the pieces of ... soap

being the pieces from which RJF working script was composed in 2007

(pieces—not poems as such, except inasmuch as such things are meant for performance, to be rendered in speech, to be spoken and embodied, too.)

saponification: first rendering

Rumours that they made
Humans into soap
Are no more than that.

Let me be more precise:
The legend is of Mount Sapo,
A Roman shrine to an unknown God,

Where it’s said that at some point
The making of animal sacrifices
Became so frequent as to be excessive,

One goat-kid was barely off the altar
Than the next ewe or ram was
Being put to the knife.

It would seem that the God of the Temple
Was a punishing God, who had inflicted a terrible
Punishment on the local people.

Or else, the area around Mount Sapo,
Which is supposed to stand above the Tiber River,
Had been blessed with a sudden abundance

And rather than enjoy it, as a boon of nature
Or as the fruit of their honest toil,
The people suspected a trick,

A caprice on the part of the God or a test,
Which they would refuse to profit from and
By which they would not be demoralised.

Then again, the priest of the shrine
Would have seen the people grow prideful,
The stockyards full, the granaries overflowing;

He’d see his own trade in sacrifice dwindle
While those he looked down on,
From his height on Mount Sapo, grew rich;

On behalf of the God whom he served,
Whom he’d represent sitting in judgement,
He’d demand the God’s due, or else;

He’d exaggerate the God’s features
And, like a jealous landlord, he’d demand more,
To clear the people of their crime of pride

And, once it was pointed out to them,
To wash away their guilt,
He’d demand an orgy of sacrifice.

Such a priest could not be satisfied
By half measures and such ignorant people
Could not be converted by logical arguments,

No, first fear and then guilt,
Sustained by the spectacle
Of an almost sexual intensity:

A blood orgy,
In which each individual
Took part, played a role.

At the foot of Mount Sapo,
According to legend,
Runs the Tiber,

Wherever it was, because you won’t find it
On any map, or whatever the cause,
Which the legend doesn’t relate,

There, on its banks, while the men
Led their animals to slaughter, and the children
Looked on, the women were washing.

Perhaps they washed the bloody robes of the priest
Or those of their husbands and sons,
Who were called on to assist,

And, as the sacrifice went on, perhaps the demand for
Clean clothes increased and the women
Tried to keep up and perhaps their daughters ran,

Carrying wet garments to dry and dry ones
To replace those that were stained, the legend
Doesn’t say, it says only that it rained.

The rain sent down a mixture of blood, fat
And wood ash from the Temple above,
It mingled in the clay soil of the riverbank below;

The wild thyme, growing on the slopes of Mount
Sapo, and the olive groves, might even have perfumed
The “soap” that the women eventually found there.

About this the legend couldn’t be clearer:
As if the people and the priest, the Temple, the
Town, fear, God, guilt and Mount Sapo itself,

The whole process of rain, fat and sacrifice
Even to the burning of the bodies afterwards,
As if all this was simply a machine for making soap.

soap: second rendering

My theory of beauty is that it
Shouldn’t be easy to look at.

If it was a smell, it would stink.
It would have the stench of birth
Or a rendering plant, which have

In fact, the same smell.
I suspect because both
Are fatty processes.

People have said
That the bodies are flayed

In my paintings.
I find this faintly ridiculous:

The paint is flayed,
nothing more.
(Of course, I use big brushes.)

(If anything at all,
My work results
From many happy accidents,

Accidents which are
Exterminations,

Accidents which show
The wreckage intact.)

It shouldn’t be difficult
To look at beauty, either.
I always work from models.

When none is available to me,
I might work from myself,

In a mirror, or from a photo.
But not so as to bring something
From inside out:

I’m not interested in the
Inner beauty of a subject;

It would be foolish of me
Of all people to say that,
To give that insight credence.

If there’s any beauty to be found,
It will be in the suggestion
Of the paint. (Meat isn’t

Pretty. But a certain red
Is suggestive, isn’t it?)

If beauty were a tactile phenomenon,
It would be difficult to remove
From one’s hands.

You see,
I’m already presuming
One has touched it!

