the Aleph, ‘Taking Los Angeles apart ’ is an inquisitive reading of a decidedly postmodern landscape, a search for revealing ‘other spaces’ and hidden geographical texts. The essay feeds from Jorge Luis Borges’s brilliant sighting/siting of ‘The Aleph’ – the only place on earth where all places are, a limitless space of simultaneity and paradox, impossible to describe in less than extraordinary language. Borges’s observations crystallise some of the dilemmas confronting the interpretation of postmodern geographies:
‘Then I saw the Aleph … And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? … Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them amazed me more than the fact that all of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I will try to recollect what I can.’ 1 Soja, E (1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. Verso, London/New York
Saturday 05 October 2024
A stream of consciousness, assembly points, Singapore in space, a refrain…’it is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind…’
In Postmodern Geographies, Soja (1989) writes of ‘an intention to tamper with the familiar modalities of time, to shake up the normal flow of the linear text to allow other, more ‘lateral’ connections to be made. The discipline imprinted in a sequentially unfolding narrative predisposes the reader to think historically, making it difficult to see the text as a map, a geography of simultaneous relations and meanings that are tied together by a spatial rather than a temporal logic. My aim is to spatialise the historical narrative, to attach to duree an enduring critical human geography.’ 2 Soja, E (1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. Verso, London/New York
Monday 21 August 2023
A recurrent image swept up on conscious shore, the burnt out hull broke dream of a species, rent on the wind. The airblast out over Krakatoan distances of night, airtremors, the launchings of a thousand rockets into the sun, the brief dance of auroras in the Indic skies, the burning fuselage tropics, acid rains, the silent spring of metallic rain…the morne, thrust out into some brilliance, rainlight broke and she emerged, emerged as bright and tall and karmic as Saturn’s ice moon, borne against the sky, thrust into the dawn’s preternite sails, waking shoals, air currents, salt lashing, the swell picking up in the lagoon, the lagoon of sunken coralline caskets, the rocket’s night working a patchwork of codes, systems, a paranoid grid, a tremoring node out in the ocean, Inersia Freyt.
With the tide ebbing, the thousand satellites turned in a unity of movement and countermovement, a mirroring… the planets clears its space of debris, what we are building, it is not a planet it is something else, something unnameable – the next word he spoke was indecipherable, he packed up the campfire, stoked out the last embers and walked on, out past the riverfields of the Atlas deep.
A howl, the screaming rent against the sky, jets tangling, invisible lines, planes burning up, atmosphere blotting with the constellations of satellies…Parabolis NK, burn up, the atmospheric conditions, gravity, in-fallen-ness, the condition of infalling. Inersia frey, Iris Flown, In-fidel, Infraternising light, the typhoon crushing Mulanje villagers, ripping up the cedar trees.
Monday 12 February 2024
I’m writing a review of Space in the Tropics, 24 years on. Redfield wrote it in 2000, before the towers came down in New York. He traces the story of French Guiana as a penal colony of the French Empire, later becoming the site of the Centre Spatiale Guyanais (Guiana Space Centre). Space in the Tropics floats freely of its original signification. I’m in Singapore, writing from a desk in the Yale-NUS library, its 20:54 dark outside, the walk from here to RC4 snakes through a labyrinth of tropical trees, further you come across a fragment of the Berlin Wall, Xiuyi took us there last semester. I sat on the sculpture at UTown lawn and waited for Herman the Husky to arrive and do his short-leash rounds, the sun dropped out with people playing baseball, frisbees flighting, the Flavours canteen humming with chatter. As the sun drops, the cicadas commence, chirruping, small birds fly in and out of the canteen, chirruping, the sun reflects out of Elm College windows, the port isn’t far, but you don’t feel the sea here, you have to search for it, find some elevation. I rode the lift up the top floors of the South Tower, and sighted small boats, parked out on a flat bay, the rain fell in sheets, wind rattling the trees. Space in the Tropics floats free from French Guiana, the concept gathers energy in flight, an albatross on a cold ocean night. It mingles in the air currents with Mark Lewis’s The Construction of Space in Early China.
