POLUS

Polus is a city suspended in full-bloom. Amidst a bounded clearing, an assemblage of urban rooms unfold from a compacted centre. Decadent interiorised worlds—dome, gallery, garden square—proliferate endlessly, each room filling and spilling into others. Continuous doorways, stairways, colonnades, connect interiors such that the outermost room might always be traced back to the central chamber. Growth is enacted via arborescent sequencing that tends towards supersaturation and the eventual overwhelm of its own logic. From the centre-out, enfilade arrangements give over to unravelling passages that promote fragmentary encounter.

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This constructed fabric is located amidst an encroaching surround of another abyssal structure: a wild and un-mappable expanse. Hyper-verdant ecologies—dense forest, sharp cliff, flooding lake—invade the urban periphery and render it unstable. As the two conditions intensify and forge, they come to be seen as mutually enframed entities.

NOUN: Polus

From Ancient Greek πολύς, meaning “much, many, more,” from Latin polus “the end or extremity of an axis” from Latin root, pele “to fill.” Figurative meaning: "too-muchness, over-fullness in any respect" (first recorded 1700). Latin cognates: plethore= fulness, pletho = I am full, pienaros = “entire”, plenitude = “abundance,” pleres = replete, covered over, complete

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ADJECTIVE:

1. (of amount/quantity) copious, ample; plethora, profusion
2. (attributively) excessive, embellished, decadent
3. (of space) filled, swelling; over-written, exhausted
4. (of distance) far; of unknown extents
5. (of time) elongated, suspended
6. (of sound) resonant, endless melody
7. (of light) intense brightness; chromatic, calorific

ABYSS

— abyssos “bottomless, unfathomed,” from a- “without” + byssos “bottom”

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AGORA

— ageirein “to assemble,” from √GER “to gather”

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WOLD

— weald “forest, wooded upland” from √WELT “woodland; wild, untamed”

The city conceives and constructs itself as an ordered and geometric clearing in the midst of a forest of branching and fleeing signs which continue to carry a dimension of dread...these two distinct universes, that of the city entirely given to measure, and that of a world sensed as immense, dangerous and unmapped.

With Roland Barthes, the "and" takes on a radically different function. Instead of drawing together two entities to form a unity it operates to concatenate without fusion, but also to ramify...The conjunction is not summative but excessive.

...the matter is neither of explaining nor of defining but only of describing (in a nonexhaustive manner): To describe = to "unthread" a word...parfiler {to unthread}…"Newton a parfile {un­ threaded} the sun's light, as our ladies parfilent {unthread} a cloth of gold. -What is parfiler, sir ?-...It's to unthread a fabric, to unweave it thread by thread to separate out the gold."

SATIETY (n.)
From Latin satietatem “sufficiency, fullness, abundance” from satis “enough” from √SA- “to satisfy.”

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SATISFY (v.)
From Latin satisfacere “discharge fully, comply with, make amends,” literally “do enough,” from satis “enough” + facere “to make, do, perform” from √DHE- “to set, put”

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SATURATION (n.)
From Late Latin saturationem, from saturare “to fill full, sate, drench,” from satur “sated, full,” from √SA- “to satisfy.”

Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them... and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper... all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.

These are moments when the complexity of existence spills into a singularity. The singularity of being here. Only here. And now. Only now. This singular sensation is intense. An extensive intensity. It is a spatial unfolding of a kind, a spasm of depth into intense surface.

The carpet of blood

Patterned with darkenings, congealments.

The curtains — ruby corduroy blood,

Sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor.

The cushions the same. The same

Raw carmine along the window-seat.

A throbbing cell. Aztec altar — temple.

[...]

You revelled in red.

DELUGE

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Meaning “to overwhelm, torrent, flood,” from the Latin diluere “wash away,” from √PLEU- “to flow,” also in terms of the source offlow.

You must be drunk always. That is everything: the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time that crushes your shoulders and bends you earthward, you must be drunk with-out respite. But drunk on what? On wine, on poetry, on virtue—take your pick. But be drunk.

The sweetest honey is loathsome in his own deliciousness

and in the taste confounds the appetite.

...intoxication is the success of a sacrifice whose victim would be the sacrificer himself. Bataille recognized the ultimately comic character of the sacrificer who, at the limit, remains flawless. No doubt intoxication is also comic because the inebriate does not completely disappear, afterward feeling pitiable, sobered up, and sometimes disillusioned with intoxication itself.

This is not an architecture registered in style, typologies, tropes, distinctions,definitions, in fixed measurements and origins; but rather in its intricate excesses and in its affecting hazes.

