a footing; the ground keeps multiplying; it’s why reorganization intrudes the line as easily as makes it possible in the first place. A critique of the thesaurus is one way; opening it and dancing, another (and finding words that aren’t in any thesaurus I know, yet another). The resources, the threads and attention. That moment philosophers moved down the bench a couple positions and opened spaces for some who might not be so sequacious in their attention to the brittle traditions—it was welcome if ultimately incomplete: their vitilitigation toward their thersitical teachers’ adversaries’ students overcomplicated with interpersonal history what could have been a straightforward turning to the next movement. And so it ever is: a document written collectively and edited in the sky, putting us here again wherever we may be. According to early reports regarding a translated release about to be issued from the uninhabited offices of the noncentralized planning multiplicity, the region of writing, the nowhere-zone toward, in, around, and away from which we write is a solitary area whose forces arrange “rhythmic mobility” and other figures into a linguistic object, an autonomous space, a void “inaccessible and inescapable.” According to the sententiary experience of not-dwelling/laboring in this place, skirting its edges, sheathed by its silent exigencies, growing becoming-typing toward being, isness, the space is also gestural, beckoning, drawing us onward, its interminability only a feature of its planned closure, its incessance less actual than virtual, an aspirational object-cause. Grant the saprophagic nothing-space its due: we’re always/never in an argument whose past dimensions exceed/cancel local particularities, the somnifacient gloomhaven we’re constructing for every word precluded by the eventual totalization of emergence. It is one way and its other way. Some are waves in the solar frequency; some are these nihilities; some refocillate criticism’s past; some are subrident pages under morphological cloud cover. Returning to ourselves is also an eviction. To leave and not leave, lingering on the threshold, unable to read our supernatant work floating upon the saturated electron wobble of our cybernetic amplifier’s unadulterated overdrive with a miniscule layer of vacuum between: it’s where we might come to rest when the firewalls and backups fail. Pause. Rehearse and remember. The flow and the state and the passion condenses around the edges of the text’s casement. When others ask for an aperture they might receive a concession toward feeling, autofictions of astringently crafted rubble, memoirs of impartiality. It’s how the connections get made, moving from one thing to another, alone, as “if the desert were a here one could actually reach,” “the point at which here coincides with nowhere.” So open the lunettes and oriels and beg their limitation becomes yours, even if for a moment. Death was just so postmodern, wasn’t it? Begun, signed, dismembered, things had to be conditioned anew before nonexistence could again be a giant curved squamose boomerang, some beam of matter cast by the luminous lucarnes in the side of reality’s procedural cities nested immediately prior to the onset of all the various known and unknown physical constants. But we worked; so, death is again merely death. For anxiety, see . . . (Other entries in the index can be found in the next volume, a series that is a project that is a long poem that is a discovery of ongoingness that is inertia that is a fear of finding something different/new.) Otherwise, keep plucking that string, worrying its tension with the slightest touch. The parts of language. The syntagms and drumrolls. It’s not just the velleities of our early adulthood; we’re embarrassed by and regret so much, so much more than that. Consider. If light is the great unexplored critical object and the unwritten essay that we’ll never get to beckons and the various manufactured voices we’ve lost along the way are probably still speaking somewhere, then wouldn’t those potentialities produce other potentialities ringing into evening, tallying all the dark pages against the spines of our dreams? If. Reading other things, there were other things to read. Brown on a white background. Neon color field experiments (pretty much the norm there for a bit). Black on a background of slightly lighter black. A trip to the mechanic to recalibrate our gyroscopes, flush our injection systems, replace our stolen catalytic converters. Copper and rust. Yes, I suppose literary space is subintelligitur if inaccessible, intuitable if nowhere. We’re trying to access it and produce it, carry it over and let it be. The mind is not a receptacle nor a prism. The book is something you hold in your hands. The work occurs as my ring finger hits the S, my middle the E, and, of course, everywhere else. But it’s also here. My negligence spreads in the darkened room, indifferent about the strepent consensus and their conclusions about death and horror, ignoring expiration, letting each keystroke dwell in this unconcern. It might just be youth (ha), but right here is a space I can’t achieve yet can’t escape. And, of course, I worry that what is so simply and obviously absent, what I’m trying to make disappear, what cannot disappear, the thought and the scribbling and the word collecting and the references and automatic sculpture maker all conspire to bring into presence through duration and sequence what we won’t write—it is here nevertheless. (Remember that leaving it out is always one way.) But I’m not sure I need the word overcome for this or other activities; or else, I want to exercise a practiced ambivalence toward it and other phenomena worthy of resistance. For if you’re here with me at this point, we can both adjudge ourselves fairly patient; we endure impatience while probably slipfast toward anyone else in the room or whatever social gathering we’ve loosely committed ourselves to later attending, convincing ourselves we’re capable of understanding ourselves by paying lip service to the old saws about paradox and contradiction, convincing ourselves that we’re crafting a space that’s open enough and that perhaps the words hastening toward it aren’t just literary scoriform, what remains after all the reading. What tales about the clacking of our plastic console we’ll tell to support that interpretation. What extensions we’ll fashion to harness emptiness, the being of what isn’t there. For when we reach for something, either through the lancets and dormers or else by gentle digital snipping, what wasn’t there provides an interval which it oh so quickly overfills. Maximalism and its tradition. Minimal forms sequenced and multiplied. Fragments and procedures. What’s missing. The too much. Ranging while ventricumbent, it’s too easy to project what we might do. So, it’s important to note that we’ll be sure to stay silent about what the book after the next one will be. Let’s reach again. Remixes spread dubious and thrasonical artifacts into the churning cultural forge. It’s so procellous, this dust, this darkfield, this raging model we’ve built for some being in the expanse to come along and revise as they see fit. Shift. There is so little pressure in such bulk for any particular line to ring, perhaps it permits vigilance of a different sort. We can go and go, parsing a bit here, grabbing something over there, playing through the various directories our reminiscent longing and contrition. Stark blasts. Fermenting drums. Feelings of impossibility and overconfidence. Here, what seething here. The doubts and the imposture, weekends of rejection, recension, and when back at the poetry office: fine. Okay, onward; quick shifts—pack in. We’ll turn our winnowing fans into the ambrosial stream and establish bonds with quietus and the gondoliers responsible for selling goods rather than ferrying us to the other shore. Each line that doesn’t complete the work adds to our baseline verse-stats; we’re giving it another go, repeating repetition, doing something before going out, building a form here and there against the great engulfing mechanism, that carboniferous megastructure ahead; not destituency: the overworld beckons. So, for more gathering “together into an undivided space,” attend. The secodont skyline doesn’t offer a vision: it’s space to preserve our hearing for what we couldn’t sell at the show, a poor decision to sing, to introduce a breach in instrumentality when