sin∞fin - Performances at the End of the World

Poetry of the performance-based film • www.sinfin-themovie.de

© VestAndPage 2010

 

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BLACK

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I saw Eternity the other night, like a great ring of pure and endless light, all calm, as it was bright, and round beneath, time in hours, days, years driven by the spheres, like a vast shadow moved.

 

One concept corrupts and confuses the others.

I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics;

I am speaking of the infinite.

 

 

THE CLOWN'S HOUSE

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What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?

Take a point, stretch it into a line, curl it into a circle, twist it into a sphere, and then get through...

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THE STUDIO

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WRITING

 

Head bowed over the oval-shaped washbasin. Hands stacked to the tap to produce an intense, motionless effort to escape entirely through the drainpipe. Re-sucked. Vanishing.

A mirror on the wall: the only immovable onlooker. Flaring nostrils and pupils like needles. The skin, like to a membrane traversed by shunts, begins to come off in curly pieces, as if they were made of some sort of buttery jelly, dotted by oily pores.

Auburn locks are unthreaded from the scalp like lean raffia. Temples beating hard, veins drumming harder between bone and pulp: hundreds of sledgehammers smashing an anvil. Dense, viscous blood starts to pour out the ears and run down the cheeks to reach the mouth. The tumid, swollen tongue tastes the entire sickly-sweet fluid with voracious licks. Forcibly tightening the molars, shoving them deep, constraining them to grind the gums, and then crumbling and crushing the jaws. Then, abruptly, the nails, greedily rapacious, lacerate, tear, quarter, disembowel, gut. The fetid aroma inebriates the lungs. The feline hands voraciously rise up again: they rummage and ransack among the intestines curled like sapid snakes. Finally they swerve to turn and throw everything upside down: muscles, tendons, and nerves. They grab the ribs. They twist the arches and snatch and rip off bleeding ropes, stretching them to improbable extensions. Then, with a last, frantic lunge, they clutch the heart and squeeze it like a citrus fruit. The eyes squirt from their sockets, rotating, wheeling and dissolving to tears.The head breaks and splits apart like a block of fat in broth. The spine whips free from the back agile like an acrobat, and it throws the vertebrae to the ground, offering them as a palpitating feast, while the echo of a scream is heard all around. 

Mercy for flesh!

 

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THE BATHROOM

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SHAVING

 

Standing (up), sitting (on a chair), lying (on the bed), sometimes even waiting for what is going to happen; and yet to be perfectly aware that what is going to happen as somehow already happened.

A body enclosed in a circle seems to be waiting always for something, inside of which it may happen, or always makes an effort to become "something".

It is inside the body that something happens, as the body is the only source of movement.

It is not a matter of 'where', rather of 'when'.

The effort ending in a spasm is an actual abjection close to fear.

 

CHAINS

 

To find a sense, to dimension and recognise, to reveal…

What does all this mean?

What does it mean to get out of myself?

What does it mean to communicate with the others?

 

SHIP

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To communicate is an act that belongs to the body. Only. (It is an emotional fact.)

It has nothing to do with information. It is beyond any pre-ordered scheme. It is rhythm, sound, breath extension. (It is an emotional fact.)

To turn out any emotional action-reaction, means to favour the deceit and declare the false.

Signs, said or written words, colours absorbed or repelled by the eye… Everything must be enlaced with the body. (It is an emotional fact.)

For the body there is no other way out: when it yields to lie, it always confesses. (It is an emotional fact.)

 

 

THE BARN

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UNDRESSING

 

Where is the essence? Maybe it has shrunk; maybe it has just gone away. There is always a sort of stillness beyond the movement, beyond the elasticity of sensations, beyond standing, sitting, lying. There is stillness until the complete dissipation.

