Читать книгу I Love Artists - Mei-mei Berssenbrugge - Страница 16

Recitative

Her voice on the telephone, while she is out of town performing the activities she is describing,

but with a poignant elevation of mood, is quantifiably precise, insistently formal,

as stripped down as a Palladian animation of form. Her beauty is identified with order,

liveliness, serenity, a courtly arrangement of platforms or painted stars.

Half their conversation is in shadow, so they speak in and out of a diagonal wedge of light.

The possibility of static or a gap on a starry electric night gives the impression of her body

constantly engaged in transition, but she desires to enter a body of material by talking.

In Sumer and in Egypt in the 3rd millennium B.c., speech was spoken like an arrangement of stars,

an orderly procession of luminous beings, who counted poetry with sound,

until speaking gave way to a duration that would not reconstitute, so she may appear

as a large masklike close-up and as an immobile figure in white on the bed,

who actually absorbs space.

One can paint stars on a black lead background,

equivocal stars casting carpets of desire here and there in the middle of an errand,

which up to then had proceeded in the state of non-imploring urgency of a body in diagonal,

an image of outreach or hailing. For me, it seemed love was a spiritual exercise in physical form,

and the diagonal was glints off an inferred line of sun lingering, as spring

synchronized with the double space of her desire and her desire for their presence

to be hieratic, not wholly expressive, a standard of grace in the corridor of a day,

with narcissus. If it is through counting that speech is connected to time,

then crossing an inferred estuary of this conversation is a rest in music.