top of page

sin∞fin - Performances at the Holy Centre

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

© VestAndPage 2011

 

WHITE

 

The idea of the profound oneness of the creative thought

And all the aspects of creation

Has always been present in my consciousness,

If only at a latent level.

It just needs a messenger to awaken it,

To remind me that there is a way to cooperate wholeheartedly,

Uniting plants, animals, the others and the subtle world.

 

 

STARVATION LANE

 

EATING FLOWERS

I try to capture the moment.

My dreams don’t narrate anything any more, they articulate themselves as questions, and questions manifest as images.

What if these images are just fragments of the process that builds up memories?

Finally, I fall asleep. It’s like a paradox of time and intention.

As if travelling back in time to murder my ancestors, and deny my own identity, my Self as it is today.

Invisibility of different kinds:

Who speaks what from there, and how do I listen?

Everywhere I go I see people running, running for their lives.

What language do these people speak? What songs they sing? What dungeons they crowded?

What thoughts and ideals suffer and soar in their souls? What can be produced if nothing yet is assumed?

Which place do I go to, to be protected from violence, if my country just merchandises potential violence for another?

Where is this place? Where is this place where every door is closed?

Where people are simply calling God? Where innocent people are entrapped?

Where no one comes to my aid? Where the young shed blood and then people pray?

Where citizens are called vagrants? Where is this place?

Home?

 

EATING FEAR

Yet, still flaws in the system.

Modernity’s great promise, the freedom from fear, now lies in ruins.

Fear as medium, not as message.

Fear as collateral effect, force behind progress.

Fear as refuge, home, style, character, tradition.

Fear to take a chance, scoring the aces, that plays and wins, caressing, embarrassing.

Fear manages. Fear rocks.

My fear begins where someone else fear ends.

Give it a face, a symbol, a trajectory, a luminous trail.

Signs, lines, symbols, visions in black-and-white and colour.

Voice glued on a wall, which animates and gives evidence.

Lights, transforming into more than for which they were drawn.

Fear along lines, undefined by boundaries.

Physical, drawn, etched, carved, real or imaginary forms.

Smelling the air, I try to identify the cavity, the ravines, the corners where fear was sleeping,

Wishing slow rainbows for my eyes.

 

EATING BORDERS

Where did the ‘I’m here’ kind of map go missing? It was never there when I grew up.

The comfort of not being watched as an oddity, of slipping easily into something known…

I don’t want to move, but now look what I have got, matchboxes for trees, and open drains.

Bethlehem, Gaza, Kashmir, Lhasa… So many places, guarding against…

 

 

SEMBLANCE LANE

PUSHING LIMITS

Quite a few things are in danger of speedy disappearance: Am I ephemeral too?

Questions don’t stop.

Investigation has its own reason to exist.

To merely comprehend a little of the mystery every day – not loosing a sense for a holy curiosity.

Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach impressive lessons, though I make holy what I believe.

I have met a lot of clowns, who tried so hard to be profound; and teachers who taught nothing but the faults in others, not knowing they have the same, if not twice, as much faults themselves.

Perfection does not consist in any singular state or condition of life, and beauty cannot be the way towards the useful, or towards the good; it only leads towards itself.

 

PUSHING COVERS

I am not who you think I am. I am neither East nor West.

I am simply elsewhere.

I always had just one question in my head, and it was the wrong one.

 

PUSHING COLLECTIONS

All Holy writings are abyss.

How profound they are? How simple?

Friendship, the holy tie, is made more sacred by adversity. Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.

Life is a game with many rules, but no referee.

Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, and so many lose.

Secret thoughts run over all things, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame, without rhyme or reason.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, the homeless, whether a mad destruction is wrought under the holy name of liberty, democracy, or globalisation?

To recollect my personal falls fills me with a feeling of holy sorrow.

The configuration of things is now, to have found that person in my life, so that I could live.

Dreams grow for being put into action.

