A Reading of 'Of The Nothing Of' by Dom Gabrielli

In Favour Of the Nothing Of

I am lucky enough to have followed Michael Mc Aloran's increasingly impressive deliria in both paint and word for some time now. I feel lucky to have sampled one of the sweeter oblivions to be found, here below, in this rather unsavoury neck of the depleted forest that is 21st century poetic production.

This remarkable book, Of the Nothing Of, should startle its readers with its vicious humour and astonishing imagery. Mc Aloran is a master of the subtle, of the minute, of the tender, and then very able to destroy all such niceties with brutal verbal butchery. Yet his images are never obvious nor cliché (unless deliberately to prove a point). This language lives in the muck of the denied, in the graveyard of the repressed. The Beckettian non-narrative is just a start, in fact the meat here is so insubordinate as to remind the reader of another Irish genius, Francis Bacon. Here indeed, Mc Aloran's words cannot be more horrific than life itself. Here we are. In the eternal, modern dilemma to tell it as it is, to rip into and burn illusions and falsities, niceties and conventions. None least of which than existence, ontology itself, stripped, dilapidated and executed with wit. This is a book about difference in itself, the multiplied subject, the zonar and polar consciousnesses which roam, which know too much but can reconcile little. Nothing lurks in the absence of the capability to genuflect to any God or any avatars of such. Of the nothing of. Stutter but do not fall. Fight but do not maul.

The first section of the book is a tour de force. Brutal, dark, pronoun-less narrative, without characters, without subjectivity, without plot. Relentless descriptions of the myriad facets of Nothing and the way the glorious body lives its daily murders: severed organs, razor hands, cum oozing and piss frenzy, open graves, scuttling dead teeth. All will have their moments, parading as mock subjects, their minute ascents, into the slanting ray of glory, raucous night grants the dead in their nothing. Intricate frames where part-sentences, 'apres l'apocalypse' images, partial rhymes and songs, bit-conversations, mingle in a polyphonic surge of voices-images. One of the great claims here is to have invented a style which can absorb all others, whilst surrendering, necessarily, only, to the nothing of, from which it is impossible to rise or escape, without insistent gaseous effort.

"all the while the whispering voices, the murmuring shadows, in a cloud-burst of deathly smoke, haven to fall drenched to the bone with nectar bloodlessness, all having said, and with what absence of sound, click-clack and the spine warping, spit it out the scum of nothingness, genuflect, genuflect unto the memory of the dead god, in the laughter-spill of the orificial night"

Here, language itself speaks the revenge of the innocent, of all the forgotten. Echoes. Where is the author? Where is the hand of the surgeon-poet who is both corpse and medic at his own post-mortem?

Luckily a narrator of sorts will wake in the subsequent sections to 'genuflect to nothing in a vacancy of shit,' to 'inhale the final bones of purpose,' to 'fade as of birth birthed into this death-dreaming.' These, and many more, marvellous lyrical interventions, testify to quite how much insidious humour there is hidden in the bed of Mc Aloran's work:

"I place the blade upon the tongue of my night…

…I am the refuse, of the earth’s quarry…"

To such sentences, there is little to do but admire, keep reading and wait for the next:

"…drag of the old bones, the dead airs, the silent never to become, all ashen and ever bled, till circus, cast aside, the heavenly of, the scarring of…

…i breathe the sudden of…spill of dreaming in a kaleidoscope of shattered colours, igniting the sky…"

And the next:

"the hours pass through me, they claim nothing but the meat of it, the flesh… the endless night is my altar, none else but to expire of breath denounced or spent/ absurd as the wind’s claim, forever, of the else or none…

…the words they fade away, death’s tomes, rustle in the breeze, scattering tumbleweed throughout abandoned graveyards…"

Now it is your turn.
 

Dom Gabrielli, 15 jan 2013

--

(Some samples from the second section- 'of the none exposed')


…A bell jar of collapsed echoes, and the dead entrails of foreign speech no longer the settled, no longer there or else/ (sudden, sudden…sudden gleam of tears…)

…Here rolls the dead eye and the forever getting it over with, (-begin again…)

…All sprung from the withheld…   

(I see the eye yet I cannot see…)

…I laugh yet I am dead…I steal the laughter, from out of the senselessness of death….      

