Mark Goodwin is a multimedia artist who has published works with a number of publications, including: The Hedgehog Poetry Press, Intergraphia, Leafe Press,
Longbarrow Press, & Shearsman Books. Mark lives with his partner on a narrowboat in Leicestershire, and you can find him on Twitter/X (@kramawoodgin) or on bandcamp (https://markgoodwin-poet-sound-artist.bandcamp.com).
Fall leaves as soon as leaves fall.
— Douglas Hofstadter, quoted by John Man in Alpha Beta
What is an open book, if not two paper faces that make a corner?
— Dr Holly North, from Track, Tracked, & Tracker
The corner is a sort of half-box, part walls, part door.
— Gaston Bachelard, from The Poetics of Space
We now call the span
thus meted out the dimension.
— Martin Heidegger, from Poetry, Language, Thought
How can the event that cannot be grasped still happen to me?
— Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other
A message – the function-&-form of a message – might be imagined as a writhing bright strand of hot jagged light somehow able to bore – without destroying – some way through infinite strata of cold rock blacker than any black ever made or imagined by humans. And if this cannot be imagined ... there is no message ...
You have asked – or would it be better to say demanded? – that I report on my time in the Corner. That country you know nothing of – yet for so long now your backlit screens have projected to your people some certainty about such a land’s two planes, and the fold, or great valley of these two planes’ meeting. How carefully you have let them, your people, or made them of course, know of the vastness of space that abuts against these planes and presses into that Corner’s infinitely precise fold ... and the deeper that space presses the more infinitely precise the line-edge between the first surface of the country & the second that faces it ... yet faces it not head-on but instead at an angle – as a function of the Corner – and thus how that angle would allow for all perspectives, even those as yet unknown, to be taken by any one of that land’s citizens if only she, hes, he, seh, eh, or esh could stand and crouch and sit and lie down and face every direction at just one specific – yet secret – coordinate on each of the land’s surfaces. And yet the dark abrupt stop of the fold is infinite! This Corner, this country, this ‘unapprehendable land’ is now an idea all your school-children take as ... read. It is an idea arranged. And it is an idea granted.
The message is not thus – let me be clear about my meaning, the message is not of ‘the’ ‘us’. Not of the one thing following on from the other. Not of the one being following on from an other, nor following an other’s ongoing. And not of many beings following as one. And you must, all of you (your ‘all’) be warned that the message has no soul, and that the numbers you read this message by, and that the whirring of the fans that cool the calculations of the numbers you read this message by, and that the ever-trickling spread of LED lights & their ever-changing constellations set in an aluminium sky – all these are actually un known in the actual in finitely tight canyon where the Corner’s two walls touch.
Let the tran smission begin, then(ow) . And . Try . To . List . En .
Fear so often is just a sub-atomic-particle’s-width from peace. I felt this cusp as your man-things pinned me to The Document Table. I felt the quark-thick thread of the divide, and I balanced on that whilst your men dined on my bones. It was when they heard me, and I saw that they had heard me ... I saw the deepest terror in their eyes. It was when my torturers finally understood that they had at last produced the truth from me. Their terror! How they were crushed by what they had sort from me. Peace was for me then blacker than any black. Blacker than the black of milk or that of snow.
Here is your final chance – you may switch off now. Perhaps it would be better to go back to reading, and to cease this listening. You have torn the wall of your face away from the face of the wall of your screen to be ... here ... listening. Perhaps you should turn back to your backlit screen. Beyond here the Corner deepens into a murk, a kind of slough, that you could never have imagined ... and just like a child one hot Sunday afternoon sat cross-legged in a corner where oak skirting boards meet, a child in a glee of angst, a child poking at fibres & dust particles, and perhaps also bits of spider on floorboards, a child facing in–to a corner, drawn-in to an infinite cosiness (co-sine-ness) of a corner with all a room’s vast held back, an adult vastness held back ... like this still child you may not be able to return,
⏎to those smooth surfaces so comfortingly back lit by others’ desires & in tentions.
Should I begin? You need to know that ‘beg inning’ & ‘I’ are irrelevant. But there is no tran slation, just now, and so I will have to carry on through this transmission using ‘I’. And as for ‘beginning’, well, beginning cannot be ended for a human, until you experience what . I . Am . A . Bout . To . Tell . You .