I missed drinking: I thought bars were truly holy places.

 

PUSHING EVIDENCE 

Bought is Gifted. Owned isn’t Shared. Discarded is everywhere. What is "evidence"?

Ragged curtains across an open door. The night that deepens. A bulb that flickers.

I am ready to spill like the white of an egg.

I need to be touched softly, my edges smoothened tenderly, lest I tear and become meaningless.

What must the future has looked like to the ancestors, as the sunset in the expanse nothingness of the horizon surrounded them?

Water could contain roots, droppings, rubbish, leeches, snails, cockroaches, scum, frogs.

Is this the water to drink?

Subtle changes in water mark the passage of time, or produce effects of timelessness:

Sometimes water stops flowing from the taps.

PAINTING MEMORIES

You reach a moment in your life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living.

Then the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions.

On every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, and finds the most suitable mask.

For is it not that one person misses is alive in another person’s memory, and that which someone relays, narrates, recalls and shares, becomes part of what someone else encounters, discovers and remembers.

As if all individuals felt themselves to be masters of a secret treasure, in order to maintain the illusion of normalcy.

There was no personal or world problem whose solution did not exist in some sphere, I guess.

All things are possible because of other things. All things are variations upon some other things.

The past is summoned in the present.

To ask a person why he came to a place is to ask why he left another.

 

CANCELLING MEMORIES

Everything is cracking up.

I still define myself in terms of relationships.

Yet so divided, and more subdivided inside.

A blind grasping out for the wholeness:

I change simply to conceal something from myself.

I've reached the stage where I looked at people and say…

They are, though they've chosen to block off at this stage or that.

People seem to stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

Sometimes I meet people, and the fact that they are cracked across, that they're split, makes me believe that in this way they are keeping themselves open for something.

How many times did I come to the conclusion that: I’m wrong.

People need other people to be kind to them. Everyone.

I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be gentle to me.

That's what I really want, if I speak the truth.

 

 

RELICS LANE

 

RECOVERING RIPPLES

It still grows, and sprouts.

Graveyards, fields, lakes, mountains, rivers, till to the sea. Music. Poetry.

Perhaps a time shall dawn (or may return) for resources that precious, for resources made.

Don’t bleed, don’t die now, don’t cry,

Our home be no more a distant, difficult paradise.

Ripples are always in movement, though still they wait.

This even one single ripple doesn’t know.

 

RECOVERING STARS

I am of the pertinacious kind.

I move around the planet, leave my traces, kiss some wounds.

When the sun rises, the stars move along, for they don’t know on what to cling to. Some even disappear.

If one recovers one of these after a long time it is fungus infested and seems to glitter.

I have not run all around to let it vanish.

If I find one, a castaway mushroom star, I take it up with my white hands that do not know what they can carry.

I take it up, and place it in my chest, between ribs and the wall of the heart where it shall be warm, but I cannot assess it.

 

RECOVERING SUBJECTS

Everything existed and nothing existed. Nothing from everything.

There was one and there wasn’t one. Now this statement is quite different.

A subject has been introduced into the duality,

Meaning: ‘someone existed and no one existed’.

Part of a becoming, or no one is there.

No one has (yet) arrived, no one is participating.

The one who wasn’t, has yet to be, but may perhaps come later.

Therefore, there are two, a pair, a conversation or dialogue:

Not a one and its lack, rather a double, of the one who is.

The double, perhaps death? The risk of disappearance?

One who was and the one who wasn’t at the same time?

 

RECOVERING LIFE

Restlessness, like light and cloud shadows, passes over my body.

Something is happening upon me.

Life has not forgotten me. It holds me in its hands.

It will not let me fall. A cat has nine lives. And so do I, I hope.

Why not so?

 

RECOVERING PATHS

Refusals may, as a reaction, create new fears, born from the ashes of those previous ones.

The fear of difference is the fear of acceptance.

