Durégesis #3: A Monolith of Soft Rains

(Being one in a series of animatics / animations in anticipation of [out of nothing] #7, “time ⊕ (nothing ⇒ but)”; forthcoming, Fall / Winter 2013.)

This is the place where I stayed as long as I could, in the immemorial clatter of water dropping a thousand feet, a trample in the fields of that calm September landscape built on the line of the horizon, the horizon a sudden volume of water might obviate (exactly where that water is: green under the light of the moon), a landscape of insomnia, where there is no need to know the time but to have the consciousness of time passing constantly present to the mind— the place where, at the moment it happened, I know I’ve endured everything but I’ve won—where however close one may be, everything is seen from afar: the liquid and unknown earth, a whole tree shaking itself into aridity, when I was not refreshed I wanted a desert, or a normally dry month as artificial as the world must have been when it was created… yes, I lived here in only the most temporary way, I strolled among memories of myself, my intractable habits, like the sudden intrusion of a consciousness among the fierce unconscious sunflowers, wonderful and futile (of the purest gold (the very substance of History)), and the water I, whose fingers trace the inscriptions on the marble pediment in the weeds, the water I will draw tomorrow is so familiar with time it seems to be time itself, not to have resisted time but somehow to be experienced simultaneously by the flesh and the moon as a kind of vague paroxysm, an explosion lighting up the brain at the same time as the obscure and red night of the womb, thus I was reborn in a city achieved through prayer, called back being by a call to headquarters before nine A.M., if life be presumed by movement, reborn coughing loose a meconium of ice and sand, I was in that 110 degrees merely the motionless outline of something, an abeyance flexing, tensed, as if immobility were somehow the prolongation of movement or, better still, movement externalized, for I had another six days to move out of this great visual silence which I adored, this edge of a dangerous precipice on which life continues merely by accumulated speed, over it into a river in which all my saintliness dissolved, and in its current I was deformed, my warp loyal through its adapting to God’s freedom, a freedom limitless, and not only in time but also in its effects, without distinctions between its participants, I had no business but I wanted to be the one, not stopping, not slowing down, never interrupting, permanent, like film showings—including the repetition of the same stupid plot, all dressed up in modernistic style, asexual, the next person, and a parable, but a true one, like those invisible statues, slow and interminable, in fact, backlit with a permanent conflagration, that permanent sunset I have always wanted, so this is the place—a curve of soft, deep earth that flash floods last night wiped out; an entire country come apart, filling the gardens—where wherever I went, I would be seen, where the intoxicating odor of ripe apples is a symbol not of affluence but of order in the daylong valleys, where the hesitation which is the sign of the human would be much too late, infinitely smooth, here where space most closely resembles time.

(All frames captured via a Superheadz Digital Harinezumi 2.0.)

(All phrases culled from the following sources: Joan Didion, “Holy Water,” The White Album, FSG, 1979; Clarice Lispector [trans., Giovanni Pontiero], “Creating Brasília,” Selected Crônicas, New Directions, 1984; Claude Simon [trans., Richard Howard], The Grass, George Braziller, 1960.)