Space is not an intuitive thing to write about. I could write about the room I am in right now, there are mahogany desks laid out in three lines, a staircase sweeps down into a further room of desks, the room is richly American, reddish sofa chairs onto marble tables, outside you sight a tall living tower beyond the trees, slightly moving in the wind. Redfield published Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana two years after Gabrielle Hecht’s The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II, two monographs richly exploring the French national archives for stories of empire and identity. In 2002, Redfield followed up with an article in the journal Social Studies of Science entitled “The Half Life of Empire in Outer Space.” The paper would address Redfield’s novel exploration of the intersection between postcolonial studies and science studies in Space in the Tropics. An early draft of the 2002 paper would be presented at a conference on ‘Postcolonial Technoscience’ held in April 2001 in Berkeley, California. Organised by Gabrielle Hecht and Warwick Anderson, the panel and audience included Lawrence Cohen, Donna Haraway, Paul Rabinow, and Anna Tsing. Before the signifier floats free of its mark, I want to trace a genealogy of Space in the Tropics, a family tree of sorts in time and space. We can do this now with Dimensions and other software, tracing the citations of Space in the Tropics through time. The 2001 conference in Berkeley occurred in April 2001 (September 11 was in its future [is it paranoid to connect the two?]).
In December 2002, Volume 32, Issue 5-6 of the journal Social Studies of Science would publish a collection of essays drawn around the theme of the conference. Warwick Anderson wrote the introductory essay entitled Postcolonial Technoscience. Gabrielle Hecht wrote submitted “Rupture in the Nuclear Age: Conjugating Colonial Power in Africa”, Redfield, “The Half Life of Empire in Outer Space.” It seems a good place to start, excavating the concepts and themes in each of these essays. A close reading of Space in the Tropics will come later. It’s 21:24 in mahogany, listening to Floating Points w/ Eddie Fiction on NTS Radio, the library closes at 22:00, will walk back to UTown and watch an episode of The Sopranos. Will write more soon – this is a page to keep myself honest and keep myself writing. Writing is fluidity so much as thought. One last thought, Haraway is quoted by Redfield in his closing chapter when she writes: ‘space and the tropics are both utopian topical figures in western imaginations, and their opposed properties dialectically signify origins and ends for the creature whose mundane life is outside both: civilised man. Space and the tropics are “allotopic”; i.e. they are “elsewhere,” the place to which the traveler goes to find something dangerous and sacred” (Primate Visions, 1989). Dangerous, sacred, mundane – my mind falls back through the stroboscope of the last few years: Panama, Ecuador, London, Cirencester, Malawi, Morocco, Mhairi, Edgar – the flight floating past the Bay of Bengal, passing the lights of India below, drifting into Doha, misted Leith, a seal separated from its mother, a life, elsewheres – the allotopic. What am I doing here in Singapore, developing a project on Space in the Tropics II. Redfield was travelling in French Guiana when I was in the womb, what’s changed in the air currents? Where does the albatross flight now, twenty three years on?
Saturday 27 August 2023
The river flows into memories, we remember. Cranival lights, mirroring nightlake, boats loaned to hearts, floodbreak, amarind, rose. Sriharikota Island, launchings at dusk breaking the sound barriers as they slept on through the storm, the rainbracing silhouette, spinning, spinning, a break in the roof of the world, a climbing, lacing cloud of dark feeling, the heart is pursed, the sea is gone, the day is swept, the rain is young, open, melanin sun, sleeping. The rocky outcrop, a crying past, where are we going? Loss of heart for the venture no more, I can’t do it anymore, I’m sorry this is it. The beach surged, the sun passed, the shore rose, the plates dropped, I left her there on the beach, dissolving into the sea, the pheromone litten shore edge, the cosmic Sahel, the crying sunset, the red glowing, the gloaming, the passing, the loess, a railline, sleep, eternal, ungiven.
Sunday 04 February 2024
The dark, the luminous, Ola Gjcilo, Northern Lights. Tennison took the first rail out west into the sundappled chorus of birds sweeping out over the quiet, the laken, the oil slick registering out side-hull, the sun, a dipping orb, cold breaking waves, throwing out the radar, the soviet radar, Bletchley coders, working in the darkrooms of a war unknown hiding out beneath the woodlands of Biala Tawska, fighting out on the call up to Warsaw, a sheet of paper, write here…. the satellite condition, dziadek, satellite of poland. Carl-Michal, satellite in the United States, Danusia, satellite of South Africa, lost heart in the cruel world of Apartheid, satellite, where will you go? I don’t know, the rain horizon beating the shack sides, a brown hazelet, a rapping sound, the patter of water on the corrugating, bleatning remains, dirt track tyes, coming up the road, beneath the fastax tower, a palm tree, a moon carving its arc out over an adirondackal canvas of ocean, the shoals marked by moonlight, the dolphin pod huffing the atom bomb signal, a daylight of lost shimmers perish not for the want but the will.
