Matériel Perdu

BEAUTY AFTER CONCEPTS

Amir Mogharabi

His head felt as if (summoned by the

same gods from whom we construe im-
ages of anger and aggression) it were
held in place from above.

And that, (having lost all recollection of

his body) if it stayed suspended like this
any longer, he would begin to dry heave
what was left of his imagination, and its
corresponding organ.
 My lady’s tomb is living amongst us.

It stirs, with the consistency of a mirage

from under our inconsistent tongues.

As she begins to speak:

the sun and its radiance

merge effervescently.

and
In the darkened house of architects who believe in progress
or
In the darkened heart of artists who believe in reason

my lady is never to be found.

If art is more than an impression of itself, if with an ironic faith we believe in its trans
formative ability, (Here I mean the transformation of an immaterial order, transforma-
tion on the level of lived experience. In contrast with the alchemical transformation of
base materials, or active transformations of social order) then the teleology and purpose
of any object, action or event must disclose its status as ‘conjectural’ and not ‘historical.’

Since the synthetic definition of ‘history’ implies its accuracy, we must either reinforce its
analytic definition (namely: a ‘considered’ and therefore invented series of events) and ac-
cept history as immanence, as creation; or distinguish history from conjecture, in order
to reefy that: We are originally (by the very way of my saying ‘original’) aesthetic animals.
 When the dead return home to drowse.

They return to where the body, the earth,

and their simultaneous decomposition,
are all pigments on a circular canvas:

And the spirit maintains its flux and its effects.

A contradiction between a crown and its construction.

A vapor full of alchemy.
A gust of wind that drifts across a drying puddle, at ir-
regular intervals.

Because I consider ‘ambiguities’ the most informative, and revolutionary qualities that
events can produce (in an age where abstractions exchange abstractions, objective and
isolated systems of signs determine experience, and labor refers to nothing more than a
dynamic linguistic economy from which the human hand remains absent), the following
tract will aspire to turn a hush across the lips, onto a vertical (Y) axis.

Where the lips are no longer across, or separate from, their whole.

From their face. Reflected in its totality.

That is:

the face is as much a tear, as the ocean is the moon.

 And
(with an always unexpected outcome)

the wind
under the solitary sun

the wind

attests to the spirit’s ongoing search for poetic

freedom.

Inasmuch as the word ‘never,’ accounts for our own mortality, then
materials never disappear.

Concepts do.

Thus we must conjecture upon contradticory questions.

Would a mountain ascend from our periphery if we were to be-

come animal again, to become horizontal?

Concepts are thus, also constructs. Aesthetic ones. Which, when

taken as truths, reduce the experience of an ocean a breath, or a
fire, to an image of their interior. To the illusion of materiality. To
the sequence of events before and after their occurence.

Whether by ‘concept,’ we mean history, or simply the art of fixing a

rapport between object and idea.

The art of being a terrible artist.

Till death do artists part.

 For Figures.
or
Faces.

They appear during the disocciation of my

lady from her tomb.
For, my lady is never really mine, and will
never live among us.

But her tomb,

her logical casket,
serves as an opaque reminder,
that my lady is also yours.

My lady is nature.

It is contrary to my abhorrence of metaphysics to write a tract which, in the end, may fur-
ther categorize what should be left immanent: experience

However, if I were to describe a phenomenon (bound by imagined topographical con-

straints) like history, or its tokens (such as psychoanalysis, biology, ethnography, art his-
tory, sociology...) then I would do so, not to prove any one sophism over another, but to
put sophistry into play as a creative exchange.

Where words (whether they vehiculate a revolution, or an aversion of the eyes) reveal
materiality from the inside.
 May her constaneity soon pass over us like amnesia.

So that,

deafened by an intellectual stupor,

we can look at her face once again,

and not separate one feature from another,
but consider her beauty on the level of a complete experience.

There with what we may call dreams

what we may call a string of symbols against
a static black

the drifting
and the dreaming

will occur at the level of

absolute indifference.

Insofar Matériel Perdu is nothing more than a title. A title that is chosen intui-
tively.

Surrounded by a cloud of possible meanings, the sign acts like a plume of smoke
rising from a fallen building, and it may disappear with the same shamelessness.

The same rising and falling for one whose love is service, any one tide in the des-
ert.

For, if materials are considered concepts (and language can become material by
way of its affect) then it is simply irony, to conjecture the aesthetic value of a
particular type, or category of material. Namely, those awaiting their destruction,
disintegration, pulverization their immolation...their eternal recurrence.

Materials that are and are not lost.

Tautologically caught between their symbolic, and real death.

Never to disappear (real), contrary to what I mean (symbolic).

That is, what this is not.

This This.