Dear Marc and Shelley,

I am writing to you from the Paris airport, where my Air India flight back to New York is running three hours late.

In the wake of last night’s long opening at Le Fresnoy, I’ll be home sooner than either of you, whose travels I am now trying to spy in the distance —

 

— you by now in Scotland, Marc, at your parents’ house at the edge of the North Sea, mourning your grandfather; and you, Shelley, already exploring Berlin with Elizabeth, a city whose building spree must have changed its profile completely since I was last there.

Lying awake in jetlagged agitation these past few nights at Le Fresnoy, where our final work on installing Housebound proved to be so fraught, like you I needed to snatch at least an hour or two of sleep whenever I had a chance.

And so I tried practicing the old technique of progressive relaxation, attempting to quiet my body down into slumber. But as usual my monkey mind kept me up, leaping from limb to limb.

For some reason the arrangement of my body then appeared to me not with its familiar bilateral symmetry, which I remember learning in elementary school science class (fold the body in half to match eye to eye, arm to arm, leg to leg, lung to lung, etc). Instead I got caught up in a continual action of vertical translation that had never occurred to me before.

First, I found myself transposing my upper limbs down to my lower: shoulders to hips, elbows to knees, wrists to ankles, palms to soles, and fingers to toes — as if I’d telescoped my body down to half its height.

Next came the notion that the two lobes of my brain could become the two lungs in my chest, both pairs breathing together nicely.

Alas, that peaceful co-existence didn’t last long — the lobes moved further down to become the two cheeks of my butt, squashed uncomfortably against the mattress.

Then the mere mention of “cheeks” brought me back up to the more ordinary cheeks of my mouth, which I puffed up playfully with air. This immediately transposed them down to my lungs, expelling whatever was left of my brain there. Perhaps it’s then that I fell asleep, for I remember no more.

I was wondering just now what either of you might make of this visually (or otherwise). If you feel like answering, please do, wherever your thoughts may take you.

Disarmed. Sometimes I wish I could remove my arms before getting into bed — or rather before going to sleep.

For a side-sleeper like me, their removal would put an end to the awkward scrunching of these jointed limbs into makeshift positions that I keep having to rearrange, even as I slumber. No longer would I face the occasional horror of an arm falling asleep on its own, all painful pins and needles when I awake but it doesn’t, instead flapping from my shoulder like a useless rubber appendage.

Eyelid

But this bedtime improvement is nothing compared to another I’ve been dreaming of for a much longer time — the ability to read in the dark, no longer distracted by the ambient space of the room, mental pictures no longer impinged upon by the visual periphery.

Better still would be to do away with the book as a physical object. Rather than on a white page, I imagine the words materializing on closed eyelids — that is, on the same screens onto which your rem visions project themselves on.

Third eye

Now it occurs to me that there are certain kinds of reading, less visceral or at least less immediately visual, that call for a different kind of contemplation.

For this I imagine reading with the third eye of enlightenment, which is said to be in the middle of one’s forehead — not that I believe it. Still, when I direct my thoughts there, I see what I read with greater abstraction and purity.

This higher level of reading is by no means confined to abstract words like love, infinity, level, and the like, or to logical operators like and, or, if/then, etc. No, the words you see through this third eye can still be visual, but in a special refined way that is best conveyed with a couple of examples.

Take the word mirror first. When pictured on your eyelid’s warm membrane, the mirror you see is set in a wider surrounding, which its back-silvered glass reflects. But when visualized through your forehead, the mirror simply hangs alone in space, reflecting nothing (— or Nothing quote unquote).

A similar effect obtains, even more strangely, with the word indoors, which the third eye apprehends as pure interiority. Unfurnished: containing neither object nor detail, just the remnants of the feelings for them.

Having a word stuck on the tip of my tongue is a common enough occurrence, but as an impasse it’s minor compared to another I encounter far more frequently — so often in fact as to constitute a spiritual condition!

This presents itself (deceptively) as a similar problem of retrieval, though not of a word I can’t remember but rather of a thought or even an illumination that escapes me.

Another expression — I can’t put my finger on it— comes a bit closer to my experience. But that phrase conjures up the image of your rifling through messy piles of paper on your mind’s desk, amongst which the right page has been temporarily buried — whereas the sensation I’m trying to describe concerns something definitely not in my possession.

I’ve thought of calling it at the tip of my finger, but by this I don’t mean my finger as it’s about to touch something, but rather as it points towards something out of reach.

My sense of it is that I keep pointing my finger in different directions, wavering as I do so, hoping to alight on the right angle. This is almost like a dowser with her divining rod or a blind man with his cane.

But all too often I find my eyes following just the fingertip itself rather than what it’s trying to point to.

Last night as I was pondering this in bed I fell asleep with the image of my right fingertip glowing dimly red in the darkness. It illuminated the tiniest area of darkness around it, like an impossibly weak flashlight.

When I awoke, however, I was thinking about the sun.

Many years ago I devoted myself to watching great films and to figuring out how to make one or two small ones of my own. With so many hours spent in darkened screening rooms, the basic filmic rhythm in which one shot succeeded the previous one at the moment of the anticipated cut began to bother me — not for intellectual reasons, but in my gut.

I found the same oppressive rhythm in the films of even the greatest filmmakers, who seemed to share no other formal property — Brakhage and Hawks, Rossellini and Preminger. Nothing was more certain than that the shot I was looking at would soon end in a cut, and the next one too, and the one after that.

This felt like an endless compound sentence: A and B and C and D and …

There were films that dispensed with cutting entirely (Warhol, Snow, Gehr), but this was not what I was after. I dreamed of a film syntax that more closely resembled that of a complex sentence, in which each shot had a sharply different grammatical function. There were stabs at that in Kubelka and Eisenstein, though even their best films relapsed into the same familiar structure of one-shot-after-another.

I soon realized that the ideal form I had in mind could result only in very short films, consumed very quickly by the demands of differentiation. Very brief lives! Or, as it turned out for me, no life at all.

It also struck me that you could object in the same way to language. For after all most of our reading is not of one sentence alone but of many in succession. So it came down to the same thing: one sentence after another, all falling within fairly predictable lengths, and all ending with a period.

These long-forgotten thoughts came back to me recently when I was pondering a passage by William James in which he considers the stream of consciousness:

Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period.

Later he remarks that we can’t sustain our attention for more than a few seconds at a time, that when we concentrate on a topic, ours is a “repetition of successive efforts” to bring it back to mind. Each time our mind comes to a tiny rest, we’re soon dislodged again and must flutter off to another branch (hopefully of the same tree!)

When I try to sit and think without distraction, I steady myself by considering the rise and fall of my breathing. The length and quality of each breath varies, but not the fact that one succeeds another.

When the day comes that it doesn’t, I won’t know it.

1

Asked what he was trying to get out of the dancers with all his questions, the composer said he wanted his music to express what they would be feeling when they danced onstage.

2

The dancers replied that they wouldn’t be feeling anything — they would be too busy counting.

3

Earlier, the composer had said he was a practicing Buddhist. Now I wondered whether he ever remembered to count his own breath.