- Jun 26, 2003
- 376
- 2
- 18
(This article is inspired by and dedicated to the imagery of Walter Benjamin)
People tell me life is a race. If it is, it is a circus. You can probably picture the big top; it is loud, garish, comic. See its red and white stripes ascending into the clear summer sky? The grass is a little withered around the entrance but nothing too bad. Picture it in a park. Your own special park. Maybe it’s a piece of woodland, maybe a beach. It doesn’t matter. So long as it’s some place you know. A place where events happened in your childhood. I knew someone once who wore a Batman shirt and would go collecting little creatures. She would stand, arms up and smiling, – such a smile! - holding nets and insects high into the air in triumph.
Come closer.
Listen, you can probably hear the cacophony from inside; the music floods out, all styles at once. Look, there’s the ringmaster beckoning you inside. He's an Oxford man, old sport. Draw the curtain back. Come, come don’t be afraid. Here you can have everything all of the time.
What acts are on display?
**
The big top is theatrical; one can’t sit and think – he would be bored or lonely. At a circus, one performs!
The nature of the performance is gesture.
Gesture forms around games. It forms around most relationships. It forms around fucking, and drinking and standing middle-aged, beer in hand, gazing at the television. Around board-games and visits. Gesture is theatre. It is false experience. Gestures are formed by protocol; the sink of life. Throw your being into it. That gambling game. It matters. Those things that dole out feeling to be dressed in emotion’s garb: their design is gesture. He doesn’t call her, she is upset. She cries. Throws her hand to her brow. Gesture. The last gesture of a gestured relationship.
Throw shapes.
There is no experience. It is packaged. There is no wisdom, for tradition is dead. Myth once led man, guide-like, to the wonderful certainty of death. It too has died. God is so very fucking dead. Gesture leads us, like players, day upon day – it matters! – until ‘all our yesterdays have led us, fools, the way to dusty death.’
It is a writer’s curse to sit to the side and watch, insufferably full of himself. Perhaps it is why I do not get along with people easily. I mean really get along. Deep down. I always aim for something higher… to record experience – itself gesture – that people might see themselves. To spark something, if only in one.
A writer records the gestures of others. He lives not but observes.
The lips parted and spoke: “you are too serious.”
People tell me life is a race. If it is, it is a circus. You can probably picture the big top; it is loud, garish, comic. See its red and white stripes ascending into the clear summer sky? The grass is a little withered around the entrance but nothing too bad. Picture it in a park. Your own special park. Maybe it’s a piece of woodland, maybe a beach. It doesn’t matter. So long as it’s some place you know. A place where events happened in your childhood. I knew someone once who wore a Batman shirt and would go collecting little creatures. She would stand, arms up and smiling, – such a smile! - holding nets and insects high into the air in triumph.
Come closer.
Listen, you can probably hear the cacophony from inside; the music floods out, all styles at once. Look, there’s the ringmaster beckoning you inside. He's an Oxford man, old sport. Draw the curtain back. Come, come don’t be afraid. Here you can have everything all of the time.
What acts are on display?
**
The big top is theatrical; one can’t sit and think – he would be bored or lonely. At a circus, one performs!
The nature of the performance is gesture.
Gesture forms around games. It forms around most relationships. It forms around fucking, and drinking and standing middle-aged, beer in hand, gazing at the television. Around board-games and visits. Gesture is theatre. It is false experience. Gestures are formed by protocol; the sink of life. Throw your being into it. That gambling game. It matters. Those things that dole out feeling to be dressed in emotion’s garb: their design is gesture. He doesn’t call her, she is upset. She cries. Throws her hand to her brow. Gesture. The last gesture of a gestured relationship.
Throw shapes.
There is no experience. It is packaged. There is no wisdom, for tradition is dead. Myth once led man, guide-like, to the wonderful certainty of death. It too has died. God is so very fucking dead. Gesture leads us, like players, day upon day – it matters! – until ‘all our yesterdays have led us, fools, the way to dusty death.’
It is a writer’s curse to sit to the side and watch, insufferably full of himself. Perhaps it is why I do not get along with people easily. I mean really get along. Deep down. I always aim for something higher… to record experience – itself gesture – that people might see themselves. To spark something, if only in one.
A writer records the gestures of others. He lives not but observes.
The lips parted and spoke: “you are too serious.”
Last edited:
