defining our world in its percussions.
A room moves over a landscape, uprooting the mind, astonishing vision. A
gray film melts off the eyes, and runs down the cheeks. Farewell.
Modern life is a journey by car. The Passengers
change terribly in their reeking seats, or roam
from car to car, subject to unceasing
transformation. Inevitable progress is made toward
the beginning (there is no difference in terminals),
as we slice through cities, whose ripped backsides
present a moving picture of windows, signs, streets,
buildings. Sometimes other vessels, closed
worlds, vacuums, travel along beside to move
ahead or fall utterly behind.
Destroy roofs, walls, see in all the rooms at once.
From the air we trapped gods, with the gods'
omniscient gaze, but without power to be
inside minds and cities as they fly above.
June 30th. On the sun roof. He woke up suddenly.
At that instant a jet from the air base crawled
in silence overhead. On the beach, children try
to leap into its swift shadow.
The bird or insect that stumbles into a room
and cannot find the window. Because they know
no «windows.»
Wasps, poised in the window,
Excellent dancers,
detached, are not inclined
into our chamber.
Room of withering mesh
read love's vocabulary
in the green lamp
of tumescent flesh.
When men conceived buildings,
and closed themselves in chambers,
first trees and caves.
(Windows work two ways,
mirrors one way.)
You never walk through mirrors
or swim through windows.
Cure blindness with a whore's spittle.
In Rome, prostitutes were exhibited on roofs above the public highways for
the dubious hygiene of loose tides of men whose potential lust endangered the
fragile order of power. It is even reported that patrician ladies, masked
and naked, sometimes offered themselves up to these deprived eyes for private
excitements of their own.
More or less, we're all afflicted with the psychology of the voyeur. Not in a
strictly clinical or criminal sense, but in our whole physical and emotional
stance before the world. Whenever we seek to break this spell of passivity, our
actions are cruel and awkward and generally obscene, like an invalid who has
forgotten how to walk.
The voyeur, the peeper, the Peeping Tom, is a dark comedian. He is
repulsive in his dark anonymity, in his secret invasion. He is pitifully
alone. But, strangely, he is able through this same silence and concealment to
make unknowing partner of anyone within his eye's range. This is his threat