An acrobat always stands still inside himself. I may be strong-minded, but no one can say I'm out of my sphere now, for women's special mission is supposed to be drying tears and bearing burdens. What I see is that in the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods. When I guard the doors of my senses, possessed of mindfulness and alertness, I am content, bringing along only my barest necessities. Abandoning the taking of life, I abstain from the taking of life. Abandoning the taking of what is not given, I abstain from taking what is not given. I take and accept only what is given, life not by stealth but by means of a self that has become pure, inwardly sensitive to the pleasure of being blameless. Going forward and returning, looking toward and looking away, bending and extending my limbs, carrying, eating, drinking, chewing, and tasting... urinating and defecating... walking, standing, sitting, falling asleep, waking up, talking, remaining silent, abandoning all the hindrances and the mental fermentations. Enraptured, my body grows tranquil, sensitive to pleasure, and by feeling pleasure and not stress my mind becomes concentrated, to permeate my entire being with a pure, bright awareness.

Unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability, I direct and incline myself to the realm of visions.

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THE BEDROOM

 

SEASIDE DOOR

 

Every day I die to rediscover myself through my own dreams, in a process of virtual sequences,

side by side with my body that I try to manage and run,

entangling and imprisoning in a role I have built for it.

I animate these moments, I presume.

I recognise my presence in this world through my daily rituals,

by expressing myself with common gestures, as if I were seeking an ideal of circularity.

There is always a struggle, a tension, and a drama in all this.

I explore and determine the relation between my body and my soul,

a unity that seems only possible in the realm of utopia: something improbable but not impossible. 

A last frontier to discover.

 

FACE OF GLASS

 

An action begins and dies, framed by gestures and history.

Man’s anatomic obsession is an extraordinary mind’s anomaly,

a cruel affection, sometimes also a desperate, precarious enjoyment.

To play, to use, to settle and torture the flesh with experiments, as if it were a lifeless puzzle-game, always ends in bringing to the surface human beings’ irrefutable fragility.

The soul seems always to be sought, because it is constantly removed and dismissed.

The soul moves along the dreaming, to tell the story of a life.

 

MIRROR GLASS

 

Nature is like glass reflecting the infinite,

as by the sea reflected is the sun,

too glorious to be gazed on in his sphere.

I remember someone saying

that Nature is an endless sphere

which centre is everywhere

and which circumference is nowhere,

and that within this vast sphere

we sail ever drifting in uncertainty,

driven from end to end.

I remember someone saying

that I shall now recall to mind

that the motion of the heavenly bodies is circular,

since the motion appropriate to a sphere

is rotation in a circle.

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THE TOILET

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CORDERO

 

What is the body? The body is… ‘What’? What is the body? The body is ‘what’.

When I forget the sound of the knife on my flesh, it means that I’m not myself anymore.

It means that I have changed identity.

When the wounds heal up and I see them fading away without leaving a trace,

it means that I’m dead, that my blood has stopped flowing.

It means that I entrust my memory to someone else and that I am done forever.

It means that I have lost my control and I don’t remember my name anymore.

I have shifted my weight outside, and I am convinced that there is an inner side separated from an outer side, and an "after" resulting from a "before".

How many afters can I count without there being a before?

I open the drawer and I see all my tools well lined up. If they look extraneous to me,

it means that I’m a walking dead. I use them to rejoin me to myself.

I have no power without control, and if I forget the meaning I have given to myself,

I don’t have any control; therefore I don’t have power.

I don’t allow my signs to fade completely away – 

I often renew them, for they are the grid to map my mind.

 

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THE PLAYROOM

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HARLEQUIN

 

Non-action, annihilation, non-relatedness, restraint, evasion, insight…

Sometimes I feel irreducible, as if the earth (inside my body) returns to and merges

with external earth-substance, and so the fire, each liquid… the wind.

Other times I feel uncreated, without a creator, barren, stable as a

mountain-peak, standing firm like a pillar that doesn’t alter, doesn’t change, doesn’t interfere.

There is no cause, no requisite condition, for the defilement or the purification of being.

 

FLOWERS

 

I have always tried to go towards something.

Maybe I’m scared of the time that slides away and vanishes,

that filters through my fingers without leaving anything in the palms of my hands.

I will have to be born a second time, to be born again, get a second choice.

But I am still thinking. I still want to grow.

I want to tell one of the many secrets I have: I don’t know my face yet, and I’m envious of it.

