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Crash Course
Sleek steel-grey vehicle speeding through sunlight to where the road peters
out on the beach in slap-dashed cement clinging to brick-ends, mudpuddles of
sandpitted tentwater and blocks of conglomerate stuck to torn-up scabs
of surfacing. Jump-cut jolt-started from handscrawled signs, instance is simple
tense, place made over entirely to time. Kickstarted from handscratched marks,
houses are outposts of distance. Eaten under wheels stripped of all history,
that progress without aftermath, where you were is where you are now set back
along the axis. A single timeless virgin present processed pointlessly forwards,
translating future to now exactly blanking past as expelled detritus. From absolutely
inside, all without look like escaped killers, all seem nude, moving as smudges
at the margins of the screen, blurring to merge beyond this sealed place whose
soundless murder is self-defence against all silence. Touchbutton windows
effortlessly glide shut without seam to subtract self as distinct from its backdrops,
extract viewer from its sights, relieve seer of thing seen. So vision is magnified
to vista eyelessly. Incommunicably itself everywhere and otherless. Slides on
a layer of ensnared air through a carscape of facades each of which exemplifies
self without residue, each of which is not there. Gradually nearing, fleetingly
proposed as instant only to be wiped out at the moment they come close. Scanned,
excised from sight in the matchless light of the shatterproof shield, it’s
the landscape shifts to your static demand for action. Self breathes here so
bulletproof against any but its own noiseless feedback you can be shot dead
for sounding or forgiven for screaming if disturbed from such sleepless cinematic
dreams. Track is fodder to that bodytight mindspot from which all time and place
have been sucked clean out through the seething vents’ stitchless
pleats. At night, senseless metal shells circulate around each other in a frictionless
element of dancing lights, where all contact is collision. Beams streak streamlined
through the aquamarine dark. They meld to perpetual noon at midnight. In the
abbatoir on the outskirts of town, electric lights shine till dawn.
Shot out of a tunnel, out of a frame-gap, out of night as a space of mere lack,
a masking, a blocking, a blind-slat, a bridge-strut, a salt-brick, thin wall
between vast windows that engulf the whole view. Class concept slices through
a landscape of samples in infinitely receding series, each extinguished as soon
as it is instantiated, whole lush world leased to us by the sovereign sign itself
unsignifiable. Moves forward by continually touching and spurning the ground
it touches. All designates that which once itself described. World destroyed
once it is abolished to the imagination. Fleshtight eyedot, vacuum-wrapped,
styles itself into a zone of pure forms to hover over the faceless tarmac on
a cushion of smooth space, purchase of its rubber base on the surface repressed
beyond texture or grain, but still needing it to move on. Smoothed out from
the centre, everything ripples to rough and sharply grazed enough at the edges
to shred hands that reach out from the walls of barbed-wire and plaster seizing
red roses, fingers that claw though the incinerating steel mesh seeking water.
One touch deletes what is already not there, matchstick shack shimmers down,
fragile membrane of the egg’s yolk pricked by a flame-cleaned needle and
syringed into empty air. So forgetting its forgettings it must go on carry on
blinding to denial until it includes everything and seamlessly there’s
nothing but itself to omit. Gunshot report like a thundercrack. From crouched
foetuswise between frames of the arrested fast-forward film your dark double
slowly uncoils and rises up to snipe at you from the motorway bridges and tower-block
balconies. Shivered images trickle through the fingers. Someone shouts at the
rain-blurred fringes. Something unspins at an eye’s edge. Pixel by pixel
the lightscene reforms in gradually accruing drops on the screen that the wipers
smear clean again. You are shot into the violent zone where the gauze tightens
to burst and every contour is obeyed. Travelling into a horizon of louring haze,
rain oil-drumming on metal through wet-bleared windows, forced through the gorge
where the radio goes dead. Rain cross-hatching the roadscape, grey-black rubbing
of zinc or lead, waterlogged rain-heavy ink-dark blue-black sky, dimension drowned-out.
Inside you hear the wordecho of the thunderbolt still tapping on the window
you shield behind like freezing ice-steel receiver whiplashing the signal live
back on the streaming screen but somehow holding to it in motorway stormrain.
You home your engine in fast lane to the transmitting tower shifting in grey
rainmists but still lighthousing you to a point amid millions of gale-dashed
points of cross-slit slash-silver which rimshoot off the chrome and whip-crack
the signal to keep the godsped wheels from skidding. A bird’s wet throat
chirping rebirth as it drinks from a milkbottle full of rainwater on the step,
arrived overnight as the guest of the frost’s breath.
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Crash Course