RJF: third rendering

They gave out soap with the letters R.J.F.
You cannot know what that meant
Reinjudenfett

The letters stand for ‘Pure Jewish Fat’
The soap was made of human fat
You can imagine then how it felt

To be told to wash our clothes
And even to consider cleaning one’s body
One’s hair with the fingernails, the bones

And flesh of our murdered loved ones.
For all I knew at the time there might
Have been a small piece of my father

In that soap that I washed with. Or of
Our old neighbours in the little house. Or
Of my friend’s father, of whom no one spoke

And not a trace was ever seen again.
One year after the liberation, Simon Wiesenthal,
The famous Nazi Hunter, reported a find

Of boxes, in a former army depot
With the same initials, R.I.F.
With ironic satisfaction he records

That the wrapping paper around the bars
Only revealed the soap was manufactured
From Jewish bodies

But how the systematic Germans left out
Of their list of ingredients the most basic
Information, whether they were “children,

Girls, men or elderly people.” No doubt
You will have noticed with an objectivity
Gained from history that the first soap

Had the letters R.J.F
While the second
Was marked R.I.F.

That nowhere in the German language
Is Reinjudenfett grammatically correct
And if I tell you now that R.I.F. stands for

Reichsstelle für Industrielle Fettversorgung
The Centre for Industrial Supplies of Fats
To the Reich – which nowhere mentions

Human sources, Jewish or otherwise –
You will see
There are inconsistencies

And with the cynicism
Of scientifically trained minds,
With a smirk or a wry smile,

You want to say
We now know
To make soap from humans

Is an almost impossible thing to do,
I concede
But in every generation

There are magicians
Who are able to do this
And similar things …

And let me add
The burden of proof
Was as light at Nuremburg

For the existence of the gas
Chambers as it was for
Human soap, that is

Impossible to bear.
So finally
Weigh in your mind

In your imagination
The child, the adult
Nearest you, beside you

Touch him or her gently
Or even pinch them
Not to wake them up

But to feel their density.
A woman or a girl will have
Slightly more essential fat –

An amount necessary
For maintenance of life and
Reproductive functions –

Than a boy or a man
Even if she’s worn out
Worn down to a sliver

Knowing it to be her equal her sister
Could you take and use
If by a magic trick or a rumour

I could give in to your hand you
I’ve told that they made from her
This small sweet-smelling thing?

under no illusions: fourth rendering

The taste of the scar
When I lick the word
On her face is not
What I expect

For a start
The stitches distract me
The stitches we sew
Into everything

And where the two skins
Join I can discern a third
Texture or colour, which
My tongue remembers

It stabs out to left or to right
It advances over
The convex relief of her eye
And strays so far as her mouth

Before returning
To the offended tissue
A rough piece of work
As if different hands

Had tied each thread
As if the butchery
Lay not in the official wound
Carved bluntly on her face

But in the healing frame
Although I’m under no
Illusions about that!
There’s always going to be

A scar, the flavour of which
If I may say so
Will always pervert the taste
Of the surrounding skin.

remove your fingers: fifth rendering

You’re not quite there …
But I can see you clearly …
Too clearly …
Perhaps

…

Yes …
Yes …
I understand …
Are you in some kind of trouble?

…

Well, you come here then!
Well, you come here then!
Well, you come here then!
Well … then!

…

No.
I’ve lost you.
No.
Damn it …

…

Saponification can also refer to a more uncommon
Although naturally occurring phenomenon
Than that of soap manufacture or than that
Related in the dubious legend of Mount Sapo

It is the process resulting in
The production of adipocere
Or “grave wax” whereby the fat of a corpse
And other soft tissue converts in the ground

To a waxy soap-like substance
Closely resembling that familiar from daily living
Like your basic wash soap
It is almost odour-free and colourless

In those rare cases in which adipocere
Or “grave wax” has been recorded
In which the conversion of saponification has been
Observed we find the following conditions

Firstly the overall amount of fatty tissue must be high
Secondly the agents of decomposition are present
Only in minute quantities or entirely absent and lastly
The soil around the body is found to be highly alkaline

trostlos: sixth rendering

It lives on its own
It lives on its own and
Is one hundred percent
Not serious because
It is not itself and
It lives on its own
It lives on its own

