Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede emphasizes the ludological role of abstract anatomies and how they project different erotic instances from the artificial carapace that those bodies redesign in the act of reading through their garments and organs. In the rhizomatic level of the composition of the text, those organisms reduplicate themselves as they codify many narrative routes performed in a labyrinth that could be created by Borges, or drawn in a map of impossible cities by Calvino. They crawl out, an embryonic skin mutating from the surface, morphing and maximizing its efficiency in subdermal layers of chronotopic plateaus. And in this machinic process there is no way out, only immanence to the exoskeleton, of language. Interfaces, surfaces, devices, catalogues, collection of objects, membranes, tissues, limbs, cellular processes, all conjoint in the locomotion of an ever-complexifying synthesis of deep media appendages bedding fictional worlds and theoretical writing, browsing digital and haptic spaces.
You meet Abyssal walled memories,
You enter the nightmare dimension,
in its inward-coiling state of Grace,
where low-poly dreams of futures lie,
the thresholds of sleep,
carried by St. Lucy in the Valley of Rulers,
when the king of the gods was once
fired with love for Phrygian Ganymede,
and when that happened Zeus found
the secret song at the hollow heart
where lies the Locus of candent Void,
the absence far beyond non-corporeal gates,
founding a shape preferable to his own,
wishing to turn itself into a bird
he nonetheless scorned to change
into any,
save that which can carry his thunderbolts
tearing the bodies free of breath,
long years of slaying,
by masks concealed, eyes unrevealed
somewhat at peace, Dante joins the feast
his eyes growing blind the more he dine,
a sense of slowly fading light.
Soon a spectral hum identifies the rapture,
the hissing words reborn from the darkness
of earth’s core, the catamite he dreams,
from the new land a whirlwind rose
and struck the forepart of the ship
he throws himself into black fire
to hack and slice iron grips of ice
grimly rose the gibbets’ frames
and dreams standing on a shore
the invitation to cross
with the hand of his mouth
passing through difficulties
of entering the earth and the corporeal,
exposing the skin interior-face & fragrances
glimpsing jewels’ heart afire,
in the form of spice,
unfurling words whose nectar drips,
from the corners of your mouth.
Now, hunted by a powerful eagle
that snatches him up to the heavenly sphere of fire,
a royal boy with javelin
gives keen chase, tiring running stags
and Jove’s swift armor—bearer sweeps him up
from Ida in his talons
and the boy’s old guardians
in vain implore the stars
the savage barking of the dogs
disturbs the skies.
Ganymede with his skin
bound to the text.
The thing whose arrival,
Did you anticipate [?!]
Shifts from limb to text
Wrapping itself
accumulating gas from the reader
and the cavities of reading components,
allowing your body to operate
converting them into the bubble
of the universal polymer
when
new thingness screams across the sky.
in white sand poured into my footprints
like a succession of occluding hour glasses
Praying to Thelma Gibbs
At an altar,
ritualizing the machine,
the positions in the text,
abstract biomes, membranes crawl
filling the space of the frame voidmachine weeping
Nathan Carpenter tries to describe
what a certain machine looks like
but can’t find no other word than ‘disgusting’
upon peeling it from the skin
the screaming continues to grow
and morph,
the original nucleus of a half dozen screens
undergoes mummification
something more attractive
piercing the skin and plucking debris from the ground.
Lynn Henderson drifts from the center of the labyrinth
Asterion dissolves into the aether
Messages endorsing succession of dreams
Ruby Wise sutures itself to the theater
while archways and silhouettes root themselves
in the physicality of the performance
embryonic to the collection of objects
a topography of tissue and fat
Then it seemed that, after circling a bit,
the thresholds of its labyrinth dwells
when grey cities reared to smoky skies
tall towers grim and ugly,
in whose shadows none might dream
of deepest sea beds coil,
warping us as we migrate clotted,
on the floor of this fossil sea,
your sluggish impressions
from viscera mounted on plinths
scrolling pergamenous raw data
full with dead scraps swinging in sulphuric tide
where atmospheric skin in whorls of foam
to halt the rhizome’s construction.
