PART FOUR

Contrary to love, one might have expected the last couple hours to crescendo with a blood wash, a bouquet of limbs. And to the degree that we were pulled, ecstatic, past the horizon of the body, its practical violence did become an immediate, throttling aspect of our experience. Another of the things a body does is destroy itself. Or, at least, parts of itself, maintaining a certain resilient sum with which to proceed. The cells, the bones, the neurons—all of it under constant threat of overhaul. Let’s take the bones. There is an age when some sequence in the cell DNA tells it to stop refurbishing the integrity of the bone structure. Until that time, tiny proteins spend all their lives destroying the bones so that other tiny proteins can build them anew. This process fully refurbishes the bones every dozen years or so. Teenage bones, until the end, don’t exist. So, suffused as we were in the non-totalizable unity of the body, these sorts of processes did not go unnoted. But far from spelling out a sort of terror, they seemed to exist as a disproof of peace. An affirmation if you will. The violence of the body affirmed the body as a place to go on living. And as for the violence we’d become used to—the newspaper apocalypse, each morning returning to herald the depravities of abundance, of disparity and riot—this was conspicuously absent. It was as if the world had ceased to enable the archetypes of human drama. There was no revenge, no redemption, no plethora of reactive forces engulfing the now. Nor was there any feedback imagery, no involuntary ticcing of war or the daily, almost domestic carnage we’d come to know. Once, and only once, I was visited by an image that was plainly disturbing. The image of a dog, splayed, entrails rent across the soiled asphalt of the highway’s shoulder. Then the lyrics of a song: “To be red tendon dog, blood breathing by the side of the highway.” And of course it was beautiful.

In addition to these sudden song memories, what could be heard in the last couple hours was legion. True to Cage’s word, the ostensibly inviolate silence of our contemplation contained within it a great aural wealth. But where Cage had made it seem abstract, conceptual, this new flaunting of silence was the very essence of physicality. Suddenly the shudder was sounding. The shudder that we was announcing itself, or ourselves, in oscillating sonic tides that rose and retreated in consonance with the body’s unending revelation. How obvious, we thought without thinking, sound is touch. To vibrate, to sing. The body is a music, an unruly symphonic mass from larynx to synapse. The mess of the body—sloshing, zapping, choking, warping, unfurling, lapping, etc.—creates an aural field that fills and colonizes the air that allows its passage. It also reminded me of drinking—the undeniable intoxication, the gleeful loosening of self and loss of stability. There was the mysterious confluence, that feeling of throat and liquid undulating together, the substance indecipherable from the mode of its delivery. So it was: drinking in and spilling out: the same.

To quiver was to sing and to sing was to imbibe, torquing the last couple hours into a kind of spontaneous bacchanal. But would that have been evident to a casual observer? Having been an unmitigated participant, it’s not a question I could answer. And what might be meant by casual observation anyhow? Causal is more like it. All that time we spent gutting the wreckage of our world so as to see more. That was the problem with seeing. It filled things, created things, changed things and everything appeared casual. Appeared. Seeing reaped and harvested, carving deeper into the illimitable surface of things without touching them at all. The more I learned about seeing the more I saw that cause was effect. It’s like that old worn phrase: seeing is believing. It really is! But not one and then the other: both, simultaneously. And as cause piled up on cause we casually looked the other way or looked directly at it and did not see. If someone “objective” had been there at the end to watch us, he would have been wholly oblivious to what transpired. If someone “objective” had existed, that is. It all depended on the cult of separation, severing the real from our perception because we had been told it was insufficient. Severing each being from every other so as to isolate some convenient truth.

Unfortunately, language is also a technology of convenience, and thus far my account of the last couple hours has struggled between a desire to express things in terms of an experiential real and my inability to fully escape the realm of conceptual abstraction. The latter intrudes and impedes by dint of learned and, perhaps, neurologically embedded habit. But that’s where the last couple hours approached a kind of suturing magnificence. They constituted a situation. We became situated. The place-taking of site returned to us at the intimate circumference of our own bodies. And in being sited, situated, we were not set. It was as if a spotlight had been turned on. And we were in the exact spot where it had been pointed, patient, waiting. It was the sensation of performing, but with the added realization that the performance had been going on for quite some time. Already performing, then, in the spotlight of being situated, conceptual abstractions seemed to flake away. Qualities like warm, loud, wet, rough; these ceased to exist apart from the particular physicality of things. Where before they had drifted separate, unhinged, ready like transparencies to be laid atop the blank slate of the objective world, they were returned to the objects themselves. The notions of objectivity, separation, isolation, severance, definition; all these fell away like a dark game whose rules have been exposed. Or: we ceased telling a bad joke.