Ok, add a breath
I in my stupid way
In my accidental way
Have helped to reproduce it but
I can’t take any comfort from that
In a word a breath
Because it was never in me

Is it unfair of me to expect
To be paid for it?
For the action that made it?
At the station it was made?
You cynics will say
It can’t hurt
But it does

If at any stage of the game
I gave up
It wouldn’t mean a thing
I can’t move
Imagine being so useless
No really I can’t
Not a thing

Look you’ll also say
How he’s played at life
He doesn’t even have the
Right to call his body
His own just pay me all
Right and I’ll get by
As if I can nothing

list incomplete: seventh rendering

Fun at the soap factory …

Four boys with
One bar of soap

Four girls playing
Hide
And seek

Four little mouths
Washed out for cussing
Or
Kissing

Four great soap mistakes:
Grey soap or red soap
Soap on a rope or soap
With a single hair

A family of four ducks
With a bar of soap
On each foot
Skating

Novelty soaps in the sock drawer
Kept in their original boxes
On the mantelpiece
Four years old

Marks on the soap
Made by
Four small
Front teeth

In 1948 four bars of soap
Wrapped in a funeral shroud
Buried at Haifa in Israel
According to the solemn ritual

plateau: eighth rendering

When we started all this
I was like an ant
Crossing backwards
And forwards

Can you imagine me
Walking in a straight line
Like an ant
With an arrow in its head

One centimetre
At a time?
A tiny ant
Everything was circles

On the inside
Of a balloon
But what if the balloon
(Because this is exactly

What I am talking about)
Were a soap bubble?
And all of you
Especially you

Were rainbows
Refracted in oil crystals
Shimmering on the curve
Of the soapy mixture

A little person walking
Along it
Would return
To the place she started

I thought, always
Always is a different kind
Of elastic than the kind
Used to make balloons

Crystals form and it snaps
When someone doesn’t
Come back and different again
From a surface in a wire

Bent to make a frame
To blow bubbles
Because ideally
We’re stuff

Strong enough
To make wars on
Steel and not just
Light and soap

I entered and I left
Through the fracture
In my always
With this idea

While over my head
The fertiliser in the air
Made rainbows
And below my feet

The world could
At any moment
Burst

And probably has
Innumerable times
Without our noticing it.

pumice: ninth rendering

The question that dogged
The footsteps of the early humans
When they were first upright
Must have been:

Is it possible to make soap
From the body
While it’s still alive?

The second would have been:
How many bodies
Would we have to have
To make enough?

And the third: In what way
Would they need to be alive?

These thoughts, the mere products
Of claustrophobia, isolation
And inertia, arise from the practical
Consideration that

You can’t make an escape route
That leads into the ground,
Albeit that it’s become impossible
To build above it,

The races flow together
The mingled waters rise
And cover the earth
Now at 6.6 billion
Soon at 7

In what way do they need to be alive
For this to happen?

Like the slave owner
Who thought negritude,
That blackness could be bred out

We’ve thought purity,
That love and light
Could be bred in
And installed
Under conditions of hygiene,

Black and white, Arab and Jew,
Asian, Caucasian, African,
The colonists, the colonised,
And the occupation,

Applauding individual efforts
In this direction,

We’ve knowingly endorsed
A worldwide programme of eugenics
Opted for the sexual selection
Of the daytime soaps.

Until today, when getting into bed
With the enemy seems a dubious
Prospect, replete with new dangers

Risks, which could not have been
Foreseen only fifty years ago:

The bent wire of a universal human
Nature now looks like the instrument
Of an abortionist

And the skin forming inside it
Is no longer the minimal surface
Of our similitude but the maximal
Surface of the differences between us

But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Confined inside the message that
I’m being watched for signs of love

For showing sexual interest
Or having simply
One unclean thought,
By countless eyes,

I’m a mole
And it’s a dirty job.

…

When I found her,
Halfway in her preparations
To join the teeming things

That scuttle above our heads
For which we don’t have names,
I saw an angel crouching over her.

I could at that stage
Have grabbed her ankles
And pulled her out
From under it

But I didn’t want to divert
Its attention away from her
As usual, onto me.

