Mirrors should reflect a bit more before sending back images

Jean Cocteau

No matter of desire. Life is wasting. The over under animal.

Grey is seeing to the evening, realising once more that a
writer is a person dedicated to the point of mania. Sat erect
on the hotel toilet, a space that amplifies all sorts of insides,
trousers round his ankles, belt pointing towards the door. Hes
worrying that hell forget to flush, that a cleaner will later see
him staring upward, supine in the face of hotel policy, dwarfed
even by what is small. Listening is anything but rational, he writes.
Wanting to surrender this existence he has not asked for
up | down | standing | sitting eventually he will become
pure motion. The hotel room is bereft of anything that might
resemble toilet paper. It doesnt matter anyway; over the last
couple of years hes found it increasingly difficult to finish.

Naked, he moves fast to the bedroom, accidentally socks his

left foot into his trouser pocket. The capsules that scatter
over the bathroom tiles are the same colour as the bright
horizon of the recently displaced Reni painting that now sits
against one of the adjoining walls. He fingers a small piece of
limestone usually wrapped in an embroidered handkerchief.
Whilst staying in hotel rooms Grey harbours a perverse need
to obscure any reflections that may send back images of his
face.This is why the handkerchief has been separated from the
rock and is now sellotaped to the TV screen.The last time hed
caught a glimpse of himself the silent messages had sounded
like pins and needles, it had taken him months to dig up the
tactility of the burrowing tic, repeating that death might be
nothing but sound. This is Greys recurring dream.

Letting himself run over imperfections in the rock, Grey

presses a thumb into its face to keep it quiet. Considering the
vanity in his wooing of emptiness, all too suddenly, he stops
chasing the sugar. The gap that opens up is a shallow, outrage
of his image, and will soon disappear, leaving things slightly
as they were. The world behind the curtains is the world of
vibration, he says, and the light turns through like water with
no blood, or centre. When he thinks of her, he hears nothing.
An intuitive affectation, inanimate gesture reduced to mental
collapse. Fixing his thought on stillness, losing it. Where does
it fall? Inside, he pushes, this is emptiness. In Aristophanes they
shit on the stage, like dancing lanterns. Trodden down and
bellowed. Her body, that he has made hollow over the years,
long since made its last sound.

Pressing his thumb further into the object, he forgets once

again that he has a choice. Sat on the edge of the bed, planting
his feet shoulder width apart certain muscles the abductor
and adductor, duck out like the rupturing of clarinets. His
thumb stuffs further. The melancholy proportion holds sway
picks up where it left off responding to his constant need
for dilution. He welcomes the damp warmth of the bed
bracing raising his feet. Immersed in a life I cannot see, Grey
quickly scrawls, I cannot hear harder than ever. He realises he hasnt
seen his toes for some time. Its possible, he mutters through
clenched teeth, for a train to be dislodged from the tracks, as if
it were another persons feet, coming to slap against the side of
this bed. The whole thing slides towards the mirror, exposing
former impressions.

As a play of interruption in scale and space, this will finish in

irreversible dislocation, though for a time nothing much is
happening; flecks of dry coral sitting quietly among his fingers.

Playing host, entering another stretch, he studies two figures

in his mind. Two deceased marionettes whose insides he will
sew together a few hours from now, disappearing behind
the surgery, creating a centaur on a conference platform
messed with the evidence of previous circulations. One of
these figures has always been old, like a cave, half his features
covered in obstinate shadow, a face like an unwittingly wise
oyster, already in state, failing in lacquer. The other is covered
in mines, as still as a vase. Or some eggs. Or a book. Both fuck
like giraffes; too busy catching lizards to watch the air show.
Blown through a pipe their skin creates a landscape, ricochets
hard off a pigment bound with saliva and urine.

In pieces, perceptions of the other walk over the selfperception, and Grey, as hard as he might try, can never quite
tell which way is looking. Buuel and Lorca are specimens in
a jar he needs to unscrew, a mutual attraction owing at least in
part to their difference. Shattering to breathe that air, he pushes
these selves further out into the dunes, as if hollowing out a
memory. Two hands feel for evidence in the thick carpet. A
light blue tie hangs over the bathroom door when captions of
light formulate monotonous renditions on the wall opposite.
A white telephone does nothing in the far corner. Continuing

to bend, bare feet creasing the light, itself-intermittentlyexisting. Springs. Goose like and flaring. He breathes slowly,
feeling the yogurt skin under his right eye, returns to the talk
in his mind, his own small reverie.
Today we are little snails from the fields, just before
falling asleep.
You need understand (for me) it will always be an
obsession.
On my hand, it was an obsession, like cutting open the
moon.
What you ask of me, I do not ask of you.
And so, what now? With nothing left, do what we
will; we must try and invent our desires. Ring our own
definitions, saw away at the planks so that only we can stand
on them, turn against ourselves and bite at the glass obstacles
we are want to admire, all the way to the heart. We must
open the heart, hung with rope, dangling from a bridge.
I recognise your voice, but not those lips. I cant
distinguish you from
empty up.
You mean open the window?
You remind me of getting old.
I cant hear you.
As if you were listening to Wagner.
Exactly. He had no reflection. Listened under himself.
Who are you?
Filled with joys both the world and not the world. The
closer we move into the gossamer, the more indistinct and
brighter the sleep.
What she hears outside is what I hear inside. Ill cut you
in half.
What is there inside to be heard? Is this what you hear
outside?

The outside, or an outside?

Am I speaking? Do I not work?
The object was overrun by coral, heavenly naked
bodies.
Bravo, bravo. Like some kind of fevered dream.
Aeroplanes of fathers, smelling of iron Im sure.
I saw this over a distance, covered in his ninth
symphony, stomping heavy feet and smacking my face time
and time again against the golden surface of the Baroque. So
love would spray from the ground, like the wings of a bull
mounted naked on a swan.
Were dividing into some kind of polysemic
claustrophobia. Hopping and opaque.
And we are as endless repetition. Our present remains
spinning in the ear. Someone will eventually claim that time
does not finish a poem.
Were in your ideals again are we? Hm
Lets
say, its not through a conscious recollection, that such
distance may be surmounted, rather that it may lie with the
unexpected. Imagine statues of the libido were to fall about
our ears. We might finally sit among the objects, gorged and
yellow.
And thus eventually it has very little to do with the
thing heard, wouldnt you say?
We can fail to anticipate the future so many other ways.
Do you remember the games we also used to play with
objects? When we sat in the quiet of relative orientation, a
map positioned just above our heads.
More and more, it was forgetful and beautiful. No
matter what an avocado stone of Matisse pink inside a false
wooden eye a wooden partition and the telescope full of
dead angels and saints under some sciatic cubist throne as an
arsenic lobster, a life size moustache on a tiny giraffe, a photo

of Jean ironing an orphic bathtub that sounded at the time

like a steam train of birth charts dating back to Pierro
della Francesca, who was sat in front of Cocteau, waiting
to get in the bath, which was impossible, and this was the
point, the anxiety of pushing that which was behind to a
place where one can see its behind. Ideal phantoms in glass
tubes, everything may again move, slicing itself in half. The
light would always crumble as it passed through us, as if an
inflection, hung up between two curves, like the belly of a
whale.
Before us, we planted so much static, a kettle whistle,
the Douaniers portrait of Apollinaire, made under the skinny
pines of a muse long since passed, and not before its time,
stretched out over the distance of some colonnade we found
recordings of bells pushing up the quartz, an empty film
projector simulating a cow coughing up its own mother,
it span like Sister Vaseline, a pastel left on the floor, a sex
organ, a fallen chimera. We would gaze for the long hours
at Albertos portrait of Char. That sub-auditory sense, a
so-named dysarthria of the ear, which fell over his knee.
We were full of playthings. Encounters stretched through
piles of bright morning hours. Remember the mountain on
his forehead? Hed sit for days burning under a hot bulb, a
descendent of Parmenides in his cold cloaca castle, singing
dry away about how he wished to scratch at the ears of his
audience, with fingers like large green almonds, creating the
air tired of circles and lines, dreaming of canals and sailors.
It was a sign. Like his dead poet, handsome as a Roman
tortoise, lying in front of us on that deserted boulevard,
the eyes of a heron in his mouth. We felt a desperate need
to empty ourselves that moment, to push the brain and
the body, leaving both to dissolve in their own way. Like
emptying ones bladder we said, the micturition of the brain.

