On the occasion of the publication of The Third Event Part 3 with Crater Press (London&Santiago) this month, A Perfect Vacuum is publishing excerpts of Parts 1-4. The entirety of Part 1&2 can be ordered from Tipped Press (Cambridge, UK).
“...who, cut off from their people by accident or by choice, find that they must inhabit a world whose constituents, being alien, force the mind to succumb to an imaginary populace.”
—Djuna Barnes
Part One
The third event discloses itself across the atlanticity of impermanent bad kingdoms. It proposes a human mouth as antidote for the great noises that hunt each other in the night of world systems saturation. Continents emerge as conspiracies of space capturing both time and non-time in connection with the processual ruin of empathy and the compromised global ocean. We are interested in poetically fabricating a specious tension between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean worlds, between real and unreal mass. The smog cut glacial aquifer is the material substrate on which a belief in tropical cathedrals proceeds. Atlanticity is staged upon the moral concept of willingness and the immanence of actual land. It is onto these two principles that the third event projects its humanity, a line that ends adorned by its revealing “a private, invisible end-times.” Unable to fulfill itself, the third event takes refuge in the coolness of an asymmetrical interspecies relationality that is a garden, or a menagerie. There, its heroism resembles an ibis among tall metaphors.
[…]
In the absence of any imaginary, we imagine the third event: what is felt against the evolving pollution, what was not taken down, naturally evaporated, burned, or chemically diluted with microparticulates. What was sealed or escaped or repatriated. Undaunted by the impasses of artificiality, we see no reason to extend our hypotheses to immaterial intelligences, that is, to mediatic floods and other apocalyptic spectacles—such as the disappearance and reappearance of lakes—that reorganize the general conceptualization of what differentiates habitat from mud. Insofar as the third event dialectically contains a deep-water horizon, our inquiry must interrogate the problematic generated by the non-a-priori intelligence of the social as a form of mystical certainty. Containment and current converge as a discourse of black water plumed in crude naps. It is unclear at this early hour whether the woes of the landscape have invaded speech. From here we consider the deep-water horizon a future limit inscribed into the paleoceanographic history from which the chauvis, chevrettes, nutria, loutres, belettes, bécassine, moqueur, colibri, gros-bec, and héron—as species representations—partition themselves in becoming examples of an abstract resilience in situ. It’s not that the vital solutions of life will always find a way; it’s that everything that is not life is already disadvantaged against life’s hegemony for disconcealment.
While widely believed by those outside the continent, no one came to rescue inconsequential fauna during the lesser flood. This hoax was generated by a video of a man who appeared to be saving chaois, belettes and similar species that had individually assembled themselves on patches of high ground. The video showed the man wading out into the orange water, falling in sink holes and dips in the land and grabbing the chaois, the loutres, the belettes and the nutria by their tails and rescuing them in small, species-specific boats. Non-Atlanteans lauded the courage of this man who convincingly stroked the teeth and small, mean faces of these creatures as if he had spared them from the flood and in turn prevented their generalized extinction. Atlanteans know, however, that the true life of these species is precisely in their asymptotic annihilation by rising water which gives an arch to an otherwise neutered accumulation of days and years. Without this minimal, chance-based survival, the chaois, the nutria, the loutres and the belettes would be perceived as unfit for continuation and eliminated by force at the cost of seven Atlantean bolts per head. This is a lesson in the non-self- evidence of the image of the catastrophe, as the oracular can, of course, betray you like anything else— mischievously or treacherously.
Concerned with the explanation of the earth as considered through the optic of inheritance, we ask: Is there a deep form of life? Do eternal things endure it? In Atlantis, there are no discreet villains, having themselves descended from the lower bottoms to walk among the autochthonous. Crimes of theft are washed in quotidian geysers, and serve as a metonymy for the lesser flood’s capacity to take away substance and give back a vertical, victimological light with which to look upon what is no longer there. To this, Atlanteans employ the proverb: “but what doesn’t the day owe the night?” Embracing the jargon of concatenation, the Atlanteans believe that their destinies, despite being mediated by a hazardous predilection for self-knowledge, might just befall them at any moment. They are thus ever fixed in an activated waiting that is both supple and long. Being from an inexistent landmass they are unbound by the unfolding of past territorial determinations that would foreclose the elaboration of survivalist intelligence such as is found among hot prairie orchids, the bloom period of which has been evolutionarily extended to accommodate the statistical rareness of symbiotic pollination and other processes of species life. This capacity to subsist before others, while not being evolved to a singular ecology, is also the fodder of a unidimensional alienation, which the Atlantean expresses with naive cruelty.
