APROPOS PARADISE SQUARE by Ágnes Lehóczky
A5, 112 pages, Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2025
The second part of a larger project on ‘the poet’s house’, generates a psychogeographical inquiry with a clinical-critical intensity to the remembering and reconstructing of museal spaces which we, eleatic strangers, passengers par excellence, optimistic eyewitnesses, near- or far-dwellers, might be able to inhabit as ‘horizontal’ spaces of temporary, short-term residencies or as elective, or even as posthumous homes. The work continues to experiment with and to stretch our expectations of what constitutes ekphrastic writing weaving here an intricately labyrinthine hybrid work of readerly poetics, a hyper-sensitive textual dérive that explores the blue or bluish zone of a ‘lost girls’ home’, and a paranoiac re-reading and re-examining of the impermanent households of the corner-of-the-eye horizon girl, the ersatz I, the temperamental tom(b)boy, the paranoid-parasitic self, the premature paper citizen in and of ‘unsettled status’. This is a status quo granted by both or either choice and chance enabling [the antagonistic] one to reside in a speculative and hyper-real shelter, a quasi-mausoleum, a home-spun paradise [square], an untrue, abstract asylum or a self-made ‘hortus botanicus’, architectonically designed and built as unfinished building or as abandoned book or as subterranean syntax in a cognitively hypothesized country of the in-between, a space which Hannah Arendt calls ‘nowhere’ always already split, permitting [the abstracted] one to occupy this side of, preoccupied by the outside of, consciousness – having lived wilfully and long enough on its outer side to be neitherside, postponed, deferred and stashed away. A status or zone of deep sleep, temporary dormancy, impermanent waiting which, paradoxically, nevertheless, holds and gives one hope for and promises, preserves and/or presumes a future.
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