…In my gravestone vanity, I eclipse…I eclipse of the ever having uttered…from smoke till sounding…echoing trails of nothing…nowhere…traces/ ashen…

(The endless night, is melding colours into nothing…)…

…A brick wall, dense with ivy…scattered bones litter the fresh cut grass, with their bound secrets…(all…not a word…beyond sound….)

…Ah, I remember the…I remember the dreaming of…taste upon havoc and the blank teeth chattering…silent…chattering in the murk…

(Cataract of the exposed heart…)

…Torn bleak and wildly in the flaming haze of anguish, to lick the cool stones scattered in the fleshy earth…Soil of despair drenched with final vacancy…

…Till spun hard and closed redressing the scuttle of the limbs, tracing out the burnish upon scattered shadows flittering in the half-light, knowing of the less or of the more, absolved, the gouge in the gait silenced, knowing of the less and less, unto sparkle, unto ever but naught…

…There’ll yet be a heart, it is said, all spoken for, all said I no longer dream I dream of that which……cancels…I ingest my own negation, I scar I cannot scar as if to breathe were something venerable…it comes and goes…as consistently as the flesh’s frailty…

(Knock again…)

…Exodus of…Of the speech redeemed…Drag up thy cross, and walk….


---


...Of a word, (--no nothing--), of which has come before, nor begun, until the last drift, spun silken of sinew clear…

…Spun silken begun of the first sinew till the last echoing breath…dead all but one, having eroded, scattered clear, dread along step where no reaching purpose snares, so echoing, dead, of the first reaching, spun/ begun…

…Tread without mirroring…sky of insectal swarming…the moon pierces the bloodshot eye…embers of laughter…all said yet still the thrash of the blade…   

…The hands tremble…

                              …Night resounds, through spectral tide…


---


…Liquid dreams, carouse the ever having been, yet stillness there, blank, motionless as a cadaver, subtle as carrion flowerings…

…Oblivion sweet oblivion, a violent kiss to staunch the coagulated night, till fallen asunder/

                            stray/

                                        at the hilt of death…

…Embraced/ benign/ flux of the escaping breath, sudden unto downfall, scratching away the skin…

(…In silence’s   

                                     twilight landscape…)
         
…Mocked by the astray of words still desolate, where the lungs vibrate of the spun sharp sickened of, fragmented of…

…All along, it has often been said, elixir of fallen speech claiming the shadows, yet still in tide of spoken, locked to the bone, there’ll yet be another, shock of the dead rat pelt, of abortive scar…

…Bone or lung, and the in-drowning of it…I see/ I see the nothing left of it, where spoken of scatters the strips of flesh/ sinew/ the shudder of vagrant reek, into the emptiness…

…I collide…The walls do not shift I collide, sickened by vacant hope…

…In my dreaming I die, I die absolute, where the feathered mask of decay shifts from one mirror unto another…

                 (Collapse/ dredge/ obsolete/ benign…)

…All but for the…Never knowing of it, wordless/ traceless/ spat out…

…Subtle as winds cracking the whip of it, in dry weather…

…Arc of a dead grace…

…Liquid          as the sky’s indifference…


---
                                                                          

…Cemetery breath…

                         …lashed to the…

…Bone break and the nocturne of it, till amend of sudden shrill shriek of pitch…Bone light in the palm of hand dragged from the vault of night’s endless shadows…Wind clad in some vacated room but one in the depths of pitch…

…Laughter and then…

…Spill lest there echo the in-dreaming of foreign absolute…

…Headless till vast…(succumb)…breath without air…

…Cemetery heart…
 

…of the etched sands of whispers, drenched in foreign, ever where the ocean of the skull unfolds…

…Crystalline tears of…

…Words erased…

…Sound without meaning…ever to clutch the fragrant none of speeches, vagaries…Known without/ ever none/ no not known/ breathing of the lack/ begin again/ end once more…

…My absence beneath the brailed sky…

…Severed of the all and in between, ruptured once, ruptured once more…

…Attrition/ exile…

                    …I genuflect to nothing, in a vacancy of shit…

--

'Of the Nothing Of' is available from Oneiros Books here