LOUIS ARMAND / excerpt from GAGARIN
Louis Armand’s novella GAGARIN appears in its entirety in Always Crashing Issue Three, now available to order via Bookshop, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and local bookstores everywhere (we particularly like City Lit Books in Chicago and White Whale Books and City of Asylum in Pittsburgh).
The Orbital continues like this, night after night. Slant of cosmic rain slashing the blacktop. Dopplered taillights receding. Not alone then. The great migration to outer. Not the sole survivor then. Focus on that. Focus on the drift, the undertow, the invisible line reeling in. A distributed mass of alter-egos. Vanishing. And each time around the same again. The same vanishing again. The same slant. The same outer. Till none left. No others left. Only the survival to survive. Repeating. After night: night. Eons of undone time. Focus on that. The second before & the second after. Nothing between. Nothing from nothing, but the random propulsion of an idea. Focus on that. An idea of “nothing.” First one, then the other. Gravity’s re-birth. The fall. A flashing blue enveloping light.
Gagarin lies there staring at black bits & pieces of retina floating in the light. Do these detached fragments prove Time exists? They watched him. They listened to his thoughts, vital signs. Perhaps the history of a deception isn’t the same as the history of an illusion, but what then? If this present moment collapses back into prototype. Winter’s painted childhood, the luminous eye wing of a trapped locust. If that moment then was the bow-wave of an orphaned precession. To count at the end as in the beginning. One of these had an author, something intended it. Mind evolving to non-mind. The visor comes down over this floating world. Know that we come from the sea & are composed of water, which is dialectic. Space : time : a speck of light. Galactic floes swallowed in the Void, in the Naked Eye dangling from its lifesupport. Observe this slagged rock on which the great mandala hangs. All, for the purposes of retelling, diminished to console wraiths, compression artefacts, a faint distant memory of a quantum state. And given a blind coefficient to alter. Gagarin rests at the controls like a stone Buddha contemplating gravity as he/it/they fall upwards into the sky. Choirs & barbaric heliums sing the perfected measure of imperfect things. Under any other conditions this scenario wouldn’t be possible. Surrogate, of all that’s not to come. And now the cinematically menacing sense that probability knows exactly where he is & when he’ll be there. Man oh man, thou patent anachronism! Why does he doubt himself. Question mark. “In the moment I’m unaware of myself, do I exist?” An erasure pulsing with capillary life? The point isn’t to preserve memory, but to create it. The way language creates an horizon from an infinite perspective, converging on two instants separated by a mind the size (93 billion yrs) & age (14 billion yrs) of the cosmos. Brunelleschi by the light of the original photon. To count such evolutionary particulars greater than any whole, would be to expend all foregone conclusions. The lifesupport sends back echoes only. He must learn to decipher them, so as to recognise the enemy when he meets it. That sinful being who is the mind’s expression of self-loathing-through-punishment. Nosferatu! Nosferatu in a cumulus of dark matter. Mon semblable, mon ampère.
& set out upon a raft through the ill-devised metaphor. Hurrah for the idiot born from space!
A rising Vostok in the East. Fiery calligraphy, such stuff as prophesy is made of. Riding the Leviathan into his dankest dreams. The little Oedipus re-run cartoons ringaring in conic sections going round. Daddy stick to glad mammy hole. G-force vertigo turning Borromean knots from his unravelled intestine’s pulsing umbilicus. 300 strapped tons of thrust. Oh Semyorka, my Semyorka! Ten nine eight seven six. The radios scream. Once more blinded by G.O.D.-light. Raybans & materialist dialectics. Finger-braille clitoris uvula basal ganglia switchboard maniac. Don’t shoot the messenger! He’s just the meatpuppet tossed from hand-to-hand. The cremaster in the orgone accumulator. The flyblown ointment. Floating about in the broadcast band like a fish through a film archive. The whole thing’s gone autopilot. Electrodes in cortex sing the body electric, zapping a Delgado fix. Technicolor brainspasm comedown. Dostoyevsky headsplit. FIRST MANMADE CATASTROPHE IN S=P=A=C=E! The monkey on his back grins, whispers, “If you can do it once, baby, you can do it again & again & again…”
Each cell a perfect hexagon. Assembled into a hive: a geometric eye the remaining dimensions leer through. Was there ever an art distinguishable from judgement? A throw of dice. A bronze cast. Action enchaîné in a single defined moment. Europe in its time was a regularly constructed paradox of inexhaustible iteration. They’ve called him many things. Failed Escape Artist, Gravity’s Hostage, Kosmonaut of the Inner Void. To discredit the impossible, in the eyes of such two-dimensional beings as television is made of. Cartoon clowns trip-teasing the world’s solemnised radius: Here Dwelleth Dragons, Fringe Elements, Ungovernables. He’s the Logos that threatened to get away, brought to heel by a Hero’s welcome. Keys to the Kingdom, the Fiefs of Flat Earth, Banlieues of Impenetrable Bureaucracy. They’ve handed him his lines which now he must hand down to Posterity. Perikles, The Funeral Oration. Did Gagarin think he’d even exist if they could’ve fit a committee in the cockpit? Did they in turn suspect he’d bring the plague down upon them?
Gagarin dreams of Prenatal Life
And so the forward-projective cinema begins. Swimming uphill, the mysteries of oxygen make ruthless advance upon the scenery. Dorsal, vertebra, evolving wing. More sombre variations on the theme of birds. Kino-eye of the flying cinematograph. They’re counting the frames in reverse like sleepless auditors, tax consultants, secret agents, resurrection stuntmen leaping mid-air courtesy of the most blatant camera-effects. Their stopwatches are hungry predators flexing their jaws. Already there, always ahead.
Gagarin finds the Enormous Mind inside his head! The last empty landscape, beckoning to enter. The sun inside the cave, an unfolded horizon of cat’s eyes & nebulous effigies & shipwrecks. He floats through low-orbit suburban sprawls, industrial estates, zones of drift & boredom. Invisible forces of incessant noise. History is a trick of light. The instruments are calculating the number of steps required to recover his initial state. A man alone, shot to pieces, at the end of the road. Silence finally, also unheard.
A voluptuous, forensic victim drowning in the unsleep they’ve created for him. Desolate angels of release. Mechanics of G.O.D.’s impermeable will. Dreaming of them, always, on the occasions he’s allowed to dream. Of the agitated observer, of the immovable father. Mein Gott, hilf mir, diese tödliche Liebe zu überleben!
Ridiculous as an emotional commonplace in the mouth of a robot, with all creation raining down. Even the monumental fermions’ erotic petrification, makes a wandering unrest of the Artist’s pinhole eyes, diurnal, ambivalent. How nakedly he’s served them. “In this lifetime,” they whisper, “desire only a frontier!”
In the family-viewing section, sculptured behemoths became extinct exactly on schedule. It’s a story told through the eyes of a stenographer for an audience of filing clerks. The task wasn’t to show the truth but to induce in the spectator the belief that they’d discovered it. Hungry for a sentence that could be pursued to the end with absolute certainty – of a word as definitive as a tombstone – of a book after which nothing more can be said.
Neither this nor the next world, but in a polysemy of circulation. The end isn’t the end, there was no beginning. (Escape, always by retrospective.) Pourquoi pas un petit jeu de mots ma chérie? Cleansed of the odour of veneration, the question about the basis of Art now begins to find an answer.
Louis Armand is the author of the novel The Combinations, among other books. He lives in Prague. More information can be found at www.louis-armand.com.