The light of the distant star system, Ifira, pulsed, the cave was stretched back behind a large protrusion of rock. The moon-glow revealed the shape of ships, bounding across the distant straits. The satellite, implicated in all sorts of spatialities, yawing open, the are the points, brought together in my search for Inertsia Freyt, the last neuromancer of Lemuria, the moon goddess, the ship rolled and broke, the waves slammed out across a moonrutted night, they were being stalked, quite possibly, by a U-Boat commander.
Monday 09 October 2023
Footage: 2004 Boxing Day Indian Ocean Tsunami; Jules Verne ATV Re-entry Fragmentation of memory, the bright luminous breaking, breaking up over deep Pacific jarlets, the terra-aqueous descent, the love poured out into one’s life, suspended out over blue latticed ocean, the clouds dancing in the night, shorn of its light, the fallen, gone, lost souls of the spaceship Serengeti, the venturous…Slamdinski LeMay brokering out over Pacific nightcaps, the engine roaring, out past the westerlies blowing salt, orange hazelight in the sunfall of our finest hour, glass ends, the debris broker, the stafer…we will speak again, I love you, goodnight. The Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, the Pacific Ocean, the Southern Ocean, the ice caps, the Himalayas, the high mountain glaciers, the Mekong, the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the darkness, the coastal lights, the shimmer, boards of Canada 5.9.78. Inersia Freyt dancing beneath the Fastax Tower, shutters shuttering, the rapatronic planet, coriolis and cumulus, cut the night-cord, stray fast, they’re coming.
A genealogy of the satellite, grandfather, lonely satellite to a nation lost, I don’t write to a nation, I write to a world, a world of unbroken cold, a bleeding red sky falling through the pocket of space, this vast vast abominable life, the ocean’s bayonets, blast radii and sleep, sleep when the night is won, sleep of the rested, this world is crueller than wind on a silent sea, the cove hidden hotel, the lost basin of a dream, the rapatronic carnival, take me home where the trees smell of juniper in the spring, and lakes gleam, bottles of suncream spilt nasal on the spanish night, tortillas, olive oil, terraces in Sicilia.
Tuesday 06 February 2024
Pyotry Ilych Tchaikovsky, hymn of the cherubim. This swaying. Tenn reached out across the sets of controls. Hold it god-dam you son of a moun- hell Ten where are we, the pyrotechnical balloon drifted, the continent below, look that with you maw’s farm, the roar of honey slipped by into the horizon, now reaching a blur of gloaming distance, baloons sounded the ionosphere, a safe remove from the cutting storm that drew the city out of its slumber, one crisp september morning, the rearing re-entry corridor, calculations, at a loop, von karman lights up, radiating atmosphere, burning up, burning, tenn are you gon mee it – Tenn where are we – Tenn-crakcking sound, the sound of radiation, space.
Monday 22 January 2024
I returned to Singapore on the 9th January after some months back in the cold of Edinburgh and the heat of Tenerife. Those months passed in a blur. To recollect the day I arrived back in Edinburgh, it was cold, there was mist all aside the tramlines. The tram snaked through daybreak, it drew into the Foot of the Walk Leith, where I met Mhairi. She looked tired, like she hadn’t slept in days, keeping watch beside her dad. We walked to her sister’s house, I showered quickly, then we made our way to the hospital. The cancer ward was warm, up a flight of stairs into the corridors of a warm palliative war…the door to his room has his name written on it. Edgar MacDonald. I think there was a light rain outside, the windows looked out over the Pentlands, the artificial ski slope that glowed at night. The room was full of assortments of fruit, snacks, he was listening, as people spoke to him, he rose up a couple of times, tried to exit the bed altogether, these moments fill you with questions, did he want to go somewhere? Were the doctors lying? I hadn’t been there when the discussions were had, he was too weak to fix the infection he had, it had been some years, passed from department to department of the NHS…
Wednesday 07 February 2024
A genealogy of the satellite – where were you born? Where have you been? What did you see? Did you watch when the world ended? Did you see the silos open in the dark? Did you feel the atmosphere when you returned? When did you die? Who did you take? Why did you come? Where did we meet? Will I see you again? Why now? Why here? Why did you leave me? Why didn’t you stay? Where did you go when we needed you? Come back, it’s cold, the door won’t shut, there’s nowhere else to go.