Too fast! Too fast. Think of me, think of her in me

a waist like water in my mouth. If there is an order to be
perceived, whatever you like, but too fast!
Bending in her is the best way you know of staying
still whilst speaking yourself into pleats of matter as they
bore through you in sounds lost. What we have here is
constant and split. As confused as a lamb in love with a thorn
bush. Her figure is a dream-proteus distended. Beyond
observational limits, like a rootless algae. Stuffed empty. Only
after a long struggle can we hope to reveal something of
her true air, the malady of love. Char, holding this vice to
the point of perfection, would not stop writing about its
boundary, Im sure you remember, the stone features in that
adsorbing poet, tied down, waiting to enter the forest.
I remember the transitions, fresh from the external
to the further external, his chalking of what we heard, no
matter where it may have derived, taking up further layers,
creating nothing but temporary borders in the folds, where
the line sat in still pursuit of itself.
Ive always hoped that in mind of his image, we could
eventually partake. That the line would strip us naked in a
reciprocal breaking.
Why has your voice become so high? And why her?
Lets not stand on ceremony. Offer me a little something
would you, my little prince? Trust your own bark at the foot
of this flood.
She has always been that which we cannot see, do you
not understand?
This gets old as we do. Just look at my hands. Or whats
left of them.
Some might say its hearing that makes us old...
From that angle sentimentality sleeps the bad sleep.
The possibility that there is a beginning, some kind of
distinguishable point, is absurd. From which point can

such a thing be judged, or from where, can this non-point

be made? Singularity to proffer universality. Its not that
its I mean, its not that, its always, its the hammering in of
digressions! Points to after points points. It was a small and
soon blunt bird that eventually flattened the quagmire.
Especially when were hungry. Getting serious in the
face of concentric circles erasing themselves, wearing away
their gelatinous suspension, so far removed from a sense of
origin.
If its all the same to you
No! Its never that! This is, its all, all the dry hay! Can
you not smell the cod chafing its spread over our walls?
Whatever we speak bats fly right out! A huge pile of shit flies
right out. Dwarfing the field in which it resides. The field
solely responsible for such stink. And yet surrounded by it.
A dint in absurdity. Day after day. Dog after dog. Mirrors
come and go as they wish.

Holding open the void, Grey hands it to himself. The room is

a series of boxes within boxes, each one trying to depart and
move into the other. He is the cold-standing-waiting-figure
between them all. On his back in the dark, stiff limbs, his eyes
break the balance, coming to rest on the ceiling to which the
night before he had pinned the conference schedule.

Sound moves in with the silence.The prefigured boxes become

rooms in a projected flow of close images. Looking across the
mirror and up to the words forming words, Grey reads slowly,
becoming slower as he moves down the list, pausing between
names to hear the pause that becomes longer between the
words that break.

SPECULATIVE
ARRANGEMENTS
IN
TIME
A series of semi-nonfiction semi-fictions

DAY 1
3 pm: Buck Oak, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti & Benito Mussolini.
4 pm: Jack Rubin, Lou Andreas Salome & Robert Walser.
5 pm: Michelle Wall, Marianne Moore and Maya Deren.
6 pm: Alice Bonafoux, Kenji Mizoguchi and Junichiro Tanizaki.
7 pm: Grey Underdown, Luis Buuel and Federico Garca Lorca.

DAY 2
3 pm: Bachiko Watanabe, Maria Theresa & Belsazar Hacquet.
4 pm: Ray Horse, Thomas Browne & Robert Burton.
5 pm: Ivy London, Mary Shelley & Hyacinth Marie de Lalande de Calan.
6 pm: Astrid Pin, Charles Baudelaire & Auguste Rodin.
7 pm: Hart Cohen, Carlo Emilio Gadda & Pier Paolo Pasolini.

DAY 3
3 pm: Marcel Patch, John Keats & Heinrich von Kleist.
4 pm: Agata Hall, Adlade Labille-Guiard & Jane Austen.
5 pm: Rosa Macinnis, Italo Calvino & Anne Sexton.
6 pm: Marit Rask, Ralph Waldo Emerson & Anton Bruckner.
7 pm: Clare Hugo, Alexander Graham Bell & Isadora Duncan.
8 pm: Antoine Beach, Friedrich Nietzsche & Carlo Collodi.

For these three days sixteen hewn individuals will permit their
minds to wander. Misplacing various furniture and ornaments
into empty rooms, they will sit patiently in the dust and stare
into the mirrors of several constellations at once. Controlled
by a whiff of indulgence, towards which they may push their
minds and tongues into the mouths of others, receiving
unfamiliar organs in return. Speculation and imagination
coinciding as concerns not wholly past or present.

Waiting, Grey picks up himself, shuts his eyes, looks in the

mirror and says: this isnt about how to listen, or what to listen
to. He pulls those words out from behind the mirror, feels for
the colossus between them, the one absorbing fractions of
his voice, curving towards a more formal tone, scratching for
lack of its former intimacy. Rather than what he could make
with a set of tools, he concerns himself with how to make
the tools themselves. Grey studies a thing before it is made,
stomaching all the while, whether or not it is possible to be
free of perplexity. He is visiting a world in which the one
listens too much and the other, too little. This evening he will
stand up and try to imagine himself a method of prismatic
correspondence between the two who will enter him not
even the once, as he enters them twice, creeping up on the
stitched hellion in his mind. He has for some time now felt a
motionless enlargement of jealousy that he has been unable to
extricate. He cannot help but force himself to watch himself,
as nightly he delivers the amorous inward attentions Lorca
sings to Buuel during their dialogue that is, he forgets in the
moment, his bullish mind.You chew and spit like a duck,

says the former of the latter.

Fingers spread wide. Hell, in a low voice. Hubris falling into

embryonic layers. Everything is subsumed by electricity.
There is no one employed to clean up the shit. Look
around us!
Well quite, but at least we cant smell our own faeces.
We can fling it, thats our goat, but the field the
Aegean stables
What are you saying now? This is far too dramatic, what
have you been reading?
Ive only ever wished to see a cupid, sleeping among
the curves.
A surface ever exploited. Taken away from us. We want
it too much.
The man was never mucked out.
The smell was endless! We think thinking. Is it our job
to speak a thought that has no empirical counterpart?
Show me a world that only exists.
I have nothing for you.
Such a thing, whatever it means or is to you, would
have us dismantling all elements of linguistic dichotomy,
creating language anew, bereft of the word. A work of
madness and love that is as impossible to imagine as death is
to the hopelessly rich.
At such a height it could reconfigure those long giants
of anatomy, physiology, continents, atmospheres, worms!
Enormous figures, reflections of their own unravelling.
What was it that Schwob used to say? Lets push the
plumb a little.

Now this I do know. Where are my glasses? Ah, never

mind. Those among them, tiddle tiddle, who are merry, sometimes

turn their behinds towards the sky and cast their excrement in the face
of other men That would be you then they strike their own
bellies lightly. Your cochlea must be quivering like a telegraph

pole. I can only imagine, in sweats of delight, do we receive,

like a sweet lime in warm sand. My veins are full of salt;
choirs of slugs are cutting down the forest. Like a Narcissus,
or some kind of resounding Democritus, I cannot help
plunge fingers in my ears, and finally know peace. Until I
can no longer hear myself.
What do your sirens sound like, in there?
Opposition is removed, in there, as you say. I play at the
feet of a daughter of Aphrodite, at least thats she calls herself,
blinded by the pleasure of such gorging crown, I peel out
of myself along the pier, until nothing can be distinguished
from place. If it were only possible, I would remain that way
until I drop, again.
In there
Would that it were so.
Do you ever grow tired of circles? Dressed up in such
violent postulates of romanticism, your words reveal nothing
to my concupiscent gaze but the neckline of this ocean.
In our concentricity we can witness both sides against
themselves, civilisation and nature. Feckless misanthropes like
our friend, who perhaps I should call a misomaniac There
he is, look, walking like an ambulance into the crease.
I believe the word were looking for is logomisia.
You really are quite beautiful. Going to such trouble to
uncover a word just to shroud your inconvenience.
Please.
Open this would you?
What are you passing me?
We must keep our trousers from getting too wet.

We must make regular trips to toilet.

