Against reproach
How much floats unsaid between these islands. Yet there are moments when it is all there, a deafening amen, edged in icy light. An incurable fool, I keep setting out on these little rafts made of so few words so poorly bound. I am no sooner afloat when I hear the wind laugh. But the only place for hesitation was that shore.
Transmissions among us.
A day of midnights, and we wanted the endless blue. We waited for the bodies to walk from the graves and when they did, we saw them as flashes of what we could not explain, would not mention. We were watching for bands of jays. We wanted, walking at the lake’s edge, escape. Escape! we said. Wild, we said, Untamed! Aspirational declarations, we did not know their substances and heard the dead sometimes like voices between sleep and waking. They offered up secrets, but we had yet to learn their language, smug visitors that we were, proud of our rage, our escapes, our untamed hungers. The rest was late and deep and went on mostly unseen.
With Jon Fosse.
There is a possibility, when planning a scene, of doing nothing. Of taking time, as the saying goes. Besides, something always happens anyway because with nothing to do, it’s all breath and questions, both of which are loaded.
With no buffer between a life and a sense of scale and scope, every exchange is weighted, too. There you are, lover. I see you, strange stranger. Strip it down enough, and you are left with a fierce poetic sensibility.
With space enough for reflection, everything is linked: death, the living, and the tension of seeming opposites. With so many unknowns, held at the boiling point, you get a very specific ambiguity, and if there was a point you were meaning to make about the nature of communication between us, perhaps it is only this.
Yes, it has always been this complicated.
***
Inspired by (and with borrowed phrases from) this article by Sarah Cameron Sunde on the plays of Jon Fosse.
