WEBVTT
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And for the first time, he wished he were far away.
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Lost in a deep, vast country where nobody knew him.
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Somewhere without language or streets.
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And he dreamed about this place without knowing its name.
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And when he woke up, he was on fire.
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There were blue flames burning the sheets of his bed.
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He ran through the flames toward the only two people he loved.
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But they were gone.
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His arms were burning, and he threw himself outside and rolled on the wet ground.
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Then he ran.
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He never looked back at the fire.
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He just ran.
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For five days he ran like this until every sign of man had disappeared.
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She cannot see him.
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She can only hear a deep, vast country without language.
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The only people who matter are gone.
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Running without end.
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Never looking back.
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Every sign of man has disappeared.
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He reaches her.
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She calls him by his name.
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This is Public Reveries.
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Somehow, even after years of building trust that this kind of moment is actually an opening to something deeper, I also feel a kind of quiet panic.
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What if there's really nothing to say?
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Sometimes the silence feels full, almost pressurized.
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Other times, it feels genuinely empty.
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The experience of not knowing where to start, and the experience of feeling there's nothing there.
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They look the same from the outside, but feel completely different in the room.
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In either case, together, we begin to speak anyway.
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Sometimes I hear a kind of voice whispering, Say whatever comes to mind.
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Say it even if you don't want to.
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Let your mind drift, like a traveler watching the scenery from a railway carriage.
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Even when they do find the words, they might say, I'm sorry for going off subject, or, this might be a tangent.
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What if what we talk about matters less than the experience that speaking creates?
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What would it be like to speak without yet knowing what you're talking about, or to whom you're speaking?
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Let's return to the scene where we began.
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The 1984 Vim Venders film, Paris, Texas, begins with a haggard man walking through the desert in a sport coat, a tie, and a red baseball cap.
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He looks like he's been out there for weeks.
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When he finally stumbles back into civilization, he refuses to speak.
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For days, nothing.
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Then fragments, single words, only in response to questions.
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We learn his name is Travis.
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He had a wife, Jane, and a young son.
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Something devastated this family four years ago, but nothing about it is spoken directly.
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Sometime later, he finds Jane working in a peep show on the outskirts of Houston.
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Men come to private booths to look through a one-way mirror at women in rooms decorated to look like other places.
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A hotel, a coffee shop, a swimming pool.
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Most of them come not for what you'd expect, but to talk.
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To speak to someone who can hear them but can't see them.
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Who will listen without ending the conversation.
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A confession booth in a casino.
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Travis sits in the dark.
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Jane comes in on her side of the glass.
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For the first time since he ran from their breakdown out into the desert, he sees her.
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Is this your first visit here?
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Yes.
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You realize that I can't see you, even though you can see me.
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Well, that takes a little getting used to.
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I'll just listen.
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All right.
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I'm a real good listener.
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On this first visit, he tries to speak to her, but he struggles, becomes flustered, and leaves.
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Another day, he comes back and tries again.
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He sees her through the glass, turns the chair around, so that he can't see her either, and picks up the phone.
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This time, he tells her their story.
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She doesn't know who he is, or that the story he's telling her is her own.
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I knew these people.
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What people?
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These two people.
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They were in love with each other.
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And together they turned everything into a kind of an adventure.
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She liked that.
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Just an ordinary trip down to the grocery store was full of adventure.
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They were always laughing at stupid things.
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We like to make her laugh.
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Because all they wanted to do was be with each other.
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They were always together.
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Sounds like they were very happy.
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Yes, they were.
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They were real happy.
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And he he loved her more than he ever felt possible.
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Travis speaks for a long time.
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As he goes on and starts to describe the ways it went wrong and how he destroyed their family.
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She begins to recognize him.
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He was surprised at himself because he didn't feel anything anymore.
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All he wanted to do was sleep.
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And for the first time, he wished he were far away.
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Lost in a deep, vast country where nobody knew him.
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Somewhere without language or streets.
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She says his name.
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He thinks that's the end of it.
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But Jane asks him not to leave.
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To hear her too.