trying to make flowers of light bloom. Their petals spread throughout the canon but are already dried and pressed. We can look instead through jalousies of phalanx-grade techno-organic spider silk that permit only the most liminal of frequencies through their slats to see displaced lists empty and indigent. Speaking and doing through such limitations aren’t only a snag in the fabric of the diegesis, the narrative beginning to run amok; they’re a gaze backward when no one is following, an obscure point out upon the limb of the impossible, that “other night.” For if even our references can disappoint, how might a fenestella in the no-place of a salmon-colored wall invite us to gaze forward when feeling the spleen of our domestic rurality? So much bone on the contact mics, the clacking bows and bells. A germinal band. An outfit essential for any aficionado to have once not-discovered on their not-own. A small publishing house in a most reputable part of the city. Is it better to be no one’s student? The threads of inspiration we claw from the surround can bury, can be buried. Our best lines’ hauntological taunting and the drop ceilings of another inscrutable and poorly run institution. If we could turn from ars poetica, even just once (which we can’t), if we could slide our gaze from a walk down the hall, a new issue of a journal, the catastrophism of multidimensional strings in cinematic possibility-space, then we wouldn’t need to write another sentence that displays its desperation for another construction like catalepsy in/for the carpet of our fluttering nor a slight pain in the right ear. Great heights devolve previous aspirations toward the golden hour and the smiles of generations. It’s really not chicanery, but it is I guess infrequently like single-note groans looped in the lobby during the opera’s intermission (in terms of its familiarity and ease, all the practice). We just really can’t stop. Turn. Please. If the reflection between then and now reaffirming the revision of what distracts from each spatial harmony is not not attention to how something is made, then. I suppose our voices were once imperative. That was a tic. The conditional habitude of a cruise ship being used as a general diagram for the internet, a crucial part of every assemblage, another. Xylophony. The gray concussion windows. Much passivity. A pronoun’s final usage. Avoiding the topic, any topic. Abstraction. If IT comes by and suggests your inveterate browsing habits are causing building-wide outages, learn magnets pulling the air, go back to progenitors and their initial monochromatic periodicity. I guess we can permit voices in the indecipherable radio static of clandestine communiques in the night’s desperation. And always remember the distortion and error, “for where the wanderer is, the conditions of a definitive here are lacking. In this absence of here and now what happens does not clearly come to pass.” The designs we have on the next few moments are a debut album released at the height of a global upturn, like turning on a light and slightly disturbing all the people who had been sitting there quietly in the dark (though they don’t visibly react). As we gingerly make our way over everyone’s bodies, “‘“suspended in language,”’” as they say, we realize that our task all along has been to construct “a specific physical arrangement[, an apparatus]” to determine the possibility of measuring, well, whatever it is we’re measuring here. I suppose it’s less an utterance or hymn than a funambulist performance between “empty abstraction” and an intrinsic structure to organize that unique quality morning light possesses right after we breakfast and read the news. The number of EPs and singles we’d have to collect to be completionists is staggering. Reversal is not negation is not novelty, but if we want to present at this year’s conference, we better be sure to go just slightly over our allotted space for remarks. The attention economy consists of at least fourteen different rubrics and twenty-seven intricately detailed instructions for issuing press releases about the house show (that a broken snare head shall end early) and its lambent afterparty; assessment is also a serious facet of the company’s new direction. Drone and fly. Fundraise for an impossible project. Drown in the bourgeois skylights. The orange stairs beyond the chorus pedal of your destiny descend fabulist landscapes in the mouth-aether unaccountably trimmed at the glass museum, the stolen lyrics, the uniform periodical spines, the surrealist failure. We can’t really read more because then we’d just be remixing the sonic palette of contemporary literature with a worn-out turntable and a second-hand mixer found in someone’s great-grandparent’s attic right past the holiday decorations and the unfinished watercolors. No one lives in uncanny valleys anymore: the housing prices are just out of control. I’m not a fan of their newer work but am a devotee of not giving up before something is just completely, outrageously exhausted. Don’t discount a press or label’s allegiance. The feeling that, within limits, anything goes. When more distractions permit my neck to swivel and my attention to stray toward the ergonomic lifestyle improvements I so desperately desire now that all my other needs are met, the content of crystalline anamorphosis clings to the breathable atmosphere of the room’s threshold we’ve waited to cross because the imperial nightmares persist in teaching us their/them our innumerable blunders and failures in the underground dug to avoid feelings of astrophe from the new evidence of ancient moon landings. It’s not acceptable to be wholly diverted by the happy families’ investment portfolios. Other formulations exist. The mine of one’s previous work is filled with electronic waste, there to taunt with unusable resources, fluctuations in the stratosphere, the lilting breath of memory. And then, believe this, someone perfected expression and fully communicated their, um, feelings about stuff at the grocery-store rave-happening. Vibraphonic soundscapes were also part of the works cited, but interruption compromised the temporary band leader’s production of faith-based spatial practices. Let’s make weird things. If rhythms, pullulate. We don’t need transitive verbs in the VIP section of this grim tour bus. The dawn continued to feed upon the notation we’d have to impose on a work of monolithic symphonic seriousness, which still doesn’t help us create any better or more interesting cadences here; for now, it’s all just bombination, aimless klangfarbe, depthless sonic rumination about the waveless particulates bearing down upon the dwindling flashes of caesurae in the interminably changing tempos we had kept here in reserve out past the sculpture studio in the back yard of our most intimate despair. Passages, hamlets in miniature, discursive practices productive of difference and reconfiguration: the spatiality of action between apparatuses phenomenalate what some participants in the knowledge economy would rather not be doing this night, their life reflecting their so-called inadequacies and boredoms back upon themselves: chin up; grow up. An observation makes a mark in matter, these “congealings of agency” defibrillating our bodies’ intra-connections with the electrons bouncing off the edge of my desk, the cardigan we bring for summers in the office, the felt need to be profound in everything we say (that dissolves the instant we communicate). An automated language coach is an appendage without substrate. An automated life coach really digs the new color scheme you’re using on that neo-monastic laptop. (Have you thought about repainting your car that shade?) The absence of fluorescence modulates the morning’s wavelengths and I declare. Inferences about the course of what will never be verbalized by the hegemons signing off on our revised statements of semiotic impact—their purposeful ambiguity falling into paper shredders of grace, deducting at least half of this place’s accidental leapings, those moments of inadvertent glee—were slow in coming as the rollout of the new regime was done just like everything else: haphazardly and without a shred of discernible competence for at least a day’s drive in every direction. It’s all amateurism for the palladium hanging above my door; it avers that the lull in expectations is horizonless, unpredictable. Abstraction meets the wastepaper basket’s rite of vacation; it calls for a smaller font. No way at all to go faster than light, then, as we had all along suspected while stranded in the gutters of creation. Rolled into reflexive decibels of airy strumming, all the novels we used to like reading have been found wanting and so we’ve recommitted ourselves to the clicks and beeps of our favorite arpeggiator. Look at all the process in these anti-epics. There are no windows, no mirrors. A bunch of dynamic machines spinning well past their tolerances, yes, a host of grammatological operations advancing matter’s interests along the currently well-maintained supply lines of ontic trembling, sure, but no reflection, no imitation, and, to top it off, too few standards known by the session musicians who happen to be available in this locale on short notice; or: how the aspatialities extricate piles of letters from underneath the furniture unfortunately flush with the seafloor of our unplumbed complicities. So much attention and good work has been done, but—and of course there’s a . . .