Poetry: Will Alexander
BEING AS TRANSMUTATION:
THE LIGHTNING PATHS OF
WILL ALEXANDER
by Andrew Joron
Will Alexander was born and raised in Los Angeles and resides there to this day. He alludes to a painful process of self-education in his first book, Vertical Rainbow Climber: “Outside myself and bleeding on my own discoveries I discover in a cave Pythagorean lodestones broken in the air of Chaldean snake myths.” During those years of self-discovery, Alexander found himself becoming the conduit for a primal and oracular speech. The visionary writings of Will Alexander participate in, but can hardly be confined to, the pan-African surrealist tradition of Aimé Césaire. The explosion of his language engulfs almost every continent and sweeps away the categories that separate poetry and philosophy, myth and science.
As a young man, Alexander attended UCLA and participated in the political and literary tumult of sixties culture in Los Angeles. Along the way, he met and befriended other surrealist poets, most notably Philip Lamantia and Jayne Cortez, as well as making contact with members of the Chicago Surrealist Group. While still in high school, Alexander became aware of the active jazz scene in Los Angeles, sneaking into clubs as an underage youth and conversing with many prominent musicians. The link between jazz improvisation and surrealist automatism, never fully explored by the Paris surrealists, has always been emphasized by American surrealists and is strongly manifested in the writings of Will Alexander. But it wasn’t until somewhat later in his life that Alexander began to play music himself, performing on piano (he had taken lessons as a child) in jazz and experimental music milieus.
Since the publication of Vertical Rainbow Climber in 1987, Alexander has authored dozens of books and risen to international prominence. While most of Alexander’s works consist of poetry collections, he has also published several volumes of essays and plays. In all of these works, the fiery, metamorphic substance of Alexander’s style remains constant, whether poured into the vessel of a poem, an essay, or a play. Likewise, even as much of his work gives high priority to representing the shape-shifting propensities of Being, Alexander’s own identity as poetic maker has remained remarkably constant over the course of his career. An extract from his earliest book could be set beside another from his latest to demonstrate the essential continuity of a voice that seems to have emerged once and for all, forged in some cataclysm akin to the one that created the chemical elements.
At the same time, Alexander’s voice speaks to its situation — social, political, ecological — in the Anthropocene. Perhaps such a voice could only have emerged as the world-system is poised to undergo a phase shift into some new and unprecedented configuration. Indeed, the apocalyptic qualities of this shift are clearly mirrored in the configuration of Alexander’s words. Anticipating a collective leap of human consciousness comparable to the Mind’s original emergence in Africa, Alexander reports on the “world as it is today” as if from a standpoint in the future, from an alterity in which this momentous leap has already occurred.
As the partisan of energy as a form of imagination, Alexander relentlessly critiques linear conceptions of cause and effect, along with all mechanistic modalities of thought and practice. For Alexander, such modalities represent enslavements of energy, the imposition of gridlike coordinate patterns upon a free-flowing and infinite substance. Alexander upholds Surrealism and African Animism, in particular, as exemplary of the imagination engaged in struggle against what Manuel De Landa has called “linear equilibrium structures.” Against the “linear Babels” of alienated discourses, Alexander argues for “a new perpendicular burst, transmuting in demeanour,” for a language in which the vocabularies of magic and science become (once again, but as never before) interchangeable.
The force of Alexander’s creative imagination is such that it must overflow the limits of language itself, taking the forms of visual art and music. Alexander’s artworks — reproduced on the covers of many of his books — undulate with biomorphic patterns, at once abstract and figurative, that recall the work of Miró and Matta. In the broad spectrum of Alexander’s practice, light transmutes into sound, as the notes of his piano-playing — often a series of meditative, harmonic progressions — seem to follow the complex flow of his drawings and paintings. The work of Will Alexander shows what a “unified field theory” of the creative imagination must look like, prefiguring the (r)evolutionary leap on which our survival depends. //
Introduction to
Giorgia Pavlidou
Her colour is an endemic link between DeKooning and the Fauves. A seeming gestural link not in terms of superficial equation, but a kind of gestural mathematics that is Pavlidou’s alone. She does not blink or lurk on a condemned historical site looking for hidden scraps attempting to camouflage repetition. Instead we surges of painterly energy that surges from the magma of consciousness not as academic perfection that issues from stillborn mirage. Therefore the works remain kindled, forthright without intellectual vacillation.
