Malacca

Sheet of lake, hemmed in by two islands protruding outward. His perception came affixed by the narrowness of this sole entry / exit, all rhetoric emblazoned on this gap within the straits. He held his life by two accounts, his formal life and his double, in the latter, clandestine, monthly payments from a shadowy account, he was a spotter, an information collector, observing and recording unusual vessels based in a cramped apartment above the Straits of Malacca. In his day life he was a financial analyst, analysing a company’s financials, combing the footnotes, those small end notes where the real evidence was. He tried to deduce the big picture from the small details across the three financial statements, across managerial meetings, AGM notes, linked to a firm in Singapore. The elision between this life and his double was in the meeting point of the sky and the ocean, the perpendicularization, satellites and maritime expansion analytics – numbers, statements – the difference between Beckett, an analytic mind and Joyce a mythic writer

Examining with fine comb the temporal dimensions of freight forwarding company, of grain producers, sand distributors, he would often drift away from the financial models at his desk and stare out of his apartment over the Straits, the passing ships like oversized fireflies drifting outward… he imagined the company he was analysing by some primary terror, as if it were blown out and distilled in a million fragments – of supply chains, hubs, spokes, a dust cloud congealing over the Pacific drifting through on its way into the Indian Ocean. And he was a skydiver chasing the secret through the spine of the dust cloud companies, before tumbling into the darks of the Straits. The Straits were an event net, a focal point, a ground zero, Foucault’s point of total description. He worked with the cigarette he was holding burning through a statement, a fire alarm ringing….

Notes from a Different Setting 

The New Silk Road is its own world-island, lapping against three oceans – Pacific, Indian and Arctic – casting a new shadow on the 21st Century. The New Silk Road is a cosmic dance, scattering a neighbourhood of aqualine spheres across the spine of the Eurasian continent. We were all coming home from it, thrown into the cosmic glaze of sunset. Perhaps it was the vast distances and what Gaston Bachelard called ‘cosmicity’ on the side of the dreamer that did it. Cosmicity performed by the sleepless philosopher who trains the mind to hear the ebb and flow of a vast ocean in the hubbub of the chaotic, nightime city’ (Bachelard, 1958). Maybe it was less the distance than the sense of density growing out. In the seventh and eighth centuries, the Chinese capital, Chang’An (modern Xi’an) was the greatest city in the world: ‘the streets were filled with the cosmopolitan populace befitting the capital of such an extensive empire. There were priests from India, officials and merchants from Persia and the kingdoms of Central Asia, Turks, Arabs and traders from Mesopotamia…There grew up side-by-side the Buddhist and Taoist temples, Muhammedan mosques, Manichean and Nestorean churches’ (Nolan, 2015). The world island was a place we were all coming back from. That ledge, where the rumbling earth of metalline plates collided the oceanic tide. Where the subterraneous monsoon of memory came home on its atmospheric double. Those living on the world island were inevitably drawn like Icarus to the sun into the alethotope and a constant battle for truth and its valid forms of utterance, perpetual separation between seeming and real events, true and false prophets. All the while behind the lightened horizon, life and death danced endlessly outwards, upwards and downwards. Memory came home and found the horizon expanded, more coloured than before. The world island was a place after all visited by shadows of the sun and all its heatscents, corridors and darknesses. Thus so like all shadows, there came its underworld, brokered across the sky. It began to rain on the sheet of lake as Lesser stole a tentative look out from under the corrugated tent and listened. Threads of electric light screamed under an expanding torture of grey, black and flashing white cloud formations  

Lesser screamed into the gaining rain and the rain screamed back. 

His radio set crackled in white noise. Lesser sank back on his side into his hammock and let the pelleting deluge wash over his absenting mind.  A storm often gave momentary reprise of duties on the base. Lesser would often count – alternating between Russian, English and Mandarin – the gaps between the flecks of lightning and bellowing cracks of thunder.  The edge of the lake several metres from his corrugated tent had vanished to within touching distance of the wide moat.  Lesser watched the rainwater dance inside the seawater like discos in the city.  He flopped onto his belly in the hammock and thumbed down toward the compact pc and ran two shortcuts on the operating system –  drainage.exe. , stilt_heighten_L2.exe. The disco suddenly fell underground in a torrent of drainholes opening as Lesser’s tent rose twenty feet on extendable bamboo-steel stilts.  The mechanism operated by rushing water into the bowels of a piston beneath Lesser’s tent. The water would then funnel deep into an underground tributary system of treatment plants before entering the main core rooms to cool the servers. At Lesser’s new height, Lesser could now make out the far southern edge of the lake where the light show was cutting the water up into a wild revolution of cracked glass surfaces. The seconds between flashes and rumbles shimmered in a cacophony of sound and light breaking off the broken shards of the lake’s retina. The sheet was hemmed in by two long lips of sand and alloyed fencing installed by the dredgers.