Part Two
In the abolished century, Atlanteans stood still allowing the mosquitos to loot their blood, saying: “there is no irreplaceable absence.” They are all out getting wetted by the weather, eaten by the insects, interpellated by the laws that orchestrate exceptions. Their bodies appear, through the diaphaneity of these processes, as would haptic replicas—edgeless and unrepresentable—like a swamp annexed by a sea. The floating life, with its limitropes and leitmotifs, ceaselessly habituates itself to coveting displacement, here understood as whatever elements symbolize the non-presence of tempests, foam and phantoms. When the Atlantean body is most wounded they call it the flood body. When it is most mutant, the petroleum body, or the carnival body, or the communion body. Since the arrival of the third event, despite being submitted to an alternative futurity by the most risky object of eras, Atlanteans will rescue the bee from the wave and struggle to involve themselves in its truth. Conversely, they dash cabbages, torn silk, rosaries and aspirin into circumoceanic currents in the deep-water convection. Potatoes, linen, hymnals, lecithin; collards, cotton, gris-gris, gelatin: all one in the end despite recompositions. “Do not save love for things,” they say, “since outside the night is government.”
Here, the almost-earth is animated by a porous field of asphodels, whose capricious mellifluidity, being neither sorry nor faithful, makes for an awkward augury. Meant to discover the structure of the third event, and getting only so far as the temporal fabric, woven into an eschatological specter, the archeologist, being drunk, is ready to believe anything. “The third event: Solid? Liquid? Gas? The purpose of this reconnaissance involved sketching an archeology of the future catastrophe using a method derived from the peripheral freedom of minor science. The assemblage of atlanticity, in its capacity as meta-narrative of mercurial objectivity, was conceived to address the cruel coordinate in the hardcore conduit, where we find the dead on the lips of the living and the living on the lips of the specialists. Taking a pirogue into the flotant, the archeologist examines watermarks left by the deep-water horizon. From them, she diagnoses the restoration of the flood’s authority as an epiphenomenon of surplus heat involved in the fabrication of all this cheap alchemy. Just as before, the cane was a sweet machine of fealty extraction. Reconciled to field clothes that reek of bagasse and to stumbling from the rum, each day the archeologist watches the refineries burning the largesse.
[…]
Pauouelle says she has prophesied their meeting by “the water of these desires.” The fieldwork is the museum of their encounter. She begins her interview asking, “Do you saps believe in a deep form of life? Do eternal things endure it?” According to Pauouelle, the night is not premeditated, though its been going on for a long time. This woman is neither process nor procedure but one permanent thing: a disclosure, sumptuous and irremediable, as in tragedy. Her freedom is neither tender nor self-evident, constituted primarily by the habitual trespassing of demarcated wilderness, singing harmonies with locusts and eating honey like a ghost. Her days are calibrated by the growing of specific dark melons and brackish corn. In church, she genuflects against the pew as would a hunted body. Her losses are predominantly terrestrial. She privately interrogates the cultural consensus that all absence is supplemental. Her subjectivity resides before a portal managed by a legally designated retainer. In the grave dilemma of her solubility, she tattooed the word “refugee” on her upper thigh. Her capacity for autonomy is delimited by the external obligation to curb the visible likeness of her will, thus prompting her will to go underground. She has a phobia of logistics’ primness, the frightful beige of data and quantification. Her groin pouts as if she keeps her love in it. Her most secret aspiration involves living inside the minor tide of history. Her thoughts negotiate the elucidation of what may lay beyond mere hope as motive counter-principal. For her, the outside is officially “unoccuring,” but hints of its existence show through the splendid and reeking falsification of origins. Despite her criticism of the hysterical parousia of her civilization’s unlikely resurrection, she consents to the strategic essentialism of believing in a heartland.
In Pauouelle’s dream she is herself in a market, having descended her mother from the trailer’s stilts. They agree to buy squash and cream to cook together. But as they enter all the stalls shut just as they approach. Angrily, Pauouelle reaches for the hanging plants on the walls and dashes them to the floor. Upon waking, she realizes that this dream has conjured a memory of her mother telling her that before she was born her fetus was fed on only squash and cream. “Dreaming is like night work but of another order,” she says. “The dream speculates on what it can skim off of the bank of the body. The dream is a heist to which the dreamer is a cheeky accomplice.” Pauouelle believes the dream involves not her decomposed familial love—as this would be the stuff of egoic analysis—but the unconscious problem of being born in the common colony, submitted to the desolate miracle of all the devils and all the saints, to the sexuality of the garden, and to the ovaries of the female sago palm, to the social uplift of the night, to the ethos of the ethnos who is one blood cut up in lengths, to the orchid moth whose name in Atlantean means, “memory of the future,” to the moth orchid whose name means “prophecy of the past,” and finally to the desperate medicinality of music to which the Atlanteans often incant the saying, “You’ve got to believe in the sound. It’s the one good thing that we’ve got.”