As if she was
Receiving something
From the angel
Her mouth opened

An order, a mouse,
An official slogan,
Whatever it is angels have
They can’t digest,

A lump of fat, I no longer
Know what it was

She didn’t look at me,
Let alone turn to me for help,
It was as if she stared
Into her own mouth

At her tongue, her teeth,
At the wet and redness
Of her gums,

It wasn’t a violent act
And afterwards I kissed her face
And for many days after that
She just hung there, halfway in.

I wondered, as I’d once been told,
If I wasn’t myself an angel
And not a mole
At all.

I should never have lugged her
Down here, if my father had been
Conscious, he’d have put a stop
To it.

My mother never met her,
Never knew
Of the efforts I made
To live.

…

And I regret that I’m the only one
She ever had. (My mother,
You fool!)

But what if there are others inside her
Just inside, waiting to replace me?
(Inside my mother!)

Why shouldn’t there be?
Even when she’s dead,
They’ll keep a record.

But what if they’re there now?
Slightly off-stage, in the hallway
Of her inner-city flat?

I’m sure they would
Imagine themselves
Exactly as I am,
Day in, day out
Underground

The only exception being
That they have a way out

A door, which will
When the time is right
Be held open for them
And will shut behind them

But then, they don’t!
And so comes a closer resemblance.

The entry they expect
Is a doorway on a painting
Which hands seize violently
And thrust aside

To see what’s underneath
Because it’s actually a curtain

Then there’s no way out
At all.

But they still come
These wriggling worms with feet,
For whom there are no names

I hear their manoeuvres above me
Already, the tramp of their small shoes

Making tiny holes in my solitude
Which is all I really possess

I wonder if they know
If it’s possible,
How much,
And in what way?

Whereas pumice is formed
In a single spurt from a wound
Deep in the earth,

Soap is solid and continuous
And has no grain.

plateau’s problems: tenth rendering

Quite apart from becoming blind
I have my problems
Which I now wish you to consider
Without prejudice or sympathy

Number one:
We reach a plateau
There is a giant edifice
An imposing structure
We break off tiny pieces,
As much as we can carry,

We take them home
And wash away the dirt
Of superstition, with which
The centuries have encrusted us.
Good for something, then, you say
This soap!

Your opinions will no doubt differ
As to what the building on the plateau is
Whether the temple to a knowable
Or an unknown god
But for our purposes it’s a depot
For the distribution of soap

One of a number found after the war
You see, this soap, that was manufactured
Elsewhere and only later transported here,
Has some special properties
To which its users are mostly blind and which
I’d like to make a modest effort to reveal

I’m no magician
I can only share with you
What I’ve picked up, and that
Is the literal truth of my condition!

Well, most people are hoaxed all their lives
However much they use of the stuff in question
Even when quite spent
it slips from their perfumed hands
We can’t expect them of themselves
To come to a moment of revelation

No, my point is,
Eschewing knowledge,
The importance they attach to belief

Because I’m convinced all of us here recognise
In the industrial warehouse to which I’ve referred
A Temple to Scientia, a Temple to the sum of all
That can humanly be observed and verified,
According to the scientific method,
Ergo, a machine for making truth

My problem is, what truth will suffice?
But what truth does will suffice for each one
Who believes it, being neither opposed
To the mistake or to the lie but to another truth
So how do we reconstruct from these fragments
Of our Temple that one truth, Gospel of hygiene?

Why soap again? My friends, why not? Look
At the effects it has! Take a lump, lather up
And lave now your body! Who taught you how
To clean yourself? And who is it
Who washes with you?
Who is there? Only the skin.

For my demonstration I shall require a piece
The honours, Ian! Are you there?
Number two (for my problem is twofold
It is knowledge and ignorance, science
And the blindness of the experimental method
Which reaches to the divine by an ascent, to grasp

Just and bring back no more than tiny relics):
Thankyou, sir, madam – although I suppose
By the kindness of your donation you are
Madam, am I right? … Before I continue
Might I be so bold as to enquire
Who is this? …

No matter, madam, least of all one of magic
I’m no magician and what meagre insight I possess
Into the beauty of the female sex I owe
To feeling only, a mere sensorial limitation
Need not blind one to immediate matters
Or to the matter in hand

