Saturday, March 21, 2009

You are what you perceive. Once the light goes on, vision is constricted by a focus; some portion of the whole is plunged into darkness, into the unseen. This, as I see it, is the human dilemma; the desire is to speculate upon the whole, but speculation is necessarily specific. The desire remains perpetually unsatisfied; whatever you get is not what you really want. The motor is the lack.

To speculate is to enter a theater and stay there. No matter where you may fancy that you go, you remain within the theater, within the mise en scene. I would like to get up and walk out on this drama but when I pass through the door marked EXIT, I find myself still inside the theater. What makes me think that there is a world outside this theater that I am in? It is my dreams that make me think that.

The way out is through loss, through the loss of focus, the loss of the camera. It is not possible to speculate upon the whole; to experience the whole is to cease speculating. The speculator cannot be the source of this desire to turn off the light; she/he is the light. What then, is the source of this desire for oblivion?