In the surging swell

in the resounding echoes

in the universal stream

of the world’s respiration—

to drown one’s sorrows

to sink—

unconscious—

supreme pleasure.

The image floats, in sum, at the whim of the swells…poised over the abyss, soaked by the sea, but also shimmering with the very thing that threatens it and bears it up at the same time…[it is] simultaneously threatening and captivating from out of the distance into which it withdraws.

Beings and worlds are folded, woven or felted out of beings within beings, worlds within worlds, scales within scales and rhythms within rhythms. As such they are states of what Gilbert Simondon called “surfused” or “supersaturated metastability” that take their fabric (psychosomatic, filmic, tectonic) to a threshold of crisis…the fabric reaches a limit of compaction or intensity and it begins to dilate and unravel.

ABOUND (v.)
“be in great plenty” (14c.), from Old French abonder “to abound, be abundant, come together in great numbers” (12c.), from Latin abundare “overflow, run over,” from Latin ab “off, away from” + undare “rise in a wave,” from unda “a wave,” from √WED- “water; wet”

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SURROUND(v.)
“to flood, overflow” (15c.), from Middle French soronder “to overflow, abound; surpass, dominate,” from Late Latin superundare “overflow,” from Latin super “over” + undare “to flow in waves.” Sense of “to shut in on all sides” (1610s) influenced by figurative meaning in French of “dominate,” and by sound association with round

I do not believe in the absolute picture, there can only be approximations, endless attempts and approaches. That is what I wanted to show in this catalogue: not the best pictures but everything, the entire business of coming closer, along with all its errors... Only through order can I get a handle on the flood of images; here there are not single pictures at all anymore.

Each image is a singular variation on the totality of distinct sense—of the sense that does not link together the order of significations. This sense is infinite, and each variation is itself singularly infinite. Each image is a finite cutting out, by the mark of distinction. The superabundance of images in the multiplicity and in the history of the arts corresponds to this inexhaustible distinction.

...in a multiplicity, what counts are not the terms or the elements, but what is ‘between’ them [...] a set of relations that are inseparable from each other

Has Passaic replaced Rome as The Eternal City? If certain cities of the world were placed end to end in a straight line according to size, starting with Rome, where would Passaic be in that impossible progression? Each city would be a three-dimensional mirror that would reflect the next city into existence. The limits of eternity seem to contain such nefarious ideas

There are, then, four ways of exhausting the possible:

— form exhaustive series of things

— dry up the flow of voices

— extenuate the potentialities of space

— dissipate the power of the image

And they leap so looply, looply as they link to light. And they look so loovely, loovelit, noosed in a nuptious night.

It may seem that Ulysses violates the techniques of the novel beyond all limit, but Finnegans Wake passes even this limit. It may seem that Ulysses demonstrates all the possibilities of language, but Finnegans Wake takes language beyond any boundary of communicability. It may seem that Ulysses represents the most arduous attempt to give a physiognomy to chaos, but Finnegans Wake defines itself as Chaosmos and Microchasm and constitutes the most terrifying document of formal instability and semantic ambiguity that we possess.

[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

It is like the increase and decrease of a more or less dense compound along melodic and harmonic lines, its aural surface traversed by a continual, obsessive, obsessional, movement. But there is an altogether different thing as well: a sort of central erosion that first arises as a threat among the bass and is expressed in the trill or wavering of the piano, as if one were about to abandon the key for another or for nothing, tearing the surface, plunging into a ghostly dimension where the dissonances would come only to punctuate the silence.

...a frame within a frame within a frame, our bodies and their bodily supports, furnishings, coexist to make of our bodies an abundance of sensations and actions. [The frame] brings the outside in, but only to the extent that it itself is extracted and transformed from this outside, stripped down, reworked, refined, in short, an outside now constructed, regulated, inside.

MISE EN ABYME.

Meaning “to put in the abyss.”

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ABYSS.

Compound of a- “without” + byssos “bottom.” From the Latin abyssus, meaning “depths of the earth or sea; primordial chaos;” early 14c. as abime “a bottomless pit” and from the Greek abyssos (limne) “bottomless (pool),” hence, generally, “enormous, unfathomable.”

A look at the ambiguity of the arcades: their abundance of mirrors, which fabulously amplifies the spaces and makes orientation more difficult. For although this mirror world may have many aspects, indeed infinitely many, it remains ambiguous, double-edged...The whispering of gazes fills the arcades.

What I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.