—the walls of too many things still stand as they invariably have without any effort at redesign; to reform the parameters and boundaries setting the course, circumstance, and trajectory of our movement, to create in the background radiation of our most loosely experienced affects a hinge that, though small, might be solid enough to use as a counterbalancing point of leverage in the soil of renewal, to agree about the need for yet another task for which no one has any remotely relevant expertise, to let the parrots speak for themselves in the new parliamentary processes beginning to congeal in the upper atmosphere—desire and endeavor and mediatize, sob and acknowledge and work. It’s what’s here for the price of being here. Apprehending space tragically can decohere the ameneuroses that we traveled around the country collecting from every roadside kabbalistic geocache we could find and then stored behind the elegant, understated furniture we salvaged from that sinking boat of pure perspectivism: now unfit parallels meeting at the tips of our fingers; there isn’t anything to conceal on these doubled surfaces—mirrored legibility, circumspect and pat description. What we’re producing is and is not life, is and is not mental, physical, social, an experience, a concept; it can be segmented and multiplied, cross-hatched and historialized, a luminosity battering intelligibility against the mutiny presented by the unpacked simplicity of bare action and exegetical architecture: miraculous, cerebral, clandestine, ringlorn. More mere mattering, something to practice and to forego portraiture for in the gallery at noontide. It’s mostly an area of possibility, something built, agreed upon, something distanced, capsized, something blanked so that analysis can proceed. There are certainly prohibitions, but they’re not proving all that productive. An empty tunnel under a major river with a lone car stalled in the wrong lane. A multidisc compilation of rare tracks spanning a career. The team that designed the new public relations kit didn’t overwork themselves nor were they particularly inspired. It was a scene. “Space is always [. . .] a present space [. . .] qua ‘reality.’” Vital and vitalizing, its qualitative questioning unmaps the interstice, the culture, the people. Ensconced in this blanket of being, we interrupt the cosmos. The consanguinity between there and elsewhere is lucubration for the perpetuation of abstracted spatial practices (though there, where the danger is most acute, one obviously finds negativity as well: differentiated, heterogeneous, multiple—those old saws). In this place, I have embraced my own self-fulfilling and -perpetuating bourgeoisification. It’s fine. Because we also become free from the scripture when the relative adverbs are mistaken for conjunctions and occurrences stop dawdling as much in the offing. And so, the rigor. Are you sure it’s not possible? The warmth was a hallucination; the planet was never not frozen. If the words arrive from the very few of them containing the concepts we’re correlating and are those words nonetheless, being and meaning what they are, do, then other words can, well . . . word. That stuff really was all prelude. If a romantic, then a carburetor, a taxon. Torque. Grand plans are for others who sit all day in cafés wondering about the state of society and how they might contribute to its improvement through their (or writing about others’) art. It’s all project. In the aether, however, some doubts were expressed about such pretensions. Cutting something out is often the solution (there’s always enough in there already) but, I suppose, so is doubt. Oh, and: worry and fear. Health is a hammer. When we recognize at a precocious young age something “baking in the sun” as metaphor, surely the text will continue to be written in a certain fashion, most likely taking advantage of the affordances of surround sound. It’s really quite silly if you think about it. If we make room in the flow-state of the list of requirements we inherited from the last regime while simultaneously becoming best friends with someone we’re anticipating meeting later in the afternoon along the quay waiting for an anonymous delivery to arrive that never does because it was held up by the fervent and implacable though uninterpretable desires of a landscape painter hoping to perfectly capture that particular quality of space in a sunset devoid of any hope and then proceed to harbor concerns about the state of things, if the colorist for the logo of this year’s most successful reality television remake could have been mistaken one lonely evening about the particular sense of dread they felt while using a stool to reach a dish on the top shelf that a great-grandparent no one had ever met had originally bequeathed to someone else who left it to the television employee and who appeared to exist exclusively as the material detritus they left behind (though someone somewhere had assured someone else at some point that possession is, you know . . .), then falling away is only perceptible within the limits of spacematter bending around the curvatures we didn’t mean to pre-impose on the results of our interpretive gambits with fine, multicellular proceedings here before we change our mind and begin traversing paths previously neglected in the wanton land rush for new places to wander through the metaorbits of latent neo-conditionality that we might also export acres away from here to the tripping, destining, exploratory parties to come. According to local authorities, transformation renders its own medium, not sloganeering whence linguistics and its ancillaries just produce more mental fortitude, but scabrous landscapes of nonverbal signification and their implied things: dancing rondure, supererogatory sculpture, determinant architecture, et cetera. Generating code is one task; it requires laboring with the “incessant to-and-fro” we futilely resist, disavowing at least some of the nihilistic generalizations attending simulacral youth in order to permit urbanization its full play. This is also, though not only, the work of space. To participate in that work, we endeavor to create a somewhat large set of things and then write the relations between them, ambivalent about boundaries and walls and what seems sturdy, defined, established (at least at first). It’s also certainly not a taxonomy, a prospectus for some travel agent’s forthcoming itinerary, but a means of production, a bountiful cartography willing to layer map upon map, script upon script, interpenetrating, superimposing, colliding, “a sort of instant infinity [. . .] an ambiguous continuity [. . .] mere shards of knowledge” (though I suppose, by now, you know that already, don’t you?). The expansive aspiration for this type of assemblage is coterminous with other commonsense utterances, with ant colonies, with slime mold, with my last three books and the next three. Or, wading through bins of records, playing one after the other, nothing is quite right, but then: yes, this one. Like, in addition to my other activities, I could learn to skydive, but that fact doesn’t diminish the accomplishments of those who have actually thrown their souls at the Earth from a great height. See. Inhabit. “Streams of energy.” How many initial gestures might constitute a thing before it begins to recede? Now, close the cover with a satisfying thump and open out onto the next stage, this other set we define as it’s instantiated, a movement we repeat. And hey, that synthesizer sounds really good with that drum kit. Unfortunately, if conversing with the morphological literati is the goal, they might convince you that the back issues just aren’t as important anymore (they’re still my favorite). That doesn’t change the atmospheres of affect I’ve inhaled from a spate of recent middling-to-good novels nor my sensitivities regarding the current state of television and the critical capacity of the medium’s adherents. That bass is just a pit of gravel being thrown into a supercollider. It was widely regarded as hugely successful. And if pastiche was ever anything. For a moment, we want to utter names; they’d make things easier: nice neat containers for connection, arrays of meaning, phylacteries of metaphysical gesticulation. No matter. Elevating the computer in that way will keep it a bit cooler, will let its fan play more lightly and deftly across the unread and unopened. Not much chaos anymore; most everything is available for inspection through your recently developed optical hardware. The phasing rhythms of the popular music played from every building mask the absolute congruence of the socially agreed upon dance moves. And: pounding drums! Ha. There are beacons on that hill. They’re signaling gorgeousness in this valley (and others), here with its sun and pleasant seasons, here where we stop and begin. With regard to texture: I suppose the conditionals have all along been comminuted utopia, an if/then anaphoric politics of syntax (perhaps); semantics are also a texture are a global horizon of desire are an unbroken paragraph are a listening project are a history with and without terminus that can be apprehended by means of semantics; the decisions required of each line—nothing automatic—iterate and reiterate, diverge and converge, and just keep going, piling datum upon datum, each pointed particulate unavoidably, complicitly, inevitably gesturing toward, in, with, because of, back to, and against the violence, the planetary destruction, the available spaces of human possibility that are product and weapon and appropriation and domination and that we still might produce differently . . . those decisions differentiate this small bit of matter and then this one and this and continue aiming elsewhere, further; if you stop to feel it, it sounds like something; it is and is not reading and selecting and quoting and referencing and pointing and cramming and much else; it is and is not the doubt and trepidation about sitting down again, about futility and foolishness and hubris; it’s also the live albums; and it’s the light, the light, the particular quality of light that in each unique place occasions distinct circumstances. So, let’s tend conclusionward. To start: all the things we left out don’t weep, don’t even notice. We can frantically wave our arms and jump up and down, we can sit quietly overlooking the valley, or we can have really constructive conversations with friends and strangers—we don’t have to include any of it; we don’t have to be distracted from the task, this enceinte which is also a blasted cliff face and series of volcanic islands. So many places where we aren’t, weren’t. And because the managers were carefully watching our pre-afterlives, encouraging us to take stock so early and so often, we feel confident that the inventory will match our ledgers. They are so many epic moments with a live orchestra. The colors fade, but there’s an alluring arrangement for the next performance, a program that we finally scrounged the funds up to print on embarrassingly high-quality paper; and here, we’ve arrived a bit late for rehearsal. The conductor informs us that we’ll be working on increasing the synthetic complex granularity and unplanned variegated feedback of each miniscule soundscape-composite to better access, here, pseudo-totalities of convolutes—in other words: sick riffs with clever song titles. “This space was produced before being read.” And so it’s clear how we need to practice topos incepting how I concresce (as) an ordinary entangled nexus: morning, basketball, cereal, walking, listening to intimations about a historic career, sitting on a hill typing beneath light powered by an endowment reinvesting in oil futures within inflation, war, and the coldest summer of the rest of our lives while worshipping the limits of crescendo in the re-recorded spheres. Traces of absolute relativity: abstract, concrete, forte. Rhetorical eschewment. Like much else, I had it partially wrong at the very start. Yes, we squander almost everything and so the tragedy of dissipation deserves brief lament. But that outflowing is also how where we are comes to be. “In effect, energy must be wasted.” Would it have all been different had we instead begun: “How much light there is”? No matter. Things persist. Declarative statements. Hypotheses in the outermost reaches of penitence. Pausing before the onrushing sequences of bodies. Bleak infinite viscous density. The ray tracings in the effervescent opacity in the outlines of in-hereness propose impenetrable concatenating transparence for the sociological study I am just dying to hear a lecture about after the full lineup of artists has been announced at the mountaintop residency three generations from now. It’s a meganovel deserving attention. A celebration and a proclamation, a brief stroll to get our bearings out here in the outside-madness of plains lacking any discernible draw distance—trees forever. And again, the light. Seen and unseen, reflected and diffracted, the protonic discontinuities boring through the artificial bottoms of complete work stoppages aiming to reconceptualize how to catechize modish aggregations of augmented-reality enthusiasts encounter, as if for the first instance, an anger of paper stars blowing out our eyes and a volander at all that escaping text. It was quite limited and also seriously too much to take for granted in the scriptory’s catacombic sub-subbasement’s hidden cells within which we could only imagine poets toiling before they, well, discovered the internet. After running over what had initially felt like the easiest part of the piece again and again, we finally felt like we were improving at detecting the differences in the dynamics of the very quietest parts, chiming the protocological obscurities accommodating our desire to go out afterward and talk about how practice can disillusion our assumed proficiency while also straining toward novelty, accumulating emphasis for the sake of going just beyond whatever arbitrary limit’s prohibition generated the quarantinic brilliancy in the first place. Just fucking rocking. It was how we could always imagine wanting it to be before the rigmarole asserted its conditional late contemporary impressionism in the targeted ad-space of word counters buzzing the dawn. Now to it, now here, nowhere in the standing of perhapsness, getting and going toward a bit of galvanic quanta igniting the next right thing. Here. Since the start, we’ve been listening carefully for space, sonically mapping the edge of each chamber we step within, acknowledging that the books in our primary alcove serve as acoustic paneling while the sound-deadening stacks in our secondary library-niche enlarge oft-neglected capacities. Headphones and ringing and now desiccating computer speakers also play their part in diffracting the portions of patterning beheld during the day’s lucid-sound-mapping. Before and beyond the past, what we share enacts when the drums come in and the distortion pedals get smashed, when the bass detunes with each windmilling strum and we scream into no microphone. A tripartite lesson in sitting still, qualifying the air, affecting the atmosphere: lay your guitar against its amplifier, turn the knob on the stomp box all the way, and then jud jud jud jud jud to a cataclysmal close; it’s how we determine where we are, our leader of string in the twisting depths, bodies slipping between the mixer’s channels, heads clamped between hyperdefined speaker cabinets of pure informatic ambedo (even though a column, a line, is no labyrinth). Each chord divides, vibrating theory into the corners and fissures, proving the materiality of even the most abstruse tome from the best university press can stand densely alone on the desert floor becoming explosive sunset. It’s an achievement, a rhythmology, a machine undulating billowing wobbles on the heaving oscillation of matter’s surging ripple, an apparatus