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She turns away so they can't see each other.
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Don't go yet.
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At first, Travis is stunned to look at Jane.
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Later, he turns away and evens the terrain.
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Neither of them can see.
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Then he asks her to turn off the light so she can see him.
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Then she sits on the floor out of view, back turned, and begins to speak to him.
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They try every configuration, except the one they can't bear, facing each other directly.
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The past is enormous and unspeakable, and they're trying to be in the room with each other anyway.
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What they do here is choreograph who looks, who is seen, who speaks, and who listens.
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They move between tenses.
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He speaks in a distant third person.
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She addresses a you, but the more vivid you is the one that she used to make speeches to in her mind.
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The dance brings the past close enough to live in its shadow.
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To speak here is to come close to what was never quite experienced when it happened, but not too close.
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Too close would mean feeling the blue flames cremating their marriage bed.
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Too close would mean not surviving the long desert.
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Too close would mean Travis living with who he was and what he did to the only two people he loved.
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The words circle and tell a story, with enough space that the flames give off warmth rather than singe.
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Jane and Travis speak to each other like pilgrims circumambulating the shrine of their shared devastation.
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They never make it to the center, but they don't run away, and they don't go silent.
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They speak their way about as close to the truth of their relationship as they can get without burning up.
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And that might be just enough for some kind of life to continue.
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He missed his session on Monday because of a word.
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Jane made long speeches in her mind to the man who wasn't there.
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My patient did something different.
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He registered the need.
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She watched God and humans and moor wind and open night.
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She watched eyes, stars, inside, outside actual weather.
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She watched the bars of time which broke.
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She watched the poor core of the world wide open.
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To be a watcher is not a choice.
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There's nowhere to get away from it, no ledge to climb up to, like a swimmer who walks out of the water at sunset, shaking the drops off.
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It just flies open.
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To be a watcher is not in itself sad or happy, although she uses these words in her verse as she uses the emotions of sexual union in her novel, grazing with euphemism, the work of watching.
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But it has no name.
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It is transparent.
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Sometimes she calls it thou.
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Meanwhile, Emily continued to brush into the carpet the question: Why cast the world away?
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For someone hooked up to thou, the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.
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But in between, the neighbor who recalls her coming in from a walk on the moors with her face lit up by a divine light, and the sister tells us Emily never made a friend in her life is a space where the little raw soul slips through.
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She spent most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet, walking the moor, or watching.
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She says it gave her peace.
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Yet her poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons, vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters, locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls.
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While there are many ways of being held prisoner, I'm thinking as a stride over the moor.
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As a rule, after lunch, mother has a nap and I go out to walk.
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The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April carve into me with knives of light.
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Something inside it reminds me of childhood.
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It is the light of the stalled time after lunch when clocks tick, and hearts shut, and fathers leave to go back to work, and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering something they never tell.
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You remember too much, my mother said to me recently.
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Why hold on to all that?
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And I said, Where can I put it down?
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She shifted to a question about airport.
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The last time I saw Law was a black night in September.
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Autumn had begun, my knees were cold inside my clothes.
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A chill fragment of moon rose.
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He stood in my living room and spoke without looking at me.
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Not enough spin on it, he said of our five years of love.
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Inside my chest, I felt my heart snap into two pieces, which floated apart.
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And now it was so cold, it was like burning.
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I put out my hand to touch his.
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He moved back.
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I don't want to be sexual with you, he said.
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Everything gets crazy.
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But now he was looking at me.
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Yes, I said, as I began to remove my clothes.
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Everything gets crazy.
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When nude, I turned my back because he likes the back.
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He moved on to me.
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Everything I know about love and its necessities, I learned it that one moment when I found myself thrusting my little red, burning backside like a baboon at a man who no longer cherished me.
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There was no area of my mind not appalled by this action, a part of my body that could have done otherwise.
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But to talk of mind and body begs the question.
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Soul is the place, stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind, where such necessity grinds itself out.
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Soul is what I kept watch on all that night.
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Law stayed with me.