Indeed, where universal nature accords
With human nature is in feeling
And experiment, a space of which
The smallest possible surface area
May be calculated to lie within
The bounds of a bent wire

And exist as a resonant field
A membrane or an M brane
Between the two spheres
Resonant because communicative
It finds its ideal and therefore minimal
Therefore most elegant form

In the skin of a soap-bubble, like so!
This then is knowledge! Good for something, yes?
But what? To connect
Over the curve

But what filled with? Breath, you say
The mysterious perfection
Of a divine aspiration
But if perfect, why limited?
The mystery, the problem is
The mathematical shape of a breath

That fills the interstitial, interstellar
Void of the Universe and Man
Because I offer nought but the image
Because the wire I’ve bent for you is nothing
But a trap for a twofold subject, both knowable
And unknown, at once cosmic and terrestrial,

Like a painting’s stretcher and support, like
A stage setting crossed by a Christ-figure,
A subject who enters up on to the nervous
System as if up on to a plateau, over the curve
Of the horizon, precisely where it connects
To every other, in fact, the minimal surface

Of connection. And all that we can carry
Is it more than we can bear?
In a place we’ve seen before
Without seeing? Number three:

What has happened to belief
When every effort is made to clean it off?
And lift the animal grease and hide its stench?

The skin becomes the article
With which we keep faith, the organ
On which it’s staked

It spreads out and extends as the horizon
Of our human being, like a theatrical curtain
Before which all sensations are played out

Or like, indeed, a skin of bubbles
Lit from within, iridescent
And hardly uniform, constituting
A great and complex geometry of emotion
Of the feeling of one skin
Against another.

on the square: eleventh rendering

My friend is following me
He is picking up the pieces
Just in case they lead

To a conclusion laughs
The moment
The story enters

The boredom
Comes upon you
My friend is not

Alone in this activity
I’ve simply picked him out
For special attention

Shined a spotlight on him
He’s certainly not someone
I could hold a conversation with

About anything more
Than cleaning products
Is he clean? Undoubtedly

I’m often asked by people
How I put up with
The constant fussing

It’s not constant
For one thing and
I’m flattered

It’s nice to have someone
To pick up after you
He watches me keenly

Like a Judas-character
And when I stumble
There he is.

Will I do
As I promised
After a serious bout

Of his interest
Like an infection
And leave him

Everything? One
Doesn’t know
The yard is empty today

The square, there’s
Absolutely nobody
To talk to. I’d always hoped

To make a great number
Of figures without a
Narrative

I suppose
This is it,
A stockyard.

I haven’t been able
To get outside it,
I don’t know who today has.

(It would be terribly nice
To have someone
To talk to.)

He watches me stumble
Again and then again
On the way

To my conclusion
Standing
With the other figures

Wearing his red armband
Like a character in a play
Who has dressed up as a Nazi

The stupid thing is
It would take a moment to cross
To him and tell him I know

With a kiss: I want dreadfully to do so
But it seems I have to go on stumbling
Like this for ever (I yearn for someone

To tell me where I go wrong!) Swastika
Armband notwithstanding and also that
A Nazi-character will shoot a stumbler

He makes the offer with his eyes
He smiles at me, no: his mouth is open
As if he’s giving an order

I hurry on like a painted coquette
Tottering flirtatiously
What a tease!

While secretly desiring him
Who conscientiously
Forbears to do so

To find my friend
My brother
That strength

To beat me down
Beyond the point
That I should feel

And to pick up
Whatever is left
After feeling.

Because that way it’s easier
That way they can say of me
When I reach my end

He didn’t give a damn,
Did he? And throw my body
In the gutter.

belcher green: twelfth rendering

There are two types of girl
I can’t abide at my place and I
Shan’t abide at a cocktail party

The too, too clean and the
Very dirty: cleanliness in one
Can rise to a pathology

Whereas with dirt
It’s a question of emphasis.
A standard of dress is required

Of a member,
A girl will not be admitted
Without a member

Be she a lady or what-have-you
We won’t have her. The proof is
In licking the spoon

You may think the drab little pudding
In the raincoat with the sallow skin
Might be improved with a bit of mixing

But it’s like an oven in here, isn’t it cunty?
And if the mixture is mean to begin with
No amount of beating will make it right