Lesser fixed his eyes on the narrowness of the entry and exit lane and the strange crackling shapes of disfigured lightninged neighbourhoods appearing then apparating like frogs. In Lesser’s absenting position, he had not noticed that it was closing on darkness and the sun had tiptoed out behind the torturing sky. In the distance of the congealing storm bands Lesser strained to make out the shifting line between ocean and sky. The tent swayed a little and rattled like a forest of bamboo as a thousand nano-spherical shock absorbers equalised the gain in wind and exposure with height.   Lesser imagined his tent like some outstretched phenakistiscope, arrayed by a series of mysterious stills of a million nameless storms, flashing in sequential phases across the spinning of the blackened sky’s disc.  Eavesdropping through the slits of the aluminum shelter into the blurring deluge, he imagined his tent populated by numerous floating peeping holes, that whirred and crackled in and out of sync with the light show out deep. When the storms bequeathed their daguerrotypes in rhythm with the populating slots, the outside scene announced itself in a fixed position of screams, when the slots increased relative to the frequency of the electric light threads, the storm system appeared to split in two, drifting in the opposite direction to that of the spinning disc. When a crack, of aeolian and aqualine pressure felling a structure on the island instanced, coating the slots in a thick horizontal bind, the storm seemed to drift temporarily back into the same direction as its outspinning neighbourhood of eyes.  Lesser could make out the faint lights of [           ]   The straits appeared strangely empty of tankers.  Lesser sat up from his hammock and groped behind his skull to the compact knot of black hair. He looked out to his left and right and saw several other tents lining the retinal lake at Level 2, the deluge of waters below sank rapidly into the funnels of the ground as silhouettes of dark figurines crouched or sat cross-legged, staring out across the sheet of thrown up shards. Lesser gave over and sank back into his hammock, redolent to the now lessening patois of rain on the aluminium roof. He closed his eyes, leaving his retinas to dance into the closing disco night of the storm. The memory of the day the sky turned fire, racing through the labyrinth of rainwater tunnels below stilt, riding on a piece of plastic, in a whoosh of the nanospheres self-repleting their colony inside the stilts, Lesser’s retinas climbed the deluge into a cold room. The ceiling gave way to bright lights of a nation applauding him on a pulpit, as he shouted in a strange language, coordinates to the ocean, the crowd swayed then fell into a steady rhythm of babbles, Lesser sank with them into a synchrony of rapid eye movements, no longer broken but moving in a tide with the shards of the retinal lake washing its soul into the bowels of the island under stilt. Lesser screamed into the gaining rain but the rain only mumbled back, inaudible, wet.

The Day the World Turned White-Lit Godly 

10:48  

He’s chewing a coin, wearing dark sunglasses, on the trainline moving through the island, on a Wednesday. 

His ears are at pinpricks under a Russian fur hat, he holds the front bulwark. He can taste the sweet red onrush of the carriage, smell the rails genociding the bulleting metal rainbreaker eastward into the base. He has a unique condition. Self-diagnosed. A synesthesiatic megallophobial metallophiliac. And he’s screaming inside though it is day, can feel the silicate buildings of the watchtowers and port facilities bear down on him, press against his head, climb into his eyeballs that he keeps clung to sweet metal, small perspect on the rails below. That he loves, he clings to, smells the sweet taste of hot running metal. Chemically, a metallophilic interaction is a type of non-covalent attraction between heavy metal atoms. He researched it. He is an atom. Lives behind the main base, in the tent for Seers that rises and falls to the tune of the ocean. When he received word about a boat crashing into the barrier, sparking a metallic dreambliss mental disarray, starlight, smelling the crush of the steel hull, hearing the red of the firework heat. A passing navy man reporting maniacal moonlit laughter in the tent forest above the shore.    

