42

To stand at the edge of myself and not be afraid. But what is there to fear here? The splitting up of the self, a body into two—or really into the here and the not-there, the inside and the inside-somewhere-else. I’m being loose here, grasping at imaginary divisions. I’m trying, in naming the process, to send some little metallic ball down a little metallic chute toward a little metallic hole: like pinball but without all the dinging and flashing lights and counting score. Actually, keep the score because something should keep track—a ticking clock or a word count or the skin on the back of the hands.

Why go at all toward oblivion or speak to the beating body? Why make a project out of description-as-wind? To keep the space of waiting open / to expect another call / to reach, again, towards what never was but still, somehow, feels like a return. An opening, the coming into clarity of a certain pressure system, this always moving somewhere-else-motion of a question.

Lou, quoting someone or some song: “You don’t know who you are, it’s a question.” This says it all, sums up the entire project and names its central contradiction: the answer being a question again, an open field, a voice tracing a word. Drawing a line in the sand knowing full well the tide is still rising.

I’ve asked the ocean for so many answers, for a way through or a new language or possibility again. A call against a call. The same tumbling, unending response. The same answer, approached again and again in shadow. I’ve spent months spent trying to understand a line from Michael Palmer: “The answer was / the sun, the question”