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We lay on top of the covers, as if it weren't really a night of sleep and time, caressing and singing to one another in our made-up language, like the children we used to be.
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That was a night that centered heaven and hell, as Emily would say.
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We tried to fuck, but he remained limp, although happy.
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I came again and again, each time accumulating lucidity, until at last I was floating high up near the ceiling, looking down on the two souls clasped there on the bed, with their mortal boundaries visible around them like lines and a map.
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I saw the lines harden.
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He left in the morning.
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It is very cold walking into the long, scraped April wind.
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This time of the year, there is no sunset, just some movement inside the light, and then sinking away.
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Nowhere to put down memory.
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Nowhere to receive the little raw soul that slips through.
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For Emily, and perhaps for Carson, the act of watching becomes their primary relationship, the beloved for whom they keep vigil.
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Yet to be a watcher of the world without someone to speak it to is its own kind of prison.
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All one can do there is brush the carpet again and again.
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Rumination is often mistaken for circling endlessly.
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To ruminate is to metabolize something fibrous and dense, to draw out its nutrients, just slowly and with great patience.
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When the stories remain untold, or there is no one to listen, they congeal into bolts, fetters, cages, aching walls.
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The world empties, and a shadow falls over the soul.
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It has no way to slip through.
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Only speech passes through the glass.
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Carson's mother chooses not to hold on, to remain silent in the face of all that.
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The nap can't be disturbed by too many questions.
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Clocks tick and hearts shut.
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Without having a way to speak, Travis can only wander the desert, and Mother stands over the sink, not telling anyone.
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Where Travis and Jane circle slowly closer, Carson disrobes and turns her back.
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She stops just watching and reaches out her hand, knowing that everything will get crazy.
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She lets the body lead where the mind and language cannot go.
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Offering herself up in this way also appalls her, and yet she insists the conflict itself misses the point.
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The grind is the working through of the grit spread across the surface of her soul.
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There is no ending to this working through, just movements in the light.
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People wander a landscape constituted by the others they have lost, or perhaps never fully had.
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When speech begins to lead, it gets less clear who is speaking and who is being addressed.
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The voices of the absent start to find their way in.
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The room fills with spectral traces of the people who mattered once and do again now.
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As I listen, I begin to feel something that isn't mine, as though I'm being conjured by the patient's absent loved ones.
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Why do I feel this surge of pride, this broken-hearted distance, this searing pain?
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Are these not my own?
00:28:54.559 --> 00:29:06.720
Until someone listens, allows themselves to be momentarily possessed by our broken places, our absent others, we have nowhere to put them down.
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Love reaches out its hand towards the April sky and meets a locked window in September.
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To lose our place, to forget what we were saying, and to whom.
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And for the first time, he wished he were far away.
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Lost in a deep, vast country where nobody knew him.
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Somewhere without language or streets.
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And he dreamed about this place without knowing its name.
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And when he woke up, he was on fire.
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There were blue flames burning the sheets of his bed.
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He ran through the flames toward the only two people he loved.
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But they were gone.
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His arms were burning, and he threw himself outside and rolled on the wet ground.
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Then he ran.
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He never looked back at the fire.
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He just ran.
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For five days he ran like this until every sign of man had disappeared.
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She cannot see him.
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She can only hear a deep, vast country without language.
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The only people who matter are gone.
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Running without end.
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Never looking back.
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Every sign of man has disappeared.
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He reaches her.
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She calls him by his name.
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This is Public Reveries.
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Somehow, even after years of building trust that this kind of moment is actually an opening to something deeper, I also feel a kind of quiet panic.
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What if there's really nothing to say?
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Sometimes the silence feels full, almost pressurized.
00:05:54.079 --> 00:05:57.920
Other times, it feels genuinely empty.
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The experience of not knowing where to start, and the experience of feeling there's nothing there.
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They look the same from the outside, but feel completely different in the room.
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In either case, together, we begin to speak anyway.
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Sometimes I hear a kind of voice whispering, Say whatever comes to mind.
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Say it even if you don't want to.
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Let your mind drift, like a traveler watching the scenery from a railway carriage.
