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Geomnemonic Regression or the Indexing of Epochal Intervals?

April 28, 2011

According to Professor D. C. Barker’s exposition of geotraumatic research ‘descent into the body of the earth corresponds to a regression through cosmic time’.¹ Here subterranean explorations mirror the atavistic regression of a Ballardian spinal descent through transorganic memory or evolutionary history. Yet perhaps opening up to subterranean influences or conditions is less a regression or movement through time as the indexing of temporal or epochal intervals, such as that carried out by Powers:

Closing his eyes, Powers lay back and steered the car along the interval between the two time fronts, feeling the images deepen and strengthen within his mind. The vast age of the landscape, the inaudible chorus of voices resonating from the lake and from the white hills, seemed to carry him back through time, down endless corridors to the first thresholds of the world.

He turned the car off the road along the track leading towards the target range. On either side of the culvert the cliff faces boomed and echoed with vast impenetrable time fields, like enormous opposed magnets. As he finally emerged between them on to the flat surface of the lake it seemed to Powers that he could feel the separate identity of each sand-grain and salt crystal calling to him from the surrounding ring of hills.²

The impression of the landscape upon and within Powers’ mind forces an mnemonic indexing of geological time, opening up an interval between the present and variable points in geological history, an interval within which the earth ‘screams’, booms and echoes. Note that Powers closes his eyes for the ‘descent’ beyond a visually configured world space or level. This closing of the eyes marks a preliminary step beyond the antropomorphically scaled and visually configured world space: ‘Level 1, or world space, is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision configures, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly’.³ This descent into deep time is marked by auditory envelopments, impressions and a mnemonic impression of the landscape within the mind, a primarily auditory domain, the constitutive bandwidths of which accompany a similar shift in scale or range as that which occurs in Powers’ awareness of the landscape which shifts from the cliff face to sand grains and salt crystals. This is an auditory domain that exceeds the bandwidths of anthropocentric and organic audibility in terms of both frequency and time.

1. Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, 498 [↩]
2. J. G. Ballard, ‘The Voices of Time’, The Complete Short Stories vol. 1, 260-1 [↩]
3. Nick Land, Fanged Noumena [↩]

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