Well, after you dear language. I would wish for the
opportunity to admire your back as we careen down these
salty slopes.
Look at what youre doing!
I find it difficult to commit to either without the other
following.
Youd next set me down to believe that the sky was full
of sound. That we are nothing but an empty lump of body.
Get up. Each one of those holes you might call teeth that
help what a word to use here give form to the words
that contain those letters that somehow make up the words
in some kind of heavy/jewel-encrusted sequence. And what
non-noise when it all hits the ground! They are parts of
that ground, you see, just look at it, all you need is a partner
who does not know any better, to partake in this idea of a
correspondence. Look at him, sat there, faces all crackly and
jammed, teeth swimming in the sharks like the pursuit of a
word.
Youre not wearing anything on your feet?
Im cursed by my lack of imagination.
Well see to that.You see this door?
Ever so.
Exactly. And two hours from now.
Whos to say? I had an inactive youth you see.
They didnt move to pass you by?
I couldnt stop moving to give them a chance. Or to
know I even existed, I suppose.
Youre spoiling me.
Being. Always.
Do you hear that?
Never.
Why dont you sit and look to me as if having heard it?
Heard what?

I cant see it to show you.

But you can hear it?
As ever.

In uniform motion, Grey takes himself apart and slowly takes

back up, little by little. He thinks he listens to himself through
hollow tubes accentuating ceiling clouds through gooses
wings. Finds donkeys underneath it all. Hes deliberating, as
usual, as to how much hell need to explain. His speculative
conversation, between the director Luis Buuel and the poet
Federico Garca Lorca, he hopes, will serve as a premature
insight into the deaf and cyclical dialogue of Buuels last film,
That Obscure Object of Desire. Throughout the dialogue the world
of moral bearings and reason is almost impossible to discern,
frequented, as it is by attempted closures of distance and
polarity, the failure of the psyche, it is unquestionably related
to love, obsessed with all its bedfellows. Grey is searching for
something in common, between the unique and different,
forgetting, seeking one and losing both. In Buuels mouth
no one ever listened to anyone else. The talk is to trace a
palimpsestic and punctured dialogue, the nebulous and fragile
consonance between imagination and ear, anima and animus.
By placing a mirror in front of his face he will speak of loosely
depicted memories, of puppets sewn shut. Surviving them,
he mutters, this is how I will remember them, some distance
away and in silence. I already know the memory will follow
me. Experiencing everything as if I remember it.

Grey is a small man, like one of the characters in de Chiricos

squares. An inverted and yellowing reflection of several

five-pound notes appears above the sink, as if it wasnt just

an image. He shuts the door, takes some lavender out of the
small glass vase next to the bed with white sheets, and rubs
his fingers. To symbolise an inanimate presence, he writes, is a statue

dreaming to transform into a living being, a Daguerreotype of marionettes

laying eggs inside each others veins, pushing further on in low tones, shoals of
cold purple particles pushing past their teeth, handfuls catching at the tongue
and falling back, succubae in love with absence, emptying their rooms, keeping

He stops, rubs again at the limestone as if

it were his eye. A piece of pink paper sits on top of a pile of
books that follow him everywhere, he runs his purple fingers
over the material, fanning its surface with soft brown marks,
intermittently pulling up and saying out, like sporadically
grimacing at small openings of sunlight seen through the
myriad leaves of a tree:
eyes tight as they refill.

the slow peach attempting to understand

listening is a closed loop in the endeavour
to dream under a copper roof attempting to
understand without windows haunted mirrors
by mirror makers an obscure object and the
obscure object

Tonight, he affirms, there will little need of description; Ill stay

away from the edges, from the danger of trailing or influencing
the conversation towards a surrounding. The two will listen
only to each other, paying attention only to what is said.They
exist in a temporary white vacuum, a formless meal they will
share at the foot of their phantom. Greys imagination covers
his mouth.

In Poes Philosophy of Furniture its assumed the reader will

understand that what the author wishes for most of all, in
his wanton description of the soul of a room, is to be able to
surround himself with the species of ornament most likely to
induce the particularly stylised visions and dreams he seeks;
hence my, Grey continues (arms protruding like collagens
of laminin), need to imagine a vacuum. A handful of ashes
cast onto the retina. As Grey holds up the stretch with which
his body is occupied, he basks under a filament heat, a moth
inclination towards beginning his routine with positions
simulating a ninety degree angle, much like his proclivity for
the right side of the bed, or the third chair along. Its as if hes
calling everything to a halt, asking every object in the room
to relent as his brain pushes and pulls itself from the skull.The
sound of a cleaners trolley knocks along the wooden door.
His senses crisscross like bullets.
But you cant show me?
No.
Because you cant see it?
Yes.
Can you hear it now?
No.
Then what does it matter?
It matters all the more now I cant hear it. Its louder
than ever.
Youre not listening to me.
I cant simply turn it on and off.
Inevitable enough. Im not even listening to myself,
thats the case. I imagine. No, I can hear you in my back,
now it is that youre not speaking, travelling your mouth feet
all over my tiny spine; or is this hearing? Well. Well. Am I
all ears? Is this a matter of anatomy? Or is it language?

Perhaps what occurs is some hearing of different things at

different times, in different ways: though our inability to
notice or to care causes a prolonged confusion. This you
see is what I hope to avoid, a life so preoccupied with
meaning and cause that I can only ever end up feeling pity
in sight of my own fallibility, pity permeated with a fouler
sense of egocentric world melancholy.
What are you?
Trying. Thats it for now.
Your heart is in the air somewhere, next to its picture,
full of rarefied mouth air, gradually lost to night static.
Give me a hand with this would you?
This is the matter. What have we got in our hands?
We are undoing for it to die. This head in all our hands,
the head that has nothing.
You promised to record yourself whistling and dancing
at me.
Now you remember, yes, you shovelled at me, didnt
you, covered your mouth and asked with your eyes for me
to document my mad dreams, you didnt say, youd thought
about, what was it? Your mad branches and my mad dreams,
mad stumps, mad frost, sat on a stump covered in a frost
covered in some madness dashed with frost on the hardening
ground.
I hadnt cleaned my ears in months.
Im listening
What to?
Im waiting
Im listening to you, surely?
Close the window please.
Is it open?
I dont know. I cant tell.
Listen to me.
I am.

Im listening.
What to?
Do you recognise my voice?
Yes, Im listening.
What am I saying as you do such a thing?
Its hard to say, yours is a noise in a city of noise.
Hang on, Im listening.
Listening?
Yes, remember?
You begin anywhere.
Thats the thicket.
How does this have to do?
You stop anywhere.
Say something.
What do you want me to say? No, wait here we are.
Ive been listening and now I shall say something. I realise
that now. We were listening before we were born I should
think
Stop the wallop.
Fatuous I know. The worst kind of excess. It was six
years ago.
What was?
My visit to some Jakes.Years ago I visited the Jakes.
Id never been. The sisters inhaled the water. The mountains
and the water, that constant murmur. I wanted the invisible.
And havent since. Been and wanted. Shant again, if things
keep going. I find it hard to sit still, you know, harder still
when I walk. When I walk thats it. All I do. Its not that I
can hear, either. I cant hear that Im hearing. Walking in
fog, you called it. I see perfectly well. I dont often its
not that I I, no, never, I never am orientating. A dog in
part the hard in the hard nose I am. And dog says you dont.
Roaming on some level, anyway. I, I walked there on
purpose; you can believe that I bet. Mm I quite

remember the place though I tend to forget its name, in

the Jakes.You know, Ive heard it said listening is a method
of defence against surprise, can you imagine that? Treating
trees like women, so my mother used to say. She posed liked
that on many an occasion. I walked not hearing to this place
the name of which I forget. Itll come to me. Six years ago
it came to me, though I was already there. Walking for
hours. Eating everything. Walking all night, ignoring the
depth of my ears like some kind of reverse Uccello. I ate
everything. Did I already say that? Pollen. Ovum. Grass.
Germ. I arrived, then five hours it took to get back, which
went without a hitch. Beautifully, empty on the outside with
no leaf and only a certain few stones misplaced underfoot.
Birds conjugal on fevering algae. It was all happening. But
then I took place. Atmosphere is a hard run term for outside,
eh. The outside Ive arrived yes, it was listening has
changed, or it at least did, for a moment. I wanted to sit close
to the waters, as close as I could with my ears all clacking,
you know, white noise and wind falls. Six years later I arrive
again back at the squeam and silt I could have quite easily
said anything, eh? The squeam Oh, you know how I
love the Orme, yes, that was surely my next ringer. Down
into my pocket. The Orme, those fucking goats. Here I was
minutes ago, an advance of merit on my part. I land a little
further away with each visit. Though I move I continue to
move less and less. I dont remember when it was I stopped.
Dear heaven how I stopped listening to your remove.
Theres a chafe outside I simply must gnaw.
How anxiously I wish to listen to myself, but I can only
move. To even hear myself would be something. I tell myself
its as if our lives depend on it. But I can no longer endure
my presence next to you.Your chafe, my expulsion, you push
it in and I feel it out. As if, watch out, Im going to crumble
you.