As observer, as visual practitioner in my own right, I feel in Pavlidou’s work a gyrational mathematics that inspires going forward beyond particulars that mime consequence or error. In this sense her works feel inevitable. One does not probe for instance for the correctness of a Gaviota Tar Plant or a Mastodon. In her instance all analysis remains subsequent or ancillary. What strikes one first remains immediacy, one does study hot or cold, but Fahrenheit is felt. Let me say physical modelling has its place, but for my particular sensibility, I carry a similar registration when encountering Vlamincik’s boats or feeling the inevitability of Soutine’s bell boys. Her works are not those that issue from fatigue or repetition but remain skilled in the honesty of her own limit.
—Will Alexander
The Water Dog
The dog is the species most accustomed to accompanying early travellers by land and sea...
-Thor Heyerdahl
Born under butane & water
under snapping fire of icebergs & razors
like a compass
pointed at the fact of combustible granite
pointing far beyond
the panorama of glaciers & icy landlocked schooners
to Antarctic labouring blisters
to special atmospheric codes
where ice sends up a smoke
like an exploded measuring jar
those expanded zodiacs of lightning
his tongue
crystal & fog & fire
his power
like a galaxy of anteater’s rabies
a noxious weather vane of lions
pointing
Zambian kangaroo
the isle of Wight
the beautiful moraine of Bermuda
pointing to arcane solstice mountains
seeing like a cenobite
into the glassy fires of the Caspian Sea
into the blackened imaginary fires of the Sahara
a tense perilous compacting of weathers
in a unit of diamonds
cracked
on sandy Egyptian mountain ranges
filing its neurological hearing
so that the poles of Venus
connect
with the Gulf of Castellammare
with the curving throat of Sicily
like a ruthless intentional steam
marking in the Mongolian steppes
with his hieroglyphical paws
of intuitive malachite & sunstroke
an Ibis in Genoa
a linseed spiral
part Damascus
part of the Swiss Thunersee & Paris
the grown dog amounts
the magical snout alignments
gazing
at threads of Amazonian life
at its headwaters rotting
pointing
kabbalistically to its bottoms with his breath
pointing
to the asteroidal fields of Ceres
the darkened pre-globar entropies with
mesmerized
with howling & starlight
with magic geometries of panic a diviner
analogous
with landscapes of darkness
briefly dazzled
by starlight & pumice
who seizes every particle of ground
his breath pointing
to butchery shelters & loneliness
like a telepathic pine juice
seething
microbiology & vineyards
howling
at those sacred iguana Dawn’s
looking magical cracks in the skin of space
sucking in eclipse & lightness
the principle force of ice balloons
a wave of lotus junctures
all the sundown bluing
all the nucleic barium breathing
across asteroidal isles
across the proton-neutron
of this life
of this present profusion
the force
of bays & winds & stars
the deep mercator blankness
the mutant compass spinning
the anti-osmium susurrations
issuing from his electrical skull
from the musical stride of his forceps’ blackness
because of his fierce navigator’s bonding
Asiatic
etheric
his wayward nitrogen calendar
his stupendous rose war ignitions
because
he is the water dog
the dog
between non-being being & being
able to distinguish the flux
between Graham Bell Island
& the Bay of Biscay
between
Revillagigedo in the Mexican Pacific
& the inland flames of Ulan Bator
the dog angel
at the origin of hydrography & fire
at the genesis of arc-light & magnesium
the dog angel
the water dog on fire
the synonymous Arctic star
the occult illuminal wire
smelling
the blood
the spaces the cunning ammonia
of cyclic ambrosial dimensions
Giorgia Pavlidou, Alchemical Ribus I.
