Geobloom (Philip Hunter)

Waking Geobloom is a brand of Philadelphia blouse. It’s a jewellery firm in the purlieus of Budapest. Geobloom also seems to be a start-up company for cactus nurseries. But hits online are mainly for Philip Hunter originals, so I suppose he invented the word. Geometry and geography and geology work together, giving shape to the amorphous world. From the start we were drawing lines in the dirt, making sense of our little horizons. Even our words do it, make sense of the amorphous. Joyce loved portmanteaus and on Bloomsday they get new airings. The main character is forever calculating the distance between himself and the next thing that comes into sight. Perspective is just the start of the story. A little explored subject is the implication in the book that everything comes into flower. NeoGeo, for example, was a shortlived art movement. It was made by people who inhabited dulux rooms in the suburbs, and further in. They seemed to prefer pink and tangerine, who knows why. But Hunter is plein air, his geo blooms day and night, imperceptibly at times, across the ancient lands called the Wimmera. His colours roughly detail the earth he knows so well, but are a state of mind as well.

Dreaming The volcanoes shot red flowers of lava and ash into the atmosphere. Streams too hot for seeds, sounds too sudden for reflection. The hills grew into mountains, bafflingly beautiful as the many angiosperm petals. Swirls of oceanic replenishment bubbled like steamed pods. Explosions were followed by erasure and overlong overlay and cooling and crack-up and crustation and erosion and photosynthetic buildup and wastefall and it’s all so long ago. Even if the results are permanently under our feet. And will change again with the next climate climax. We step forth like the man in Ulysses, a strange combination of empirical certainty and emotional challenge. We cannot picture the past yet here it is all before us, hard as nails, changeable as fire in the wind. Inside our heads the geobloom of our brain, high on its rootsy root stem system of nerves, imagines the universe breaking open into new forms. In our dreams it is alive. It is a geometry of different shapes, a geography bearing the flowers of necessity (for their shapes are necessity), a geology to which we are anchored no matter how much we bounce about or step lightly or lie down, like now, picturing the sky.




Geobloom No. 1, 2012 (Philip Hunter)