Fear takes the form of another Self, leading to transformation.

 

RECOVERING RUINS

Ruins, pure matter of resistance.

Overcoming suffering, and many lives.

Watch them, touch them.

Still standing stones, waiting for something,

They insist to exist.

 

RECOVERING VOID

The existence of the void traces aesthetic images of the world, not along physical rules universally known, but along the search for harmony and balance between sensorial perceptions.

It gives meaning to the full, can create other spaces, ambiguous and not identified, therefore frightening, though carriers of possibility of renewal, experimental results of probable adjustments:

space bubble reserves as responses to change and seek solutions.

 

RECOVERING HOLINESS

Sanctity, perpetrating freedom, can give breathing space to non-approved evolutionary spaces, generators of uncontrolled environments and habitats, in vague terrains, it is maybe possible to dance the fear and turn it into a sublimation of contemporary identity.

 

 

DRIFITING LANE

 

RUSHING WITH BELIEVE

I have read that for black holes the most basic tenet –

That the past and the future are uniquely connected – is violated.

Particles radiating out of a black hole carry no information about what had fallen into the black hole.

Throw in a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks – the particles leaking out of the hole are the same.

There is no sign of what has been destroyed.

Once the black hole disappears, all knowledge, all information about its contents, where do they go?

The whole is not equal to the sum of its parts. Origins and destinations blur.

They become loops, cycles, and patterns.

The way to explore them is through the filter of woven meaning.

They need to be pull apart so that is possible to break the loops, holding the past and the present together, for the future to leak through.

The earth does not discriminate between perfume and urine.

Abused and reviled, it tries to absorb everything, endeavouring to turn them into plants.

For that, I think I know now why beautiful things are difficult.

 

RUSHING DEFORMED

Knowing about events in the all world alters my body:

My fingers scan Italy,

My feet walk on Chinese walls,

My head spins with the Magellan wind.

My mouth tastes Mexico,

My ears hear in New York,

My eyes see India,

I think about Iraq,

My heart feels with Japan. I feel overstretched.

These mental and emotional acrobatics, may be a trial of doing justice to this distortion by increasing my physical abilities.

But I have injured my shoulder, carrying Germany.

Does a training exist for the global body?

Who is the trainer? And may I refuse me?

Do I have boarders? Am I a country?

Is total intimacy the only condition for global thinking?

Am I my place?

 

RUSHING THE PAST

My heart reminds me…

Water I am, which has become body, and earth, the fire, the time passing by.

Fire I am, thickening air.

Water of time that flows, I have no lasting.

Water I am, which has become body and the earth then will drink it.

Fire I am, a dense thickening cloud which has no endurance.

The wind over the earth I am, and graveyards, left over the sea.

Time that flies I am, while my death moves along within clocks that go backwards.

 

RUSHING THE EARTH

Half a world away mercy and fury love they play.

One morning I woke up, my cords were almost cold, my voice completely out.

I had nothing left to say.

I was running out of thoughts, running out of words,

Only few exhausting sounds were left there to feed my throat.

I was running out of feelings, running out of joy:

All around me there was nothing left to owe.

 

RUSHING THE PAST

Many things I promised and many things I tried, using all I ever had to keep my light ablaze.

But no, there was nothing left to burn, nor a heart left close to warm.

The day after I walked back home, veins to pieces.

All the things I ever dreamt were just used to feed my tongue.

Well, my body tells: if I cheat reasons with sentiments, I make illusions.

If one body speaks, two bodies talk:

They look so real for tenderness.

Slow changes may pull apart, but shortening distances it’s like seeing through things.

Is all I do just to help me to forget?

 

 

REVERY LANE

 

DREAMING TRIES

All sanity depends on this:

It should be a delight to feel heat striking the skin,

To stand upright, knowing my bones are moving easily under the flesh.

I tried to kill myself, failed, blind myself, and have now turned into what I tried to kill myself to prevent.

