Over the ragged impoverished turrets of a colony of human settlement — the un-actualised signature of this organism — the moon rises in the western sky like a habit. It is timed. Bad things and good things accumulate over the fabric of phenomenal existence like the accumulation of melody through an album from beginning to end. Time is habit and habit time.
As I watch dark heads crowding terraces I forget that I am a woman. Freedom — freedom from embodying bodily functions. The truths of corporality. I watch the heads near and far, moving by minor inches, gliding over the silhouette of parapets. In that moment, the possibility of a head observing from an outer panopticon, an outer point of view, the possibility of another higher omniscience, is not ignored. It does not arise. That is not part of this framing. I witness.
In the same plane of vision, however, there are others. Beings and bodies. They are warm, they produce sound. In a theatre, the chorus — it is psychic, psychological, sings inside, between my ears. There the story plays its destiny. These other actors of warmth and sound, act. They move, motivate, emote. They help you, the spectator, fall asleep at night in the cradle of time. They embalm your soul with the healing illusion of past, present and future. And at the centre, where the mute melody plays and the vision records, time is multiple. Love exists in essence. It is there. In difference, separation, in the fundamentally fated impermeability between witness and the actors. As it exists between Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot.
And in the end, we meet the philistines. The 21st century philistine bathes in art and behaves disgracefully with knowledge. Marketable disgrace. The fetish of simplicity, the positivism of public information, the health of thoughtlessness. The philistines never miss an event. They are well-read, self-aware, capable and critical. They love discourse. But between their ears they entertain a mutilated melody. Every night before they go to bed, they burn the idea of excess and flush its ashes down their toilets. A private ritual.
They ask why. Hide their embarrassment by exhibiting a seasoned nonchalance, a denial presented as a wisdom for balance. They express their reviews in the contemporary language of critique — relatable, understandable, doable, comfortable. The art of layering is ripe. But the ugly is kept at bay. Balance is composed of things bright and beautiful.
Binaries exist as the first by-products of identification. And so when the philistines come and when they go, play it again. Reconnect, re-plug the essential logic relations between witness and actors. Purge cold balance. Air excesses. Reinstate totality.
When all the heads have receded and the first actor tires, the album must end on the same note.