The Blood Penguin
“I am the carnivore
the hounded night walker
searching for my wings scattered under glass
they claim I should return to monomial transfixing
to exhibit A & no further
to some
I am six foot & lizard
to others
I am considered a mange lamb
returned from the tropics
I am never given due as to sum or proportion
I am seen as the source of something leprous
as no longer the, motive of who I was thought I was shaped to be
I who live as mislaid damage
as part of pointless verbal ejecta
there are no nouns to ensnare me
to fish up my blood so as to summon consensus
I am never that condition within the fire of conjoinment
I am never to be
the human boy genius
the archivist
the bartered child contending with study
I am none of the above
none of the aforesaid compendium
I am the animist
the vertical lion tundra
the diamond bird who burrows under snow
because of my leaning
I know the stark Egyptian soma
much as would a blinded cemetery scribe
& because I understand
one’s basic neural unravelment
I a, seen as piacular
as spectre
as both standing & freezing
being of some other form from other planet
as clinical moral addendum
this contains in itself
blackened scrawl marks from Moravia
from squandered quanta from the Sunda Islands
from quaking dogs from Santiago
they say I suffer I suffer from powerful deafening by resistance
my eyes & infectious with lapses
the attention span blunted
the astrological paralysis shifted
so they say the unknown is the trigonomic
is the transcended nucleus
the born educational spell
according to the flaws in universal summoning
I am ancient pantomime
who cannot transgress his inherited Ladino
as to Mayan glyphs & squares
I am plummeted
I am without the means to conduct my own prism
to take on the culpable mean
at circumstantial limit
I exist through negated practical limit
through parallel sub-causes
without knowing the desire
to seek the enzymes in living
I am without & without & without
I who create doubt & the genetics of perpetual conflict
I could be strange as a human half wrought
who poses himself as Illario Pozuelos
& what is claimed against me
is not unseasoned
is not the treason of post-fanatics
instead
it is a curious treatise on circumstantial exhibit
it says
my values are possessed by distance
like someone humbled or plagued by a treaty
my dispossessed senses
described by these methods
under the forms of the treasonous
it tells me I am lifeless blood equipment
that my Genes are not useful
that my mind is simply stricken or exposed
yet such a chronicle loses spores in the glaciers
it says
I am of Ghana & the Seychelles
of insular breakage near the Azores
yet it states my non-placement
my cavern
my debilitating refuge
not even a dwelling beneath the stars
as etheric camp base on Saturn
such is the ether climb
the sub-revelation as dialectical cartography
conjoining with the ocelot swimming across the prisms of Mauritius
or simple flatland in Manchuria
these are seen as soils no known warrior can claim
because I readily announce my resistance
my tone as carnivorous scarring wandering beyond pervasive death concussives
claimed by genetic dis-logistics
by anarchic ruin
by genetic sibling serosas
I cannot describe by cursory enclosure external motivation
or any rotary or back-flowing water attainment
it is described as similar
as ghost data
as hibernation through pillage
non-specific
post-necrotic
partaking in part as Jonquil & longevity the
of course the cells blaze
infinity evolves
the monsoons project through containment
yet nothing revolves
nothing forbears & is clement
I exist
as steep electrical ice
asking of myself spells
of pointless dominating fuels
within this agnostic current
I describe
myself as one who’s hellish
who’s buried his weight with double insistence
who seems to sleep in a brazen cylinder of peril
then after a pause in listening calling myself The Blood Penguin embraced by squalls
by an oily & misshapen blinding”
Giorgia Pavlidou, Mutilated Madonna.
