the clearing is necessarily dark, obscure - a black round. Its reality attested to by the squareness and whiteness of the represented world, after the law of contraries.
Crossing it is neither a movement of colonisation, of opening it up to traffic, of smuggling into it signs of property or propriety, nor of transgressing against a representative order.
a square white world demands a black sun. Even so, traversing the round black shadow burnt permanently on the plane of representation is to wade thighdeep in ashes, to feel one’s legs – the “boys” – lose traction and watch them smiling into invisiblity.
This is what Mark Wills (?-2006) called burning roses – the burning bush – the future talk: the cut back to the graft-mark.
The past loves a clearing – and is in the pure past outside of timespace – more than the clearing loves a past. Loss of sense – Big Sense – belongs to ‘us’ who choose to set foot on the white square but the clearing has its own sense.
Noone has explored this concept further than Gilles Deleuze. I wonder at the speed at which we now endeavour to cross and are encouraged to assay our crossings. If we go so fast, pain becomes impossible. It is perhaps on the affirmation of pain, its possibility, that I find nothing, yet, in Deleuze, to reassure the antinomian.
And it might still be on this ground that there is a rapprochement between the essayistic critical elan and analogon of Paul Virilio and the innocent philosophy of Gilles Deleuze’s Being/difference in a life. The latter’s (non)being insists in the dark round as the complement to this critical time and (un)critical silence about the square white and represented world.
The clouds were torn tonight and screamed when they could not contemplate themselves as a cat lying on its back, a bear mounting another bear, a griffin, creatures… they felt the pain of their inability to express, regardless of their narcissism, their passive syntheses. They could only become. They envied us.
