A Phraseologics of Fluid Matter
Vincent Ardidon
The motive behind this brisk consideration of the work called Endless Hours at Sea has been a bid to enclose the self into a contract signed in solluble document, into a phraseologics of fluid matter — where writing, the visible, oozing traces of thinking, is open to cascade and depletion [I may have little sense of the work. I lose the addressee and liquefy.] and where water submerges thought, drenches it, engulfs it with a crisp, wet non-discourse.
Endless Hours at Sea forms a rift in space, claims a perimeter of its own [what it owes from surf, it reorders away]: inverse shadows ensue, lambent patterns move along mechanized algorithms of moving waters on a platform. Erratic lights pass through the absorbent, open air, it beams and trots, it deflects off the hollow space and lands upon the surface. Fleeting lines corrugate. Angular rays hatch upon the dim scene. A secondhand fata morgana? an oceanographic painting? I have difficulty of revoking its due course. I bask in the ample radiation and risk drowning.
Hypoxia: I further plunge into its quivering depth. I enter the screen and plant my feet upon the floor. Coddled by ebb and flow, the observer stares at the objects with utmost sincerity, with an infallible curiosity. The naive swimmer risks diving into turbulent waters, no raft or paddle in a mammoth basin.
Yet Endless is neither solid nor liquid, it propels towards an artificial degree that is not so much a zone, but an ozone: the point at which sound becomes aqueous becomes diffraction. Caught in the ascent and dip of its form, it actualizes a self-mediatization, where matter falters in its status as force of its own activation and compulsion, where entities of formerly inert activity are motorized, transfused. It belongs to neither optics nor wave motion, it is to be found in the process captured by Robert Bresson’s maxim: “[T]o translate the invisible wind by the water it sculpts in passing.”[1] I inhale and take a piece of its staggering script. It takes me in close proximity to death, on the verge of asphyxiation I willingly take [whereas, it rows me to a deceptive afterlife I calmly refuse]. I think this speaks of the plastics of experience, a case of senescence of the real.
Sea-spaces, like any ostensible body of water, enact an idea of tremor which seems to reel upon the body’s immediate location: I look at the sea from where I stand, I view the land from where I buoy. I float, I stride, I snorkel. Distinct faculties and sentiments take charge of my body and I accept them in the most hospitable terms. Stunned by the vista, I let my tongue and tarsals softly glide, italicized[2].
But Endless also demonstrates a confrontation, a type of welter similar to the workings of a spillway: sight and sound in distributed measure. For every trickle, a reverb; for every sonos, a locomotion. The sound of metals clasping underwater. Grainy acoustics that skid, waves that echo forth. Was it a voice I heard? [an order? an ultimatum?] I am not certain. Perhaps, a fugitive mutter from the ocean cavity itself; bellowing from a submarine diaphragm, spasmodic and drifting. I am emptied of the impulse to discover its origin. Anchored away in a separate atmosphere and place, I cannot help but heed to the glissando in Maurice Ravel’s third suite in Miroirs.
A sea enclosed in frame, a view from a porthole: both persistently at grips with its limit, bound by pitch-black terrain, drawn inside and never brinking from its plane. At once melancholic and dejected, bracing and elegiac, Endless serializes the rippling scape of partial feeling [I sift through matter and invent its supplemental presence. I adhere to fluctuations]. Having no use of conferring meaning to nature or memory, Endless is what it is: a diagram for a fluid mechanics of modern intuition.
The deeper I immerse, the longer I am soaked in its acute swell, in the circular molecules that come into existence from calculated drips, in the bursts and intersections of each and every apparitional grids and gyrations. How uniquely constrained. I cannot but absolve the ocean for appropriating me in its general rhythmics[3]. I am finally trespassed by its flux. I lather from the inside.
If modern writing were actually a present derivative structured from grapho- and not in surges, in graphemes and not in splashes, in grammar and not in tidal waves, it is because this writing [this blank substance I stencil, this space I sign my name with] does not quench nor soothe. It’s something I cannot drink and therefore mortifies me. Whatever residue of reason has already been clouded. Clarity of thought or evasive aporia, it’s the same end of attempting transparence. I desist from those kinds of resuscitation. I let my lungs deposit and my speech eddy. What goes by the name judgment or criticism, I long ago dispatched thousand nautical miles away, even before inscribing the first letter, the first few leaks, of this unsworn affidavit.
[1] Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, translated by Jonathan Griffin (København: Green Integer, 1997), 76.
[2] Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, Of Hospitality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). In this work, the philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle asked Derrida to respond on the subject of the hostis, the xeno-, the foreigner. Her entire texts were printed side by side along Derrida: his on the verso, hers on the recto; his words, normally formatted, hers, on italics. I take this as an act of willful allowance between significance and legibility; of hospitality in its most typographic form.
[3] Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, translated by Christopher Fynsk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 198. “To each individual or subject, then, there corresponds a rhythm, and one can consider social life as a whole, at least on the level of the affective and pulsional, as governed fundamentally — and more or less regulated, between cohesion and discord — by a general rhythmics.”
Vincent Ardidon (b. 1996) is a writer from the Philippines.
