PART FIVE

In a way, I had been preparing for the last couple hours for years. When I say, “we were not set,” I am speaking from an idea of the possibilities that I had been nurturing for some time already. It was as if I had been preparing a kind of hearth, a nest where the possibilities might shortly reside. At first this nest building consisted of word collection. Certain words stood out to me with an uncanny resonance. Disequilibrium was the first and would prove to be the most ornate. The others that followed—veer, oblique, provisional, amid, etc.—seemed almost like sequins that flashed and danced upon disequilibrium’s turning form. Or, further, I think it may have been these words that gave disequilibrium form. As these words accrued and the form of disequilibrium emerged, it became easier to recognize the implications it proffered. We were not set. A balance was not struck. The movement was not linear. The understanding had nothing to do with stability. Or, in more affirmative terms: everything was already veering into the improvised performance of the real. But perhaps that sounds too vague. This is the problem with language. We have developed it to express definite content. Unfortunately, there is no such thing. Ask yourself: “Am I already moving?” Ask yourself: “How many layers of ambiguity exist between this movement and myself?” Ask yourself: “How can I see myself if I am a moving target?” Answer yourself: “What is the use of an arrow if it is always moving?”

Yes, sometimes in the midst of becoming something else, a process that inundated us over the last couple of hours, the answer to a question was a further question. Answers, after all, in the Platonic world we had been thrust into since birth, only worked to shield truth by gilding it. And now how far we’ve managed to stray again from the body! It’s as if we are repeatedly drawn back down into the medium of our discontent. In the dying words of an alcoholic poet: My vocabulary did this to me. So, then, more questions. How is it we became so sure life was lacking? That there was another life preferable to the one given us? Does it not begin with the misperception of an alternative? Or, perhaps, a denial of perception altogether? Is it merely a trick of language? The imagination’s great betrayal? And now who is being melodramatic? Obviously we need to return to the actual events of the last couple hours. At some point after the shaking of the hands, or during, but after we had entered the experience of our own shaking and become it, we became visited by voices. Language, no, but voices all the same, and this is what kept us free from the nonsense above. They began as gusts. One small, deep, guttural gust after another, rising from somewhere central within the shaking of the body. At first they were simply expulsions, like a withered bag wheezing its last pocket of stale air. But soon they evolved from gusts into grunts. Or more likely the grunt was added to the gust. The vibrations of the body seemed to be pulling forth a new capacity, hitherto forgotten in the miasmic swamp of unmediated expression. Gust, grunt, glory. Gustgruntglory.