| 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? |