Coping Prana
It is the way I breathe
through chronic terrifying ferns
through a black ungracious stoma
it is this uranium rejoinder
this impact pointing backwards
& when witnessed
causes observers to panic
to blur
& forget
& to flee
they can’t see my approach
my wayward dorsal looming
my lettering in black drizzle
it is my approach
my weaving
my sigil as curved embankment
therefore
I can never name myself
or plot myself
according to the sparks or splinters from the workbench
dazed
ruthless with salivation
with my ruthless insular roaming
I am like a few darkened eaglets riveted against the moon
then I am brought to a table by deafness
feasting with herons
which spins me by embranglement
by in-circular abatement
always seeking to have me neutered beneath my derma so as to talk to myself
so as to cancel my structureless scrutiny
they speak of me as lawless
as despicable
as a typhoon in a sea well
as to morals
as to fixed & accelerated combination
they fix me as deserted bereft
as a fragment from a deserted lion’s compendium
I am considered
as pointless positron without image
as hieroglyph
as sundial
as martyr
being leakage from a barbarous index province
Beginning After-Existence
On the threshing floor
there are spiders which astonish
with replications which irradiate
which strike resistance
which terrify
which de-foil carnivorous Amoeba
with each fiber
with each mandible
with each blood knot gone astray
flailing
embryonic
shifting
out of red exerted magma
threading their weight
throughout a melanotic angle
into ghostly osmosis
A Zodiacal Instant
To coordinate tigers
to look into the bright domain of sullen de-activity
is to walk on threads
is to hallucinate navamsas
Amidst The Liminal
In the cranial foundation
there are colors which erupt
into blankness which reconnoiters
which re-erupts into ratio
into earthquake curricula
in which a form of flames spirals
frayed at its core by potentia
Another Plane
Absorbing a tumbled foci
absorbing verdurous singularities
with blackened electron resistance
with a coiled & perfidious complication
like a fowl in a blazeless solar ocean
scattering its sound
across noiseless sodium rejoinders
The Newborn
The newborn
as combat
as plesiosaur & yield
as listless momentary monster
Giorgia Pavlidou, Alchemical Ribus II.
The Mime Tornado
Whirling
in this burning circular aviary
in this greenish stellar intensity
greeting the fire of my own shadow
with its simultaneous spurs
erupting from linguistic ferret
from the black domesticity of arrogance
like a wind absorbed in solar reptile signals
I greet its invincible ire
in the penetrating flux of its harried angular journey
it is a syllabus of glass & of ants
roving
like a living mutational turquoise
a lamp an aperture of virescent proto-nomads hurtling through rivers of swirling lunar
hemotopias
heated by blank Egyptian kindling moons
here I am on a raft
of instinctive gemstone tumbling
on a raft
of rainy black & red molten
calling on my shadow
with all the colour
emptied from its treasonous mime tornado
so that eternity ingests the force of blazing tourmaline i
invictas
invictas charged with the stunning typology of ignition with the empty transmigration body
taking on the momentous characteristic of the transmundane specific unravelling the basic tourniquets of hydrogen
as in songs from bodiless sun bells
the black sun levels
where karmic stains are transmogrified
& the thoughts
merismatic
like the name of a cloud passing into anomalous writhing
my shadow
the occult the runic enclave
over-arched like a beacon minus its wretched cyclical entrapment
a beacon in a floating citron granary burning from its ubiquitous orbicular fountain
from its ironic wellsprings of torment
its oases of gases
incessant
mutagenic
heraldic
boiling
Giorgia Pavlidou, Scissored Liberty Liberty.