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Even when they do find the words, they might say, I'm sorry for going off subject, or, this might be a tangent.
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What if what we talk about matters less than the experience that speaking creates?
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What would it be like to speak without yet knowing what you're talking about, or to whom you're speaking?
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Let's return to the scene where we began.
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The 1984 Vim Venders film, Paris, Texas, begins with a haggard man walking through the desert in a sport coat, a tie, and a red baseball cap.
00:07:17.519 --> 00:07:21.439
He looks like he's been out there for weeks.
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When he finally stumbles back into civilization, he refuses to speak.
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For days, nothing.
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Then fragments, single words, only in response to questions.
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We learn his name is Travis.
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He had a wife, Jane, and a young son.
00:07:42.879 --> 00:07:51.279
Something devastated this family four years ago, but nothing about it is spoken directly.
00:07:51.279 --> 00:07:59.199
Sometime later, he finds Jane working in a peep show on the outskirts of Houston.
00:07:59.199 --> 00:08:08.399
Men come to private booths to look through a one-way mirror at women in rooms decorated to look like other places.
00:08:08.399 --> 00:08:13.680
A hotel, a coffee shop, a swimming pool.
00:08:13.680 --> 00:08:19.040
Most of them come not for what you'd expect, but to talk.
00:08:19.040 --> 00:08:26.079
To speak to someone who can hear them but can't see them.
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Who will listen without ending the conversation.
00:08:31.120 --> 00:08:34.480
A confession booth in a casino.
00:08:34.480 --> 00:08:38.159
Travis sits in the dark.
00:08:38.159 --> 00:08:41.440
Jane comes in on her side of the glass.
00:08:41.440 --> 00:08:48.399
For the first time since he ran from their breakdown out into the desert, he sees her.
00:08:49.840 --> 00:08:51.519
Is this your first visit here?
00:08:53.360 --> 00:08:54.000
Yes.
00:09:01.519 --> 00:09:04.720
You realize that I can't see you, even though you can see me.
00:09:04.720 --> 00:09:07.440
Well, that takes a little getting used to.
00:09:07.440 --> 00:09:18.080
I'll just listen.
00:09:18.080 --> 00:09:18.960
All right.
00:09:18.960 --> 00:09:23.600
I'm a real good listener.
00:09:28.320 --> 00:09:35.759
On this first visit, he tries to speak to her, but he struggles, becomes flustered, and leaves.
00:09:35.759 --> 00:09:40.000
Another day, he comes back and tries again.
00:09:40.000 --> 00:09:48.799
He sees her through the glass, turns the chair around, so that he can't see her either, and picks up the phone.
00:09:48.799 --> 00:09:52.639
This time, he tells her their story.
00:09:52.639 --> 00:09:58.960
She doesn't know who he is, or that the story he's telling her is her own.
00:10:00.159 --> 00:10:01.519
I knew these people.
00:10:02.639 --> 00:10:03.519
What people?
00:10:05.919 --> 00:10:07.039
These two people.
00:10:12.879 --> 00:10:14.799
They were in love with each other.
00:10:14.799 --> 00:10:21.679
And together they turned everything into a kind of an adventure.
00:10:21.679 --> 00:10:24.240
She liked that.
00:10:24.240 --> 00:10:31.360
Just an ordinary trip down to the grocery store was full of adventure.
00:10:31.360 --> 00:10:36.159
They were always laughing at stupid things.
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We like to make her laugh.
00:10:38.320 --> 00:10:49.840
Because all they wanted to do was be with each other.
00:10:49.840 --> 00:10:53.519
They were always together.
00:10:54.960 --> 00:10:56.799
Sounds like they were very happy.
00:10:58.879 --> 00:11:00.240
Yes, they were.
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They were real happy.
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And he he loved her more than he ever felt possible.
00:11:14.559 --> 00:11:16.879
Travis speaks for a long time.
00:11:16.879 --> 00:11:23.919
As he goes on and starts to describe the ways it went wrong and how he destroyed their family.
00:11:23.919 --> 00:11:26.639
She begins to recognize him.
