From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Antinomicity
This article is about C. W. Smith's 2022 novella. For its title concept, see antinomy.
Antinomicity is a 2022 novella by C. W. Smith — his third book, after A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight and the filmed essay Beyond Correct and Incorrect Nature. A work of philosophical psychogeography in a preface, four chapters (I–IV) and an epilogue, it takes its name from antinomy, the condition of an irreducible, productive contradiction — "two that is also one." The word is given its literal origin late in the book, in a pair of leaves:[1]
one leaf was meant to grow there, but then two developed in a state of antinomicity.
Synopsis
Chapter I walks Newcastle with the narrator's young son and his dog — the closed TAFE campus, a dry storm-water drain, an abandoned gasworks silo on whose roof he falls asleep — establishing the book's method: landscape as the silhouette of subjectivity, and the empty city at its "functional peak."
Chapter II is a train to Sydney with his teenage daughter: Vocaloid music (the song "Gemini") that somehow sounds more human than its human covers, manga, and the 1978 Hilton bombing plaque. A poem set in Singapore introduces "The Fighter" and "The Failure" — "two conceptual parts of myself" who are "the same person, analogies of each other."
Chapter III, the centrepiece, delivers the full ontological incompleteness argument (chalk on a fence; the Möbius strip; "that gap is you"), then a sound-art episode in which a train recording, stretched eight times slow, becomes "a bag full of alarm clocks dragged to the bottom of an empty public pool just as they begin to ring."
Chapter IV takes the whole family to a convict-built cabin near Wollombi; cyanotype prints of the conjoined "antinomicity" leaves; and a GPS-triggered projector that, floating on a puddle back at the TAFE, casts a palimpsest of family photographs — and of "photos of the area without my son or my daughter."
Relation to Beach Surgery
Though Leif and Katita never appear by name, Antinomicity is among the most Beach-Surgery-saturated of Smith's works. The narrator notes that "my first attempt at a novel was birthed at the top of that car park" — Beach Surgery itself. Its imagery recurs almost verbatim — a "labyrinth of streets that rise and fall between harbourside industry and lighthouse shine, by the beachscape shadowed by military fortifications, orchard courtyards out the back of hospitals being converted into robotics warehouses." Its couples are Beach Surgery's mirror-logic made flesh: the Tin City pair who split the year between a beach shack and "a mirror copy … amongst the red sands out west," and who, asked which came first, "couldn't remember"; and the analogous "Fighter / Failure" self-division. The teenage quiet beach beside a chemical plant and a disused airport runway, and the alarm-clock-in-the-pool sound, complete the kinship — a key instance of the two-that-is-one that the franchise endlessly returns to.
See also
- C. W. Smith · Subject (Ontological Incompleteness) · the cycle · the glitch
- A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight · Pastoral Scanlines
References
- ↑ Smith, C. W. Antinomicity. Abrachas Publishing, 2022.