monotonous voices. This is fear and attraction of being swallowed.
Inside the dream, button sleep around your body like a glove. Free now of
space and time. Free to dissolve in the streaming summer.
Sleep is under-ocean dipped into each night.
At morning, awake dripping, gasping, eyes
stinging.
The eye looks vulgar
Inside its ugly shell.
Come out in the open
In all of your Brilliance.
Nothing. The air outside
burns my eyes.
I'll pull them out
and get rid of the burning.
Crisp hot whiteness
City Noon
Occupants of plague zone
are consumed.
(Santa Ana's are winds off deserts.)
Rip up grating and splash in gutters.
The search for water, moisture,
«wetness» of the actor, lover.
«Players» — the child, the actor, and the gambler.
The idea of chance is absent from the world of the
child and primitive. The gambler also feels in
service of an alien power. Chance is a survival
of religion in the modern city, as is theater,
more often cinema, the religion of possession.
What sacrifice, at what price can the city be born?
There are no longer «dancers», the possessed.
The cleavage of men into actor and spectators
is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed
with heroes who live for us and whom we punish.
If all the radios and televisions were deprived
of their sources of power, all books and paintings
burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed,
all the arts of vicarious existence…
We are content with the «given» in sensation's
quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad
body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes
staring in the dark.
Not one of the prisoners regained sexual balance.
Depressions, impotency, sleeplessness… erotic
dispersion in languages, reading, games, music,
and gymnastics.
The prisoners built their own theater which
testified to an incredible surfeit of leisure.
A young sailor, forced into female roles, soon
became the «town» darling, for by this time they
called themselves a town, and elected a mayor,
police, aldermen.
In old Russia, the Czar, each year, granted-
out of the shrewdness of his own soul or one of
his advisors' — a week's freedom for one convict
in each of his prisons. The choice was left to the
prisoners themselves and it was determined in
several ways. Sometimes by vote, sometimes by lot,
often by force. It was apparent that the chosen
must be a man of magic, virility, experience,
perhaps narrative skill, a man of possibility, in
short, a hero. Impossible situation at the
moment of freedom, impossible selection,
