Recovered

(This is the most recent piece in a project that begins here)

Counting for chronology
Perhaps out of habit
I question it
Look at the numbers
They mean something other than designation
A language I’m unfamiliar with
Satisfied as such

I wanted to tell you about my life of machinery
– Hm?
These things that are difficult to describe
Most of them don’t make sense to me
– Hm.
I don’t think about death and outer-body experience
It’s here with the machines
With tools and channels
The knowledge of how to operate them is alien
Almost unwelcome
It’s a tenuous balance between the ability and the abhorrence of the action
– Like eating.
I raise my eyebrow
– I get that about you.
Fair enough
– This is odd music.
It is
Fitting because it is odd
And so not odd
That looks stupid expressed in written language
– Muscle memory?
Could be
The things that make the most sense often cease to do so the earliest
– I’m intrigued.
Oh?
– You’re making a lot of sense.
We watch
Our heads turn at the same time
Watch what unfolds in the room
Or the memory of it living in the space before us
These turns of language make no sense
– It’s the wrong dialect.
True
This mode I find the least appropriate
Buried as I am in the machinery
The constant translating of form
– ‘Appropriate’ is an interesting choice of word.
Pan to follow the shapes
The sounds
Pan again
The large jagged hole in the wall opposite
Blankness beyond and I remember the house
– Dialects and dialects.
I don’t quite understand what he means
I don’t pursue what he might mean
The shape of the words is enough
For a brief moment I ponder invitation
Dragging a guest through all of this
I come to think of the guest dragging me through it
The intensity of such a looping and layering
Somewhere far away there are needs
Machines themselves
Constantly moving about
It appears to be what I’m made of, I say
– We are made of words.
That’s what I decide the machines are
The cells and the electricity and the vapour
Words in my mouth
Words that make my mouth
Words that walk as slow as Lons across the rocks and cities and seas
Romance in the rhythm
Contrived form
So that the words can become shapes
Figures
Born from the surfaces of everything
Autonomous in the cell-division of their own words
Their shapes
And that doesn’t make sense either
It goes and I don’t chase it down
I forget how long I sat there with him
Or if I did
Or just wanted to
Or always have