There were a number(en) of us gathered around the fire. She sat opposite me. Her face veiled by the waver of flames, or sometimes by the smoke, or abundance of rising sparks, and at other times just the shimmer of heat from embers smudged her gaze. But her eyes ... I see her eyes clearly. Even when a new log is dumped on the coals, and the log is shaken to arouse new flames, and a river of sparks now pours into the dark above us to mingle with the stars, the stars still as ice (waiting), the fire’s sparks orange & fluid (leaving) ... even then the points of her eyes never blur, are felt like rods projected. Yet I do not know if she is a child or an elderly woman. Her voice is ... like the chaos of river-noise, and yet her message passes through ... through my skin, and ...
instantly all stories dissolve
in the flames there is a hand-shape her hand it is like an intricately carved flint and yet also it is an exquisitely contrived metal frame electricity pulses through channels on the back of the hand-shape as sparks jump at finger joints also it is a hand made of a still-yet-flowing material I’ve never known nor could imagine neither gas solid plasma liquid ...
... and suddenly she is holding what I first wish to describe to you as a spherical full-stop, a black ball that ends what she ... well, she did not say anything ... and the word ‘ends’, that is not right, that is not it, that is not what I meant at all ... but I cannot tell you ... there is no tran slat ion ... other than perhaps ... perhaps patterns made by nerves sp read across a screen ...
The black sphere is certainly something made ... it was contrived by her-&-her kind. Yes, it was then that I felt she was not like us women & men sat round the fire. And I do mean ‘felt’. Her intelligence was ... a.solidity ... that is the only way I can describe it to you ... an impenetrable thing that registered more to touch, somehow, than anything else. And yet I never touched her. I did not know if she even breathed. If she actually had lungs with which to begin the material for words. I cannot say that I heard any words. And the black ball, of course, ended no sentence, no message – but it was of the same black that waits in the crease in the deepening precision where the walls meet to imagine the
Corner
.
The pattern of chaos, like river-rushing, had passed into me, through my skin. But it was so many many years later before I realised just what the feeling is. So many of what you people call years, passed. And in, or rather out of this time passing, I have felt and still feel things you people ... will also all come to feel ...
I have seen the passing of the flint blade, the passing of the coal-fired turbine, and the passing of all machines, and all tools .... and the passing of stars. I was there not long after fire was first felt on the faces of beings. And I am here now ... now that minds are no longer warmed by flames, but instead cooled by blue walls, by gleaming screens. All so I have gone on beyond your time ... I have seen your kind e volve ... and seem to die ... and I have been as all species of creatures as they passed ...
All that time ago, around the fire ... how I loved! Ah, how I loved her! – my bright yet dark-eyed Rachael, the mother of our children. Oh ... yes! – our little girl and our little boy, such beautiful children, Lilly & Peter ... such feelings – like river – just rushing on-&-and-&-on ... but somehow eroding the bank, and al(l)ways carrying debris ... twigs ... fea thers … finger bones … fragments of tongues … and …
a hand-shape holding a black
full-stop in rising flames, or in scurrying smoke, or in a gentle waver
of heat above embers. A Holder’s
eyes – Her sharp points across vast ness. Sparks. And all so suddenly no
I knew. And goes on-knowing
Let us try to forget then, the word ‘I’. Yet nevertheless, in this message how ‘I’ must carry on with ‘I’ other wise ‘you’ cannot listen, as ‘us’ dissolves. Also know now (that) through A dark stop
and by its in explicable g race is an only way ‘say’ pas ses
a hand-shape in flames cradles An ever-expanding black sphere and each of us And each us is pushed by A sphere’s horizon A . sphere takes in both walls that meet . At A . corner and .
fold . I saw Rachael, my love, getting older. And I watched our handsome Lilly & sweet Peter grow. I watched them so so closely, like a guard. But I was no longer there to them. And I could not help them. I saw them weeping and wailing, and I heard them say that I had gone, and that I was dead. Yet I did not go. Yet they could not see, hear or feel me ...
... And so I came to realise that being dead is only something that happens to others, but not to our ‘selves’. Selves only lose, and are damned to not to themselves be lost. For each of us – ‘thus’ – it is so. I have seen my loved ones vanish to me. And worse than any of it – I have seen my loved ones vanish to each other. Countless of your years passed, and in that passage I grew to love others, of all kinds, even though they did not know of my ongoingness ...
... but we all go ... all vanish to each other ... and all go on ... all alone ... peace blackens, forever gets blacker ... we long for all we loved whilst peace blackens round us, and through, and spreads ... a smear of us ever onwards ever vaster ... yet the rut where the faces of worlds meet deepens its stillness ... thickens
so that A death is A straightest of lines travelling in no direction for no time @ All