Albania & the Death of Enver Hoxha
Sacrifice
closely parallel with sadness
with darkened lunar wounds in the brain
the thoughts laced with paralysis ciphers
the voice full of fumaroles & muffled x-ray voltage
the cells could with exhaustive inversion
& so
all pronouncements become tautological
derisive
each attempt at revival sundered with a wearied dysfunctional torment
with psychic nuclear crippling & hyperborean chills
all attempts at recovery pushed back into limbo
if one could look at the soul
it would take on the grief of a savagely splintered darkness
a simile of cacti & arrowheads
burrowing into the crucially exposed eyestalks of crustaceans
the face always stained by a ruthless sabulosity
coupled by paranoia & blasting
the expiring Enver Hoxha
prone
like a skull on a slab of Marxist invectives
with a glut of fresh worms slipping from his forehead lying there with personal rabies on the breath
an ignited grandeur
coming out in riddles of oracular demon pulleys
rust burns smoking below the stones of his flesh
his dictatorial mutterings
like a spurt of unseasonable frog gills
like a grotesque insecticidal frenzy calling out from tormented histamine gardens
calling out from decrepit Dodonas
diseased with insidious miosis
Hoxha
with secretive bone grafts
with rational murdering solutions
always hardened
like blackened myasthenia
all his rebellious hirelings
slaughtered in a square by machine gun & mortar
the killers surreptitiously empowered
by mutative alienation
by a heart of stunted mangrove blisters
& his dreams
like a definition of mustard gas
“irritating, blistering...disabling”
Hoxha
sucking in fumes from his after-death exposure
his astral obliteration
like an exquisite brew of heinous polonium cocktails
full of disintegrated polyhymnials
full of mental pollution & polymorphic pariahs & sweating full of stunted radium volcanoes & the sociology of crows
in his Stygian necrosis
this demon
atop asphyxiation & thrones
always remains demasted
in haunted wallowing aspersions of asynchronous assuagement
his lost Malpighian body
directing his troops across a coldly burning land
with all the embraceable contusions of a stifling neurology
“...report to his majesty
that the bones have been crushed
that the spleens are now crushed
that all is in order”
the sun
like an Albanian nothingness
like an exposed nerve of singing suddenly turned over into a neutralized materia & banished
as a dried pineal concentration
& here we have Enver Hoxha on his deathbed
breathing in parasites & noxious Arabian vesications breathing in malodorous turbellarian rains
the remaining pores of his body filled with a furious obturation
with a dense clinical stoppage
taking a poll of his highly conducive death counts
his obverse vivisectionist commandments
*the population:
an arrested quotient
a blank but undivided numerical dogma
wrestling with desires in moulded sparring chambers burning in Stalinist dialectical hells
& so Hoxha
with his convinced in-solutional ravings
speaking out with his oily wolverine’s tongue
wrapped in his oily grave clothes of blackness
there were days
when the moon began to howl at high noon
when all the aromas were suspended
when all the aromas were dredged up & eaten
when each anniversary of living
was marked by insidious facial scarring
by vicious dog bites on the buttocks
this was reason
& so the populace
full of carcinomas & rugas
their eyes cast down into sacerdotal infernos
into cold intensive lesion mining
could only witness their faces in puddles of urine
could only imagine how a morning of restive balneology would feel
how a life of campanology could brighten the darkness
but always disaster
grey
& permitted to burn like a daily burden of calcinated litmus
like a corpse with a vertebrae of flukes
tossed up from the Adriatic shallow
tossed up from its ashen lonely demeanour
as an isolated cargo of worms
& Hoxha quoting remnants of Engels
concerning “motion” & “divisibility”
“kinetics” & “bodies”
under his spartan flag of pickaxe & rifle
the horseless carriage banned
the blood supply diminished
the “hillsides
a jagged line of misty peaks”
like horizontal shards
like “gigantic” electrocardiograms
more occluded than Tibet
creeping along “the boulevard of fallen heroes”
where one can feel the peasants feeding on grasses seeking to mobilize their anomalous wrath to production the cities full of “windowless walls” & a “heritage...of blood feuds”
yes Albania
being a “black double-headed eagle” on a coursing field of blood
in exteriorized sacrifice ministries
in ferocious injury battalions
its cold atheistic injury medallions charged with a-charisma & spite
like a premise or a scar
or a pure line of rote from its suppurating memory
its “mosques” turned into “stables”
comets & asteroids banned from the language
& so
one is given “mechanics” the “interchange of motion & equilibrium”
& the “measurable transference of motion”
to “quantitative expression”
the hatred of “alien morality”
& Hoxha
purged of all animal sentiment
his deathbed
like a broken imperial rock
seething with secretive personal dissension
even the “Directorate of Agitation” is crumbling in his vistas
because he smells
the insurrectional molecules of the infinite
blowing into his itinerant pantomime chamber
the inscrutable Hadean depths
a group of denuded chromium puppets floating before his eyes
his bizarre self-palpable plainness
thrown into the face of cosmic betrayal
ulcerations & demons appear beside his visage
even his own skull appears on the plainly coloured revetment
& the sun
once simply a mechanical furnace
is now a thrust of light
burning up his bones
& the bulging knot of old “foxtrots”
& purges
Giorgia Pavlidou, Visual Response to Joyce Mansour's poetry collection Screams.
