l / i / t / i / n / s / m / a / l / l / d / o / s / e / s: figures of speech

À LA CANTONADE

"How each image oozes by: myrrh decaying, tissue eroding, tibia bonier... A lavish, meatless, amazing fugitive; a knobby accrual." (John Pursch, from "Mummy pie," 2012)

A mummy, something old, preserved, and part of an ancient mystery, a lost civilization, and bygone artifacts; Pie, something eaten for nourishment, good or bad, part of a living culture or practice, a symbol of community and sharing. Together as ''mummy pie,'' a mixture of the living and the dead, a tragicomic pun between staleness and freshness, eternal body recycled for consumption, surreal dessert from real ingredients, tempting but ultimately inedible.

Through an incongruous robotic logorrhea, we learn that language is its own bygone metalanguage.

In Pursch, it seems a futuristic cyber-gargantuan mix of pirate, clown, and mashed-up techie lingo: and giving a context for this idiom, giving it a place, a grounding, and creating a world for it. This is its realm of plausibility. The idiom or dialect is not misplaced. It has its own. It is like listening to a new off-geo satellite in eccentric spiral, or a space-station auto-generated chatterbox.

The pseudo-historic allusions allow some level of connection for today's human readers. This bi-play among old meanings (ghosts, remnants of) and new or unknown meanings stages a post-data caricature of cultural artifacts, including asemic ones.

It pushes the archaeology of human history and language on to the next level of simulacrum. Here, the simulation of narrativity is an excuse for this linguistic staging. A weird idiom is less unacceptable when spoken by a contextualized personnage: the minimum mediational compromise for publication.

We are engaged, absorbed and entertained by this anthropomorphism of an otherwise post-human space of artificial entities whose names sound like R2-D2 and C-3PO... Images, echoes, unwieldy remnants of human language, a regurgitation of the ghostly patchwork of sign-ideas under the feedback fiction of a techno-poetic era.

Monday, June 13, 2011

figures of speech

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