Prologue
Beair
Be Air.
I want to breathe you.
Feel my lung chamber.
ACT I
Scene 1
How
Were you in my dream? Or is this a memory of my yesterday’s daydreaming? But your
smell is here…Coming out of the cracks in my skin…How physical should I take it to be? A touch
of an imaginary texture? I felt it too on my skin. So, were you there? Because there is no such a
thing as ‘just a dream’. And that’s what makes night rites bareable and mournings glorious.
Because you know I would sleep forever to be there with you, you leave…making me
cry…only to make me smile when I wake up. Thanks. Kissing you on the cheek, I felt the April
sky gently feeding my dry skin – which, I know, felt different before. It makes me wanna kiss you
till we drain the last drop from the long rainy day.
B: Amuirkey-style?
A: Sure – station to station.
B: Time to build one.
A: In the color of the four winds.
B: …and a friendly road…
A: It might take years to do it.
B: And another to believe that one has actually done so.
A: Undoubtfully delighteful!
Scene 2
Viral
"They knew that basically no one can help anyone else. There is no key, no secret someone has
that he can give you."
William Burroughs, Junky
Small capsules, accommodating one person at a time, are provided in an internet café in the
neighborhood. The place is cozy: the sofas are soft, the legs of the coffee tables elegant, the colors
are mellow, and the shadows of the objects friendly. Each of us was comfortably seated with
various stuff on our laps. Absorbed.
B: How can I help you?
A: Small regular coffee to stay.
B: How would you like your coffee?
A: A little milk…one sugar. And hot.
B: Enjoy.
A: I will.
Back to the capsule. Smoky Arabic sound filling the room, thin stripes seeping into the capsules.
Gentle marimba drizzle. Then distant shores of Ghana and the sound of light. And a bassline jet,
soaking me to the bone with viral epiphany.
Scene 3
If No More
“The minimum speed required to break through the earth’s gravitational pull is seven miles a
second…we would have to learn to run awful fast to achieve escape from where we are heading.”
David Wojnarowicz, “Seven Miles a Second”
Intercultual. Intermediary. Intermission. Interlude. Intermolecular. Intergalactic. Interspatial.
Interracial. Intersection. Internet. Intermediate. Interesting. Interrogating. Intercontinental.
Intercellular. Intermodular. Interreligious. Interstellar. Interchange. Interior. Interrogation.
Internship. Inturn. Interspace.
“If all therapy is speaking therapy – a talking cure – then perhaps all neurosis is a speech dis-ease.”
(Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation, 124)
And what if not…?
Exterior. Externalize. Exter-mine-taur.
T –hes- aurus. T/re/aurus. T-re-asu-re.
INTERLUDE
Crooked Beat
'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'
W.H. Auden “As I Walked Out One Evening”
In a hidden corner of the wounded galaxy, I was sharing the apartment with a couple of
strangers. The place was a mess, but I didn’t care because I was going to leave soon. We didn’t
talk much. Not that it bothered me…just a feeling…Too many void passings by…On the way to
the bathroom…my fantasies becoming audible, slipping through the gap under the door…and back
to the bedroom…Or was it a living room turned into a bedroom, where we were all sleeping,
pretending that we were having our own space? In our improvised place, we had a lot of pillows,
but my neck still felt stiff. My bones heavy. My body hurt.
Later, the lazy sun was stroking my cheeks. “Nice people,” I thought. But none of them
could help me figure out the mystery of my birth. Nor will any of them be there when I die. Right
people, wrong time. Place? But it doesn’t explain it anyway. Indifferent passers by. Hollow space
between the paths which never cross…space that never turns into a place. Then I remembered how
my brother often told me about streets, valleys, sidewalks, bridges, spaces, roads, walking,
running, and driving. Sweet, exhausted soul. And I wonder if he was talking about “pocket[s] of
death…the unfamiliarity of the landscapes agenda, what it contains in the future of its
emptiness” (David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, 39-40). I
suppose he was. In fact, I know he was. How could I ever wonder, when we spent so much time
crying over it…It’s just that no tear has ever been shed. But we looked at each other’s eyes every
time we cried. And it’s this innocence of the feverish flash in the pupil of his eye that helped me
understand what it means to fear that your body and soul might get consumed by the hollowness of
the surrounding space.
