Date: Mon, 23 Mar 1998 10:43:10 -0800
Subject: a-Whirl With Poe


For Lucio Privatello,

    The polishing of a chaotic pearl opens unto blank spaces in a
map where geographers have lost their way and instead of being
with the anticipation of bright markers sharpening the outlines
of a fuzzy background, they become entangled in indetermination
and chance. Nothing emerges slowly from the horizon to suggest
the growth of another vehicle transporting the mass of tangled
letters that gives us an extended surface for our hand's
becoming, something to hold like a now lost memory once held me
in her arms. A gathering of periods as the temporalization of
temporality founds a void of order, a bifurcating whirligig that
is at the heart of Poe's _A descent Into The Maelstrom_,
impossible to use as measure and model, and more profound, as Poe
says in the condensed smallness of an epigram's dream, than the
well of Democritus:  "I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse
of ocean, whose waters were so inky a hue as to bring at once to
my mind the Nubian geographer's account of the _Mare Tenebrarum_.
A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can
conceive." Yet this unknowable, truly fantastic object guides our
blind sight and offers the ebb and flow of chunks of candied
color to my peregrinating instrument with which I draw a
pointillic line sliding away from its purported end
defamiliarizing prose perception, slowing down the speed of a
reactive reading and becoming actively suspended with the
obliteration of a period that ejaculates the desire for more with
its reticent withdrawal.

Ariosto