So it’s out the door, Lotte, or you’ll get a
Four-penny one! Else, Clara, open your
Bead-bag and let’s all have drinkettes

On the lovely member! Ian, the honours!
There, you see? The right word in your ear
And the complexion takes on a new radiance

The hair a new lustre, a very attractive dish
That little miss! Charm, deah. Not art,
I don’t give a fuck about art! And

Not the whiff of a cunty fuck about those
What lack it! I’ve had a fair bite at both,
Fair and not fair, that is, members and non-

Members and plenty of both, I’m glad to say.
As for being a beautiful woman…
True, deah, perfectly true,

I did have a Colombian gentleman
Who was in love with me.
He was a diplomat apparently, at least

I don’t know how it started. Or ended.
Where a girl keeps her key
Is a matter between mother and daughter

And if she’s unlucky enough to have neither,
Between her and her handbag, whether
It’s the key to her flat… or her heart

Or simply the key
To what she had
For a light lunch,

By night, safely and discreetly
Deposited.
And with that I’ll snap shut.

Members only! But you, deah
Are the exception proving the rule
Now don’t piss on the seats.

She’s not a pretty little miss, is she?
And what are you thinking, cunty?
With all that green?

That you might have made the most
Horrible mistake of your life? Yes, miss,
You! Don’t be boring. Go and clash

With the décor in the corner, would you.
There’s nothing more sorrowful than a
Hopeful girl without money

Or secrets to tell. Charm, Lotte!
Move along, Clara! With dirt or hurt
It’s all about emphasis. Come along, cunty!

not soap: thirteenth rendering

I’m not a writer
I’m a mole
My house will be my grave
It was my father’s

My mother still lives in the city
In a small tidy flat

These days her needs are simple,
Enough to eat and drink
And the company of friends

It’s a self-sufficient life
Both mine and hers
And to some degree
A selfish one

She never met my girlfriend
I call her that but… never mind

On the bright side,
I wonder if she thinks of me
And what she’s doing
When she thinks of me

(My mother, you idiot
I can guess where your thoughts
Are leading!)

I often think of her when I’m cleaning.
My last girlfriend had some real issues
With the kind of life I lead

I found her,
I was the one to find her in the end…

My father met her shortly before he died
He got along with her very well
They shared an interest in
Interior decorating

It’s only thanks to the two of them
That my surroundings
Have any sense of style
At all

Not that I pay that much attention
I bury myself in my work
Which is probably what she objected to

Which is what she did, initially
“It’s not a habit!” I used to shout, testily
I liked to think of it as showing
Strength of character

I know that what I do for work is absurd
But it’s the way I do it
My application has always been
Irreproachable

Even when pursuing courses
That would make most flinch
And turn back to the ordinary business
Of being human

I’ve remained steadfast and true
And without a goal,
And, in a way, selflessly

To the extent that when I made love to her
(This is after all what you wanted to hear
Isn’t it, about my love-life underground?)

I did so with the kind of abandon
That has to be more than habit,
That must be the thing itself.

It was a strong reckless love
Destructive, even, for me
But why not be extraordinary?

I was. I am. And if she saw my weakness
I could accept that, but what I couldn’t
Was what she didn’t see

That my weakness was also love
That my coldness was love
And that my distraction was love.

Now there’s no one against whom
I can gauge myself
I don’t know whether I’m strong
Or weak.

I move around,
Half-naked, covered in dirt,
Swearing like an old sailor,
Although I’ve never been to
The sea,

I cough my lungs up
And feel my legs give way
Like rotten timber.

I can do these things
Without a thought of being seen
If I have any talent at all
It resides in not being seen

I don’t have to
But I can

Because there’s no one
Telling me I don’t love,
I don’t care, and no one
Exactly following me.

I can squirm and roll
In whatever ugly liquid
Spills out of me into the ground

And like my mother, in my way
I’m looking after myself.

If I were a writer
And went to write my story
It would say, even as a mole
He was a good son,
Dirty but good.

If I ever wriggle to the bathroom
I’ll find that I don’t even own a bar of soap
If I look in the mirror
But I haven’t any

But if I look in, I’ll see
Reflected in a pool that has collected
In the red shadows
From the constant dripping
Nothing I haven’t forgotten,

A blur, which is not me looking away.
I’ll find a piece of pumice
As if the soil around here
Had been put down by layers
Of volcanic activity.