His dark brown iris, blurred with tears thrown into ungraspable pits, taught
me how to watch
Gummo and how to love his shaking hands. But it’s also the purity of fire in his
voice and the breadth of his laughter that makes it possible to look at each other on a bright day
and know that
Even in the face of something like gravity, one can jump at least three or four feet
in the air and even though gravity will drag us back to the earth again, it is in the
moment we are three or four feet in the air that we experience true freedom. (41)
The Rut
I was digging a path, tearing hardened tissue – sweating while pushing my way through a
narrow tube, smeared with liquids dripping from broken vessels. I was carving the fabric as my
whole body ached pressured from all sides by agonizing flesh – torturing me, switching from
hostile snaps anxious to catapult me out and a centripetal drag sucking me back inwards.
My eyes burned, touching the pulsating jelly walls of the channel. My cranium was about
to explode to the rhythm of the moving lenses, closing and opening at a pace almost impossible to
follow. I begged the bloody cave to hate me more and shout me out.
The lenses then opened. Froze. And the walls gave it a violent jolt, vomiting me into the
vastness of gluttonous jaws…Into unknown arms…cutting over spikey edges, pouring crimson
over them, detonating the whole world with the substance I was involuntarily snorting through the
combustion chamber, turning it into loud offering.
ACT II
Scene 1
Armways: Smell of a Somersault
In New York the impossible does not exist. Yesterday, where the southwest Manhattan
kisses the Hudson River - leaking into the ocean - I heard silence. Just to invoke familiar warmth
of earthly imperfection, it was sporadically cracked and frictioned by sounds like wheels of a
surfing board rubbing the concrete, or a big baby dog, here and there barking, sonorously keeping
at bay silly thoughts of being lost. Their echoes saturated with salt. “Salt always smells like
memory.” (Sherman Alexie, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”)
I used to go shopping with my mother. Then we decided it made no sense, for even with
kinship, belonging is founded on a commercial contract. But she said that in the world in which
temporality knows no continuity and where everything is constructed in language, she wanted me
to be her present continuous tense. In the world where we do not have desire, but still can own it if
we buy it, sexuality abandons the body and is instead consumed through objects. It seems that in
such a world we no longer need sexuality. “But sexuality needs us.”( Sylvére Lotringer in
interview with Lynne Tillman). In such a world, I wanna be your laptop.
B: You can be my laptop…
A: Good. Can you touch type?
B: I can touch type unbelievably well…
A: Excellent. Can you tape as well as you touch type?
B: You’d be surprised how well I can do that…
A: Can you tape me while you are touch typing?
B: Absolutely…
A: Fine, just try to avoid such words…and you’ll see why soon enough…
B: Whatever…
A: Can you sellotape me?
B:I can sellotape you no problem…
A: Can you tape me while you are sellotaping me?
B: Oh, nothing’s easier than that…Say when you are ready. I am ready. Are you?
A: Oh, yeah…Can you depilate me as you are sellotaping me…you know what I’m saying…?
B: Absolutely…I mean…of course…
A: Ok, do my legs first.
B:I can do your feet too…
A: Very well…are you a podiatrist?
B: Yeah, kinda…more like a chiropodist…but I can do your feet…
A: So, can you do it all at the same time?
B: Sure. Even more - I am also an otorhinlarigologist…
A: Sounds like a rhinosaurus…T?
B: Yes, please…
A: How would you like your T? Milk? Sugar…?
B: No, thanks…I like it straight…
A: Straight you will get…Would you like your T hot or cold?
B: Hot, please…
A: Gimme one minute.
B: Take your time…
A: Can you touchtypetape me while I am preparing the T?
B: I’d be thrilled to…lemme see…I can only do your legs while you are standing…
A: OK, do my legs.
B: Can you put some music on?
A: Oh, sure…how’s John Cage?
B: Cave?
A: No, Cage…
B: Cale?
A: No… let me play it for you …there you go…
B:…Well? Go on…put the needle down…
A: I have. Listen…
B: But there’s no sound…
A: Oh, but there is…it’s just that it’s silence…
B: Bullshit!
A: No, no…listen to process of fragmentation of microlayers of nothingness…
B: Gimme a braek!
A: Oh, yeah… breaks in the unconscious, whose only possible manifestation is silence…
B: Cut it out!
