SECONDARY CURRENTS
(Secondary Currents (1982-90) is a film about relationships between mind and language. Delivered by an improbable narrator who speaks an extended assortment of invented languages, it is an "imageless" film in which the shifting relationships between voice-over commentary and subtitled narration constitute a peculiar duet for voice, thought, speech, and sound.)
I don't remember when the voice
began.
At first, I heard it
as a kind of babbling,
a metabolic susurration,
full of whispered insinuations,
chattering innuendoes,
hints.
And then sometimes it seemed
to coalesce,
to congeal about a single image,
and I thought I understood.
But then the babble broadened,
evanished into a softime warble,
and I heard nothing again.
The voice returned.
I thought I discerned
a gentle coherence.
I began to imagine another persona,
a visage,
that seemed to shimmer
in the insubspatiated fertility
of its grace.
And then,
when I thought we seemed to think
in tandem,
as if some furtive intelligence
yoked our rhythms
incanted our assonance,
and presaged our..........pause,
and when
so subtle
was the imagined conjugation
of our tongues
I was able to discern multiple
meanings from single sounds,
to intuit some universal language
whose boundless homophonous inflections
rebounded
from the keen surface of reason
and faded into the pale mansion
of thought,
we abandoned our intention
and lost ourselves to language.
We travelled.
Awkward, I felt, at first,
as if a stranger to my own tongue,
my voice
a jagged mirror
of my thoughts,
an imitation.
We felt the breath
of a northern light,
a desolate languor upon the lips,
the interminable winter,
a bitter malaise.
But then we seemed to sense
a distant rigor,
a place of fierce courage
where the moon's image in the water
cries,
"The Buddha? What wings?
or was it when the blossoms fell?"
But no sooner did I try to name it
than we shifted,
falling into a Mediterranean trance.
We awoke in the sunlight,
the smell of jasmine in the air
and the sound of goats' bells
in the distance.
An old woman appeared.
She held a basket of peaches
and seemed to be anticipating
someone or something
as if the conclusion
to some unspoken metaphor
were about to fall from her lips.
"What a wonderful thought!"
she said.
"Would you like a peach?
Surely you'd like a peach!"
"What do you mean by talking to him?
He's a stranger,"
growled an old man nearby.
"It is not his to pretend to speak
our language, as if he were
one amongst us, privy to our private
thoughts and admonitions"
"Nonsense,
He's right at home.
Look, he can already imagine telling
his friends about his adventures here,
as if our voices were like memories
and he could show them like
a photograph."
"Enough of your metaphysical
balderdash. You try my patience.
He's yours, Fatunqua, see what you
can get from him. I will talk to
you later."
"You've had a long trip. Here.
Take these. They are very good.
Very tasty. Look. Like gold-eh?
They're as bright as gold."
She was right. Sliced and opened
the juices sweetly fermented in
their own inner chambers, the
fruit roused a fiery passion
in the eyes, a hunger for
a keen sweetness, like
a thirst.
I felt a longing in my thirst,
a longing to be far away,
to move into vast distance
where breath could take wing
and the eyes would be in air
and I could sense the outside of things.
I inhaled great draughts of space,
imminently relieved
of the tangled administration
of language,
alone and unconstrained,
my silence a witness to my freedom,
my thoughts invisible at last.....
I moved through a dark, tumultuous void
whose ancient, agile vistas
resounded with allure,
corridors of thought through whose
imbricated constellations
I glimpsed a wayward meandering
of passive splendor:
the furtive gnostic eruptions
of a steamy incandescence
whose unforgivable numinous presence
was beyond the unspeakable inv-
And yet,
even as I so imagined it,
and positioned myself
within the grasp of my reach,
the tangible world-
obstacles,
impenetrable thoughts,
strange beasts
lurking in the underbrush
convinced me
that a return to an easy intimacy
was what I needed,
was what was called for.
I began to feel a little a little shaky
about time,
as if the past kept becoming the...
the present,
as if my voice were inhabitant
of a different order of time
than my own,
my thoughts
the shadowy presence of its prescience,
my words
but shackled servants to its will.
I began to fear
a kind of contamination,
an invidious adumbration of thought,
the effusion of an inchoate substrate
of pre-libidinal energy,
an unrepentent dilation
of constructed meaning
whose meandering lucubrations
foretold the essential entropy
of euphostolic processes
and peregrinations
re-invitriafied by the subcoholate
stratifications
of an ecstatic generative demuneration
whose insubstantiated logotic pressures
undiluted by lornless febrile
percussive machinations,
was irreductively proviscerated by a
tensile penumbric gasping ideoform
whose primal total conjugate sustenance
given the existence as uttered forth by
asphyxiate ergodic inequities as
not subsinct or otherwise glottal or
schismatic can proct mismal gloating
tortic as a genera logics assumed by
frisson eldo bas erra ti gon
ship to antel k tri lo montre
pi l like s k soke sl abqu ek
dko tj s abi. tu n kto
rt l px ex: s s at l
t-thel: kthe ls o
ke lnc i ! u a je t s le
ee tri-sit pn vo tep.
nu oo ert i-i kq
fn s-sr b ro.
fr bn f-fo oo vr gb
qn nnr xe po tr onpt o-ot on-u?
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