Ada Smailbegović's 'Some Disordered Interior Geometries'

A new piece that "[moves] across the grid of appearance" from Ada Smailbegović (poet, scholar, and co-editor of the Organism for Poetic Research) is up at the uh-mazing Reanimation Library, titled "Some Disordered Interior Geometries." Its sections--0.1, 0.2, and so on until 1.7--can also be read against this taxonomic grid, also titled "Some Disordered Interior Geometries." It is acknowledged that the text arises primarily from an engagement with A Field Guide to Shells of the Pacific Coast and Hawaii by Percy A. Morris, which is housed in the holdings of the library. An excerpt follows; read it all here.

1.1

"If I examine a whole collection of shells, I find a marvelous variety. The cone lengthens or flattens, narrows or broadens; the spirals become more pronounced or merge with one another; the surface is incrusted with knobs or spines, sometimes strikingly long, radiating from a center; or it may swell, puffing out into bulbs separated by strangulations or concave gorges where the curved lines meet."

1.2

It is the formation, not the form, that remains mysterious. The building material seeps through in slow formation. A soft secretion that lays down the roots of the colors, the calcareous prisms, the "successive layers of mucus [that] spread a coating as thin as a soap bubble over the deep, twisted cavity." As such the shell appears in its contradictions, "so rough outside and so soft, so pearly, in its intimacy." There is no hylomorphic edge separating its form from in-formation. There is no scentless liquid of the receptacle which receives the triangles and other figures as they change without taking their shape. The liquid hardens into form.

1.3

In Les coquillages (Shells), Paul Valéry observes that "living nature is unable to work directly with solids." In this way the creation of a hard shape, such as that of a shell, requires isolating a few solid substances from the liquids or fluids that compose organic matter. And so "everything that lives or has lived results from the properties and modifications of a few liquids."

1.4

The liquids that a body makes and the manner that they attach to words and so to causation at a distance - this either means that language is a form of touch or that something can increase itself or fold inward without touch.

1.5

In his depictions of mollusks in Les parti pris the choses Ponge suggests that the slimy secretions of the snail are a kind of expression, so that an analogous relationship opens between language and the materiality of the liquids secreted by a body, or, as he elaborates in "Notes for a Seashell," language is "the true secretion common to the human mollusk."

Image at top from A Field Guide to Shells of the Pacific Coast and Hawaii.