1/16/91 by Joshua Clover
No matter how far we back away from ourselves this scene will not reveal itself as a movie set. Not the low building not the couple meeting out front & not the desk clerk who is sick of it all. The sign flashing dirty green / pink / off & on again eludes through its perfectness--a dull trick-- the possibility of being a propmaster's deceit. STOP HERE / X-L MOTEL / STOP HERE. Because this is all there is to know we know that someone here is desperate. By the Atlas Evening News it is almost morning in a different faraway city--a foreign city-- while here night is just starting to lay out its necessaries on the nightstand: a slow gyroscope doubling as an alarm clock a lowgloss magazine & a certain number of shiny things unaccountably remembered as planets or coins. We cannot believe the desk clerk's radio has just said something like "diplomatic bombing" as it crosscuts between correspondents & home. There is a brief statelessness in all this fluxing where we can exactly be everywhere. Lovers sliding in past the only façade do not believe in each other as much as they believe in Valentino & some fantastical Casbah--signs for that part of it all before desire broke itself. The desperate ones know how all-that-refers must in the end rise from the bed of the real & ascend into the theatrical evening where our false light stutters neon neon none. . . . We are traveling into the new theology or rather this is what the couple is doing. This is the time--finally this is the time-- that it will be miraculously sexy & last all night. The clerk will be stunned into a passionate life & hagiographers will surround the motel
-- Joshua Clover (Madonna anno domini, 1991)