MUSEUM POETICA: SKÁLD

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 

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”

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 

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

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

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. 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.*

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. 

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.