10.21.23
rotterdam
imagine yourself set down in the very landscape depicted, you said, your hands navigating unattended. and she sees herself thinking that to imagine is to travel fragmented, like passengers moving from one present to another, in transit between visibility and invisibility, paradoxically motionless yet in constant transformation. i am but a visitor of dreams, spaceless, i said.
s p a c e l e s s. i navigate between worlds that do not belong as i myself am transience on apparently stable forms, formless body of. i exist as unbound entity in the inconceivable, the never worded.
and yet i imagine myself in the very landscape depicted, the vista changing even as i move. maybe time does not recall, maybe time does not exist in the memory of spaces that used to be, in those that never were, but she had set down in that very landscape before. and she left traces like powder like dust like shuffled time frames. and if body, like landscape, were to be solid appearance in which history can declare itself, then to know of embodied presence is to create embodied presence. but i look at my body, a container inhabiting spaces where it must remain foreign while begging for familiar landscapes. i repeat, she looks at her body as a container of foreign affairs, a foreign body in an incomprehensible space, but moving along with it, through it. and she knows then, i know then—she is but a resonance of engraved rhythmic cycles of both past and future causes, continuous, fluid, feedback-feedforward cycles in eternal loops of being-in-consciousness. no, she will not dare to declare history itself; she is mere carrier of stories-to-be.
please try to imagine yourself set down in the very landscape depicted, you insisted that evening, but my thoughts had been scattered for days, hot curled in a slow whorl of dark veins. or entangled skins from old carriers. like spatial-emotional paths. and i see myself returning to that landscape and she sees herself existing in that landscape but only partially. like an oblivious observer of a sad parade. imagination is unidirectional motion, i remarked. and thus, i moved in absent pre-occupation to the other/outer world while knowing you could not conceive a separation between inner and outer regions of the mind. but my outer world is always too present, i recall saying. my inner one often too restless. and yes, to perceive may be to carry out an act of remembrance, but still.
[
a silence ]
is this when you start to dance, you asked. i am but interface between organism and environment, to move to the surrounding cyclic rhythms is to formulate my physical existence as dwelling. alternatively figure and ground, my body craves to be inhabited by many different bodies, by many different minds. and she sees herself existing in a room—not in nature, not in space—and i see myself becoming sensorial matter itself, time itself, merging form and function. and who told you that the body was atemporalized, dematerialized?
i rest, no longer in the very landscape depicted. those windows, mostly open to short distance migrants carrying reflections of vegetation and temporary perception, shut down for the night. the world itself begins to breathe as my body, like landscape—not nature, not space, a body—becomes sacred meaning of idealized but concrete form, never function.
note:
my body is a collapsed act
violated
by demand
on request
as landscape.
my body is
a multitude of generative fields
like greenhouses of missing organs
like orphan spaces.
my body is a landscape
that as landscape
belongs to time
and long after the movement has ceased
i exist
she still exists
this is when i start to dance, i say