for swinging flows throughout rolling tides of corporeal substantiality “dispersed as tendencies, . . . distilled into desire” toward burdenless floating sediments underpinning measureless endurance and then back again as wave-devices for notating the uninscribed, silently agreed upon parameters for scraping the residuum left over from our spontaneous compositions. Such actions weren’t very understated even if the strings and vocal loops suggested an updated edition. For we don’t really have any drill that can access salt water buried that deep nor a lens that can bend toward the almanac’s prophecies when each subject’s sympathetic motivations bleed into the next’s—crystalline chromatic individuation in the afternoon. We can’t give up now. The umbilical reassurance between present entities suspends our doubts, hastens completion. Dimensions lost and tinny defend the latest methodological “innovation” from the agendas of the premier institutes for social transfiguration. We have other matters to attend to, like going just a bit too long with the ambience, accumulating more than is necessary for that particular session; it draws a multiple of two, half our present, toward some truncated realization like licotic evaporate; or else, the cheap art we found online rests its elbows in the sea. To anatomize a pall, its overcast halftones crinkling the murk: carol recurrence and noise consisting predominantly of small disturbances in the audience’s capacity for attention (to noise). Otherwise, here we’ll only have isomorphic changes; here we’ll be without plentitude, aching for resolution. Later, we’ll adjust to our new outfits, their arms and legs lined with piezoelectric crystals to perform ultrasonography on their immediate interior surround, a huge transducer mounted on their chests will convert bodily persistence into linguistic art, and, up top, a sound-canceling helmet will facilitate controversial experiments in echography. A period of fallowness in our regimented garden will inevitably follow; the departure from the reading cycle requires reopening the seeds from the last successful harvest—look at all the entangled nets and frayed electrical lines! The question regarding a great many disorders, what can and cannot be decided upon in advance of the intra-action, is generally for others more adept at discoursing upon such subjects and who are generally more than happy to announce themselves as figures capable of such grand ethical thoughts (but oh how they go on! [and as if we had nothing to contribute {—though perhaps we don’t}]). I’m not really sure we want vocals in our noise band, though? Know what I mean? There wasn’t a memo or anything, just bare mute vacuity. It’s not like we didn’t try to take off the bar code. It’s just, the crepuscular release date is wide open for fortification, the near-bagpiping groan of this or that particular approach. This is not random and never has been. We could sit and listen, others would read and respond, and every decision that followed would be whimsical flatulence upon a spring amble. That certain shape of moping. Singling up the optical filaments across the sky. Infinite potential fragmentation addressed at the most recent press conference—the questions called mostly for rote generalizations about the importance of individuated days. This track is better. Syncopation somehow cracks out of a concert’s aural bulwark. It makes for a great night at the club and more valuable grist for your auction house and its vinyl. But also, just worry; keep coming back to the comfort of anxiety. Structural integrity, saving for retirement, long term health. If someone suggested it was more manageable before, we wouldn’t have listened. I would do the same. But, the maintenance of present circumstances: hmm. I guess we could agree to standardize our interfaces across platforms and anticipate complications in how things will present themselves and decline. It’s only a quandary if the deictic guides we had invited in from the fury without intentionally arrive within, hitting their mark (they rarely do). So, it’s tough. Peopling the bluffs above the town sufficiently for mass reenactments of our favorite films trembles the lay apprehension about taxation’s holy technology. To accommodate burning, others will have to be sure to keep a close watch on the electromagnetic output from the tips of our fingers. It wasn’t a tantrum. It wasn’t a pleasant go-between from one party to another. It wasn’t candlelight and gentle breathing. We’re honestly not really sure it wasn’t piled up there just this morning. Assuming a familiarity with the manner of water vapor’s linear progression toward a partial comprehension of our inscrutable device’s recondite search function, we could then move on to the next stage in the collective’s training program. The participants weren’t really interested in debate; they felt the mediatic ionosphere wasn’t an appropriate venue for legislating the necessary processes before planetarity’s legendary cascade of found art installations became irrevocable. The doom. It’s almost not music. Who knows what effects were used. Such banalities. Laconic minimalism moving the oracles across the green pastures’ cumulusless dedication to inspiration-walking lets pause and simmer speculation’s rank aggrandizement of some frankly alarming behavior. Arriving easily and then everlastingly forgotten, the unvocable lexemes and morphemes of the sun and the saunter are the promise. We knew it then and know it now; it’s okay that spatial variation compels quantitative easing in the rime’s generation. A little flutter of sound here, a short air, an intake and exhalation signaling the asignification of a well-crafted title. We won’t be breathless collagists later. The mind, its antics, how we get here. We awake to rain and sputtering, our focus buoyant, flimsy. Tok tok against the window. The pane fabricated in a factory staffed by workers with families, histories, politics, the sand quarried and combined with soda ash, calcium oxide, limestone, and feldspar, the bulldozers, shipping containers, and trains, the diesel fuel and its fields and violent regimes, the float bath and molten tin annealing, this “exclusionary process”: fog-obscured verdancy of our summer valley and translucent reflection of the highly-defined pixels on this screen across the room, against the day. “The event produces an ambiguity of scale that defies geometrical analysis.” The chthonian hypermyth of “caverns, grottoes, dark vales, tombs, sanctuaries, and underground chambers” from which we all prehistorically crawl . . . wouldn’t it be simple to pull the most easily accessible of the raveling threads of this teleological red-carpet ideology all the way and emphasize “luminous space,” the ubiquity of an illuminated mirrored-façade-as-totality allegory suggested by the collective unconsciousness’s most recent chromatically minimalist graphic-design choices, our refulgent accumulations dictated by the brightly specific song titles of all these wordless anthems. Spit spot. Wet feet on the pavement. It’s easy to make records if you never have to practice. Someone’s name. The pervasiveness of multi-axis relata destructuring the most pernicious historial artifacts is misleading, especially with the disputative non-Euclidean interpretation of the fungal synœcism of server clusters’ aesthetic attitude recruiting an entirely vanished generation ascendant. We’ll never get anywhere like that again. Three whole figures just changed. If we’re to take exhaustion seriously, I suggest we listen to something released at least somewhat recently. I’d offer to pen a postcritical analysis of literally anything you wish me to if I wasn’t already well along on a critique of everything I’ve done or said (it’s not pretty). The outcome is not clear. Prose. Color field corruption has reached even the rainbowed mantles of illiterate lifestyle tycoons; look at that spine. Do I repeat myself, very well. I know we can edit this together later at the bar (though I don’t intend for there to be reason to do so). If we could even possibly hope that a small record label might be around longer than the bands whose records they publish, we’d untether from our more treasured diversions; it’d be that heart-skip-beating fitzcarraldo we’ve pursued since crossing the bike paths after critical reading class. If ozurie was the norm, its enticements now mostly have cause to surface during needlessly bangarang conclaves