Gary Hill


Site Recite (a prologue)

     
     Nothing seems to have ever been moved.  There is something of every
     description which can only be a trap.  Maybe it all moves proportionally
     cancelling out change and the estrangement of judgement.  No, an other order
     pervades.  It's happening all at once, I'm just a disturbance wrapped up in
     myself, a kind of ghost vampirically passing through the forest passing
     through the trees.  
     
     The sun will rise and I won't know what to do with it.  Its beak will torture
     me as will its slow movement, the movement it invented that I can only
     reiterate.  Too much time goes by to take it by surprise.  Bodily sustenance
     is no longer an excuse.  The quieter and stiller I become the livelier
     everything else seems to get.  The longer I wait the more the little deaths
     pile up.
     
     A vague language drapes everything but the walls--what walls?  The very walls
     that never vary--my enclosure, so glorious from a distance, stands on the
     brink of nothing like a four-legged table.  What is it?  An island with a
     never ending approach?  A stopgap from when to where?  Something to huddle
     over with my elbows like trestles without tracks, the bases of which are
     scattered with evidence of unsolved crimes?  The overallness of it all soaks
     through, runs through the holes in my hands and continues to run amok,
     overturning rocks that should not be overturned, breaking bread that should
     not be broken.
     
     So much remains. No doubt it can all be counted.  Starting with any one,
     continuing on with any other one until all is accounted for, a consensus is
     reached.  That it can all be shelved in all its quantized splendor, this then
     is the turf.
     
     These sightings.  This scene before me made up of just so many just views
     (nature's constituency) sits with indifference to the centripetal vanishing
     point that mentality posits so falsely.  Brain, minding business, incessantly
     constructs an infinite series of makeshifts designed to perpetuate the
     picture--the one like all others that holds its breath for a thousand words,
     conversely exhales point zero zero one pictures.  This insidious wraparound,
     tied to the notion "I have eyes in the back of my head," binds me to my
     double, implodes my being to a mere word as it winds the world around my
     mouth.  A seamless scroll weaves my view back into place--back to back with
     itself--the boomerang effect, decapitates any and all hallucinations leaving
     (lo and behold) the naked eye, stalking each and every utterance that breaks
     and enters the dormitories of perception.  
     
     I must become a warrior of self-consciousness and move my body to move my
     mind to move the words to move my mouth to spin the spur of  the moment.
     
     Imagining the brain closer than the eyes.


Copyright © 1989 Gary Hill

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Contact Subtext
Web Page Contents Copyright © Subtext, unless otherwise noted.