The second-best is anything but the second-best.

I look at what divides and separates, I don’t look at something in common.

I try to persuade others, and end up convincing myself, driven by the conviction of some sort of superiority.

There's oversimplification in everything, and mostly, a terror of flexibility.

I don’t ask for anything, except everything, as long as I need it.

 

DREAMING TOUCH

Do you see my hands?

With these hands, I can hold someone I love close to me, kill someone, offend someone.

I can create and destroy, join and separate.

If I raise my hands, I was told I could reach God.

That if I spread them out, I could make the entire world my own – 

Travelling, moving, from here to everywhere, from place to place,

Trying to connect.

 

DREAMING EXCESS

This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness.

This is the condition of my survival;

‘For if I did not forget, I should die.

 

DREAMING FEAR

Fear succeeds by monopolising ambiguity;

Tt casts its shadow within the capability to assess time and condition.

If I continuously remind myself of this, then I no longer have reason to be afraid.

No thoughts to think. No tears to cry. All sucked dry. Amused to death.

I see my image through a glass plate.

It blazes in circles between the eyebrows – is for this the word "divine"?

Fading into faint remembrance, re-assembling, I require myself to behave,

While many images remain fixed in habits of the past.

 

 

JUNCTURE LANE

TURNING THE PAST

What is so painful about time is that nothing was disastrous.

It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured in grey,

And nothing was tragic, no moments that could change anything or anybody.

From time to time the emotional lightning flashed, showing a landscape of private misery,

And then – we all went on dancing.

 

TURNING THE PRESENCE

I still can recognise a trace of white in every black, a bit of grey in every white,

And the greens, pale to deep, inextricable from one another.

However, regardless of what happened, my tomorrow bears no resemblance to yesterday.

Those attempting to seek the path, leading to Tomorrow in the Yesterday are deeply misguided:

This river will not repeat itself.

It carries away.

There was and there wasn’t.

Same old stories, and places,

As if something would change shape just by being in different circumstances and stages.

Real life dilemmas and situations are not questions of "make it right" or "make it wrong".

They are expressions to search for peace.

And yet, it’s all complexity.

What will remain and what will be left behind?

I might twist, entrusting troubles, nailing my doubts or build back together.

 

 

BLEND LANE

THAT WHICH

That which is not here, it does not exist anywhere else.

 

TWO ONE

 

An extension kept getting made.

The space that was here grew.

We move through a crowd, as a thread moves through the eye of a needle.

It’s like to stand still, waiting endlessly for the next to come.

Endeavour to nourish an intimate desire for a shade to rest under,

Or a will to return, even if a long time has passed.

 

TWO TWO

I live many realities, but only one among them is the fulcrum of my life.

What is it that constitutes my "Self"?

I look at it in new ways, in the light of different dates.

When I become comfortable with one way of seeing myself,

There is something that reminds me where I belong to,

What marks I have on my body, with my face still hidden there,

Within the crowd, among the clouds, or beneath a stamp,

With an ink of a different colour from the time before.

I feel a searing nostalgia for open spaces, a time before those temporary structures that never leave. 

It is all to make me safe and secure. Safe from what?

Myself, my weaker side, society?

My affiliations, nightmares, thoughts, believe?

My rights, my friends, my enemies?

My dreams?

 

TWO THREE

 

Trust in me. Shut your eyes and trust me.

You can sleep safe and sound, knowing I am around.

Slip into silent flesh. Sail on a silver mist.

Slowly and surely your senses will cease to resist.

 

 

BLACK

 

"If it be your will 

That I speak no more

And my voice be still

As it was before

I will speak no more.

I shall abide until

I am spoken for. If it be your will." *

* Lyrics by Leonard Cohen

 

VestAndPage_sin.fin.The.Movie_India_2011

VestAndPage, sin∞fin - Performances at the Holy Centre. Still from the film, India&Kashmir, 2011

bottom of page