I will break my chains to live all the lives, and I will speak like a God,

because an angel will have rescued me.

 

COTTON

 

I look at this infinite landscape as a larger portrait of my intellect,

a way of raising the spiritual horizons through generosity, self-control, restraint, and truthful speech, provided with righteous safety, defence, and protection. 

And I am always wandering, wandering… wandering on.

Just as a ball of string, when thrown, comes to its end simply by unwinding,

in the same way, having trans-migrated and wandered on,

the wise and the foolish alike will put an end to grief.

 

FIGHTING GODS

 

I have met some people of uncommon abilities,

which generally fall into eccentric behaviours when their sphere of life

is not adequate to their abilities. Maybe they are right.

Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere.

 

 

THE STABLES

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FRAGILTY

 

Only when I dream I find a possibility to lighten the weight of my anguish.

My body is capable of saving me with its answers, although I manipulate, I shatter,

I break it to pieces, and I rebuild it again and again only because

I want to be able to manage better my own self.

To eradicate my body into my dreams… Is it possible?

I often have the sensation that my spirit is becoming thinner and smaller.

I am like one who lights a candle on a hot, sunny day.

What I can say is that my soul lives and sees through affliction, i

t is always sick ‘cause it never obtains what it really wants.

It would have been much better if someone had killed me while I was still in the cradle,

rather than now cradle continuously infeasible desires.

 

DRINKING THE HORIZON

 

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation.

As well as here, in this vastness, the impossible union of spheres of existence is real.

Here the past and future are conquered, and reconciled.

To think a soul so near divine, within a form, sometimes makes gladden my humble sphere.

Though in many of their aspects, the invisible spheres were formed in fright,

this visible world seems formed in love.

Violence, money, admiration, recognition, respect, and lies they all lay within the sphere of human knowledge, but do people realise how dependent they are on what lies beyond?

 

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THE GOLDEN ROOM

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GOLDEN FACES

 

A truth, which is always denied, is the one told in the most understandable way.

I recollect the manifold past lives... in their modes and details.

Having been many I now become one. I appear. I vanish. Continuously. I go unimpeded through walls as if through space. I can hear both kinds of sounds: divine and human, both near and far.

I perceive a mind with passion as a mind with passion, and a released mind as a released mind… Released.

With release, there is knowledge, and with knowledge, there is love.

Isn’t this sublime?

 

BURNING CAGE

 

Everything that enlarges the sphere of my power,

that shows me that I can do what I thought I could not do,

is valuable, but I still suspect about many values, as the value of discipline,

even it is so often regarded as the first essential for success, for many spheres, like the one of war.

For instance, the music of the Gypsies belongs in the sphere of improvisation rather than in any other, without which it would have no power to exist.

 

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THE KITCHEN

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EATING THE SEA

 

What are you doing? What’s up with you?

You don’t talk? You don’t talk anymore? What happened to you?

Don’t be afraid. Don’t be so.

Why don’t you talk? Don’t you want to talk anymore? Is it always going to be like this?

Where are you? Are you happy? What do you remember?

I have to go now.

 

DINNER PEARLS

 

Discretion is nothing other than the sense of justice, with respect to the sphere of the intimate contents of life.

Everyone has a certain sphere of discretion, a right to expect which shall not be infringed.

This right flows from the nature.

Opponents confront us continually, but actually there is no opponent there.

 

BURNING UMBRELLA

 

I am scared. I have no consistency. I am empty.

No thoughts, no questions. It is like I’ve never prayed, never suffered.

It would be better to escape, eschew or crawl.

I don’t know who I am anymore, I don’t know where I am going, but I must find an answer.

Everything changes. Everything falls.

My spirit has not learned anything yet: hates, love, doubts, refusals and repetitions.

I’m not that strong. I’m still striving after impossibilities, hobbling and struggling along,

carrying a fear inside my heart.

What else can I do? What else is left to me?

Talking to somebody? Crying? Talking again?

Talking about what? About anger, rancour, grudge, jealousy, envy, anguish, complaints… dreams?

How much am I an adult, and how much a child?