Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (part 3/4)

The Sound of Refacement : The Hybrid Word in Glamvoid

peaceful/peaceable resistance to power gladiatorship

Somewhere, in what is presumed to be his habitas, and what feels as interstellar spaces in proliferated galaxies hosting numberless orbits most astonishingly positioned against each other, Joe Palmer is entertaining thoughts of Nola. Firmly anchored in indecisiveness, or, at least, verbal elusiveness of that what once passed between them, he hopes to find a way to download her. Dweller of the kingdom of pirate frequencies, he patiently, persistently nourishes germs regenerating the invaluable legacy of the communication they once had.

Dozing on & off now, dreaming the wi(e)red dream, those vacuumlike spatiotemporalities seem less hostile. What once was a pulverizing beat of a crowded bar is now being transpositioned into a soothing lick of the sinuous, yet steady, bassline groove. What once was a hysterical echo of the masses enchanted by power is now being channeled into finely sifted, toned down, yet articulate, sonic kiss of the guitar strings enhancing the embroidery of that what spreads. What once was dominance of ferociously ravenous chaos of excessive notes lost in the memory of the overexposed desperately plugged into a (self)dissolving spectacle arena is now being finetuned to a smoky, yet undoubtedly present, vibe of the friendly cyborg shadow.

Through semi-oneiric meanders, the rhythm of the remix is being established, as Joseph finds the bruise he now acquired. Navigating the bruise, he is experiencing what once was “the city of lost images speaking in tongues, gathered together on a woman’s skin” (2843). Where he once emerged from, is now being sensed as Nola’s quietly spoken words:”Inside the lens lies a world beyond ours. We have created it, set it free. Now it grows, expands. People live there. The spectral ones, the lost and the damaged for whom this world sets too painful a task, there they live”(2395). Just as once her “body melted away into the forest, becoming the forest” (2488), so are her words now becoming tongueless. Just as once the whole skin of things was emitted from her own, so does Joseph’s bruise contain static : re-placing noise.

The universe, as we know it, might still revolve around the motto “It’s all about making money!” (2923). Yet, in Joseph’s bruise, there is a story dancing to the melody sketched after a silhouette of “a bird of deeper loveliness for all of that” (2883). It’s all about scoring. It’s a culture disneyfied to the core, thereby attempting to impose on one a deceitful idea about the totality of discourse abundant in delusional choices between cultural theory, either oblivious to its relationship with that what it theorizes, or, forgetful of a critical distance toward the subject of critique. Obfuscating the boundaries and relationships between narrative and extralingusitic levels, such a culture seems to provide little room for critical / creative voices that object to crippling impediments to sound responses. Or, so buzz logic would want one to believe.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory (2003):

In this social order, then, you can no longer have bohemian rebels or revolutionary avant-gardes because they no longer have anything to blow up. Their top-hatted, frock coated, easily outraged enemy has evaporated. Instead, the non-normative has become the norm. Nowadays, it is not just anarchists for whom anything goes, but starlets, newspaper editors, stockbrokers and corporate executives. The norm is money; but since money has absolutely no principles or identity of its own, it is no kind of norm at all. (16-7)

            Perhaps it really is not about having something to blow up or blowing up per se to start with. It’s not about the deceitful concept of revolution that aims solely at overthrowing a regime, a class, or any other category in power for the sake of replacing it with another dominance-starved elite. Power narratives call for remapping. Redescriptions of socioscape call for disambiguation. Cultural amalgamation that Noon’s fictitious world reflects can perhaps best be discerned through his writing that indefatigably explores the possibilities for wholesome responses against inhibitions coming from superimposed cultural models, and yet celebrating the restraint that enables articulating sensible communication. The much needed remapping and disambiguation spur from knots of obscurity vividly portrayed in the story “The Blind Spot” (metamorphiction). An oasis of embalming darkness, protective of the overexposed outcasts, dreamers of the wir/ǝ/d dream, in an electric empire of blinding noise feels not entirely unlike the call in the novel Nymphomation (1997) that offers to all the underprivileged a corner of alleviating play to quench their thirst.

Thus, out of bewildering polyphonic bruises, the vibe spreads, the message—ethereally rooted—spreads. Out of cacophony of cultural smudge buzz--beyond captivity by sensationalist parasite signals—threatening to dissolve individuality and unity alike--the human face is being borne. Told in the child’s voice, the story, spreading the message, is reconstituting hic & nunc / anticarpediem poetics. Selfless, yet reindividualized, united, yet distinctive, are fellow cyborgs enduring the hindrances to patient and persistent containing noise through the hybrid legacy of change and preservation.