of heedless gasconades. It really is an aftermath. The different sides of the lathe produced an unmatched rarity. All that electricity at the baths, a way of torquing the entangled intersectional interstices through which we act. Meaning, meaning matters, oozing out, suppurating, just pus from both side A and B. It was the right move to decline to pursue that solo career and last night wasn’t any fun. If it’s only a digital copy, even though it’s listed as a long-playing record, are we shirking our scholarly duty? The mistakes we made with internal rhyme weren’t reflected in the proportion of hum to epic. Counting stars. The space between starting and finishing isn’t liminal but the opposite. To intone the event’s particulate mist with those connotations subjected essentialism to fields of force and, well, crying. It was a fairly short autobiography without much specific detail; the author forgot it all, thankfully. Eager for a new research project, the graduate students abandoned their theses to read four different library shelves in order to probe the boundaries of methodological idiosyncrasticism. There’s an unprecedented order arriving in here shortly now, derealization’s antithesis; we can sit here a-morning and just know how nearby whatever it might be is; such decentralized planning doesn’t obviate negation and prohibition but does rather complicate our internal and external processes. Principal among them, the tuning fork of abstraction, sounding once more the humming amplifiers of well-mapped textual caves. We return to “static objects . . . and . . . blank space” interrupted by the sudden vestments of urban dawn and to the “muddy centre before we breathed.” Once, they gave us, and with the authority of an injunction, common visual formants to confect our early theories about the wasteland, the infodemic, the poetry office, literary space, to conceptualize global murk, vast overland structures whose pressures are real, shockingly so. Some mimetic naïveté, perhaps—to be duly kept, discarded, revised, “generous [or not] to earlier selves.” But we nonetheless persisted and persist in the imagination’s province, pullulating (apologiae as) hopefully verdant drafts through creation’s auroric canopy toward newly-honed carbon-capture media machines as a gift toward which others might unknowingly turn. This may mean, as here, deceptive indistinguishability, a level of abstraction brought to bear upon matters and matériel obscure, ambiguous, imprecise. “Begin with the material,” they said, for “there is a violence intrinsic to abstraction.” So, some more: the red headphones, the white noise, the professional society swag, diplomas, paintings, desk and chairs, printer and coffee maker, protein bars and hot sauce, my variously inscribed bodily identities, the always imminent luncheon entertainments—each, I know, because now here instead, an unavoidably brutal signification in the entangled spacemattering in/of/from which I write and potential for a wearying “‘deadly sameness,’” a jeopardous generalization afforded by privilege, speaking beyond circumstance. But the land, the labor, the capital, if language isn’t just mirror but act—at these headwaters, abstraction waits and awaits us hardly at all. Elsewhere than exactly right here, there is almost nothing silent or bare; this academic building, this rural town, this blue state—nothing empty or neutral there. We’re not sure what it must be, but it is where we are, where we practice coalescing the abstract and the abstract, proceeding essentially from the particular out to the peripheries of spatial disjunction as “feelings, action [. . .] words.” For abstractions also oppose. If we retreat from the visual when in the ring with the romanticists, if the instrumental albeit differential analytics of discrete peripheries provoke new research in cognitive topography, if the contradictory anaphorization of anticipatory illumination materializes fragments (no matter how large), the proxemics of new space may very well be an emergently viable area of study. It is where we are (going), a different production of space: that is the project. Because the flat one-dimensionality of transport already mutilated that old thing; because the reduced form we grew up inhaling—stitching and issuing simulacral pleonasms of vicarous surface singularity from multi-perspectival interdisciplinarity, our senses theoreticians from the first despite aesthetic repression—has reached accumulation’s appercipient limit and so, here, is obliged to live. Here, as you know, it’s also a reading project. Attempts to satisfy. The movements and disturbances. A reluctance to get captured by rhetorical situations. But according to early reports, the inspiration trackers are holding down that corner of the non-commodity market pretty well. Strategies involve contradiction, appropriative practices of totalization, envelopes for the virtual and the actual, drums reasserting themselves as something other than equipment “for space is whole and broken, global and fractured.” After we state our contention, can the orator still purposively slide down the coral healing tubes, holding their breath before plunging back into the pestilential wetlands, stagnant bogs of indecision surrounding what they might prefer to discuss (though they know their audiences tire of such divulgement)? Other distillations occur before the combinatoric aggregations of nonvisual sensory heterotopic bodies embrace the anarchic multiplication of differentials against easily reproducible desires, difference arising from the rhythm of radiative condensation accreting non-coherence from the implosive crossroads announcing some gospel of finitude. And but so we might now place the readings that the syllabus indicated were optional back on the shelf, get back with it, make the walk to the science building to gather our diagnoses where we may. They also belong in that drawer over there, if we’re being honest. It wasn’t a very successful pay-per-view event. See? New plans in the offing. The modulating difficulties of thematic intentionality cede math rock’s perforated lines to other genres unjustifiably encroaching on unexplored (!) avant-garde territory and foster the false cursive the conglomerate’s using futilely to indicate something like authenticity. It’s better than the counterfeit research reports submitted by the lab’s intern or the reveries of bureaucratic sublimity arising from incautious labor-meditations impinging upon the world-changing potential of realism’s best track. Parallactic sound, ignoring the higher strings and frets to sludgily chug along for the children. Our responsibility was limited but present; it involved the natural curtailment of public acknowledgment somewhere down the line. The only pictures we see anymore get faxed to us during nonpeak periods of subterranean disaggregation. What would it even mean to begin pulling the drawstrings closed, feeding out the lines of takeaway wisdom like so much anchorage, letting the augmentations we’d declined find new purchase in the critical literature? I suppose the cooperative has other ideas about how best to utilize our volunteer labor. A stillness and a line drawn. The other’s distraction qualifies the view. Impossible to concentrate but it’s just an experiment, a kind of waiting; it doesn’t toll or scurry or seek. We do, however, suggest the following adjustments: remove the cables from the façade; they’re supporting too many specular no-hit wonders, alternative bands left behind by a now extremely dated critique of empire; let the ramifications be delirious (but only up to a point); try the rafters—their architectural stability is relatively questionable. See that sky; it was never there. If truth be told. Is this how you put everything in? You just walk and talk, and if you’re lucky enough to have a device, an apparatus, it’s almost already done. Not really worth pursuing, I suppose. All that life, a building that was already a logo anyway. The arrival theater out past the breakers of what can reasonably be litigated welcomes soporific substitutes for just holding our eyes open to the glamouflage. We fancied a season of productivity in the most notable magazines. The wide-ranging implications for the invention of the double-bass drum were only beginning to be felt. I mean, we have just a bit longer before the requisite gorgeousity. Everyone told me to listen but I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle the disappointment. And if we lacked a floor tom or a music stand, all the better. It’s all going to be covered in dust anyhow. We couldn’t afford an anatomy of yet another more-or-less totally made-up affect. The person has a subcycle that can obtrude into any spatiality whatsoever. The half and three-quarter harmonics divested from surgery, orthopedics, and otolaryngology, leaving the other medicinal branches to grow parasitically upon the hardcore breakdowns that were, frankly, just the absolute nadir of our local scene. How do we know alacrity and that it’s really just the building settling rather than a hexagonal crack in summer’s existence? The fine-grained animation subsists hesitancy. So we remain here for just a little longer, waiting for there to be no more here to return to out past what we’ve been approaching; just a couple more sittings; arrival is imminent. On the last page after successfully refraining from mentioning our interrupted lesson plans about fundamental belletristic elements, one conundrum left to this disquisition’s equations and confines involves studies in cessation theory and we’re seeing very little movement among its day traders along either the port or starboard side of leaning (amongst those silver-filigreed codices) regarding short-term prospects. Meanwhile, the hi-hat keeps the beat while we all pause emo-wailing over infrequently picked discordant guitars and the pit’s fingers in the air. But then of course another viral interruption (reader: during this stretch, illness was the norm) means pressure to put in a bit more, means that the lo-fi tracking of possibility doubles back as persuasion as graceful lost dimensions poured into the rubble as challenging detective work, unobserved solos in the gloaming, before doubling back once more as agglomerative glacial states, as trying to fix something into place whose parameters confound capture. Your wittily transgressive rejoinder-as-album-title obscured how quickly we might have actually moved, how we might have already glossed the firmament by now if the counter-cultural imperative to shock hadn’t been such a distraction during the early days of the institute. It was never enough, really, to scream at your critics and to tell the kids to rip down their posters, to read more books. Now that the association is more firmly established, we can retrospect the limits of our earlier efforts and sigh about middle age. It wasn’t clear just what getting there would mean. If a trip is a journey is a sojourn is a flight, the meeting point of striving, the culminating power dynamics of conflict and appeasement, reilluminate our shattered insignificance as data, the many-to-one-to-many vigor normed by the assessment committee’s pre-meeting meeting held two weeks before exigent declarations on behalf of the new government’s handmaidens. It’s better than when lyrics about romantic loss just totally sidetrack the line. Okay, so a direction, an anticipation, a subject, a movement, and then, then, then we’ll be on our way further and further. Is it all just accumulated weight that makes further movement unbearable? Or will it be a quick slide, like revelation or apocalypse? I suppose I cannot expect any generosity on either front: they’re often synonymous; the best would be printing without any (apparent) method at all: no heaping of scorn or idealization, spelling it in lowercase, checking the last box and obviating any oppositional inquests about regular structure or the precise proportion of creation’s ever-circling wolves to a specifically selected polestar and the ramifications of guiding and being led, the tradition of spur and decline. Success and knowledge, falling short, needing more. Stay the course; pack it in; begin with things, their persistence, their restraint. Try again. No, again. Okay. We’ll delay ambition’s realization era-ward toward some other planet before collecting the multiplying world-building mythographies meticulously planned by the new creative team’s dynamic young showrunner. It can be done for the same reason that I didn’t know it was possible to sediment aurality quite that much, stones in our ears and PAs, a bastion of almighty amplifier worship. A bliss. I can also see you’re primarily concerned with showing off all your new friends. They’re fine. I promise we can go back to something more occasional soon. For now, we won’t even bother with the curtain’s close or who remains afterward or the light outside the theater, the asymptotic approach or the tide way out with the ocean rolling on as it always has, that there was even a story to begin with, any pulverization resulting from amassed territory. We will, however, retain certain ideas about where what we wasted goes and where this avenue leads; we might add a little bit about relational patterning in spatial constructs; and there’ll be a moment and then a breath away (and then something else). And, to be clear (that is, paradoxical): no clinamen, no tessera; or, rather, only those things. We’ve sat once or more inhabiting, acting, waiting, knowing somehow that the space to come might be somewhere we already reside. Other spaces have annealed from a gathering of elements; here, we’ve gathered something not yet hardened or shut off and hope you’ll help us produce yet more. If and the plural are olive branches. If we set out originally to once again attend to stuff, our orbit has only minutely expanded beyond its initial-now-retreated object. If a coffee mug holds together a room, if we can pick at a few of its entanglements, drawing out the line, eventually, its centripetal and centrifugal forces vanish to our ill-trained eye amidst the multiplying relations it makes possible, the if we’ve posited and harangued, the if we never set out to explore much less contain but at some point embraced and stopped worrying all that much about, the if we’ve turned into a program and direction; we might now suggest that certain conditions have been met. And there are the cymbals! Crash. Endless gratitude. We can at last adjourn our furtive glances around the office to acquire the next unit operation in order to draw out one last bid for immense blue-sky gravitational desert detonation and turn toward untapped gargantua cresting the horizon, occasional grainlets of the evental careen, and, of course, genres with much better dancing. Here, we’ve been here and now will be elsewhere, as intended. We might have kept at it, dropping along toward some other arbitrary point, hoping against hope that the next restrained thing would appear though fearing a lost thread and derealizing everything, but a planned achromatic and unrectified cliff face without conflict nor arc from setting out was always a terminus of this tributary whose own feeding branches we’ve attempted to document because really, we don’t finish but just give up or meet a deadline or go out upon the plain and hope to have invited enough people along to make our trek a little less arduous. With your and others’ gracious help, we’ve laid a network you’re now welcome to use as you see fit. We set out to take something. Now, this is.

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Notes

The following resources and tools were frequently consulted or used during the composition of this poem: Bandcamp, https://bandcamp.com/, accessed June 12, 2021–July 15, 2022; Bartlett’s Roget’s Thesaurus (New York: Little, Brown, 1996); The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Discogs, https://www.discogs.com/, accessed March 30, 2022–July 15, 2022; Carol Gracie, Florapedia: A Brief Compendium of Floral Lore (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021); John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, December 4, 2009–July 1, 2022, https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/, accessed June 12, 2021–July 1, 2022, and The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021); Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford University Press, June 2022, http://www.oed.com/, accessed June 12, 2021–July 1, 2022; Random Word Generator, https://randomwordgenerator.com/verb.php, accessed June 17, 2022–July 1, 2022; Rate Your Music, https://rateyourmusic.com/, accessed June 12, 2021–March 31, 2022; Spotify,  https://open.spotify.com/, accessed July 15, 2022; Thesauraus.com, https://www.thesaurus.com/, accessed June 12, 2021–July 1, 2022; and YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/, accessed June 12, 2021–July 15, 2022.

