Today, we’re pleased to present an excerpt from Steven Seidenberg’s plain sight. Laura Moriarty has referred to the book as “a thrilling ‘excavation of the nous,’ drawing us into a realm where point of view, connotation, misdirection, and other rhetorical and prestidigitational devices are deployed in a tender but unyielding attack on the illusions we share.” Through a series of short fragments, Seidenberg illuminates haunting corners of the human psyche.
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Of everything that will concern you, and all the shreds and clippings of the rest, of pitiful misadventures and star-crossed agonies delayed, I set my shrill compliance without claim to any more or less progressive ars poetica and so forgo a maundering reprisal of events in favor of a discipline you’re sure to want to replicate, the laborious futility of a character maintained. That there is no advantage to inscribing your conations beyond paying for the common share you’ve rented by the mouth; that you stake your tithe and tribute on a backwardness that locates its reward not in dominion, but in medias res—from such idyllic pose you have no reason to reprove what you’ve been given for a stature, for the privilege of a standing, and so I set my sights on merely keeping you amused. And as I am not likely to make much noise in the world, that voice that you find so much more interior than what was once your own will serve us both as argument in favor of this fealty to appearance, this allegiance to…
ϕ
Failure binds us to the present, inertia to the future. Above all things, the decadent effectuates a past life in revolt…
Successive infiltrations of the revenants whose praxis is the frittering away of present agonies require that I dictate this encomium in something like a mania to ebb from all position—to bow before the conquered—surrendering to legionnaires who’ve yet to leave the womb. It seems an interruption; perhaps there have been many. Perhaps it is enough for an incipient resolve. It seems an interruption; there is nothing else…
ϕ
A claim you will dismiss, for which I’m not the least bit grateful. I am not grateful, but neither would I make a move to obviate the quip. Is there any form of reason…any quiver into postulate less likely to return us to such stipulated cantor, the hesitant malfeasance of an execrated voice? The question is not idle, but that doesn’t mean I’m able to rejoin with any wit. The question is not idle…
Are there any lesser suitors who would not still feign compliance with the presage of so many indistinguishable bludgeons held above them like the pounding weight of atmospheres, a threat not meant to pierce the aching thorax or the noggin but to rend with the slow torment of a turning winch? Is there any other path to reach the terminus I’ve garnered since the advent of this schism…this schism from all schism from the adventitious clay? Any stalwarts who would not begin to question such glad purpose in whatever they find purpose…who would not start out again if it would help to free their vision from the spectral suppurations of a lineage extended—a preterit for once for all delayed? Are there any lesser suitors who appear…
ϕ
From one stage to the next, the curtain falls. One may find delectation in the antics of the company; may long for the revival of some raucous prank, some cloying song. No matter. There are limits to everything, to every possible devotion. Sometimes one can’t help but bow one’s head down, but turn away from all observance. Someday every public will have used up its applause…
One wants to think the eye set at the apex of a triangle whose base is infinite, to imagine the extension of one’s view beyond all boundary or limit, but it is never so, no matter what the phase or balance. There is always an occlusion, an encompassing conspectus; the only view that vitiates the strain of acquiescence is the one that clings unflinching to one’s back…
ϕ
I walk among the fragments of a future only I discern as whole. To redeem what has not happened yet, to parse the cull of meaning from the given, from…
Every victim flushes with the pride of being chosen, singled out for this or that importunate abuse. To judge oneself as something more, to patronize the witness, one must realize that catastrophe is not the gift of silence, but its active simulation of a fate contrived as given, one’s ouster from the concourse of all possible results…
ϕ
There is no alternative, if one has listened well; one must vacate every stratagem contrived as shrewd or prudent and return what one has gained—one has abducted—as a Jubilee…return one’s plundered haul as though in service to a sacrament, and free each restive vassal baited onto hallowed ground…
Desiccated flesh is indiscernible from dust, but for the chance and unaccountable caprices of the heart. Betrayals that appear to be submissions…
ϕ
The whole business is mechanical. Pulmotors whistle, entrails twitch with peristalsis. Nosebags filled with pabulum pump easy glee through dull synapses, averting empty stomachs. An irresistible stupor overtakes the convivial faculty—Who repulsed these profligates into such a dull subsidence? What necrotic god lays scales upon these mucid sockets? The transit of the sightline into abscess, into…
Where there is wound without a cicatrix—the hollow space of sight. Regression to departure; I’ll be there; I’ll say it’s me, an overtly paradoxical attempt. One more second. Hold…No consecution binds without a first. Without a first each member is a second—the same second. A spot of blood corrupts the setting sun for our eternity. The gaze has never served anyone, a garrulous distortion. No other sated maw would dare to speak…
ϕ
A face as heavy as a bag of flour covers you elastically, to think that it’s the final…it’s the only one…The squeak of leather pleats about the neck and chin, the scrape from which the gibbous grin retires into dormancy, is neither heard by those who watch the savage pucker stitch its way from fundament to brainpan nor adduces an inscription by the rectors of design. The carnival of withered lips dreamed victim to benignities whose only other service is to viscerous afflictions; whose last attempt to moisten is at once a sly betrayal of pleasures only fleetingly remembered, if at all. This recondite debasement, this summa summarum going dead against mimesis—the first and final messenger endowed to send the message, the inadvertent narrator of what that selfsame narrative obscures…
To write for strangers is impossible; no ego plays familiar to the voice whose conscience limns it. There is no next beginning not beginning in the middle; no image of transcendence, tracing shadows in the desert…
ϕ
I’m not sure how to warrant such withdrawal—such divergence—nor by what agitation of the sea-grass I have come to be the prey of beasts who traipse along the sand. I believe that in some distant life you were more…so much more than you are now; but of myself? An old fruit brought in by the tide, its desiccated husk kept lithe with aqueous emollients, thus—degeneracy, that least admired rectitude, proves antiphon to every ruse of suppliance or censure, dreamed or jeered…
To think that it won’t work, that if I start again I will have finished finishing…
ϕ
Character is adduced by nothing so much as obstinacy, even as the singular refusal to refuse. Could one propel one’s story as a weary mule, and thereby live it likewise, avoiding all diversionary forage in the service of deferred reward, then one might yet foretell the journey’s middle from its start point, and so at last be done with it, for knowing that its terminus will come around…
Absolute power may corrupt absolutely, but short of such unmitigated suasion one’s corruption is forever incomplete. Now, of absolute impotence…
ϕ
Battered and exposed—the political economy of surface. That somehow something penetrates the unity of affect is neither reason to accept it nor a method of resistance. The paucity of meaning is the surfeit of appearance. The industry of absence is…
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