Do you remember writing this?

The rails obscured as movement, as people dull in light. The
reflection, already an obscurity, further obscured as space
between individuals. The time it takes for one individual to
become another. A picture of a burnt out floodlight next to
an infant logician. The obscure reflections: stones of light
cast through skull, after skull, already an obscurity, further
obscured, short lived. I was just that moment thinking
how locations barely exist only because people are so keen
to escape from wherever they happen to be. More and more
worlds. Come to a man, semi-wretched, watching with
intense interest a tree that has grown out of his groin.

A bit hoof and straw Whats the point of trying to

remove the sound? Its unbearable.
To escape from a transition light would not exist, like
water on dry rails you tell me, you wrote it.
But you can only know after, not before?
I wish to fracture into sets.
Hands in each others itinerary.
Hands off my itinerary!

Having paced during the recitation, unsure of his Spanish,

he now stands a cough away from the trouser press. Peering
over his shoulder he catches sight of the buttocks his by all
accounts one smarter than the other. Like his toes, he never
really gives any of himself a real eyeful. He grins to think that
he will eventually live under the thin gas of an arabesque, a
habitation in which he will perform once before his performer.
Off. And caught. Standing before the audience of obscene
gestures, the voice suddenly placed there, says nothing, no
motion, former speech, keeping nothing in reserve. Waiting.

Thousands upon thousand of colourless entractes with no

possible digression. Not questioning whether anyone would
be catching what was going on inside his head, outside his
head, rather than their usual frying of his unmoving body in
the coarse and noisy lard of instant distaste.

He isnt really that interested in the musculoskeletal system,

though he cant help but be interested, seeing as he now carries
a penchant for everything.Three days ago he purchased a book
about the history of Bavarian labyrinths, seeking to abandon
the thread of his vocabulary to context.That same morning he
spent hours on his knees, pushing a look from his face similar
to the emerging stains on his trousers, incredulous, and the
colour of soap. He was looking for mycorrhizal threads in the
damp moving soil, keen to believe for himself the fungi that
supposedly leap out of the ground in the wake of the foot,
catching microscopic debris flung into the supposed absence.

He needs the silence that co-exists with stretching. Moving

slowly through the motions lodged in his mind, forgetting,
noise and static apparently issuing from his body, ignoring
the reflex of nerve endings careening through neurological
pathways as if he somehow had a choice. He pushes and
pushes the sound out of him in order to live without it. The
more work his proprioceptors do, he tells himself, the less his
proprioception will matter. He can forget everything, grow
into stillness, lines of the mind. A tacit bystander who has set

something in motion and forgotten, or simply stopped caring,

that its still undergoing change. He will on occasion, with
eyes closed and hands, when possible, tightly clasped, watch
himself stretch. Watch himself sawing away at himself until
its impossible to stand. His body is full of fish: fish for bones,
muscles, and blood.They will soon build him a phantom limb,
inhabited by gargoyles. This is his obsessive impression of
personal detail, and inside the fish, he has endlessly considered,
are acres of tiny trees, brittle uprooted maples, deaf to evidence,
and a mess of sensory collision.

During a manic reading binge (an early method of coping

Grey had hoped to develop) he came across the Golgi tendon
organ in an old blue hardback concerning dialogue and the
bodies sense of itself. The more he learnt about tensions,
receptions, cation channels, reflexes, muscular fibers etc.,
the harder it was to shake the feeling that his body would
eventually suffocate itself, flicking and pumping over its own
dry surface. Eventually he taped the book to his bird table,
your physiognomy is my physiology, he repeated over and
over as he dispensed with more and more gaffa. The piscine
shape of the tendon organ immediately lodged itself deep in
his memory for fear of the impending disappearance.
Stones of light rather forceful, dont you think? Im
still itching
Itching? Youre dancing!
Itll never stop. Im asleep, but I must move. Theres a
wind over me.

So many things were thrown out of the library.Your

legs are the least of our concerns.
Healthy legs, healthy legs and concrete, healthy legs.
Run to walk run to walk run to walk.Might
/ thrown the light-emitting-lamp-light have been more
apt?
Lets try and avoid it as best we can, we are neither of us
cut out for such a thing. We fall foul under the heavy yoke
of narration and as such are stuck carrying the loads of our
minds in a shambolic cart made of beginning and end. Best
we stay quiet.
I can never say what I mean, even now.
The light wasnt thrown.
A place of light sick out the other side of place.
The other side of place?
Scaffold should not ask questions.
Snow is the reason your teeth are so white.
A single obscure reflection, a place of light folding
and pleasuring its cloudy sinew. Diminution is a wish for
deafness, an ear with no skin, we could go our whole lives
without throwing a snowball.
Yet you cover us in snow.
You mean to talk of ethics? You know I cant afford
those trousers. How funny it is, that to speak about the will,
one must first learn the language to speak about it. Where
are my braces?
Youre moving into the point.
Punch me in the stomach then. Or Ill do it myself.
Its interesting to consider that any explanation or
elaboration might well perform its own cancellation.
Listening need have nothing to do with words.
What are you?
In the wrong place Im dirt.

Get dirty through too much civilisation. Whenever

we touch nature, we get clean but make nature dirty in the
process. Theres little difference, we just elaborate upon it.
Up in those mountains he could never get used to the dirt
of others.
Its here for us both.
Show me then.
I dont know how.
Maybe this world is hiding in your ear Show it to
me.
We dont need to talk about this all the time. Where are
the emotions you so prescribe?
Whats the deed?
Theres a note sleeping inside your helix.
Then we must both go outside and read it through.
Im beginning to hear you.
Keep digging for those signifiers. Then back up to the
surface. All this dust we talk out of our mouths. The grass
tapers and footprints leave their mark, eventually the clouds
disperse behind the ridges. We will clutch the slippery fish
and move towards our dark sea. Arms outstretched, as open
as a troglobite.
Do you always leave your words out all night?
Do your words always lead to the corner?
We are both of us, you must admit, relentless diversions.
Ever since that bird flew into our ear, a tremendous
loud bird, considering its own stature, even among birds that
it was.
That object herein of our attentions, stuffing us close
into a life bereft of further depth, a bird flying into the ear.
Im surprised it didnt happen sooner. The emergence rooted
itself.
Here, let me.
And that layer that layer knows nothing of the

peculiarities of this incubating thrip, lets say, for want of

diversity. Small but not small enough, though neither did
he, our puncturing thunderbug. Who was it that held to the
layer that is he, understanding anything of the accents and
stresses under the dens of our relief?
Speaking our accents into spiders.
Earlier on, the fringed wing discovered the merits of
picking up a pigeon off the railway tracks. The glass covered
in kazoos.
Are you well?
What do you supposed was heard, in that ceramic jar?
Id rather you tried it yourself.
The resonance of the town meant something other.
That is. It was a cure of his image. Lets wait a moment.
I mean. Caterwauling around such a confined and harsh
architecture, he must have been the pre-dawn masochist.
Imagine that face, shimmering as the inhabitants awoke the
quivering surface with their mass undersound. Witnessing his
reflection in the opening.
Look how detached you are, and how well you now
speak.
That was a long soul.
I have an androgynous silence.
When one tries to understand listening, surely its this
listening that gets in the way.
Now youre talking like a book.
Indeed so, whilst in need of good clean order, historical
evidence must turn up later. How do you propose
To evidence that invisible?
Listening is hearing snoring, caught trousers down,
laughing as an amplification of an unamplified event.

Distance, then, gradually lets get louder Your

luggage. Gas up! Case upon precarious case, she is in need of
emptying again, look at her, overflowing with our incipient
and feckless qualities.
We are swollen. Look down.
He was swollen.
My listening is proof of my love. Cast everything out
like seed, for the ducks.
All I can do is love you madly.
And then return always then the lime! They are falling
but we are full.
Is that how we are to denote a listening? Is that whats
happening here?
We have always needed to sit under a tree in order to
listen
What are you dragging me?
To the lime.
A-field------------------------------earinnocent**andtheeleven**field-called-the-headchess.
Stop panicking. Stop messing. Stop struggling.
Stop this rhetoric. Drop it back in the water.
Whats that on your head?

