Xanadu
An excerpt from Joshua Wilkerson's "MEADOWLANDS/XANADU/AMERICAN DREAM"
Zombies, malls, malls as Zombies, the dead returned to earth, and the earth turned over for projects dead on arrival in a dying world—Joshua Wilkerson’s book Meadowlands/Xanadu/American Dream was one of my favorite reads of 2022. Out now from Beautiful Days Press, you can buy it at the link below. Please buy it at the link below.
Beautiful Days: https://beautifuldayspress.com/catalog/
Here’s a bit more about the project from the press’s site:
“Meadowlands/Xanadu/American Dream is an illuminated meditatio which cracks open the “mall” as stale icon of horrific, repetitive emptiness to release the mystico-revolutionary potential latent in (dead) mall aesthetics. Bookended by a procedurally generated poem-prayer and a procedurally generated guided meditation, its central essay shuffles like a zombie flaneur, a microplastics-addled Arcades Project, a necropastoral shopping hallucination orbiting loosely around New Jersey’s troubled American Dream Meadowlands mall. Attractions within: mall-affect theory, readings of Dawn of the Dead and Severance, Dead Mall Youtube, the occult, a radical reappropriation of Paul Blart Mall Cop, and the utopian visions of the Situationists.
Besides all that, it gets personal. The mall is, after all, a form of autobiography: Like a dying mall, the desires of childhood go on repeating themselves, sometimes eerily, sometimes embarrassingly in the background. Writing unearths them. The word mall: a spell, a radioactive dye which lights up the smallness of my distance, so detachment might collapse into whatever beneath it is real… Or, if a mall deserves love, anything can.”
I hope you like the excerpt : )
A mall of process emerges as if listening. So absence is a calm and pleasant martyr to presence, presence to sequence. Words merge referents, empty another word for always. Call it passing blank unruffled time and nothing special, turning the dimmable bulbs slowly down. There is a desire to erupt into hymn, but by then no one will be there to hear it, or even to sing. Still, the idea of a hymn is often enough to conceal the immense effort of the second hand as it swings forward, into the empty atrium. Here, everything appear light, as if any idea were simply waiting to render.
—
When they contain enough air, words like process and atrium relax the sentence, which can then try to curve like walls. To thereby incite experience. Mall cops are trained to remove all the angles, the corners that burst into eddies, traps where one hardens. Beware the charging stations. Who calcify affect in disposition. Whose coming soon can only crack the present’s back. Safer to run one’s hand on the warp of the railing, stroking the timeline from here to here.
—
Because it is emptier, the word mall is more prayerful than shopping centre. Because more blissful. This mantra shops for a center, shops in a gray field, a green field without reference. The devil is in the details, is the details. To be held pre-rendered in the absent wind, the absence of air, in this absolute un-synesthesia. Such a halo might attach to anything, might collapse into the blessing of its pre-freshness. The way the sun stood still in the middle of the sky, a full day, and then another, in its ongoing refusal to refuse us this.
—
This atrium may stand still in the center, but will always write itself into something other. Because I write assumes meaning in a mental space. Because the open layout assumes a sentence will be layered, a hidden prayer without blueprint can be registered, lit up like radioactive dye.
As if listening, the as if according to which the malls seem, all seems not to pass into dust. Because there seems to be a fluorescent coherence, we remain, not passing by. Writing all along, with the enormous emptiness of an atrium, lit up like radioactive dye in a monastery.
—
The second hand lingers, expectant, a fermata. As if this were not earth music. Its scalar rhythms bleed into eons, hyper-choirs hum up and down the multi-level layout. Up and down generations. Because the shades of former shoppers are multiple, we feel, as if for the first time, aloneness. This space, a longing for perfection—another word for always, for empty. Perfection, a longing to join the greater number.
Joshua Wilkerson is the author of MEADOWLANDS/XANADU/AMERICAN DREAM. He lives in Brooklyn, where he co-edits Beautiful Days Press.