Epigraphs to “Postrock” drawn from John Ashbery, “The Skaters,” in Rivers and Mountains (1966), in John Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956–1987, ed. Mark Ford (New York: Library of America, 2008), 147; Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l’espace (1957; repr., Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), 27; and Maurice Blanchot, L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 22. “In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.” Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (1964; repr., Boston: Beacon, 1994), 8. “To write is to surrender to the fascination of time’s absence.” Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 30. Quotations drawn from Paul A. Bové, Love’s Shadow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 189; Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Drafts 39–57, Pledge, with Draft, unnumbered: Précis (Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2004), 138; Jean-Michel Rabaté, Rust (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 21; Rainer Maria Rilke, “What birds plunge through is not the intimate space,” in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 173, originally: “Raum greift aus uns und übersetzt die Dinge” (Rilke, “Durch den sich Vögel werfen, ist nich der” [1924], in Ahead of All Parting, 172); Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 178, 213; rickthelai, “Hilariously boring given its lavish sound palate,” “Handwriting,” Rate Your Music, July 21, 2019, https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/rachels/handwriting/; tweet from John Trefry containing lots of “sound words” [tweet since deleted], John Ashbery, “Europe,” in The Tennis Court Oath (1962), in Collected Poems 1956–1987, 91; Alexander R. Galloway, “Golden Age of Analog,” Critical Inquiry 48, no. 2 (Winter 2022): 228; Sarah Pourciau, “On the Digital Ocean,” Critical Inquiry 48, no. 2 (Winter 2022): 236; Andrew Zawacki, Unsun: f/11 (Toronto: Coach House, 2019), 68; courtesy of the OED: James Hart, The Anatomie of Urines (London: Richard Field and Robert Mylbourne, 1625), 123, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/186214; Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “For the Etruscans” (1980, 1984), in The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (New York: Routledge, 1990), 8; Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (written 1873; pub. 1896), in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss, ed. and trans. Ronald Speirs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 153; Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 42; Ann Smock, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 10, 11; Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 48; Rainer Maria Rilke, “An Experience” (1919, 1938), in Selected Works, trans. G. Craig Houston, vol. 1, Prose (New York: New Directions, 1967), 36; Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 169, 238; Niels Bohr, qtd. in Aage Petersen, “The Philosophy of Niels Bohr,” in Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume, ed. A. P. Kennedy and P. J. French (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 302, qtd. in Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 125; Barad, Meeting the Universe, 114; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 16; Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 184; Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 37, 39, 71, 85, 87, 91, 93, 143 (emphases removed), 177 (some emphasis added), 183 (inspiration, not direct quotation), 205; Barad, Meeting the Universe, 245, 223; Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 267, 261; Wallace Stevens, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” (1942) and “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” (1942), in Collected Poetry and Prose, 662, 331; Adrienne Rich, “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 223, 213; Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 289; Rich, “Notes,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry, 221, 223; and Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 313, 316 (inspiration, not direct quotation), 356. Some other inspiration drawn from Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); The Mars Volta, Noctourniquet (Rodriguez-Lopez Productions RLP025, 2012), LP; Wolverine, no. 85 (September 1994); Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (1982), ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), and Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1990), ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Eugene Field, “The Dinkey-Bird” (1894), in The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat (Piscataway, NJ: Samuel Lowe, 1956); Phillip E. Wegner, Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914), corrected centennial ed., ed. Seth Perlow (San Francisco: City Lights, 2014); Sylvia Plath, Ariel: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement, restored ed. (2004; repr., New York: Harper Perennial, 2005); Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 2nd ed., 1787), trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (1998; repr., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); A. R. Ammons, Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1993); Hades (2020; repr., San Francisco: Supergiant Games, 2021), PlayStation 4; Anna Kornbluh, “Extinct Critique,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119, no. 4 (October 2020): 767–77; Paula Virilio, The Information Bomb (1998), trans. Chris Turner (2000; repr., New York: Verso, 2005); Sangeeta Ray (@tallsasian), “My goal for 2021—I want to use the word declivitous in something I write at whatever cost,” Twitter, December 29, 2020, 12:23 p.m., https://twitter.com/tallsasian/status/1343970865826959360; Anna Kornbluh (@V21collective), “today in vocabulary class,” Twitter, Jun 27, 2020, 9:39 a.m., https://twitter.com/V21collective/status/1276872908359507971, and “today in vocabulary / poetry class,” Twitter, July 6, 2020, 1:06 p.m., https://twitter.com/V21collective/status/1280186427863707649; Racheal Fest (@instantconductr), “Found in Notes app an entry I apparently entitled ‘Words.’ It’s a pretty short list: frisson trace amounts apodosis apoptosis terminus spell-monger, spell-struck,” Twitter, August 8, 2020, 8:16 a.m., https://twitter.com/instantconductr/status/1292072107376021507; Moby, “Thousand,” I Feel It + Thousand (London: Equator Records AXIST 001, 1993), track B1, 12”; David Klemperer (@dmk1793), “Is YOUR vocabulary good enough to read the New Left Review? Take this test, based on twenty five (25) words taken from a recent piece* published on the NLF Sidecar blog // *‘Shrewd Tortoise’, by Sebastian Budgen,” Twitter, April 23, 2022, 7:06 a.m., https://twitter.com/dmk1793/status/1517822204083331074; Sebastien Budgen, “Shrewd Tortoise,” Sidecar, April 21, 2022, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/shrewd-tortoise; Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (1991; repr., New York: Penguin, 1992); aiswebapp, “A Complete Guide on How Glass Is Made,” Asahi India Glass Ltd, April 3, 2018, https://www.aisglass.com/glass-made-step-step-process/; W. J. T. Mitchell, “Sounding the Idols,” Brooklyn Rail, December 2021–January 2022, https://brooklynrail.org/2021/12/editorsmessage/Sounding-the-Idols; Ernst Bloch, “Art and Utopia” (1918 [rev. 1973], 1959), in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 78–155; Kaveh Akbar, “The Palace” (2019), in Pilgrim Bell (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2021), 63–70; Gerard Manley Hopkins, “On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue” (written 1865), The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House and Graham Storey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959); John Ashbery, Three Poems (1972), in Collected Poems 1956–1987, 245–326; Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); and Do Make Say Think, Mogwai, Growing, Rachel’s, Pelican, Eluvium, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, The Album Leaf, Caspian, Colin Stetson, Tortoise, Mono, Growing (again), Ex Eye, Don Caballero, and Earth. Form: A twenty-page long Ashberyian prose poem in the style of Three Poems; like all my writing, it was originally composed in ten-point single-spaced (left-justified) font; it was then enlarged to eleven-point single-spaced fully-justified font when completed (and so is thus now more than twenty pages). Composed June 12, 2021–July 1, 2022.

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Bradley J. Fest is associate professor of English at Hartwick College and the author of three volumes of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015), The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017), and 2013–2017: Sonnets (LJMcD Communications, 2024), the first volume in his ongoing American Sonnet sequence. He has also written a number of essays on contemporary literature and culture, which have been published in boundary 2, CounterText, Critique, Genre, Scale in Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and elsewhere. More information is available at bradleyjfest.com.