Grey stretched like others drank, it was a habit, a determined

absurdity. Or, as he absently put it, a way of ironing out desk
wrinkles. As is often the case, the habit bore into deeper and
quieter foundations, digging up the slow inroads of malady.
Hed received a diagnosis of Parkinsons disease two years
earlier. Hed booked an appointment with his doctor because a
matt of purple and black lines had gradually spread themselves
over his chest and back, looking uncannily like the bed of a
Scottish loch, the doctor said upon initial encounter,

going well out of his way to say it two more times during the
consultation in the small yellow room. He was emptying out
into the sea. On his way to the surgery Grey kept close to
the notion that it was a delayed physiochemical reaction, an
obscure manifestation of all the times he had fallen from trees
as a child. It could almost be read like a map, hed said, leading
the doctor to finally reply to his daughters email, whilst Grey,
upright in his gown, watching the reflections scroll across the
old mans glasses darling, you must stop bringing ferns into the house
and leaving them in our bed ground his teeth fierce together so to
force gone the sound of a wood pigeon clumsily beaking at
cherries on the top tree stretching itself at the open window.

The shock, the funnelling of preempted degeneration and

resentment, had shunted his brain into an unforgiving need
for attention; it had to be listened to if it had any chance of
forgetting itself. So he pushed his body into its extremities, the
mind trying to forget itself in the interim. For a moment he
could be mechanical, pass into air.
Now youre doing it, lets go fill our hankies and hatch
up the voyeur of the plaintive stretch.
I see you superbly which, lets admit it, if only to
ourselves amounts to one and the same thing since we
know nothing about either, regardless of what I now see, as it
has everything to do with the brain, its everywhere, seen in
everything, and so
Yes yes, everything is connected, wonderful, straight line
after straight line, stretched and fascinating, truly the hole in
the egg, but lets ditch the Baroque, if only for a moment.

You know full well that neither of us can understand

such a beautiful display, our plumage is crumbly and smells
like grunt awful spinach. Whats that you have there?
You forget that everything is a question of the right
moment.
So the tree alphabet fell from a crane what are we
left with?
The moon shining beautifully on the piano.Yet more
mud to fling at the blind.
You gutless dwell on the grotesque, with its chambers
of warped and self-distorting mirrors.Your falling
deliberation chokes itself around its own incinerating speed,
becoming so fast that you can claim to be the world in the
world that you are listening on.
You and your ophoid animation, does it matter at all to
you, my anxiety? Youve seen the state of my mouth when
I cannot recall a recent event, the name of someone I have
met during recent months, even the name of a familiar
object. Its as if my whole personality were disintegrating like
a sand dune wrapped in a dishcloth.
You have to begin to lose your memory my dear man,
if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what
makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, and it
must be learnt. To listen to ones memory is a skill.
We laugh and terrifying sponges fall out, dry and
terrible. Then we laugh at the sponges, not so much
terrifying, during the fall they take up forms, this one a
mandrake, this one an hourglass, a pelicans tooth, a gullet, a
fresco, a wall, void of geometry, at the bottom of Lake Como.
So much steam!! Whose watch was this?
The wash shingles in nests of burning throats. Images of
bloated harems.
Watch Watch! Tell me!
They were burning many years ago, and yet you

still left me alone with your sciatica, pushing light into the
features of an audience of objects. Ill tell you. Once she
drew the stars night was understood, the moons silent mud,
that painful and exquisite epoch.
How does a swan know what a heart looks like?
You mean the beating of the bounds?
No. Only children will say that citys been destroyed
several times and only we listen less and less and each time
when they talk of big fishes.
Were gone to a big whale. Let me think about prolepsis
proleptically.
Whered you read such a thing? Cervantes? Homer?
Saint Simeon?
Those fruits of the revolving field.
Look at this Now do you believe me?
Best you go wash in the bushes. Misunderstand yourself
along with the tigers. Put that lime away!
I shall wash myself with it, scrub incessantly, itll be
hideous, lime juice everywhere, and if I hear that she is not
owned or responsible for anything or any one. The assembled
refrains of fragility. I shall know, finally, that we have mutated
her over the years, domesticated and made ourselves dumb.
Though, it occurs to me that if indeed this is true, I should
never find out. We have enslaved her and thus ourselves, fool
of our own perceptions. Listening and hearing need not
destroy each other.
It is, if anything, history, a form of study. The less you
wash the better.
Impossible! You and your mirrors.
If we are anything to go by.
Which we arent.
Quite.

It is always round the corner, that which causes us to

move towards movement, dividing a non-existent horizon
into existence.
All this talk then, is listening?
Are you? Shes an application, so is it up to the mind?
Why do I even ask? How desperate are we? What figures we
must cut underneath reason, sweating all over its absence.
If we think that listening can help us to get to know an
Elm, then so be it, or if we too think it can do nothing but
distance us from every vibrating molecule, then good luck
with our imploding! Its happening again, endless thought.
All we do here day by white day is create more listening for
us to listen to as we further create ourselves categorising.
Were drowning in dribble. Fetch me a bicycle.
Were full to overflowing of infinite environments you
can be sure, infinite thought. Its terrifying in the utmost. But
how wonderful.
I can well see you sitting in stinking piles of your
twin, right now, and even then. No distinction, no necessity
beyond that which exists beyond our cynicism.
Your lobes smell of rosehip. All of you are strictly
impossible.You and I are stuck between a love of mirrors and
an unimagined place.
Yes, and so we must breed with the following What
do my organs look like? What song did the sirens sing? And
how many lives cut the Gordian knot?
Your fists must be the size of walnuts. Did you think of
all this by the light of a mushroom?
Lorca: Who first tasted the calf of a bull? When was the
form of the chimera first acknowledged?
Buuel: You look as if youre exuding a mist Come
land on my leaf. Im full of sugars.
Lorca: When will humans be admitted as neither

woodland nor city? What does a welt mean to a bluetit?

No. The I that is not myself corners your reproductive
infinity, negligible senescence, your copulation is constructed
of a molluscs brittle features.
Rubies that emerged from the ocean.
Why do we take cannibalism more seriously than
libraries? If royals can be born surely so to can listeners?
What happened to the voice once it was immortalised?
Enough! All this meat you bulge me into. Speech and
travel the beaks of birds, rests disease in claws of felines, bred
fungus in penetration of ash, yelp lines excited children as
polyps of a dropsy, group sepia glass yet formed. The madness
sounding sand. Heliotropes, the flower whose odour evoked
with time, breasts of thawed ponds, less intensity of dusk, the
sound of new life in the trees, the garden bench, a house of
painted wood, speckled lungs of old death in our mimicking
brain.Your voice is like staring at a zebra and being expected
to talk about it. Nothing is happening, everything is on the
verge. Or it appears that way.
During your culinary tirade, I took liberty and pushed
his wattles aside, avoiding the moonlight of your teeth as
they struck the table, strummed by frictions of splinters.
How else could I chew without these bones? I catapult
all the worse when theres no wind, when theres nothing to
distract through, the dress of the window, no energy to blow
it up so that I might dance for the hairless and imaginary
exterior.
Its as if the child did not just wrap at the door you
unhinged this morning to support yourself after your latest
siege economy.
Ornamental eyelashes sipping water in vases of
microphones, done and done, whats done is just so.
Our hearts, louder still. Wait right there!

Your tributaries will continue to bend.

And I should let you plant black dragons under my
fingernails?
Pull up your trees. Fetch me an ear!
I cant go on with this. Fetch me Minervas helmet!
Half of you are vestigial, you would shout from below,
casting unwarranted glances at the owl leading who knows
where. Probably round the corner. Isnt it.
Each corner need be left as if a delicate architecture.
The small teeth of an old saw. We are all here over clarity and
excess.
You only listen when I talk into your ears.
You only say something when I listen.
Existing until I exist with you.
The death instinct. A gaseous concrescence left with no
other alternative but the death of itself, slipping away quietly.
Into that I would frantically dig, forgetting myself with
immaculate and drowsy persistence, though I tell myself I
know remember: never know what I am thinking, for
only, that I am thinking barely.
Maybe the squirrels but equally a number of other
burrowing animals.
The auditory world is one of relation, though it is never
as simple as a relationship.
To bring our sands together our hysterical parts without
our hysterical whole, passing nothing like a reflection. Just as
we are here forced to speak of things we will soon happily
forget, waving at the tilled soil as if it were only just so.
Weve been here before.
Im beginning to hear you.
Always.
For you, and indeed all of us, an inevitability of not
listening is the pimpled exercise of our rhyparography.
An escape by a sea in which the Sitka spruce has no

might, and is tiny. If only turtles could also nest in trees.

Perhaps we should leave our dead out like this? To
avoid being excavated four hundred years on for the grace of
trains.
All the corners of this world are full.

Placing one hand over his chest and sailing in a sharp intake
of breath, Grey imagines the inhalation swarming around his
pancreas, the pulsing concentricity of the lamellar corpuscle,
the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw, three hundred
golden bees snatching at the molecules like fruiting bodies in
November, hundreds of thousands of tiny bombs exploding
inside of him.

Am I an academic? I hope not. Its been many years. But if

I must be, if that residue is curdled by my small reputation, I
must remember some mistakes. Store them in clay pots. I am
compelled to eject certain memories, to sit and shake myself
like an excitable and dumb child. Of which I know all to well.
There isnt a reason beyond the blind desire. There isnt. Play
with the objective as if it would bite your hands, or better
yet, eat off your face. Compiled, categorised, and maintained,
insides arranged in stringent and binary fashion. Such organs
are emotions of ridicule. All they can do is eject positions of
social standing. I know nothing else. Look at me. I can barely
close my hands.
Is to listen what it means to briefly extract from
movement? Aching and temporary, further and further we go
on into the abundance. We must prepare for the mould.

We cant eat it all. All those boats! Imagine it. I listen only
when I wish, and so continue to grow, to cover every inch.
So phew / listen to the ground as it slowly cracks under a
growing weight.
There are no cahoots here. Its all so slow.
You looked natural a moment ago, can you imagine?
The smell of wax, gone. My heart reared in panic, but all
is well, for the best, the lineaments of your grotesque have
returned.
You can scarcely speculate about a person when there is
no person to speculate about.
My hands used to be warm.
And to Cuvier. He was standing upward and open
mouthed, we must remember. He read to me where there
used to be bells, layers of wayward, he would say, amplify
absent ethology. My bib was stained with everything bar my
patience, here, standing on top of a frozen descent, on his
hands, the watch in his pocket, admiring echo. He said that
he could feel time running through his arm.
Im the grandson of a man who had a bone in his leg.
Falling asleep under cover of Jacks. Without fail I would
rise up as the curdling food entered his mouth. My minds
would fall from his closed ear. Conkers that never land.You
need a mote my dear, he would say, for it is hotly contested.
Shadows cast over his gorgon teeth.
Your well might bring up my potato. The tubers catch
in your throat. Endowing you with farmyard qualities.
Terrible field of footprints. A plumage of magpies burn
internodes of bulrushes in the minds of the living.
Youre speaking of choking ducks, of wearing their
footprints as a death rattle, arent you?
This is your face, our fields, full of away with speech.
Growing on top of itself until impossible to measure, and
slowly we crumble to join the useless.

Like ducks dying on predellas, betrothed to the flowers

of manna ash. As they descend. Carving out grottos for
their dying husbands. In our descent all we can think of is
whacking off in quiet cement, for we have no partners.
Talk to me again about Whitmans constipation, his
haptic light and stadium whiteness. Watch me clean my
shoes.
Beards of willow, mainly, crystallising syntax burnt in
the eyes of his sun. All I can do is whimper, my arms, shorter
than my legs. Not even a knife between my teeth.
I need to return to the dinner table my dear, I left
a note there, it was worthless of course, I, no wait, I have
it here. It goes.Your ear can do to itself whatever it may
wish, what it does is invisible. The body. Is full of grace and
tactility. The mouth. Exists as an after thought, an after image.
The eye. Is everything. Forgetting will begin with your ears.
What would you say if dear Mir came to you, offering
to weld your ears to the untouchable sound of a foot
slamming hard against a wooden floor?
Nonsense I would say! We dont all of us wish to be
whole. My relationship with my own self is precarious
enough as it is, there is so much desire catapulting around
inside of me, its a wonder I havent destroyed myself a
thousand times over, the things Ive done, I want nothing to
do with myself, and so I can do nothing but chase my dirty
wagging tail, circumventing any sense of orientation as I play
hard to get in a desperate attempt to catch another glimpse
of myself in myself. When are we to have dinner? Never
mind, as I was saying I must make sure I dont consume
myself, just think of all the trouble Ill be in for if I have to
listen elsewhere as much as I listen to my desires desiring
me! Sound is the fundamental insignificance of sound, but
I cant imagine being unable to separate myself from that
heavy maw, let alone the daubs of grief and majesty that

would lay crease to my shiny head as I delved deeper into

space not my own, full of things, full of the limits of vision,
drooling, creeping so quietly and small, that no sound would
well up from the barren surface, that no disposition would
then weep here, next to this, slightest of invitations, sad
mess would not start up again so I leave myself here on the
floor, wet and underwhelmed by my capricious inability to
remain haptic form. Common life, common death, I want
no part of it. My ears are ringing horribly, do you not hear?
Residual echoes of mistimed expression; if I were to marry
my listening, I would be helpless, awash on the shores of
my anima, but it will never happen, my listening, it is not
really me, or mine, it is boundless, and yes, I know that you
propositioned me not with the nature of listening, but with
an effect, I know too well that shoes cannot listen, that they
must be an effect of our perky appendages, a collision to
make our nature so, but I would sooner be deaf than yield to
that side of myself, and yet, you know how much I crave it,
how much, when I find myself behind it, hard in admiration,
I wish nothing more than for it to be mine. But you, oh my
dear man, you, accept me for all my difference, do you not?
When you point at me my insides peel over the hill.You
embrace my ocean. We have sat and listened to each other
not say a word, not move a muscle, corresponding between
poles of isolation and union in many dark and misgiven
rooms wherein we would palpitate to misdirect ourselves
between directions, snuffing full to flop with loving self
doubt, admiring our reflections as if we were looking at
anyone but ourselves, paying no attention whatsoever to our
violent portrayals of shared psychological absurdity.

Hes almost done, leaving animations deep in the carpet.

Complicating a stretch that without fail will result in the same
impression rehearsing; this is what its like to eat myself.This

is what its like to eat myself. A ray of sunlight feels the

window unbroken, in his room of glass relationships a ray of
sunlight, divides. Eventually it will all remove. Abandoning the
figure of androgynous ennui, placed against the wall, lost to
the labyrinth. Her arm curled around her skull, let no more
in. Let me remain zero.

Hes in no hurry to draw a line, favouring middle moment

and ground. Propped up against the wall, he sees the image
in reverse, the more he focuses on it the more abundant
and indistinct it becomes. The figures above him distort the
scene, turning the sea into the sky, the light opens it up, the
surrounding abyss pushes at its own frame, heightened to the
extent that any movement could cause it to collapse. Hes
trembling, predictable, his own within, within this further
within, settling into vision once more. The haze forgets the
reproduction. Its becoming harder to see.

What is it Im speaking on? Which speculation, or point?

