the destroyer > cheap papers > Maureen McHugh
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There's a layer beneath it, the hands opening, the music of jewelry, the sometimes-singing breath of it. It takes a strange tough kind to meet in the middle. If I move my hands to make a sketch in the air of the event that happened, one late night or evening. If I flip the switch and the radio turns on. The flash-bulb of the here and where and the what of it. We were swimming in the pool. We were on the rooftop. The moon looked green
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[THE RESEARCHER] asks you to lower your body into the swimming pool. On the top of the water, you place your hands. The researcher asks you to reach down, to hold the light there. You cup your hands , motioning toward the water repeatedly
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It is impossible to recollect a memory without altering it to some degree. Each repetition of the memory alters it further. When a memory is re-told it is described as being elastic, shaped and distorted according to the time and the place of its re-telling, depending on the circumstances from which it is being seen
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There's nothing here to disappear inside of. To crawl out through. We watched nights condensed into minutes, observing the shift of the light's frantic patterns on the wall. There's a world inside this body, which is just a Stunt Body; it is the body you leave in front of the television watching your body watching the television within yourself. Her voice on the recording sounded distant, a little too high-pitched, not as how I'd imagined it to be. You say the obvious thing: that nothing is ever like it is the first time, can never be. Not the sound of the thing out-loud or inside of it, but the distance between
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It is unknown whether or not all memory is a sub-set of imagination. There is no certifiable way to test this. I recognized you from somewhere, uncertain of the circumstances, yet you swore you had never seen me before. We refer to this senselessness as Something With Menacing Complexity, whether it was your voice I heard from the bath-room, whether I had confused what had happened in the scene of a movie for what had actually been. I told the man everything because his face reminded me of yours. You pronounced your words the same
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The artist envisioned memory as a series of lines holding the world down into a specific pattern. Only a small space is free for us, here, to move around inside of. If you put your hands out you will bump into a wall. If you steady your arms your hands will shake, even though you're sick to death of the kicking / beating part of it. In my memory I had slowed down time enough to count back the pace of it, to own it, but still it felt untrue. To know the way out of but not nearly knowing enough to kick the stool back out from under it. It is a comfort, at least, to know this pattern exists
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Any life-altering experience can be re-told in 50 seconds. Every city in a movie is New York city. Every desert is this desert. Each event resembles the past event before it, each face the face of another, the same manner of speech, the same dull light, bright neon, the same types of darkening rooms. Control is the mind's most desperate invention. You had your fun of it, that weekend. I can hardly think about a life contained within itself; a life not made entirely of the shades of the lives of another. I tried to track it once, in a notebook, but placed the pen down, confused
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The rule of shadows dictates that when moving one step forward the shadow must move one step away. There you go, shifting your light to shine down on another. It is exactly how you'd imagined it to be. It was less interesting the closer we got to it. It was the time and the place and the feel of it. To go through life, wanting to be unreal, undoing everything. Can't you tell I'm joking when I'm joking? I don't even exist
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You say you are able to control yourself by simply not entering the world. Flash of light through the bedroom. Birds continue somewhere w/ their obvious singing. The song which was stuck in my head as you were talking to me, the looped shot of the car traveling forward through the desert, the mind's familiar set of images. You can continue on this wrong path, in the wrong time, in the wrong place, imagining yourself fitting into the body of every-one who says or does any-thing. Everything occurs as it was said to, as it has happened before, as it has happened in memory. But things change, you say, --- so which is it?
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Returning home, you realize what you thought you had for dinner was not what you had for dinner, that the song playing on the radio had not been released until years later. The facts are not correct, but the blonde girl licks the lollipop while the brunette cuts the tips of her fingers off; it sounds like music entering from the other room. Time, the playwright said, is the furthest distance between two places. When I have mastered time I have mastered you, have gotten you out from under me
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[THE RESEARCHER] leads you to a white room with a white couch, the walls made of two-way mirrors. He screams into a tiny microphone. What does it feel like? What does it feel like? You are instructed to stretch your arms apart as far as you can, with two objects held in each hand. This is what it feels like, the researcher yells