He’s chewing vigorously on a coin on the light rail, in rain, on a Wednesday. He looks down over the bulwark at the raillines, unnerving slightly the comrade suited aside him. 

His terror of the bases outbuildings the onwater psychiatrics are unable to nail down. He’s chewing the coin down around its edges, swaying back and forth fixed down at the rails when the train pulls in past the far eastern dock of the island. He rises and exits, without knowing, drawn by some movement on the horizon, an approaching storm of electrical – , tightening his Russian fur hat, holding his face like Munch in a Dockland terror. He senses a deepseated torture in this place, flashingback on the boat crashing on barrier, hullscreaming into netherblack red red blackness gathering. The role of Lesser is to monitor the waterways of the island, focus all his perception on that narrow stretch, unlock the labyrinth of the ocean currents and their relation with the secret project underneath. He is observant, artisanal – he draws all sorts of strange shapes from the horizon, da Vinciesque womb images, seeking to unlock the world-island from its slumber in deep blue oceanic nether

10:51: 

The World Turns Whitelit godly, Lesser observes blurring and a dark spot in front of each eye. A later report reads he lost consciousness altogether soon thereafter. 

He comes to, though not quite, in a deep red tinted waterway, a fire burning against the water’s edge, a voice shouting metal prices against the wind. He feels an urge to stand though he senses a deep floating sensation, electrical currents pulsing through the metal dockway he is refuged on in bright sweet fiery redness   

He tries to stand, the voice shouting metal prices, nikkel, tin, rises and falls with the glint of the red sky, he reaches out to touch the water past the fire, it’s thick, like metal flowing through metalworks, he hears hammers, welders heat, broachening on dark black Rorschach shapes, the buildings of tall cranes, terror rising he begins tilting on darkness, he suddenly grips himself from the overwhelming urge to drown his head under the metal waves when he wakes. 

He is in a strange blue lithium space, cooler, the voice of metal pricings far lands has gone shifting on a red tide into some distance, he feels the air around him like small particles of cool dustlight, sand falling off him, he sees a dark hatch, submarinelike on the ground that laps like a flooded ricefield in moonlight, he sees a figure moving out among reeds on the edge of a distance, the source of words travel ghostly through him in a language he does not know, he tastes a lithium sweetness working along his nerves, a cooling calm, hears the flicker of small batteries firing up across his entire bodyscape floating across metalline delta, he climbs through the dark watery hatch though a sudden urge to remain in this space fills him – to drift down the moondelta in a deep blue convalascence of quiet, he’s jolts. Into a hull now of dark crushing noises, hot metal, sailor voices shouting into an alarm bell, distantly flying out across a mayday land of foreign oceans, surging brown rust snuffs out the cool blueness, casting shadows against the hull of the gaining red alarmlight, the deltawaters are growing as he sinks through the hatch, he hears miners mining the depths of this watery shadowland, smells the sweetness of the metal in the hull’s rockface, at a distance voices shouting now growing faint in the barrels of blackening rorschach hatchways, the redalarmlight lets on to an ocean of shadows listing silently across the delta, he tastes metal air as thick as black water, sees an explosion in reverse cries falling silently into ore-picks clanking resignedly in deep deep watery space that is now above his throat, he wants to drown in a tickertape of warning symbols, red lights, suspending gasps only to find his nose, mouth, body always rising slightly above the metalline tide, spheres of lithium blues, reds, blacks pull in about his eyes, as the voices distant now adjoin the bargeman in dopplered pit prices, he swims gropes forward toward a lateral hatch, making out the faint red of a sign in the pulse of the alarmlight. 

How do we mourn the souls tethered to us beneath the water, beginning with the depths of space and the remotest nebulae, and thence gradually to descend through the starry region to which our solar system belongs, into the alethotope of the terrestrial spheroid with its aerial and liquid coverings, its form, its temperature and magnetic tension, and the fullness of organic life expanding and moving over its surface under the vivifying influence of light and heat. Interminable heat. And the birth of the longest dark winter in memory.  

“There are souls beneath that water. Fixed in slime, they speak their piece, end it, and start again: ‘Sullen were we in the air made sweet by the Sun; in the glory of his shining our hearts poured a bitter smoke. Sullen were we begun; sullen we lie forever in this ditch.’ This litany they gargle in their throats as if they sand, but lacked the words and pitch.” (Dante)  z