A subjective welter of interpretations, the mechanical men,
sawing at the small mechanical tree, sawing themselves into
small pieces so as to resume themselves in unrecognisable
figurations each visit, each return, quite out of my say so. Im
at the mercy of everything. Their combined weight affects
nothing, erects the myopic spine; projective automatism does
nothing for their will. With each stroke the previous is erased.
Surely by the time that one indicates hes finished, that its

that its time to begin again, the other will already be thinking
of someone else.
And so it is a love that fell out of us, a bridge between
two stations, a wind made of clay, a force heard behind the
body.
Its raining. Dont you hear?
As if it were pruning the flowers of gypsum.
Flowers of gypsum! Like the jellyfish of a thousand
tigers. Spiders that strike the window at night. Ive no wish
to merely imagine.
Keep going, no matter what you hear.
Cover my eyes, would you? Stay here.
We cant stop for long.
But we havent stopped for weeks.
Well sleep when the moon sleeps.
Slicing the cheeks to the wonderful difference of our
bodies.
Do you have what you want?
Im as full of people as a city. Remember? Saw off
helmets of mistletoe, the tree has many hearts.
Do we abandon our principles because theyre
impossible, or because theyre getting old? Like the story of a
lady, who only opened her mouth to migratory birds.
I hear nothing but birds.
I dont hear anything. The lady, I assumed that was
where you found release In leaving things unsaid. Tides of
infinite and formless intimacy. Our industry of commodious
solemnity. The thick spore will disperse, layer, and build over
itself.
She will never occur in the same environment in
which the thing is. Observations of any form are past
comprehensions, this is all accepted yes? For what its worth.
We have a hard time accepting they are of different

environments, they dont remember their childhood the way

we do, though we cant help but remember ours they way
they do.
Carcass and make ugly, a notebook, dancing feet clash
with magnificent ballrooms of mould, a parrot, and hardness
to crush hardness.
Its already ugly before we create ourselves in order to
condemn. Am I even here?
You were once sincere.
Yes, yes, covered in the excrement of your mind that was
once vague we are all vague.
Out you popped!
We grow ourselves but refuse to partake once we realise
what it is we are growing in.Touch my ear would you. Is it still
there?
The pockmarked little shaver, covered in hair and
dripping in lanolin.Your mind is like a weather vane.
Each one, as tight as an oyster. We sit with our bellies full
of hell and complacency, and then set about sharpening skin
into words.
Surely you mean speech?
Just because youve got a cock like a horse, it doesnt
mean you can throw like one.
Hark to big Zeus!
Hark to those woodpeckers!
You sound like a marble beating up a childs mouth.Your
pockets are full.
Each circumference is one of hubris.
Why are my pockets full of thistles?
I cant admit that.
With our fingers in our ears.
The golden wave.
Shut your noise!
Seldom I would, stand up, and you kill my ears.

And then what am I?

The dead mouths of desire.
Have they ever been in love?
Always, but until now I believed it to be sweat, that
particular smell as you run in panic from some situation in
which you are requested to recollect yourself through walls
of interiors in order to remain recollected.
Shall we?
In all this time only seven oak have grown. I shall
content myself with memory. I have no axe with which to
fill the pot of myself.
My apologies, I thought they were buildings, and my
nose is far wider now it has been through a printing press.
You must have noticed? If the leaves on the tree did not
move, how sad we would be, and they too, in our sadness,
would assume our sad air. We live in deep holes. There is
something intimate in you, concealed in the forest that
conceals the tree. I doubt youll ever emerge.Youre like a
word that suddenly rises into its own Psyche.
Im erratic at best, we all know it, listening to every
leaf that falls, crawling into the sea, into Venuss shell, whilst
I console myself behind heavy curtains, attempting to expel
the stones from my insides.
Shes played us against ourselves. We, civilisation and
nature, language habits, feckless misanthropes, giants caught
in our dirty pants, feasting on each other, promoting
continuity and hiding behind the stress. During our escape,
as we begin to forget, slaves to our obscure perceptions, a
perfect refutation of what she has come to stand for, and
so suitable a template for what we are dreaming to achieve,
might be seen clearly in the sky. But it will always whimper
in our own voice that it does not. And so we will continue
to create yet more interpretations, as we guffly wince here,
motion and further speed to add to that which can only

open over time, copy upon copy that is always our reality,
slipping into the same reality. And there underneath, the
heart, a field of poppies drink themselves blind.
Please, please correct me, slap my soul silly, but she does
not and has never, needed language. When do we stop?
Bend my ear with the shitty purple of aching thistles.
Shes just a wheel we use, like thong, or triptych.
Dump doves! Form any reduction you think might
benefit the life we can never have that we can never leave.
Weve never stopped to see, I suppose. Im sick of being
outdoors.
To posses even an ear is to be bendless.
Its to be as humble as a chaffinch in August.
Give me your shoes!
Where have you been?!
Filling foxgloves with ants eyeballs.
Burning stones you mean? You sound like youre
leaking.
Check my heel, please?
You feel as dead as ash, lay down with me.
Do you still wish to solve the concentric ear?
There is nothing I wish to solve, to believe such majesty
is to beach ones own whale, and I am already terrestrial.
The last time.Your mouth is showing.
Showing what?
You fear me like a stomach of apiaries. Please, no
applause.
I fear salt. The robin turns his back and inhales my
racket.
You never open your mouth.
I have not learnt
You mean you havent one.
So you can let us have it with sound!
As bright as the breast.
Oration, you say?

Of what? Whats happening?

Its long since we were emotional.You see? We follow
the ear and we cease to be lost. Foam in the bone.
Cells in the clay, mould and remould as we, move closer,
our eyes expanding.
Everything I touch is the same. Elaborate and
encrusted. Thats the horror. Where are those who cant help
but lose all intelligence in favour of experience? Who forget
how to speak the moment they sit down among others. Who
cultivate a taste for the usual and unusual. Who tell stories.
Simple and underwhelming. We sing, on occasion, if the
mood is right, to no one, who can hear. We think nothing
of walking ourselves into the ground, our passion overrides
our reason, we are perceived as weaklings for our many
ailments, grossly mistaken perceptions that we are, we endure
regardless of the intellect.
Im cold, these lights do nothing. Am I unravelling?
I am. Suppose we were to listen? Lets not. Are those roses
between your thighs?
What if theres no room? We would perish right here.
Youre unfurling again, seahorse. Where is she?
She is the grotesque. In all this compulsion, to
understand everything, everything fills me with oblivion.
I cant see your eyes.
Watch your fingers.
Madly in your words are more words.
Careful, or we shall fall off the ladder.
Are we picking strawberries?
Who said that?
They who are subjected to the singular strong arm of
listening. Though listening is proud, I grant you. It is only
so because of the humiliation it receives in the hands of the
mind. The house in which she sleeps is not a kind one. But
eventually those limbs will petrify.

Here it is! November, I knew it; the corvidae will never

relent in that ratchet of humping!
Flatulent and epic as always. Lets avoid representation,
no penetration, avoid that, as best we can.
Why is there not a god or saint of listening?
Because we all of us will do, there is nothing saintly
about the ear.
You think the sky is really full of those kinds of stars?
The ocean full of treacherous mermaids? We need the insides
of trees, weve seen their reflections.
Pork and cuff your remarks! Dont make me cough.
Meanwhile. Im busting.
You piss like cattle. All gods are gods of the ear.
Love me?
Stop talking.
Be quiet, yes Quiet.
Disastrous.
He saved the one ship and in doing so the others
were cast out to sea forever. The sea is shrinking. My love is
smaller and smaller by the hour.
What are you getting in?
That hole there. She is the ghost of layers.
Finally. Numerous occasions. Or whats really
happening. We reside in thought webs made of substrates and
transitions.
What about experience? Does experience refute
ghosts?
Of course not, it mutates, and forgets!
So weve got to this point by forgetting?
Forgetting to listen?
I say we never forget to listen, though it often evades
thought, we forget we have been listening.
So to experience is to forget?
No. Its to remember, to weave the forgotten.

The snow clears.

Pull me behind the door and into your breath.
Your eyes have disappeared into my imagination.
I am old and getting older by the second.
How do you propose we perceive such a thing?
Walking stiff and sudden into hum. Feet barely touching
the floor. Consumed by an osseous river outside which our
sister tells of an orange in a hallway, of a pretty young girl
scratching her white thigh behind a door, lion after lion
falling from the Eiffel tower, landing on innumerable sacks of
hazelnuts as the sounds of a thousand people drag their feet.
I am the sheep in love with your horse.
Theres no telling when it comes to the love and its
dilation. Everything we listen to becomes experience.
You broke my compass
None of this is meaningless, we listen to every word.
Or I hope.
What shall I call you? Why dont you make something
out of this? Ah, dont look so mortified! Get your bladder
out. Slowly and slowly absence will lead by its own slow
example. Remember what happened when last you listened
to yourself? You ran to every mirror in town, you said,
opening your mouth to the planes, and not once did you
recognise your voice for the waves.
Put your shirt back on, and dont be so literal. It took
courage to listen to something like that.
Thats why Im shouting, so you dont have to. I love
you. I think, less courage, more forgetfulness. Were listening
ourselves into blisters.
And so our language descends. And within the regress
we may fall on a new language, a sea change, or former
reception. Ive said too much. Lets sleep that bleak sleep on
top of words not said.
Im listening. I think. I still cant tell. Can you? Tell...

