Kara Kendall & Maya Pollack
Sunday, April 7th, 2024
2:30 PM
A found text, with additions and omissions
A: He tells himself other inconclusive stories, asks useless questions, performs useless
gestures out of an embarrassment of distress for a strange world that was lost as soon as it was
created. He declined to celebrate or affirm anything in human life. He will admit to only four
certainties: that he has been born, his living will die and for reasons unknown and unknowable
he cannot keep time. As silence proved its own hardships. His thoughts formed a hiding-hole in
the depths of which he could bury himself and remain invisible even when he was looking at
what went on outside. When he saw an external object, his consciousness of what he was
seeing would remain between him and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which
prevented him from ever coming directly in contact with the form; for it would volatilize itself in
some way before he could touch it…
B: Where do we begin?
A: Should we start with a brief history.
B: Before my bones, nerves, and veins were fully strengthened.
A: Should we start from early childhood.
B: I was born in a lightning storm.
A: Should we start with your name.
B: In a minute. I’ve forgotten the words to tell you.
A: I knew them once.
B: I’ve forgotten them.
A: We’ll talk without them.
B: As God would have it.
A: Is he smart.
B: Yes very smart he sees right through me.
A: In my day we valued blindness more.
B: Mystical
A: Mystical I don’t think we have that word mystical.
B: Musical
A: Ah the perfect listener yes.
B: It’s not surprising.
A: It’s not a secret.
B: Secrets save me from dissolving.
A: What do you mean.
B: My separate existence.
A: My separate experience.
B: My separateness down behind the world.
A: Then do you believe in the unconscious.
B: I see mankind reaching back by the millions.
A: You don’t see the time.
B: But I’m trying.
A: To see time.
B: Every morning when the sky gets blue.
A: As evidence of psychic life.
B: I invent a future
A: while subterraneously living from another.
B: In a place where time stands still.
A: Nothing takes place but place.
B: In the ecstasy of visions.
A: Dreams give us more than we ask.
B: I’m not talking about dreams.
A: Why
B: I can’t close my eyes.
A: So we stumble upon a door.
B: With knees of stone.
A: The slowness of stone doors.
B: Opening in me,
A: it fills us,
B: we arrange it,
A: it breaks down,
B: we rearrange it,
A: then break down ourselves.
B: And we grow smaller and heavier.
A: Like years. In front of stone doors.
B: And it finally gets so heavy…
A: As one dies without knowing where to.
B: Don’t go on.
A: And they look at them calmly with clear eyes. That is the great courage of a body. And all the
others, they spoke with our silence. Extremely busy silence. Do you know what they say?
[PAUSE]
B: What do they say?
A: They talk about their lives.
B: From the point of view of man.
A: A man alienated from its source.
B: A man in despair.
A: A man walking to the end of time.
B: The end of space.
A: The end of darkness.
B: The end of light.
A: He doesn’t know.
B: He doesn’t know where it ends.
A: He is afraid to disappear.
B: He has to vanish.
A: There it begins
B: like the substance of a dream.
A: I heard that was said of the universe.
B: A psalm of solid matter.
A: Heard it and heard of several thousand years.
B: Before I was born out of a mother, generations guided me.
A: Human beings are born too soon.
B: I am guilty of this.
A: I am my own child.
B: And it’s hard to describe
A: the soul moving from the center.
B: And it’s hard to believe
A: he desires to do things that belong to the world.
B: Wearing wrinkled garments.
A: Ashamed of his nakedness.
B: A state of being that craves the last breath.
A: Since everything, when confronted with heaven
B: is broken up into its elements.
A: They crashed, true slabs of rock.
B: Blood flowed darkly.
A: Unearthly music fell into your altered heart.
B: I am the song of myself.
B: I keep falling outside myself.
B: I seek to harm myself.
B: I expel myself out of paradise.
B: I entrap myself.
B: I bind myself in calculations.
B: I keep myself from enjoyment.
B: I exhaust myself.
B: I ensnare myself.
B: I binge on disappointment.
B: I believe those who wish me harm.
B: I equivocate fetish for love.
B: I debase myself.
B: I doubt those who love me.
B: I stifle myself.
B: I stalk the drunken mother.
B: I choke myself in a stutter.
B: I discover my solace in extremes.
B: I exchange the whisper of praise.
B: And I try to return like a drowning man who stamps on the floor of the sea.
[PAUSE]
B: I want to understand.
B: The good woman.
A: The sovereign good.
B: The true act of mourning.
A: I discern one day
B: the skin of the relationship,
A: a certain tiny stain
B: the symptom of a certain death.
A: A double movement of descent:
B: To do again, out of love
A: what gravity does.
B: Love needs gravity.
A: Love tends to go even further.
B: What we create we love.
A: To imitate God.
B: To love the beloved being.
A: To want to recreate him.
