I seek only the gestures of a lonely ruthless
quest.
To resurrect if only for a day the marvellous
dressed corpse of my desire.
Larvae, moths, necrophors.
To perpetuate the cemetery,
to plaster you with sea-weed,
To open up a gap
and produce a breakdown.
Conroy Maddox – Poem, unpublished. 1941. (written on the cover of a blue notebook [2011?],
ink largely unsuccessful, reproduced here from pen nib pressure marks (by the thin paper, soft 5b pencil rapidly
shading back and forth over indentations method))

0 – proposition [found in pdf last saved, 14/04/2013]
At the ground zero of the stable, the individual finds their feet placed steadily upon the interstices
of two axes: space, and time. Of space, we much discuss this, much is discussed – we have the
texts for no-thing – nowhere, the chronotopic hinging on a centring of time yes, but only as scale
of progressive movement in space, and the problem with that is movement in space. Space appears,
by a literary hand, to eat time, time and time again, to eat time. To accrue itself by it – and yet
space appears only ever the short two steps made into itself and stuck there. Or one, or two wheels,
perhaps for that matter. It is a trapped variable. In such, one might perceive our steps affect some
alteration of reality – alter the axes, axe the interstices, but that appears all too desperate. Perhaps,
or perhaps, but perhaps, it is rather time that eats space, but does not spit it out. Time digests space
– the steps before, the steps after, the steps two steps before, etc. And thus; perhaps, but perhaps,
at the axes interstice the individual finds themselves on two feet of a space, that yes is transient,
but yes is tangible – but time stands rather here, at this axis, as a field playing as point. The past
event and event to come digested in its leviathan body, the individual does not stand but swims,
kicks water rather, in its belly. Time is encompassing, immersive, corrosive. It dissolves space, as
the individual, as so much more, or less, or more, taking up room, is encompassed, immersed,

corroded. Digested by it. Thus, perhaps, perhaps, the search for no-thing, or comprehending no-
thing, or façading as no-thing is but an approach to our own illusions of Thing*. A subjective,

modernistic (done-for) struggle with our own vessel that always re-arrives at; fig. 1, vessel empty,
or, fig. 2, vessel wishing it was filled. This approaches, perhaps, human experience. As human
experience is that effected upon the vessel in space, by the alterations of their predicament of time.
Trapped in the digestive tract of time the individual views the corroded artefacts of time and space
(that is, t + s = μ), covered in active acidic mucus, flush past them and mistake them for fleeting
images, for memories, or dreams, or actions, or – or, hallucinations. But in reality, a reality, and
not presently, impossibly so, a stable one, they are but the pin points of time throwing off the
illusion and slipping to the field of the never. Then, then, here, or here, by means of – of wasting
your time, or bending narrative time, or breaking my concentration, we – that is I, + you – just as much
as w + e, might approach a mimesis of experience. Realigned from human in space, to experience
in time – indeed,
perhaps, yes, indeed from nothing, to, to never.

notes on translating Marcel Béalu, 9800 S. Sepulveda

4: “I can’t sleep anymore. I’ve
called off the search. All
evening buried in my armchair
I’ve sat and waited for the waves
to take me. But as they started
to reach the walls, as the eddies
took up the things in my room,
a frogman slowly opened the
door. Green water rushed in and
over his heavy form, ran over the
carpet, raced up towards the
ceiling…

viii. Fragments of quotation written on inside back cover of red journal [2009?]

Bruno Schülz, The [?] of G[?]
– ‘ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have
their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd tightly together and press hard one upon
the other without any pause. This has its importance for any narrative, of which continuity and
successiveness are the soul.
Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time [indeed]; events that
have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided, and allotted; events
that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air homeless and errant?
[indecipherable]
Worried we run along the train of events, preparing ourselves for the journey [?]
Is there perhaps some kind of bidding for time?

Conductor, where are you?’
Track dolly forward, screen dissolve from boat deck to black to true black. Add: POV lighting.
Shows: low walls, ceiling cut from rock. The reader shuffles forward, books wrapped in arms. Hair wild and long; clothes in tatters.
Looks back and beckons to camera. Camera
follows. Disappears off into the corridors. Camera disappears off with it. Cut
cut.

 

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Andrew Robert Hodgson is author of the novel Reperfusion (2012), the forthcoming novelesque Mnemic Symbols (2019) and monograph The Post-War Experimental Novel (2019). He is translator from the French of Roland Topor’s Head-to-toe portrait of Suzanne (2018) and from the Danish, Carl Julius Salomonsen’s Modern forms of art and contagious mental illness (2018). He tweets at @andhodgson

About the banner image: Smelter Cemetery, Where Employees of Asarco Smelter Works Can Be Buried.