To watch (wash) how it adds up.
Four characters in the room. A bed, small desk, two dimmed lights at either end. A straw mask hangs from the door knob. The colors of that mask, its tangled hair.
"Our first step in the employment of this procedure teaches us that what we must take as the object of our attention is not the dream as a whole but the separate portions of its contents."
I had received a gift, a small wax egg I took to be a sign of some third person neither of us knew. Just below the surface, two portraits. One, a man in a robe read a book set on a stand before him. Perspective reversed, the fr edge of the book pushed out from the surface of the egg, the whole thing in danger of falling to an unseen ground. Two, the same man stood knee deep in a river, a dim figure beside and above him, others watching from what seemed to be the shore. My own sense that I had missed something.
"The function of a knot" manipulation of string into a Jacob's Ladder in the place of which Blake's watercolor: an unsupported staircase turning up through stars from the sleeping man. In the place of which a still earlier version.
Or a community, as one would wish to give to another. Channel and case, "the submerged chain of mountains already alluded to." A chain, that is, specifically: a grip we have on some things following others.
The story he told had to do with a life imagined, a life, as he said, in the world of things removed slightly from what he expected. He had received a gift, a painting or, more exactly, a painting that had been manipulated, run through some kind of copying process. What seemed to have once been a set scene, perhaps a still-life, was now abstract, black and white, almost caligraphic. Except that in one corner he could almost make out a new scene: four figures in a room, sitting at a table. Two men, two women, looking at a mask or, he thought, a photograph of a mask. His story began here and moved out or back into the rest of the painting.
A history: one from one. Back in two.
Into. Common graft leave from or for. Estate founds as state funds.
Meant from another room: "Blue means water; the wavy line means a wavy line; the color black means black" the voice of a boy as he knows. And pays for. "The king of the world. The queen." As "an order which goes beyond their interaction as such" words where he sends them reliable beyond any syntax. Records screams on tape to make a history without relation, listens to it daily. Two dimmed lights at either end.
Whichever object I choose the wish holds as I hoped had I been able to give the story its outline the day I dropped a firecracker into a bottle and ran leaving whatever fragments behind me and mud at my back launching rockets with friends who may never think it the same. What is real. Distance from it. I tell you who I thank, I think.
Holly roads march rounds outsed for an I let go to the end of a certain rope. Who follows it as it goes. Knots an early means of keeping track, totem beyond relation to two who listens.
Employ records: he had a ball he tossed into a can repeatedly, running with it from one end of his basement room to the other. Hammer, saw, piles of nails in another room just built for others to be housed, his clock taken from the wall. A chute through which sounds fell from above. Conflates the two the one and its other. Flower beds out front, a ramp to the attic, one door open or closed. With the can, which he nailed onto the top of a door frame, he had a net out back where he played for a time. Driveway one and two. Turn and shoot, off the rim or in. Slice and its other. Countrary. Train.
"A wash not of." Which he invents. Prevents. A system he stands outside as what he says forges, forgets. Masks what tracks, reads maps along the way. I mean to say sells what he can in a market where he finds himself enclosed in a chain of barter, lifting out the contents of a box one by one, reaidng what they have to say.
One by one by one by one. Each act begins with four people, seated, eyes closed, all humming softly. The stage bare but for them and the knowledge of what they keep offstage. One holds a small box within which a simple black mask is visible. The string which would have tied it to a head has fallen to the floor, tangled.
Density. Their configurations. The control or lack of it implied. What each thinks of the others. As labor means to know.
Jump rope skipping rope step round the block black rope stretched taut all the way though why we couldn't have said more than the pulling itself allowed. Aloud round again rest again round. The edges the picture. Draft back out into two stretch again four corners four figures one in each round again rest again round.
Drops to the floor, shattering.
"One understood nothing, if by understanding is meant the discursive expostion of arguments which one had been taught to practice." Two understood, none less. And two others. A bed, small desk, two dimmed lights. Shall shelter. Of course between. And enter.
Not speaking until later, I moved from the door to the couch and sat.