…found at the moment in Magdalo Mussio
Jim Leftwich
June 2017
Magdalo Mussio
…found at the moment in Magdalo Mussio
The word in the upper right area of the poem-drawing is almost certainly not “feldspar”, though
that is the pattern of letters first recognized by my eyes, and once filtered through to the brain it
exists as part of the composition, whether I or you or anyone else thinks it belongs there or not.
The word “vugg” means “a cavity in a rock, lined with mineral crystals”. As metaphor, it might
refer to the nooks and crannies of our cultural ecology, in which some of us might find the kinds
of hidden gems that make our environments livable. Coded resonances connect certain
countercultures and subcultures across geographic and generational divides. Reading these
resonances will look like apophenia or insanity to those who have not by one means or another
(by any means, in fact, from another angle) been initiated into the slipstream. The subcultures
have of course been appropriated and repurposed. The dominant culture is more than willing to
sell us our alternative identities at a discount. Buy one, get one free. A counterculture, however,
is at least potentially another matter entirely. Whereas the several subcultures in play at any
given moment are likely to operate as marginalized components of a mainstream
socio-economic/political milieu, whatever exists as an actual counterculture will circulate
and percolate as a self-defined underground. It will be of no use to us to merely proliferate variations
on familiar themes. So what if the fish refuses to recognize the water, the fish is where it is and
the water is what it is. We have long ago walked beneath the ruined arch. The ruins are in our
heads. We are standing on ruined ground. Repeating the old, familiar practices will only get us
more of the same. Once upon a time, all the world was a stage. Now all the world is a text. We
start again, wherever we are, with a new reading of our surroundings. Another world is possible.
We read it everywhere we look. It’s the inscription above the entrance to the pansemic
playhouse. It’s the next chapter in the training manual. Darwin was an ancestor of Breton. The
fish has legs and is breathing on the beach. Do we offer this as evidence of our success in
a surrealist game?
The variety of fragmentation. Languages blending disruptions. Experimental morphemes
splitting corruptions. An ooze of critical thinking. Leaf fuel funnels the camping letters.
If rife lesser pinks virtuoso impulse-dealer, a modern cheese invested in the open nests,
discipline takes the spindle for a ride on its own tale, nor are they consistent in the laboratories
of molten scripture.
Lamp-deuce, the audacity of the program is always a ruined linguistics, on every surface
entertaining the transformation of the available urges.
A history beyond the betweens. As if a history beyond the betweens becomes. Becomes
a-historical. A close reading of the present yields a future and veils a past. No one has ever said
anything began where it currently is.
Magdalo Mussio
Without an image, emerging from thought and pierced by chance, you could have no way of
knowing what I am reading, what I am thinking, what I am looking at, awaiting the material
memories of an everyday threshold — solipsistic pansemic postulates? (we are of course
proposing a collaborative, utopian solipsism, one which negates itself as a given) — subjective
improvisational pansemia? (intuition, having been trained by appropriation, is used extensively
in our ongoing research for the untitled training manual) — found at the moment in Magdalo
Mussio: cracks and trembles along the upper edge, as if written on sheetrock and removed with
packing tape, 56 48 se 11 12 ,, 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25, followed by four more
lines of numbers, smeared and scrunched, unevenly spaced, then a line of quasi-calligraphic
scribble-squiggles, a scattering of possible writings over the left seven-eighths of the image,
fading to scratches and paste at the lower edge, the right one-eighth crowded with scarred and
fractured scrawl, there is/was a message here, no mention of us, nothing else, fingerprints in the
cave of the hands.
Citronella geranium. Intrusions intervene and invoke our fictional selves. The hydrothermal
plutons at groundwater flow through the minerals in country rock. The convection of composition
and intrusion is inversely proportional to the circulation of constituent processes. How much
water does a begonia need? How much for a snake plant? Typographic overwriting. Nothing
happens in a void. A void happens in nothing. Avoid a void happening in a nothing. We read our
feet as they walk across the foyer. Release the dimensions stranded in semiotic reflections.
Repeat our preference for ravioli over spaghetti. Collage and handwriting, writing against itself,
discontinuity of parables, meaning is osmotic and not at all. Meaning as osmotic is not at all.
Translated as intention/volition vicariously fundamental, helix-axis, deliberate marks assert
our assent:
It is an arch, probably not of triumph, settling into shaky ground, missing half of a stone along
the top, a redacted rectangle of text (or possibly a television with the screen painted black)
hovering above — maybe the top of the arch is a landing-pad… for television-shaped aliens
emitting — perhaps firing, as in textbullets (alien spermvirus from outer space) — letters,
letterstrings, syllables, morphemes, phonemes, sememes, vocables, words, phrases,
sentences… leaking text through the gap in the roof and into the area enclosed by the arch… Is
that a door? A door made of text? An opening? An exit? (Is the prison-house of language in
ruins? Have the ancient walls crumbled to dust? We enter under the arch… ahead of us is a
door.. There are no walls anywhere…) No. Judging from the color of its margins, it is a textdoor
made of stone. We may be here to go, but there’s no exit through that back door. Either we can
never leave, or else we have to go out the way we came in.
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