the repetition of nested interiors, laced with domes,
concavities & plasmic earthquakes cracking,
making sound like a pulsing drum,
its many voids skittering back
in never-lapsing flow
jagged viscosity of arcane spinal moss
through the magmatic projection
of Ganymede’s weaving
extra-somatic ganglion networks
recorded footage—
Each labyrinthine frame gushing inside out
as it disembowels
a dysmorphic amusement park’s
magmatic spell beyond registers of
The Transorganic Holocene Scenario //
the trajectory of distending bubbles
as imagined in
Rituals of Ganymede’s apud flesh-graffiti
offering the tablet of a beginning for the future eon
under the veil of the image of an era
of computational primitivism,
in the tradition of deleuze & guattari,
the schizopastoral edited and redefined
as a landscape of complexification
the intercostal compositions of
a Tabula Rasa
or, Locus Amoenus
of the Stomach
that will function
as synecdochal breakdown
for the neural facsimile
of the sigil-branded
ekphrastic deep Apeiron.
Screaming induces a choral overdose
of synthetic surfaces by dint of
guts and smut somaspheres,
disseminating its infinite soils
fused with proliferating poetic tissue.
Such smut-making attempts
to reorganize his theoretical framework
when the Minotaure will not arrive
as an autopsy performed better
to understand the mirroring alien anatomy
when you stare at a mobile device.
Furthermore, it allows one to the explore
the plastic reenactment of the ballardian crash fantasy,
smut-maker debates migrating deeper into the cityscape,
wandering through nighttime cityscape,
natural eyes removed
and replaced with the techno-photo-tactile kino,
mutational hypothesis
where everything looks at everything
fusing in such desert geometry,
via its own resources of camouflaging
with intelligent skin like anechoic body topographies
sketched by Lucy Mcrae.
Considering equally the radical surface
of a secret portal,
the rituals incorporate a mass structure
that can be arranged by patterns of sleep
through occult figures
and symbols of large metallic objects
reconstructing hyper-linked
web secretions riving elsewhere
there where it can be conjoined
to drones navigating the collapse of architecture:
walls, stairs and doors
grinded down to a seemingly flat surface
of sand in a landscape
of non-rhythmic repetitive demolition.
This presents a rationalized transfiguration
of densely allusive textures
through a sudden shift
in metaphor as a result of feedbacks
and non-lineal complex picture
of temporal and spatial organization,
Nucleus diffuse into its surrounding tissue,
a soft apocalypse of the 2020s
assembling striated
and sever prosaic slabs where each page
modulates into ambiguous veins,
creating a multitude of potential pathways
across the surface, various narratives intermingling:
the product of an aborted feedback loop
sending instructions to a void …
The text assumes the ludological set
arranging various routes communicating pathways
with each surface, unleashing
the possibilities of an erotic ontological encounter
enabling the text to understand its own thingness
revealing the ground pattern through
yonic and phallic designs,
where the movements of genitalia
are independent and adrift.
Such mazy thingness orients downward
a kind of deep-set throne for the bull
at Knossos where the goddess crowned
with a wreath of grain utters sentences
of dynamite-imploding flesh.
Revealing the cabinets of curiosity
clinging to the dense papier-mâché frame,
presenting the anatomic reticulations
of Pandora’s dimensional drift,
where each combination of elements
describes a puzzle lapse
between one desire and the other,
an overall consuming textum.
Hence, we conceive the multicursal pottery hedge
in time without space,
and the fragmentary periphery
of the Dionysian energetics
prioritizing dissonant dynamics
conflating the Minotaur and the labyrinth.
The Someone (Rosa Fisher or
Nathan Carpenter or Thelma Gibbs
or another named entity)
Thelma Gibbs deconstructs her name logoclastically
in a variation of soundscapes,
grasping the field between
textures, surfaces:
the tentacular Ibis
from the tongueless altar of cornal and soapstone.
Our unfathomable mass returns to memory in pain
of fading into aether and a return
to the softness of corporeality
a forgetful random noise
in the ambient background of all media
shivering our own catastrophist euhemerism
where we lost phylogenetic memories
coming forth with sails unfurled
from the sealed haven they entered thousands of years ago,
a crosscutting haptic possession
that reflects a permanent testo-junkie polishing
executed in all the sensible parts of the body.
Accordingly, it provides a second
ephemeral fantasy in the dreamscape
desiring the animation
of the all-encompassing eye having those nightmares
of dreaming its seeing backwards,
recognizing a second desire,
the astral projection of a living text,
or the extremities of the nerves,
agitating the subtle fluid that they contain,
which flows from all the parts to the one housing
the central nucleus, thus occasioning
a kind of uninterrupted shivering anchored
in the clouds as the intangible clutter of the body,
too noisy and too fast to get any sense
of its totality, with every glimpse
conjoining into this foggy,
prehistoric landscape placed
as freeze-frame dome
populated by ghosts and apophenic patterns,
beyond the cusp of the place where you stand,
the locomotion of feet a second-though,
about to bathe in pools of ice
and orange blossom,
in the wonderful facial ejaculation of Ibis
performing the choreographic entrance
to Babel/Babble,
an eager vision changing at the speed
of constructions basking in a multitude
of lateral appendages fugitive exteriorizations receding
metallic gut of habitation devices
from the note Lydia Burke left you
where ink becomes more itself,
slow prosthetic aggression
of flurry meanings in the compound
of sludge, floating in another dream
(the site of a monolithic cube kino eye hand)
where pink slog depresses into your chest.
An omnicidal light overthrows the head
in terminal performances where the object becomes itself,
Thelma Gibbs projects her being
through ethereal plane,
you bathe in the pool of fluid left behind
by the weeping voidmachines,
the metabolic concerns of the species
as series of jumps aside cut-ups
coagulating local space viscosity
of cytosol, blood coagulates. Negentropy scrolling
an interface where you see the orb as it drifts
as friction factors from the text
emerging as video, removing vestigial tissue,
while our glitch accelerates toward
the void of dead geometries and meat
turns iridescent in further mutations of
digital extensions of the sensorimotor,
navigating forward to punch on
recorded footage from the haunted fist
stretching our orifices while reading it.
We teleport every amalgamation
of spectral appendages as kino eyes
stigmatized unto your palms
now calloused shut,
an indecipherable lobby of wall hallucinations
from threads of hieroglyphic abstraction,
labyrinths of bottomless falls
whose entrails bleed-out in chambers
of noisy-mutis data,
jumping between the dripping filaments
of the unnavigable, we are lost in
the non-library in the excessive re[citations]
& lemmatum from Mnemosyne:
our serpentine fog spreads
like post-atomic platforms of dust
inhabiting this mobile assemblage
of sand, nerve, flesh
and the stomachus
of EORIRHNROEPRIJFNFOFPDIJFFOKRINH
as graphomaniac outskirt
losing the place of
a drakontos assemblage
with Milton&Borges stripping every body
out of nothing, out of filth’s statuesque
decorations for the room of desert geographies,
the multitudes tightening language
across hernia protruding silence
stripping every signification in the room,
fading into the arabesque patterns of the wall.
Appendages in the text come and go
as horotic rockets over the tissue,
a meta-plastic transition in the signature
of the formless in expansive tissue and
the scream in pink and gray
of a larger Kunstkabinett,
wonder-collections of the spinal artifices
of a frame rooted in the ground,
exoskeleton, the intricate dreamscape
of stomach’s pantheon.
Collage stretching its gravity,
cubomania dripping arborescent roots,
florilegium infesting Gaia,
skull unraveling Mnemosyne Atlas ,
bridges on top of slithering bricabrac,
viscera pulled the curvy compendium,
the mutis liber of paratactic DREAM RESIDUE
registered through fractalized landscapes
scrambled in the intestine’s occult signs.
It is through the sigil ceremony of such landscapes
perceived in the interface’s soteriology
of astral projections produced from voidmachine
ritualistic peripheries, where the limit-movement
which connects actions
drops its tinctured weapon
hatching up the theater of metabolic utopias
refocusing gaze position of the text’s
self-mechanized surface
into the playable fabricated shell
blurring the separation of the organic and the inorganic,
where each monstrous input sprawls
the sensorimotor detection,
like Kleist’s puppets dressing
avenues of gargantuan memory spiral circuits,
collecting objects from the surrounding landscape.