Part Three
[…]
the jellyfish narrative—
this is what I saw in a dream.
miles of them dead in ribbons of purple
and electricities of purple.
my father, the bad boatman,
looked out onto the gulf,
his blood knowing things.
we spoke together in my dream
of his big catches. of sharks. later in my dream I am
on a beach with my father, dressed like the Dead Sea.
we are burying jellyfish with plastic shovels.
he says to me,
« how could it always be like this? » I say, « it will not always, if the dream is to end. soon I will no longer be the sea bird kidnapped by thermals, obsessed. » he said, « yes, but Pauouelle, the dream’s over, it’s ended, we’re already awake. »
so I covered my feet in jellyfish
—to prove something—
and ran screaming into my father’s house,
screaming, « we’re already awake, »
as my father poured white vinegar on me.
//
you are meant not to pick up
where the archeologist left off
but to fill the ditch
she left with her wonder.
as if home, I called into someone else’s house :
« mama, here comes midnight
with the dead moon in its jaw. »
the future, someone once said,
is a body of water unlike any we have seen
or heard. the future,
wet as if arriving from a voyage,
drying its shiny clothes by fossil fire.
off-white interrogation of fate
lost in a cycle of summary currents,
meant to return the dislocated element
to a sea with which it grafts familiarity.
the police secte, the oligarchs, the bureau
the thieves, the « struggle » for « progress, »
the shambles and briars.
on my ride through vague country
to the great fake mock peril,
I hum, « o the sun
is a cold and
a pale horizon. »
land of marine transgression and of want.
they have given strange birth to us
who turn against them in their blood—
our daddies in the long ground.
//
though I had first imagined our meeting as more than the effect of a dubious solidarity, the archeologist began by asking if I believed in a deep form of life and if eternal things endured it. she asked if the third event was solid, liquid or gas. who are the SAPs?, she asked. when or where was the deep-water horizon? what happened in the abolished century? what is the boundary of the good? what do atlanteans give up for lent? I told her arrogant humility.
she did not ask how, despite knowing one or two things about the interpretation of the actuality of land, I find myself the subject of a moralistic fantasy and the owner of several dysfunctional images. she was not interested in the game of complex betrayals by which I make myself sick with viciousness, by which I make viciousness sick with fragility and
by which I make fragility sick with caprice.
she was not interested in understanding by what techniques we enhanced a deception.
she asked me if I thought « atlantean culture » was dead. I said it didn’t matter.
[…]
dreaming, I am on a beach with my father dressed like the Dead Sea.
he reminds me solemnly that we come from a long line
of vicious, fragile and capricious birds of prey,
which is why I love to eat rotted blood
and why I love to be used as a weapon in ceremonies
in which those who govern us imitate so-called natural violence.
in an unexpected moment of pity, I told the archeologist how in being cut off from her own people, she finds that she must inhabit a world whose constituents, being alien, force the mind to succumb to an imaginary populace.
Part Four
If microalgic cells, stressed by radiation, emit a protein-based red florescence, salt lakes can turn the color of cake or pollen or amber. The sun, then, would be mauve, blocked by wasps, by wasperie. In the weeks following the revolt, bodies continued to turn up in water-graves outside the colony, submerged in the dark between liquid and gas, tonally ambiguous as the liquid tones of mantis eggs hatched and floating in air, like the petals and sepals of phenotypically plastic orchids, greenish and mottled with purple, the blooded lips, the pouches, the ivory. Since now there are always storms, the maringouins fly as low as possible, light bombing the blood of ankles everywhere. A rag saturated with phosphorus was the first act of sabotage during Unreconstruction. There were passive and active forms, major and minor forms, simple and grand forms. A few ounces of plastique, properly placed, could bring down a bridge, or mineshaft. They would arrive by pirogue or mule to demolish a portion of track. They slashed tires, drained fuel tanks, started fires, started arguments, acted stupidly, short-circuited electronics, desecrated monuments. They endeavored to engineer a general device for lowering the ruler’s morale and creating confusion. They were poorly equipped and overly eager and occasionally resourceful. They engaged in subversion, disruption, obstruction, destruction, meddling, pranking, and trekking noisily.
