Leslie Scalapino

From: Orchid Jetsam -- a Dee Goda Mystery

Being between one sun at twilight and dawn -- darkest twilight's jetsam follows one -- holding a sail

orchids in air -- not connected, no hand -- in darkest twilight is jetsam? and -- no jetsam in earliest dawn

orchids -- no hand -- [they part] it parts from jetsam at the same time

Actions as Reading and Plays

      During performance of my poem/play, The Weatherman Turns Himself In, the audience sat in a darkened field of hanging black irises (flowers) with rapid action occurring outside this field in front of the viewers. The activity is going on in a medium where it cannot realistically occur. Rapid action is apparently being represented in a setting of a play which cannot be rapid action, as of action films; and the play's action is occurring solely via the language being stilled to be contemplative as the language's only activity.
      By the activity being separated from the language and going on at the same time, the action is not (only) what is heard and seen, and it only takes 'place' there.
      Activity is the only community. At the same time the viewer is conscious of separation, one solely.
      This passage from Deer Night (which is to be read and not enacted and is also the activity of a play) refers to The Weatherman Turns Himself In:
      "People were describing an action as it was occurring and being seen: as being its occurrence. A man said, "I found the action/the movements distracting -- so that I couldn't listen -- I just wanted to listen to the language." I want the viewer to exist, in this distraction. Not to listen as such. So as not to re-form the action of listening, itself. At all. That one could apprehend outside of formation only.

      Events have 'invented' a measure as space.
      That occurred by their passages loosely extended not occurring any other way as life. Except that it is there.

      "The people migratory, working on the roads, crawling out from under the corrugated zinc pieces under which they live -- where they are on the gorges at dawn burning the tar: dawn is -- life is nothing.
      That dawn is that. (At present.)

      The latter is action that is its motion (doesn't exist -- 'there' at any place as a sole entity in the series or sequences or whole -- not in any other form than its moves) by not asserting its content simultaneously or sequentially. Authority is ignorance.

      There is no reciprocal gesture
      held apart, so that all experience -- which is memory even -- at present
      is not observed -- there is no observation 'there' -- (motions one makes registering as memory are not observed -- in the sense that observation is something else, occurring entirely by itself)
      Cognition (which seems first, after) and events may occur at the same time but separately -- in experience.
      Obliterating observation by it being sole and experience by it being sole."

      This occurs easily by simply giving up one's mind -- and the outside -- not hanging on. (Yet one has to hang on to write it?).
      Giving up the outside as 'conversation' and at the same time giving up the interior 'conversation' occurs in the 'viewing' of performing (these becoming the same).

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