A: It has already been cut up and incorporated in one of the recent projects exploring the
possibilities of non-matter.
B: It doesn’t matter…let’s do something else.
A: But you are already depilating me…
B: Yes, I am..and that’s cool…but I need to check your hard drive before I start taping…
A: What? You didn’t start yet? I told you I want you to do it all simultaneously…I want to
incorporate empty, homogeneous time in that act to show a shift from one paradigm to another –
a departure from the concept of Messianic time…
B: Oh, I know tattooed beat messiah…
A: OK… I myself got some backseat education back in the day…but it’s not that…the act should
show the disappearance of horizontal temporal relationships…horizontal temporal relationships…
B: Oh, ok…I don’t’ mind going horizontal…
A: Glad you do not…coz it will demonstrate how contingency, manifested in arbitrary choice of
events, testifies about their profound fictiveness. Then I will use it to prove the fictiveness of the
very act. That’s why I have to keep on playing this record…sorry if it irritates you, but it’s not
about me or you or…
B:…anything really…
A: Yeah, no…I mean…it’s about something…but not really…and also that ‘something,’ as the
story progresses, sorta eats itself…thereby underlining its fictive character…
B: Makes no sense…
A: Whatever…check my hard…
B: Good…lemme see…looks like it’s all right…now let’s make sure we can go online…damn…
can’t find your wireless…
A: Nevermind…plug me in.
B: But then you are not mobile.
A: I am… a little…but the point is not that I am mobile, but that we have another parameter in the
act…I wanna have the cable in the frame too!
B: No…you can’t have a physical cable dissolve in the silence…it doesn’t work…gotta go
wireless…
A: OK, I can go wireless, but I still want to keep the cable plugged in…we’ll get rid of it as we
go…it will decompose when disintegration hits the climax, OK?
B: Okay…
…
A: Lighter, doctor.
B:There you go…
A:Thanks.
…
A: Can I…?"
B: Sure.
A: Thanks…
…
B: Your foot all right?
A: Miraculous…
B: Keys?
A: Better than ever…
B:Anything else I can help you with?
A: Can you doctor culture?
B:I was made for doin' it…
A: No make up though…
B: This was below the waist…
A: Oh, well…
B: I know…that's a secret… put some record on…?
A: Sure thing…Any preferences? Wishes? Desires?
B: I dunno…Count Ellington perhaps…
A: You mean Count Basie?
B:No, it's Shirley Bassey…
A: It's Duke Ellington…right? Do you swing?
B: I love swing…make it LP, will you?
A: I agree…otherwise is too short…
B: Play some Marvin Gay…
A: You mean Gaye?
B: No, straight…
A:…T?
B: Sure…some black T to keep me up…
A: Coming…
…
A: Here it is…the finest brand of rare Massachusetts teas…ancient plants from the other corner of
the planet brought to and grown in the New World…home brewed…
B: Mamacita!
A: Now…take a small sip and observe how it slides down the throat…that’s part of the traditional
MA T ceremony…
B: MAST ceremony, here I come!
A: It’s not exactly the same, but you can go on…so, take a sip of MAsT, let it slide down your
throat, and follow the epigrammar of the liquid…it normally takes a minute till it gets absorbed
and hits the senses, but once it does, you board a rollercoaster which elevates you and takes you
one level up from where you started your pangalactic drink…
B: K…what happens there?
A: There you pay historical homage to the predecessors…kinda go on a liquid pilgrimage…down
the ages…sorta spiritual journey, which brings you to the center awaiting triggering (which is
typically the arrival of a traveler) and catapulting the Earth’s core…vomiting fire bile…bale…
bail…out …through mother’s gigantic mouth…
B: Like wow…
A: Yeah…but before the ejection of the mother’s cannon ball happens, the rollercoaster takes you
to the site where you undergo initiation into the next level…right in the center, there is a white
noise lake and in the middle of it is the treasure island…you need to get through the noise and on
the island…in order to actually experience the cleansing which is the goal of the journey…there
one goes through the maze called “Hit me with your rhythm stick” – a ritual in which you pile the
sticks according to the beat coming from inside and, by doing so, make sculptures (some travelers
make astonishingly good sculptures)…there are four stages…once the shape of your rhythmic
sculpture matches that of the invisible core, you have reached the fourth stage and the content of
the earth’s guts forms a powerful jet carrying you out…
B: Groovy…and then you spin…and spin another track…and spin me…until we get consumed
by fire…
A: Yeah… all the way back to the state of absolute freedom…the one which requires no external
stimuli…total purification and spiritual awakening in which we are actually transformed from the
earth’s bile into emerald light… but
because it’s not possible to reenact the original state without
rites of passage, you need to invoke it by going back to the cosmic womb…
B: Where do you enter?