00:11:29.039 --> 00:11:33.840
He was surprised at himself because he didn't feel anything anymore.
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All he wanted to do was sleep.
00:11:38.720 --> 00:11:45.360
And for the first time, he wished he were far away.
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Lost in a deep, vast country where nobody knew him.
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Somewhere without language or streets.
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She says his name.
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He thinks that's the end of it.
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But Jane asks him not to leave.
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To hear her too.
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She turns away so they can't see each other.
00:12:14.159 --> 00:12:15.759
Don't go yet.
00:14:17.200 --> 00:14:20.639
At first, Travis is stunned to look at Jane.
00:14:20.639 --> 00:14:24.480
Later, he turns away and evens the terrain.
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Neither of them can see.
00:14:26.480 --> 00:14:32.320
Then he asks her to turn off the light so she can see him.
00:14:32.320 --> 00:14:39.919
Then she sits on the floor out of view, back turned, and begins to speak to him.
00:14:39.919 --> 00:14:47.600
They try every configuration, except the one they can't bear, facing each other directly.
00:14:47.600 --> 00:14:55.679
The past is enormous and unspeakable, and they're trying to be in the room with each other anyway.
00:14:55.679 --> 00:15:04.399
What they do here is choreograph who looks, who is seen, who speaks, and who listens.
00:15:04.399 --> 00:15:07.440
They move between tenses.
00:15:07.440 --> 00:15:11.200
He speaks in a distant third person.
00:15:11.200 --> 00:15:19.519
She addresses a you, but the more vivid you is the one that she used to make speeches to in her mind.
00:15:19.519 --> 00:15:24.960
The dance brings the past close enough to live in its shadow.
00:15:24.960 --> 00:15:33.600
To speak here is to come close to what was never quite experienced when it happened, but not too close.
00:15:33.600 --> 00:15:40.240
Too close would mean feeling the blue flames cremating their marriage bed.
00:15:40.240 --> 00:15:44.960
Too close would mean not surviving the long desert.
00:15:44.960 --> 00:15:53.679
Too close would mean Travis living with who he was and what he did to the only two people he loved.
00:15:53.679 --> 00:16:02.639
The words circle and tell a story, with enough space that the flames give off warmth rather than singe.
00:16:02.639 --> 00:16:11.679
Jane and Travis speak to each other like pilgrims circumambulating the shrine of their shared devastation.
00:16:11.679 --> 00:16:18.799
They never make it to the center, but they don't run away, and they don't go silent.
00:16:18.799 --> 00:16:27.200
They speak their way about as close to the truth of their relationship as they can get without burning up.
00:16:27.200 --> 00:16:32.080
And that might be just enough for some kind of life to continue.
00:16:32.080 --> 00:17:23.759
He missed his session on Monday because of a word.
00:17:23.759 --> 00:17:30.640
Jane made long speeches in her mind to the man who wasn't there.
00:17:30.640 --> 00:17:33.519
My patient did something different.
00:17:33.519 --> 00:17:35.359
He registered the need.
00:18:57.519 --> 00:19:03.599
She watched God and humans and moor wind and open night.
00:19:03.599 --> 00:19:11.839
She watched eyes, stars, inside, outside actual weather.
00:19:11.839 --> 00:19:15.119
She watched the bars of time which broke.
00:19:15.119 --> 00:19:19.680
She watched the poor core of the world wide open.
00:19:19.680 --> 00:19:23.359
To be a watcher is not a choice.
00:19:23.359 --> 00:19:33.039
There's nowhere to get away from it, no ledge to climb up to, like a swimmer who walks out of the water at sunset, shaking the drops off.
00:19:33.039 --> 00:19:35.599
It just flies open.
00:19:35.599 --> 00:19:52.240
To be a watcher is not in itself sad or happy, although she uses these words in her verse as she uses the emotions of sexual union in her novel, grazing with euphemism, the work of watching.
00:19:52.240 --> 00:19:55.519
But it has no name.
00:19:55.519 --> 00:19:57.920
It is transparent.
00:19:57.920 --> 00:20:01.039
Sometimes she calls it thou.
00:20:01.039 --> 00:20:09.920
Meanwhile, Emily continued to brush into the carpet the question: Why cast the world away?
00:20:09.920 --> 00:20:17.519
For someone hooked up to thou, the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.
00:20:17.519 --> 00:20:35.359
But in between, the neighbor who recalls her coming in from a walk on the moors with her face lit up by a divine light, and the sister tells us Emily never made a friend in her life is a space where the little raw soul slips through.
00:20:35.359 --> 00:20:45.599
She spent most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet, walking the moor, or watching.
00:20:45.599 --> 00:20:48.480
She says it gave her peace.
00:20:48.480 --> 00:21:04.400
Yet her poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons, vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters, locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls.
00:21:04.400 --> 00:21:11.200
While there are many ways of being held prisoner, I'm thinking as a stride over the moor.
00:21:11.200 --> 00:21:16.799
As a rule, after lunch, mother has a nap and I go out to walk.
00:21:16.799 --> 00:21:25.039
The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April carve into me with knives of light.
00:21:25.039 --> 00:21:29.680
Something inside it reminds me of childhood.
00:21:29.680 --> 00:21:45.279
It is the light of the stalled time after lunch when clocks tick, and hearts shut, and fathers leave to go back to work, and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering something they never tell.
00:21:45.279 --> 00:21:50.079
You remember too much, my mother said to me recently.
00:21:50.079 --> 00:21:52.480
Why hold on to all that?
00:21:52.480 --> 00:21:56.160
And I said, Where can I put it down?
00:21:56.160 --> 00:21:59.759
She shifted to a question about airport.
00:21:59.759 --> 00:22:08.880
The last time I saw Law was a black night in September.
00:22:08.880 --> 00:22:13.759
Autumn had begun, my knees were cold inside my clothes.
00:22:13.759 --> 00:22:16.880
A chill fragment of moon rose.
00:22:16.880 --> 00:22:21.759
He stood in my living room and spoke without looking at me.
00:22:21.759 --> 00:22:27.440
Not enough spin on it, he said of our five years of love.
00:22:27.440 --> 00:22:35.039
Inside my chest, I felt my heart snap into two pieces, which floated apart.
00:22:35.039 --> 00:22:39.680
And now it was so cold, it was like burning.
00:22:39.680 --> 00:22:42.720
I put out my hand to touch his.
00:22:42.720 --> 00:22:45.039
He moved back.
00:22:45.039 --> 00:22:49.119
I don't want to be sexual with you, he said.
00:22:49.119 --> 00:22:52.079
Everything gets crazy.
00:22:52.079 --> 00:22:54.640
But now he was looking at me.
00:22:54.640 --> 00:23:00.400
Yes, I said, as I began to remove my clothes.
00:23:00.400 --> 00:23:02.880
Everything gets crazy.
00:23:02.880 --> 00:23:07.839
When nude, I turned my back because he likes the back.
00:23:07.839 --> 00:23:10.880
He moved on to me.
00:23:10.880 --> 00:23:27.680
Everything I know about love and its necessities, I learned it that one moment when I found myself thrusting my little red, burning backside like a baboon at a man who no longer cherished me.
00:23:27.680 --> 00:23:36.720
There was no area of my mind not appalled by this action, a part of my body that could have done otherwise.
00:23:36.720 --> 00:23:41.440
But to talk of mind and body begs the question.
00:23:41.440 --> 00:23:53.839
Soul is the place, stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind, where such necessity grinds itself out.
00:23:53.839 --> 00:23:57.359
Soul is what I kept watch on all that night.
00:23:57.359 --> 00:23:59.759
Law stayed with me.
00:23:59.759 --> 00:24:12.559
We lay on top of the covers, as if it weren't really a night of sleep and time, caressing and singing to one another in our made-up language, like the children we used to be.
00:24:12.559 --> 00:24:18.880
That was a night that centered heaven and hell, as Emily would say.
00:24:18.880 --> 00:24:24.400
We tried to fuck, but he remained limp, although happy.
