Mirror This World, image by AC Evans
EXPLORING THE TEXT
The structural
arrangement of an urban eclogue
Unfolded in front
of us beneath an overhang
Of neglected
adjectives. We saw
Three towering
stanzas in the grand manner,
Idiomatic,
self-reflexive and embellished
With shiny,
metallic neologisms.
A parental
advisory notice warned us that
The lyrics were
explicit. We wore dark glasses.
Ahead, the pathway
was clear and the air was alive
With a distinctive
cadence – a melodic pattern
Barely discernible
at first, but soon to dominate
Our thoughts – our
guides refused to go on.
We marvelled at
the alloestrophic irregularity
Of nearby
deposits, seeing veritable tangles of
Words in irregular
rows, including
Many anisometric
examples and several
End-stopped lines
leaning over us at crazy angles.
My companion
grabbed my arm, pointing in wonderment
At the sky above
us: it was turning into an open field, free-form
Cloudscape both
linear and non-linear at the same time.
We had never seen
anything like this before.
A caesura appeared
in the form of a black, cubic shape,
But we walked by
without a second glance.
From a pillar
constructed of in-striding lines of text
A sing-song voice
with indefinable accents and stresses
Addressed us (or
so we thought) in a word-flow;
Sometimes a sweet
euphony, sometimes a harsh
Cacophany, a
dissonant tone-colour that,
We later
discovered, permeated the entire structure.
All around there
were strange syntactic patterns and
Unfamiliar
typographical conventions.
Gigantic capitals
in diverse fonts towered over us
Like the sculpted
arches of an enormous building.
The sing-song
voice echoed in the recesses
Of this immense,
vaulted, visual poem, while.
Beneath my feet I
noticed a discarded epigraph,
Neglected now and
covered in dusty, ironic, slangy
Fragments of
forgotten phrases from previous times.
The atmosphere was
uncanny, I sensed the surreal
Presence of
condensation but my vision was restricted
By the gathering
darkness as we approached the Aporia.
The chronotope had
long since collapsed and now
‘Liminality’ was
the only term I could think of to designate
Our situation,
shuddering with the anxiety of influence,
Struggling to
maintain aesthetic distance and perhaps
Even our sanity,
in an extraordinary place where all organic
Form seemed
over-determined – oh, how I longed for synaesthesia!
“The heresy of the
didactic!” gasped my friend.
As though from
nowhere a grand narrative, a slimy tentacle,
Wormed its way
through the gloom, passing within
A few feet of us,
but I knew we were protected by a magic charm,
A talisman, a
Darke Conceit – we were the lucky ones.
—AC Evans