Whereas soap is a body, solid
Manufactured these days by a method
Of continuous production

Meaning that fresh ingredients are added
To the mixture up above
While down below the finished product
Is drawn off, pumice isn’t

And has no such connection to the body,
Before I can use it, notwithstanding this
And scrape away at my skin
I’m reminded of my confinement

At the centre of a porous surface
Pierced by countless malevolent eyes.

fourteenth rendering: towards a methodology – theory of half-mime

(from the notebooks for the RJF project)

We have a room
An empty room, square
But not out of necessity.

There are figures in the room.
They possess the range of movements
That the limitations
Of being figures
In an empty room
Allow.

Except that everything
Is here in the room as well
(Unless the space has no good will),

Everything that extends action or
Constrains movement, everything
That requires some kind of action
In order for it to be accomplished.

All things are here in the empty
Space of the room, however,
Only in part.

The part of all the things
That the figures can know and imagine
Which is in the room
Is that part which is not here.

But then let us be more specific,
The everything called upon
By the figures to exist
Exists only insofar as it requires
A kind of action and a sort of movement,
Physical and mental.

There is the memory of it,
For example,
But not the pencil itself,

The imagined fear
But not the fear itself
And not the object,
Whether enemy or monster,
Giving rise to it.

The type of everything we have here
Is constituted by memory and imagination
Gesturally.

To be more precise,
It is physically constituted and posited mentally
By the particular gestures (as in mime), by the
Memories and imaginations of the figures.
So that therefore it can only ever
Have a part existence.

Moreover,
The figures act and move in acknowledgement
Of the particularity, partiality – for being part-
Objective, part-objects – of the things they call on,
Of this everything that they,
And only they, and each of them,
Singly, can invoke.

They are attentive to the fact
That they are figures in an empty room,
Square but not out of
Necessity, empty also
But not out of necessity.

Half-mime, because part-object,
Incomplete action, because pseudo-cause:
These are the modes, and contents,
Of their engagement
With the actual, of acting
In cognizance of the part played by the
Real, which is all – everything – there is;

And these are not rules:
The discipline in question
Is freedom.

All that can be said
In the words they say
Can be said to exist
In the same way,
In part,

According to the discipline
Of freedom, which leaves inside the room
Room within it, a gap, through which things,
All things, whether words or things,
Are able to enter
But never completely enter.

This opening for words,
Which leave behind them
The irretraceable path of lightning,
Is as wide as the sky and stretches from horizon
To horizon, encompassing what is out of reach
As much as what lies within our grasp

But inevitably has more in it,
More of what is out of reach – for being high up,
For being remembered, for existing only
In our imaginations.

The words, the lines spoken
Are creatures like anemones,
Their tendrils reaching out
To trap what they cannot in fact
Hold, to say what they cannot
In fact mean.

How then will these figures
Relate to one another
If not also by
What they imagine
About one another
Or remember?

The gestures of relationship may come,
Of touch, hurt, ownership, to one figure
Or another but not
The means whereby they relate.

None of these figures will be
Anything to any of the others,
Only what they
Do and say.

Even to themselves
They will exist in
What they imagine
And remember.

…

At first, 1) You can’t do
Anything; 2) You can’t do
Anything, see anything
But you can’t close your ears
3) To this irritating voice.

You can neither stop your heart
Beating, nor cease to breathe.

And yet what happens
Will happen,
Half by accident,
Half by instinct,
By half-mime,
By gestures made
Towards and away
From what is there,
And so, partial.

A list,
An open list
Constraining what happens to what
Happens next, limited by the event,
Liberated by the acknowledged past
That is only partly here.

Now, make up this list, this series,
Of what is created and what is
Remembered, the two:
Let’s call this a score.

…

To disprove a thing, a word, is more interesting
Than proving something: a shoe, for example.

We can all see it’s a shoe,
Now prove it

Isn’t.

…

Have your personal list
(You pivot, you turn on it,
As on a dime)

But should it have made
An ethical sense

That will
Come

From the fact
It was never
Complete.