00:24:24.400 --> 00:24:45.599
I came again and again, each time accumulating lucidity, until at last I was floating high up near the ceiling, looking down on the two souls clasped there on the bed, with their mortal boundaries visible around them like lines and a map.
00:24:45.599 --> 00:24:48.559
I saw the lines harden.
00:24:48.559 --> 00:24:51.599
He left in the morning.
00:24:51.599 --> 00:24:59.200
It is very cold walking into the long, scraped April wind.
00:24:59.200 --> 00:25:11.200
This time of the year, there is no sunset, just some movement inside the light, and then sinking away.
00:25:35.599 --> 00:25:37.759
Nowhere to put down memory.
00:25:37.759 --> 00:25:43.039
Nowhere to receive the little raw soul that slips through.
00:25:43.039 --> 00:25:54.640
For Emily, and perhaps for Carson, the act of watching becomes their primary relationship, the beloved for whom they keep vigil.
00:25:54.640 --> 00:26:02.799
Yet to be a watcher of the world without someone to speak it to is its own kind of prison.
00:26:02.799 --> 00:26:08.319
All one can do there is brush the carpet again and again.
00:26:08.319 --> 00:26:14.079
Rumination is often mistaken for circling endlessly.
00:26:14.079 --> 00:26:24.640
To ruminate is to metabolize something fibrous and dense, to draw out its nutrients, just slowly and with great patience.
00:26:24.640 --> 00:26:36.799
When the stories remain untold, or there is no one to listen, they congeal into bolts, fetters, cages, aching walls.
00:26:36.799 --> 00:26:41.680
The world empties, and a shadow falls over the soul.
00:26:41.680 --> 00:26:44.400
It has no way to slip through.
00:26:44.400 --> 00:26:48.880
Only speech passes through the glass.
00:26:48.880 --> 00:26:59.279
Carson's mother chooses not to hold on, to remain silent in the face of all that.
00:26:59.279 --> 00:27:04.000
The nap can't be disturbed by too many questions.
00:27:04.000 --> 00:27:07.519
Clocks tick and hearts shut.
00:27:07.519 --> 00:27:18.559
Without having a way to speak, Travis can only wander the desert, and Mother stands over the sink, not telling anyone.
00:27:18.559 --> 00:27:26.240
Where Travis and Jane circle slowly closer, Carson disrobes and turns her back.
00:27:26.240 --> 00:27:34.160
She stops just watching and reaches out her hand, knowing that everything will get crazy.
00:27:34.160 --> 00:27:39.440
She lets the body lead where the mind and language cannot go.
00:27:39.440 --> 00:27:48.720
Offering herself up in this way also appalls her, and yet she insists the conflict itself misses the point.
00:27:48.720 --> 00:27:55.599
The grind is the working through of the grit spread across the surface of her soul.
00:27:55.599 --> 00:28:02.000
There is no ending to this working through, just movements in the light.
00:28:02.000 --> 00:28:12.240
People wander a landscape constituted by the others they have lost, or perhaps never fully had.
00:28:12.240 --> 00:28:20.720
When speech begins to lead, it gets less clear who is speaking and who is being addressed.
00:28:20.720 --> 00:28:24.880
The voices of the absent start to find their way in.
00:28:24.880 --> 00:28:32.240
The room fills with spectral traces of the people who mattered once and do again now.
00:28:32.240 --> 00:28:42.880
As I listen, I begin to feel something that isn't mine, as though I'm being conjured by the patient's absent loved ones.
00:28:42.880 --> 00:28:51.359
Why do I feel this surge of pride, this broken-hearted distance, this searing pain?
00:28:51.359 --> 00:28:54.559
Are these not my own?
00:28:54.559 --> 00:29:06.720
Until someone listens, allows themselves to be momentarily possessed by our broken places, our absent others, we have nowhere to put them down.
00:29:06.720 --> 00:29:15.119
Love reaches out its hand towards the April sky and meets a locked window in September.
00:29:15.119 --> 00:29:25.440
To lose our place, to forget what we were saying, and to whom.