B: Human misery would be intolerable
A: if it were not diluted in time.
B: How does a love end?
A: Then does it end? To tell the truth, no one–except for the others–ever knows anything about
it.
B: About innocence concealing the end.
A: I wanted to tell you what I think.
B: One always ought to keep oneself a place.
A: Yes, that’s the word.
B: A private place
A: where one can be alone and love.
B: To love
A: one knows not what,
B: nor whom,
A: nor how,
B: nor for how long.
A: To love
B: all the words are suddenly coming back.
A: To set aside a place inside oneself.
B: Wait,
A: you never know.
B: Wait for a love.
A: For a love without a person attached to it yet.
B: Wait for that and only that.
A: For love.
B: It took me so long to realize
A: that love distinguishes man from stones, trees, rain, and that we can lose our love and that
love grows through loving.
[PAUSE]
B: They say you are wedded to the sun.
A: The only pulse that runs by itself.
B: And I fail to feed on light.
A: As he insists on sight.
B: I watch myself expand.
A: We are not referring to life as we know it from that surface of fact, but that fragile, fluctuating
center which forms never reach.
B: The void is supreme fullness
A: but man is not permitted to know it.
B: The deeper I swing into regions of nothingness
A: the further he is thrown back into himself.
B: I must be very open and watchful now.
A: He is jumping into darkness.
B: I keep asking myself, what am I doing to get out of where I am?
A: What is he doing with time.
B: In the world here and now.
A: That cannot be followed by a Beyond.
B: This is true sustenance?
A: This is a true sentence.
B: Shall I pray?
A: Shall I pray and be ceremonious? And what I assume you shall assume. For every atom
belonging to me as good belongs to you. What I give I give out of myself. One can know the
whole world.
B: Without stirring abroad. Without looking out of the window?
A: One can see the way of heaven.
B: The further one goes.
A: Past the gates of conscience.
B: The world is full without me.
A: And these are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands. They are not original with me. If
they are not yours as much as mine,
B: they are nothing or next to nothing.
A: If they do not enclose everything,
B: they are next to nothing.
A: If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle,
B: they are nothing.
A: If they are not just as close as they are distant,
B: they are nothing
[PAUSE]
A: The common view.
B: It overlooks, among other things.
A: It altogether overlooks the very fact of not being in despair.
B: Of not being conscious of despair.
A: Is a form of despair.
B: It is an infinite merit to be able to despair.
A: It is the greatest misfortune and misery actually
B: to be in despair.
A: No, it is ruin.
B: It is the rising level of consciousness.
A: Or the degree to which it rises.
B: It is the continual intensification of despair.
A: The more consciousness.
B: The greater despair.
A: They speak all at once.
B: It is not sufficient.
A: One sees all at once.
B: The despair which is ignorant of being despair.
A: The lowest form of despair.
B: Despair did not want to be itself.
A: The despairing ignorance of having a self.
B: An eternal self.
A: “I am” is the world.
B: World without time.
A: The hollow boom of time.
B: The world deafly forming.
A: I can hear because I exist before the formation of time.
B: Can you hear frames dragging.
A: I do not hear with outward ears.
B: In your soul alone
A: the light is not spatial.
B: But it is far.
A: Far brighter than a cloud.
B: A cloud which carries the sun.
A: I see this in my soul.
B: The vault of heaven.
A: I see the world in my soul.
B: The ground that is earth forms.
A: The navel of the world.
B: The umbilical point.
A: The energies of eternity break.
B: I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it.
A: And as the sun, the moon, and the stars appear in water,
B: so words and certain human actions take form and gleam
A: I call it "the reflection of the living Light.
ALL EXCERPTS FOUND IN THE FOLLOWING:
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Barthes, Roland. The Lover’s Discourse
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Beckett, Samuel. Silence to Silence (documentary)
Bingen, Hildegard Von. Letter
Cambell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Carruth, Shane. Primer
Carson, Anne. Plainwater
Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet
Duras, Marguerite. Emily L.
Jung, Carl. Man and His Symbols
Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness Unto Death
Kafka, Franz. The Blue Octavo Notebooks
Kafka, Franz. the Holy of the Holies
Laing, R.D. The Divided Self
Laing, R.D. The Politics of Experience
LeGuin, Ursula K. So Far So Good
Lightman, Alan. Einstein's Dreams
Lindhardt, Hanne.
Lispector, Clarice. The Passion According to G.H.
Lispector, Clarice. Agua Viva
Mekas, Jonas. As I Was Moving Ahead I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
Nin, Anaïs. Diaries Vol V
Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time
Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Rovelli, Carlo. The Order of Time
Sarte, Jean-Paul. Nausea
Smith, Tracy K. Life on Mars
Virilio, Paul. Open Sky
Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace
Whitman, Walt, Songs of Myself
Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass