LM Rivera: SOME IMPRESSIONS ON ADMITTANCE

a fox

lifts himself

from the bed

and begins

to speak…

Origins are not unprecedented. We modify and are modified. We alter and are altered. Origin-ality hardly participates. In the beginning, as it is in the end, a writer simply summates unto an entrance that may or may not be note-worthy. This note—which we have chosen to call: a speech—is no different.



The critical apparatus guiding us, will decide partnerships. Each partner will forge a passageway, a bridge between doors. THE BOOK is forgotten, for the moment. The passage is all-together-entire. This is not to say that books/referential tables aren’t immanent—they’re indispensible, unavoidable, and ever-present. But they too are seconded, for the time being.



What is shown is what has been given, given to be shown and seen. Neither observation nor scrutiny nor the investigatory eye will be able to assemble, yet. Appearance, in variant guises, is the primary case and the tool of a circumspective disposition against expected formations. The historical image departs.



Topoi enter of their own accord, though an acute directivity is part and parcel of a summative account of this kind. Which is to say: governing positivisms are marked and targeted. An embattled prose (pose?) initiates itself contra to the reigning attitude, currently, prevailing. The question of what’s current (what’s contemporaneous currency) is our extant gestural performativity, our affect-gravitas. Antiquarian discourses are en-framed neo-terically: there will be no returning, as such. Futural discourses are presently supplanted: predilection and prediction are avoided, if and when possible.



Et pourtant (in its lyric tonality): we return to origin(s) as extent context. Con-text, as in: against the text, beginnings countering themselves-in-of-themselves, toward an experiential universality, a meaning-making paradigm. Meaning, as first poetics, means: non-causal self-reference, the referential act wedded to the experiential. And, again, origin as initial en-framing—commencement as performative environ.
























in the space

of his speech

is a lung:

a tin container

with a red marble

ricocheting inside…
























But let’s, for the sake of a kind of lucidity, shift the directive somewhat:

In the demanding movement from ontic-space to ontological-space, which is to say: from material manifestations to lived ones, we must take up arms against biographical certainty, historical actuality, and clock-time, in order to implicate the referential act in Aristotelian (and we use this word cautiously) sharpening. The coming-into-focus of existential coordinates by means of a floating logos brought downward, is our preliminary interpretive act (hence: Aristotelian reason and the negativization of self-evidentiary assumptions): a return that does not return.

And in this return-that-does-not-return: an unadulterated ontological access proposes its notional ground against (and herein we speak of the fundamental demarcation therein) theoretical current-ness.

Suggesting any access point is a dubious supposition, save for tentative formations set upon convergence by non-metaphysical means. In this respect, access is not accessible or excessive but, rather, de-centered. Access is factically inaccessible but phenomenologically open. You can’t and would not literally enter but you know how to get in, being that the door is unlocked and the interior is readily available to your body.
























in the red:

infinitesimally

lesser stones

laying inert…
























Why won’t we enter?

Firstly: death or the risk of such. Secondly: functionality and its discontents. Thirdly: the presence of a ghost, the specter of indeterminacy. Fourthly: complete(d) anxiety.

Even metaphysics—in its dishonest leaping—has a temporal range. Non-entrance—as opposed to non-arrival—displays no range or field, as such, and, more precisely, there is no factical trace wherein lived circumspective consideration can be given, no metaphysics of non-metaphysics but, simply, material superstition. The ghost(s) of the Kantian epoch cannot be undermined or overcome by their intuitive conditions.

Showing and givenness are surpassable artifice, in relation to the substantiation of relatable, evidentiary modal demonstrations. Adjustments in these concrete acts, by way of psychic states as the-lived-concrete-itself, project an imperative and unavoidable neutrality.

A non-Barthesian conception of neutrality asks itself a non-question, in order to compose the question in profound detachment, in imperious impartiality.
























inertia

joins the other

and packs her away

in a forgotten speech

no longer spoken

from the lung…

The neutral is nothing more than a code-function for the absolute. When speaking of the absolute, we are doubled outward: consequences of a relativized Modernity at the threshold. The absolute persists, if only as an incorporeal hypothesis near completion. Open coding requires an opening to the speculative prospect of the absolute. Closed coding requires a closing of determinate dismissals of the absolute. The absolute can only be rejected by an absolute that replaces.

Rather than directing discourses toward a dismissal or a negation of the absolute—which would only, under such conditions, reinstate a less cohering object—we would, instead, couch the phenomenal thing in a state of perpetual meaning-making, which (for our purposes here) we will call: Art.

Art, as such, is a conductive and generative and performative site of formation, not, yet, wholly formed. Its material consistency would either be presupposed (metaphysically) or, much more adroitly, self-referentially generated by admittance protocol (as in the Kafkan protocol):

without its red truth

opening up the space

a turn turns from

occurrence to actuality

then from actuality

to mere appearance

appearing as the work

of the fox no longer

embodied.

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LM Rivera lives in Santa Fe, NM. He co-edits Called Back Books w/ his partner and poet Sharon Zetter. His work has appeared in various places and his chapbook Two Tiny Books (or wild phenomenologies) is forthcoming from Spooky Actions Books.