A: Because you need to be ejaculated through the mouth, you need to enter through the navel…
B: How do you find the exit?
A: Because the state of absolute freedom is such that it does not allow errors, you don’t have to
worry about it…once you get inside, you’ll see…you can’t go wrong…
B: Okay then, pass lightly one of the cups…
A: Perfect…
Scene 2
Later
A: Will you join me to a gentle country telestratum, Gringo?
B: How far is it?
A: Approximately 3.5 miles from here.
B: Is that the rite place?
A: Precisely – that’s the wright time.
B: I just woke up determined to keep my secret alive.
A:I believe in live and let live.
B: Give and take kinda thing?
A: No – give and receive rather…it’s not about taking…
B: I didn’t mean to boog you…
A: That’d all wrighte.
B: I am becoming the horizon of your disappearance.
A: For which I am endlessly thankful.
B: I don’t wanna be transformed into a supersubject…I’m just a Van Goh for you…
A: It shouldn’t bodder you…People no longer project themselves into their
supersubjectival objects. That party is over, amigo.
B: Interesting…
A: Instead, they became just potentialities of velocity.
B: Verily…Listen, I thought you blew the whistle that woke me up.
A: Nothing can be farther from the truth – I am the whistle.
B: I might see you later then, Gaucho.
A: I wouldn’t doubt it – not even for a split second.
Scene 3
And
B: All correct now?
A: Yes, my prehystoric señor. I’ll have some more of that exoplasmatic pie.
B: That’d make even an ambulance attendant…or whatever…puke. You’re a hard boiled
tripper…
A: You’re talking with your mouth shut?
B: Nay, it’s jist that you cannot see it.
A: I can see everything.
B: Don’t be silly. Rather open the other eye1.
A: Ay…or should I keep it closed and try to smell the sound you make?
B: It’s not that it’s closed…know what I’m sayin?
1
“And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the
feet, I have no need of you.” (Cor. 11:21)
A: Kindasorta…
B: So? Goddit?
A: Goddid. Still, you mouth’s not moving.
B: Right on. Now you are ready to be initiated into the secret I’ve been keeping alive for so
long. Sometimes a sound enters my aura and conquers my whole being.
A: It has to get out somehow…
B: Precisely. And it will.
A: Is it palpable?
B: Only in certain circumstances. In order to achieve such a high level of sensitivity, one
needs hyperexperienced guidance. How’s that for a starter?
A: Sound by me.
B: Listen, we’ll have to make a couple of delicate adjustments in your northwestern wind.
A: You reckon?
B: Absolutely. The right level of sensitivity requires a superbalanced mixture. This, in
turn, is to suggest that you need not only make the northern stream flow more freely, but
also allow a constant, smooth, and measured influx from the south side – already incensed
by a touch of the eastern sister-stream. All this keeps you in a state of a perpetual, mild
drift, where the conversation among your four winds lets the right four- part mixtures to
fuse with it, only to be carried on towards the big mouth.
A: Say?
B: All the required linguistic preparations completed, my blood bro. If you wish to proceed
with anything related to my immaculately exposed explanation, I’m afraid that will imply
actions other than discursive.
A: What are you scared of?
B: C’mon…it’s just empty phrasing… means nothing…just to keep the conversation
going…euphemism in many cases…
A: Do I need to get castrated?
B: Oh, God…I see what you mean…NO – euphemism is an expression which allows you
to talk about nasty things, so it looks as if you were a nice talker. What you confused it
with is the word eunuch. You have to understand that readjustments of this kind require no
self injury. No external violence either: all the aggression – if necessary - needs to be have
been realized in the preparatory stage, which in your case (I’d dare to estimate, but correct
me if I didn’t get it right, has been done quite thoroughly).
A: I’m with you on that.
B: Very good. So, do you think you are ready for having your mixture fine-balanced?
A: Every bit of me.