The Drawings of Byron Baker:
Phantom Electrical Scarring
For Byron Baker, the daily mind seems snared by crazed consumption and blindness, by enthrallment via “immediate perception.” This perception condones itself via carnivorous scripting that attempts to package and re-sell a blind declaration of detritus. The individual in this equation exists as blazeless doppleganger. This being a state that compels itself according to carnivorous immediacy. The latter not unlike subconsciously scripted negation where the individual evolves a condition that corrodes collective neurology via sustained negation.
One can only describe this condition according to draconian inveiglement spawning itself within the psycho-physiology of the current meaning of the soul. This being none other than the corrosive code that has sustained the anthropocene where the individual is deemed isolate and urged to consume his or her energy as an isolate mental facet in pursuit of its own simulation. This means that cognitive application has regressed to such a degree that simulation is inscripted according to planned outcome. Thus the individual is scripted to respond as a transactional remnant that quickly fades into itself and disappears without memory. Certainly not an evolutionary state but one that devolves to pointless molecules as drift. The human psyche in this state does nothing other than foster an ungainful ballet. What transpires is none other than the mind as pointless tautological exercise. So the contemporary mind is time and time again cajoled into blinding segmentation that currently translates as personal isolation post-Fukushima. This current era being one subsumed by protracted numbness devolved according to distraction.
It is vis-à-vis this current state that Byron Baker distinguishes his optical glossary. Instead of reverting to the human figure as 20th century optical angst, his drawing re-invokes the blurring between the Ediacaran and the Cambrian as transported visual identity. A visual identity that opens onto what is considered to be an obscure state of transmission. He weaves seemingly implausible lines, as grafts of grafts that imply pre-human registration. This being insight that magically scripts the state from which we recognize our pre-identity. Baker optically scripts the seemingly unimaginable via bio-geo distance in time allowing us access to the Cambrian over 500 million years prior to humanity. What he instigates with his lines is a bio-electricity that rivets our eyes with what is currently considered to be an uncharted era.
Certainly he never refers to its likeness as a failed state of energy, via implausible lines as grafts, that generate a swarm that I intuitively understand to be organic scarring. A scarring as if his lines exploded from anonymity rather than super-imposed excellence stifling an abstract idea of geological memory. This being the condoning electricity of these untitled works. These being works none other than electrical ignition magically scripting phyla and counter-phyla that are presently witnessed in the recently discovered Quinjiong biota in South China scripted by the science scribe John Timmer who speaks of “...fossils that include dozens of species half of which have never been seen before.” It is as though Baker has grasped the primeval writhing of this era in counter-step to modern rational innervation. His lines mine the wayward energy of volcanic inner principle with an anarchic beauty of interior precision, analogous to the Cambrian stage erupting with life.
Baker’s drawings remain endemic with accuracy that explode as curious optical anthems vertiginous with the anti-categorical as if his lines possessed a strangeness of sound akin to a deafened lorikeet in pursuit of its own vocal emission. The latter being an alien transmission alive via intuitive recognition of itself. His lines hark back to Ediacarian worms as living aboriginal movement. Thus the drawings display a mongrel electricity that weaves itself according to primordial saturation thereby invading one’s optical to such a degree that a kind of synaesthesia transpires in accordance with sound. His lenses glow as though at one with strangeness emitted from enriched alien coffers. He thus elicits the pre-human tenor of consciousness. In this sense his drawings organically hail the anterior far in advance of the seeming stasis we have come to recognize as history.
Baker’s anonymous scriptings represent the staggering filament that occludes the archaeology of movements, ideologies, and cabals. Thus, he presents life with our present optical foreclosure. The optical tenet that has presided over 500 years of human realism has never presided over his powers as spontaneously empowered as they are by the primeval. As these works magically etch the pre-human, they illuminate a zone of life rife with consciousness, with powers that entail anteriority. The works telepathically evince themselves and naturally eschew the neural elements that are formally understood to accompany human reasoning. Each drawing inveigles purported direction. Mystery suffuses his lines not in an attempt to impress the wiles of transactional folly, but to reveal to us what the conditioned mind can never know, baffled as it is by present limit.
Of course these are drawings that never pose themselves via delimited criteria. Their range is incommensurate with a strained or guided fervour as they open onto a realm that mystics and theologians fail to perceive. They reveal to us a scrutiny that can never be rationally known. The images transact themselves as levitating vowels that magically address a declaration prior to the human body as sole domain. I am not speaking here of drawings that pose a bullish maze of market drawn abstraction, but of insight that only the cosmos itself is capable of posing. The only thing I can draw from at this stage is immaculate pre-cognitive energy that coalesces with something other than our cognitive skills are able to draw from. Here we have a fusillade of energy full of fresh and reactive coils that explode, lengthen, and regather, all the while startling our sensitivity via an immaculate pharmacopoeia of the unknown.
From these drawings we can begin to gain acquaintance with the riddle that forms our presence rife as we are with our present existence. Not as a blinded lumbering of ghosts, but as energy that gambles according to defiance purposely mistating movement according to linear fragment. These are drawings that fail to portend laws that underscore pretension and belief. Via Baker’s scrolls we can begin to interpret the riddles of ourselves stifled as we are via occlusion and self-debit. With these drawings, we enter into a realm scarcely verified vis-à-vis human methodology.
Whether black and white or of colour, these drawings pose substantial question marks via their arbitrary gift of expression. Silence magnetically pursues its own forces as if human caroling had given way to forces that seem to predate the unknown, that spawn a burning electrical health. These are not scars that imply human injury, but scars that seem to specify the unknown. Baker naturally inhabits the fantastical genre of skill that summons a state other than pedestrian engagement. In these works, otherness self-kindles and blazes via arbitrary lensing that focuses beginnings. Certainly not inaccurate because it is arbitrary, but because it initiates a portal tuned to aboriginal mathematics. Of course this does not portend a mandala of valuable rules self-inserted to fuse with pointless visual cabals.
The theatricality that suffused these works remains nothing other than magical mesmerism embodied and empowered by the phantom skill of harmony. One can say that his lines possess something of the liberty that first impelled Miró not according to exact resemblance but according to spirit. They carry a mysterious ordination of energy very seldom engaged. They engage an accuracy not unlike that of a phantom red hawk in search of invisible prey. Because these drawings investigate their own forces, they can never be misgauged according to an occupying tautology.
Far beyond the specifics of human realia they engage themselves far beyond a state fervent with misperception. Of course this is not work that applies its gifts according to goods and services. I equate these works that naturally rise from pre-human assignation, pre-human in the sense that they self-arise when as their own motility, extending themselves beyond replicas of themselves.
Instead of looking to extra-planetary realms such as Titan and Io, Baker investigates the mysterious identity of his lines in motion. They possess a fundamental electricity that populates his drawing hand, finding in the process an extended primeval proboscis that lends credence to the Quinjiang explosion that continues to magically dwell in the hills of South China.
This is why artists and creative thinkers such as Baker and John Timmer understand that human heritage implies energy that supersedes its 500 million-year astral origin. Specifically for Baker, this is a heritage based upon gratuitous spell but pre-extends itself beyond measurable calculation, certainly sans modern invention and its conclusions posted subsequent to 1945. In this context, Baker never specifies gratuitous engagement, but all the while he engages the power that unleashes spells circuitous wrought via what Breton once perceived as the “interior model.”
Baker enlists his line as burning draft, as electric elixir, scrawled via ignited cinder, via erupting wavelength where the garrison of personality fails to engage. Not unlike the energy that engages the appellations of Hayter and Picasso, Baker sustains creative courage in the face of a population constantly hostile and distracted. Therefore his arbitrary wavelength burns, yet at the same time engages an incandescent neutrality that never engages the listless monikers of the marketplace. Indeed, his drawn lines molten with the fury of creative scarring multiply yet at the same time engage the cosmic tension that functions as our unknown inheritance.
—Will Alexander
1. & 1A.
1. Elliptical Magnification: a quintet of phantom galaxies at distance made manifest via lessened visual registration, more akin to distance that cross-fertilizes as ophthalmic aurality, being architectural scarring, not unlike phantom electrical hail, they being a pointillist panorama of movement within movement, each galaxy glistening and not glistening, akin to phantom electrification, objectively implying themselves as realms that appear from vacated seance.
1A. New Taxa: not a lesser flash as cause or inscription, but a granary closer to the property understood by human neurology via telepathic stellar greeness telepathically conjoined with strange electrical filaments conveyed by magnitudes proto to visibility. Thus, scientific inscription needs to conclude this registration not unlike the Enorama Creek near the Australian Flinders Range with its siliciclastic prelude to Elatina — being nuccaleena with deglaciation partially galactic via its charisma as magnetic with absence.
2. Elevated Nuance: these being galaxies that exist according to contradictory nuance, explosive according to astrology of nascence, they speak to that character of the mind that inflamed itself as water not unlike Neptunian aerial galaxies possessing the nomenclature of burning stellar rivers, exuding themselves as occulted stellar rivers, part occulted light, part cacophonous ballet of cinders that etch their various motions according to the free electrical stratosphere of the mind.
2A. Norma Creek: the classical conjunction of the above and the below. I am thinking of the Australian Enorama Creek magically condoned by galactic secretion. It remains enabled by uranian filaments that electrify its essence according to galactic syntax that complexifies itself within our seeming confine that constitutes terra/luna. Because it possesses simultaneous irregularity that our human kindling evinces it carries microscopic magnetism not unlike the verbal starlight cast as range according to the vocal tenets that empower expression via the vocal kingdom that is Adnyamathanha.*
2. & 2A.
3.
3. Galaxias: These inner formations reveal themselves as interior carbon inflammations, as revelatory whirlings akin to pale tornado whirlings. I call these lifelong whirlings viewed according to human advantage as energy that remains sidelong and kinetic. Because they are sidelong they trespass time, hence this instance a fugitive appellation applies, Galaxias, curiously Greek in origin, but beyond its temporary value, understanding that these imaginary shapes remain charcoal in demeanour, rife, with great imaginary roaming.
3A. After Lanka the Russian wandering dog: because the cosmos sails on Earth I liken this scripting to pale equivalent colour shaded between terra firma and the uranian. The lines in this work seem akin to fore-grounded hatchlings not as graft or simulation, but more like spells or organic hesitations that reflect themselves as presence. This image scripts itself as a singular presence organically sired by a roaming charcoal nebula. A carnivorous riddle of irregular reflection.
3A.
4.
4. Tuned according to our parent Sun: these drawn optical sculptings remain closer in weight to our present biological boundary. Though they sub-optically rotate within a colorful electron field. These works close the volume as expanded microcosms of colour always implying themselves via aboriginal seeding being a conduit to the Pleiades taking on Aboriginal Makara myth of marsupial women endemic with pouches. At this point one tends to conclude upon the primordial couple Narungga and Barbara the first man and woman that kindled our first evapouration toward the beyond. They remain our first colour, our first declaration, our first pulsation according Divinity as the beyond.
Originally trained in clinical psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, Giorgia Pavlidou is a writer and painter living in Los Angeles. She received her MA in Urdu literature from Lucknow University, India and her MFA in Fiction from MMU Manchester, UK. Her work has recently appeared in such places as Lotus-Eater, Zoetic Press, Maintenant Dada Journal, Puerto del Sol, Entropy and Thrice Fiction. She is an editor of SULΦUR literary magazine and has a poetry chapbook forthcoming with Trainwreck press. Ireland-based Strukturriss Magazine selected her as the main artist for their January 2022 issue 3.1.
A SKÁLD’S GALLERY:
Will Alexander
1. Will Alexander performing at UC Berkeley.
2. Will Alexander reading at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
in Venice, CA.
3. Will Alexander performing at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
in Venice, CA.