No. The one subsumes the others in an old game of

phantom. I slept unusually well last night.
Cant both exist at once? This contradicts singularities
The object observed is singular, the hat stand resides
next to the door, the vibration however, is plural. The ear is
plural, or it is a receptacle of that which is plural. It extracts
from the multiple. We both of us have too many legs.
Im sure we can exist simultaneously. We just cant
observe ourselves doing so. We cant think thought whilst
listening listens. It does us no good to salivate. To listen, or to
succumb to listening, is to fall for the trickster.
So listening is love? But Im still cold.
Of a sort. It is part of the mesh, one will grow tired of
not seeing anything growing on the other.
We never see it.
You mean whiteness?
No always no! Drink at your own lake. I am full of the
sound in here. We must leave.
It would appear that listening was waiting.
Vibration is as abundant as oxygen.
But vibration is not solely comparable to the ear.
The ear is the bottom of the pile.
A squid! Sucking on pebbles in the dark. Holding up
the ocean.
So to encounter is a condition?
A rare one. To encounter is to exist knowingly apart
from listenings spongy lips.
But you said the ear was the bottom of the pile?
Indeed yes! And we are attached to its ocean.
Plural is just another word for mania.Your fist reeks of
displacement. My fruit is scattered.
Terrible ground. They are being social. Can you not
hear them?
Stop moving. Its falling apart. We nearly had it.

I cant!
My heel aches.
Our air is frozen with sediment
Sentiment. There are flies on the surface. Listen.
Listen to me!
It deforms us to its likeness.
You can hear them piping.
It would appear that history is waiting.
Spare us your incipience.
When Lazarus rose from the dead he had no memory.
And that blood-sick beast fed the deed to the word.
The smallest sucker willingly dissolves.
Were not for any one minute a laurel or any other
relation.You absurd. We wait, but why do we wait?
Even with little or no division, there are seemingly
endless permutations of relationships that the ear can crash
in on, demanding its own importance, bereft of context,
believing them, wanting, to be listened to. Eventually,
bored witless, it continues. There are frightening parallels
in this, most parochial of observations, and so confusion
perpetuates itself, gives life to that which already breathes.
The ear is absurd, and we make it worse. Everything is
experimenting on everything, nonstop demonstrations of
history, demolishing the present. Rock pools of association
that ignore the tide that itself will later be caught ignoring
the moon. If we believe we recognise a sound we are led
further into that which we do not recognise, into folds
of beating memory as the mind unfolds, believing we are
experiencing that which in effect has already happened, a
process collapsing under distending memories of its own
erasure. Might we consider, as we begin to empty ourselves
under the microscope of this auditory plankton, praying to
chance to refill our nets, that by emptying ourselves of

environment, we can only become slower, a true speed that

doesnt answer to definition. Think of the down humour
who day by day straps up its own misgivings and feeds off
the face of its unrelenting reputation, draped over a mouth of
negligible perception. The only hand that feeds our listening,
she, that flies to and from thought, as thought, provided with
means to exist its undoing. I could be mistaken, theres little
doubt about that, here as anywhere I am still thoughts vessel,
or so I would have myself believe. One need fill the mouth,
of course, but one must learn to empty it too. I suppose such
a method may exist, but its entirely idiosyncratic, reflecting
the situation of the world in the individual. Heres what Im
trying to say, what Im unable to say, occasionally slapping
my slop onto the rotten floorboards that call me back to my
own doubt. I enjoy the sound of eggcups, like Im jumping
into a frozen lake. We might just as easily speak of the
attentive succubus, positioning itself in the mind, a figure
of such intimate proportion as to be able to push the mind
back into itself, to conceal it momentarily in wool. Blake
once said that the most sublime act was to set another before
oneself, it might now follow to say, or to repeat, that the ear
is a wonderful and precious body, a tool bonded to speech, it
becomes and receives language, and places things at our feet
just as it places us at the feet of things. And so it is once more
undone, given further and further life in the chaos, receiving
impressions through the swelling into which it breathes. We
have been sat still in careful nurture, tilling the auditory polis,
burning and rebuilding in a state of reduplicative society.
Always building a little more than we can burn. What I am
unable to say is what I am unable to imagine, weve become
shadows of a great waste, buried under our own image. Its
amusing, is it not, how such a boundless instrument can leave
one feeling so bloodless.

Delightful.You make me believe that even Sisyphus

could have been happy.
You know I cant perform if people are watching. Im
sewn up tight, like a statue.
We drop our projectiles discreetly, one by one. These
words are all phantoms that travel the hill. The letter roaming
the word which roams the page which roams the mind
roaming the letter complicit, oh, stick your fingers in
your ears to elaborate upon your internal dampness in
which listening might evacuate as a quality of passion. If
we always listen to each other, we will inevitably, quietly,
hope to refill. The more we learn about each other, well,
then we must remember to switch off, to drop our ears
into our pockets, be ready to throw them at anyone who
should disturb this balance between void and equilibrium.
The irresistible force that thrusts two people together would
render impotent those organs with which we formulate
understanding and quarrel, endlessly we quarrel, using
them as they use us. And here I am, guilty of this thick
and baggage; for sure I am a body in the ground. Peppered
with arrows.You cant stop me. Im listening to myself, but
that does not mean a thing in isolation, Im listening to
myself, taking it all in, but what Im being is a cracked, bent
Libra, old and syphilitic. I cant see straight, cant walk in a
straight line, it enters me, tells me Im sour, watches from
below as we sustain in clumsy and ill advised collisions.
We cannot leave each other be. Give each other the space
we need. Were left inside, a small pincer of light shining
above our heads, just enough that we cant see the outside,
but not enough so that we can re-dress, and we stand to
wondering if this is part of the imagination, begin to forget
the prevalence of orientation. Were left pawing, drawing our
walls, speaking of how we might get back to the world

to renounce what we have formerly interpreted. But then

a voice, the two are one the same, Im smiling, as if I were
saying, when I smile it does not necessarily mean Im happy.
Were still there, this shape and I, watching each other like
we would a wild boar, I am inside there and I am here,
talking to you, as you listen, devoured by monumental shapes
of dreams, light tunnels into your bones, sticks there like
glucose, eroding any possible comprehension. Light farms
you like a monolith. But still I am full of a desire to listen, to
correct myself, to keep talking, to erase my words through
the ear, to fertilise my image in the hope of developing
something a little more colourful, a little less sickly. We can
listen to anything we want, and so I cannot help but think
we need to exercise restraint, and this, makes me sick. But I
agree, and I am sick. If I could stop listening to stop speaking
about it. To collapse in reverie over asexual form, columns
and skulls, chlorophyll, thighs. To sit and wait for ballerinas.
I must climb and observe, cast my gaze over the small cracks
between glass and skin, to see nothing beyond that which
I have described. Decoration may risk making the insides
explode, so less of the orange tears or the bear astride the
belly of St Michael. I have in my heart a simple desire, a will
to treat sound with a severe lack of ornament or indulgence,
and to leave it there, to revel in a buoyant symmetry that
swells only to the point that I have no say in the matter. So
that I can indeed listen, detach parts of myself, cast them off,
and watch them still in the distance. But I cannot, I must
listen, for now, and I must suffer in this swill building piss of
it all, listening to myself only increases my bleach, my gradual
descent into personal disregard. Seventeen erect figures lying
in the snow.

Hes forgotten to wash the flecks of blood from his fingers, a

light red gum blood, ejected from the present of his suffocation.
Its 1pm and hell be needed in an hour. Hell be subject to the
usual fare of diligent eyes sucked up and squirrelling around
his body, as if there were some detail buried in the blue suit,
offsetting his bald head, that would give away the heart. As
always hell attempt to resist thinking of the faces as memories
of former faces, those halls of mirrors that were once famous as
places of torture, myriad leaves of a plant, intent on dropping
sex over itself. He isnt so concerned with listening as his
mind is, itll happen, he figures, though evidently he has no
choice in the matter.What more is there to do about it? Its all
around him. It/she. Whatever the term. He gives shape to this
stunted and seemingly contradictory view, he claims, in order
to live outside of it, to be able to return to it; playing under
memories he thinks belong to someone else so that he might
have someone to help him face the other way, a voice that
can tell him something about the tuning of his body, about
magnetic fields. When plagued by the psychological, a man
can be unbearable.

(Perhaps we always want the person we love to have

the existence of a ghost)
Adolfo Bioy Casares

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