When the archeologist asked Pauouelle, “What does it mean to sabotage a catastrophe?” the Atlantean just stared into the vermilion water that claimed everything. They wanted to burn the cane, but it was burnt already and turned into bagasse. They wanted to liberate the chaouis and the belettes, but they were not captive, just hissing and feeding on trash. They wanted to break machines, but they were already swollen with heat and sulfur, and so resembled the populace. The few trains were mostly forgotten, belonging to the abolished century, like all unambiguously historical elements in the intra-continental fold. Feeling the dizzying limitations of their analysis, the SAP shadow vanguard aligned with a criminal contingency, whose territorialization of the underworld augmented their belief that the Third Event would manifest itself through maleficence, since once things are given over to ruination, the wild elements, adaptive to necessity, to harvesting misfortune, and to triggering cruel metamorphoses, reign absolutely.
[…]
Being underground, the SAP revolutionists developed a strategic alliance based on a shared understanding of the stakes of atlanticity with a criminal organization the Bureau refers to as the Thieves, but who call themselves, with great delight, The Magic Gang. Since the collapse of indiscreet villainy and victimological absolution, the Thieves began to enrich themselves through the manufacturing of an ecstasy-inducing drug known as the dinguerie, made by soaking the dried stamens of the cypripedium parviflorum orchid in liquid methane. This substance is then mixed with a species of nénuphar conserved from the abolished century by crime-adjacent Atlantean matriarchs in the common colony. The productive combination of these two-admixture psychotropes was gleaned over several generations from a close study of the habits of black wasps who trepidly lit upon the orchid after harvesting water-lily pollen and would consequently become intoxicated to the point of attempting to mate with the idolomantis diabolia while she sagely enhanced her floral mimicry, the devastating results of which are well-known. Itself psychoactive, consuming the dried orchid on its own results in bouts of convoluted desperation for self-determination in the past through the generation of hallucinated genealogies in which Atlanteans forget that they still inhabit a non-existent continent, taking on the tender melancholia of grandiose deracination that has led most to find the side-effects of the flower of exile pleasureless. In light of this general sensibility, those who cannot afford the dinguerie settle for anything that tastes like honey from a rock.
[…]
Having been subjected to a great derangement, Atlanteans, like Pauouelle, make sacrifice to soft serial conduits, a sequence of literally glorified ditches, whose water, once the color of cake and pollen, separated the light from the dark boundary of the good. Salt, which is known to rarely ruin anything, was once mined there un-intensively, almost innocently. Pauouelle had refused to discuss the SAPs, unconvinced that the archeologist meant her any good. She spoke instead of BATTY and BIDON conspiracy theorists, who believed, for example, that the Bureau of Land Interpretation were currently engaging in a low-level long-form gaslighting operation, informing the populace that all bioluminescent species had been recalled, unfit for continuation, when in crepuscular hours the corollas of fireflies were perceived shining through the half-living cypress. This, the Oligarchs contended, is just reflections, introspections and degenerate fantasy. Pauouelle insinuated, however, that the rulers could intend to manipulate the people’s sense of reality by simulating bioluminescence in horseflies, which were already trained to mimic other species, pollinating desert crops in the absence of moths. Some said the rulers were tampering with the plaquemine, injecting fallen fruit with datura to contaminate the deer population, which some call the first and last free thing to roam the common colony. Others interpret this theory as the projection of a collective desire on the part of those born in the colony to poison their masters, their masters’ animals and their masters’ uncut glacial aquifer. To the archeologist’s question of whether or not she believes in the continuation of glowworms, Pauouelle replied, “those things involved a prior sun, being leaky in providence and in higher love. It’s true, she said, that the hills were alive. But mercifully, all the demanding gods are dead, wearied by our adaptions.”
In Atlantis, Pauouelle said, adaptation is a barreling toward the future of disenchantment through the subsumption of extinguished belief. The bruise taken on for damage done to the image of the mutated body in adaption is gruesome and vaporous. It is the result, at its most visible, of undergoing a recomposition, from a world marked by drudgery and neglect, to living inside the strange architecture of the concept of one’s own liberation. Unlike atlanticity, it was a concept she needed not in and for itself, but in order to submit it to acts of betrayal so as to not devour it eucharistically. Having gone from quandary and spite and dereliction to behaving, without much resistance, identically as others in a room, Pauouelle said she has one consolation: full of a heavy sound, she would never escape, no matter her how brutal her mutations, wanting something raw and studied and without origin, like vengeance.