These modes and tones are presented as dream states
that function as premonitional indicators
of hypergestural artifices recirculating
and mediating blank areas,
transit zones defining voidmachines,
fed with blackblood and softened flesh,
the tissue of nuclear detonation,
the base of a dilapidated acropolis
of a theoretically-fictional fungal catastrophe.
This would be the ceremonial center
of a library of Babel that allows us
to navigate its hexagonal fractals,
forming a series of marble plinth
labyrinths with floral patterns
emerging from the skin, always forming
the ludological puppetry of a Beckettenian trilogy
of dreams that allows for Thelma Gibbs to drift
through the back of your skull,
stemming the play-of-light of textual theatrics
juxtaposed to a primordial color,
enacting the textual machinery
of incandescent artificiality
as in James Turrell’s works
and the Mallarmenian annihilating white
of the pre-corpse alchemic recipe
exposing in deep gray matter
bone-dry sarcophagi in Guyotatian predatory adventure
of fine cloth writing.
Such exoskeletal appendages
in scenes of labyrinthine language
that is phantasmagoric, cyborgean
and confused in the expanded anatomical field
of amorphous sound fiction (earworms,
drones) performs a short-circuit ruse
of displaced gambling horizons
as it is juxtaposed to operating systems
intrinsic to flesh, as Sondra Perry does
in her FleshWalls installation,
repurposing simulating tools
with open-source computer graphic software
in order to map an interface manipulating video,
breaking down her own skin
into recognizable feature projections,
in a way that presents itself
as less organismal and more abstract:
(what moves your thingness) threads forward.
Leaping in frivolous arcs.
This realm of possibilities reveals the spiderwerb
binding artificial ligaments
creating an abstraction
of the anagrammatic operation
through the notional infinite point
of biological landmarks as the mass of data is assembled
in the hyper-paleonymic cluster
of language=in=itself, bounded to the indissoluble mist
of metonymy. The text tracks the course
of its own biology in the
intestinal movement of a staircase,
which is the metaplastic conflagration
of different word devices
that iterates the inverse side
of the cascading cloth
as dreams of amputation Instruction manuals
leading itself as the material catalogue
for some kind of altar
for a haploid ritual spawning canvases
an exulting emblem outpouring
of harvesting binds, one remembers
with the hand severed by the void:
a vessel can only linger in the void for so long
before it must be pulled back
into the corporeal realm.
We hit the jackpot of this piece’s rear-guard by the somewhat mute and hollow sound of laminated deck, which is followed by chirring shadows immersing deeper into the handicraft rave surface, struck in the temporary site of the totalitarian kitsch (of Kundera’s defecation) that amplifies the anatomical smears of glitchy poubellication (Lacan).
This rapping is conducted by the hysterical kitsch, and the librettist incorporates the minor skills of an operatic installation in the modality of a theoretical Sprechstimme or, a scream suffusing all polyphonic degrees.
The spiraling opera projects the galactic conflagration of architectures, and moods in relation to mist, cloth, gut, nerve, in full extent through spells performing the fragmental recitative in cascading graffitis.
Such bubbling expressionism spaced in doomy cut-ups of ephemeral pitches compresses the haptic wall and folds into new elements.
The package of sonic ideas leads in small doses of chirpy vocals, returns to the metabolic squeaky fiction of a coagulated dreamscape in freely atonal style, expanding its field through the anechoic catalogues of Ganymede, as if he would be hosting the rhythmic abyssal traces around the glowing corners of a bioluminescent deep-sea skin.
Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede, by Mike Corrao. Minneapolis, Minnesota: 11:11 Press, January 2021. $12.00, paper.
Frederick Arias is a Venezuelan writer and translator residing in New York City. He studies at The New Centre for Research & Practice and is applying for a Master’s in Comparative Literature. Find him via Instagram: @Frekzolet.
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