The Body Artist

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seams of being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

But it can’t be true that he drifts from one reality to another, independent of the logic of time. This is not possible. You are made out of time. This is the force that tells you who you are. Close your eyes and feel it. It is time that defines your existence.

Time is the only narrative that matters. It stretches events and makes it possible for us to suffer and come out of it and see death happen and come out of it. But not for him. He is in another structure, another culture, where time is something like itself, sheer and bare, empty of shelter.

He kept it going a while, ongoing, oncoming, and it was song, it was chant.

Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me.

There’s a code in the simplest conversation that tells the speakers what’s going on outside the bare acoustics.

I think you are making your own little totalitarian society, Rey told her once, where you are the dictator, absolutely, and also the oppressed people, he said, perhaps admiringly, one artist to another.

You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness.