Maturing and Dementing

The true King of Redonda (Xavier Marias), the illustrious lord of that small island rock near Monserrat, has written at length concerning the "dark back of time," including a book with that title. The phrase is taken, or at least adapted, from Shakespeare: "What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abyss of time?", The Tempest, act I, sc. ii, line 49. Redonda has no inhabitants currently so far as is known, but there are several rival living claimants to the throne, and many famous ennobled peers, among them the Lord of Vertigo (WG Sebald), Duchess of Morpho Eugenia ( AS Byatt), Duke of Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola), and so on.

Cicatrix* also claims the island throne. This is not the queen’s real name, but it might be something along those lines. She is a woman with long dark flowing hair and cold blue eyes. Chilling indeed. She is sexed, but only nearly so, being forever adolescent like Wednesday Addams –
Child of woe is wane and delicate…sensitive and on the quiet side, she loves the picnics and outings to the underground caverns…a solemn child, prim in dress and, on the whole, pretty lost…secretive and imaginitive, poetic, seems underprivileged and given to occasional tantrums…has six toes on one foot
– black and dark tones predominating and giving the impression that she is above the law.

A parallel example of dark backwardness in nature is indigo, also said to be the colour of the ‘Third Eye’. The lines of flow which produce the natural dye are famed for their difficulty, especially the tendency of the dye mixture to “sulk”. A sulk may last a great length of time and in some cases can become irreversible.

These are the difficulties of wayfaring across boundaries. Gilles Deleuze demands from us similar performative efforts for the purpose, contortions as some have argued, to make us think. Perplexion, and similar words which employ the root “-pli-“, such as perplicate, implicate and replicate, are not uncommon in his writing. The “-pli-“ root meaning is fold, a turned down corner, or, by extension, an angle across which criss-crossing lines of flow are simultaneously being both reflected and permeated.

It is leaky. Such, as Anne Carson reminds us in one of her essays in Decreation, is the nature of active boundaries.

* a scar forming over an old wound. In excess this can impede the functioning of a limb.


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