perpetuates because it is . The question begets another question not in hope for clarity, but to construct: an eternal definitionless field amassing around what is not there. To try to define such space would only there negate it further, to bend it deeper there where it is not.
In the third unit of the four-part talk, Cage’s text enters into its own sort of repetitive blanking in and out, circling its self-aware and therein hybrid empty center, repeating interweaving variations of small phrases, punched into the pattern of a frameless, blank collage: “More and more / we have the feeling / that I am getting / nowhere,” he says, again and again. But also: “That is a pleasure / which will continue.” The nothing moment, then, is fed into the self as the self itself, and it is a joyful being rather than some guidebooked idea we are forced to press against. The effect acts to rather defuse what could be immortal terror in the way when one is told they must relax when they clearly can’t relax, unto a resignation to the futility of self, which once invoked, allows a kind of interior freedom, functionally useless but existing nowhere else but in the self—the same way that in resigning the control of ego to the unconscious we are rested and forced against the things we otherwise might never wear: the rolling boulder, the room’s awakening, the memory of people we’d forgotten, or who exist only in the dreamholds of the head . The sleepless mind allows at last, away from waking onslaught, some brainless shape to bloat inside of, blanking out against such daily sinking into the want of warmth and light, rubbed and rubbing around no center. One is left at last, without sharp signal, endlessly upon some nameless cusp evoking both strange pleasure in its presence and terror in its refusal to come on.
]
]
]
The longest I ever couldn’t sleep at once was 129 hours, through the turning of the New Year into 1999. I was living in the ex–master bedroom of my childhood home, the same room, likely, where I’d been conceived twenty years prior. The house since then had grown—six new rooms added to its dimension in my preteens, boxing in more air around. My bedroom’s only two windows faced a small work shed my father called “The Building”—for younger years I’d both feared The Building and somehow hoped to some day live inside it, in its small and gloaming light. Often, awake with nowhere else to look beyond my window, I would feel sure I’d seen someone there inside that other, parallel pale, watching from behind a glint of moonglow, there just as quickly gone.
This certain week inside that week I’d come down sick with mono. My face swelled and my body bubbled sore. Hard to drink or think or move mostly, in which case most similarly afflicted should be sleeping, and yet I, inside my room, could not turn me off. My brain, as if in cycling against the medical commandment, Get as much rest as you can , insisted each hour to stay cycling, drawing days on. I saw clocks even when I closed my eyes, drummed with the slow pulsating idea that any second might be the one in which my self ’s sound might finally become silent, slip to nowhere, become gone. Instead I saw colors, prisms, tunnels, smudging; the room packed full of eyes; the light sometimes from TV alone at 4 AM like a long and grossly narrow hall. I lay on the bottom half of what once had been a bunk bed, a thing I’d begged for years ago for Christmas though there was no one there to share it with, as if in the night I split into two and needed both, terrified by the way the room around me, in those hours, seemed as well to bore new holes in the walls.
Also visible from the room, via its two other glassy surfaces, were (a) the kidney-bean-shaped swimming pool where as a young child I nearly drowned, my mother having turned one moment in the light to look at something elsewhere and turned back to find me having somehow flipped facedown, and where in
In the third unit of the four-part talk, Cage’s text enters into its own sort of repetitive blanking in and out, circling its self-aware and therein hybrid empty center, repeating interweaving variations of small phrases, punched into the pattern of a frameless, blank collage: “More and more / we have the feeling / that I am getting / nowhere,” he says, again and again. But also: “That is a pleasure / which will continue.” The nothing moment, then, is fed into the self as the self itself, and it is a joyful being rather than some guidebooked idea we are forced to press against. The effect acts to rather defuse what could be immortal terror in the way when one is told they must relax when they clearly can’t relax, unto a resignation to the futility of self, which once invoked, allows a kind of interior freedom, functionally useless but existing nowhere else but in the self—the same way that in resigning the control of ego to the unconscious we are rested and forced against the things we otherwise might never wear: the rolling boulder, the room’s awakening, the memory of people we’d forgotten, or who exist only in the dreamholds of the head . The sleepless mind allows at last, away from waking onslaught, some brainless shape to bloat inside of, blanking out against such daily sinking into the want of warmth and light, rubbed and rubbing around no center. One is left at last, without sharp signal, endlessly upon some nameless cusp evoking both strange pleasure in its presence and terror in its refusal to come on.
]
]
]
The longest I ever couldn’t sleep at once was 129 hours, through the turning of the New Year into 1999. I was living in the ex–master bedroom of my childhood home, the same room, likely, where I’d been conceived twenty years prior. The house since then had grown—six new rooms added to its dimension in my preteens, boxing in more air around. My bedroom’s only two windows faced a small work shed my father called “The Building”—for younger years I’d both feared The Building and somehow hoped to some day live inside it, in its small and gloaming light. Often, awake with nowhere else to look beyond my window, I would feel sure I’d seen someone there inside that other, parallel pale, watching from behind a glint of moonglow, there just as quickly gone.
This certain week inside that week I’d come down sick with mono. My face swelled and my body bubbled sore. Hard to drink or think or move mostly, in which case most similarly afflicted should be sleeping, and yet I, inside my room, could not turn me off. My brain, as if in cycling against the medical commandment, Get as much rest as you can , insisted each hour to stay cycling, drawing days on. I saw clocks even when I closed my eyes, drummed with the slow pulsating idea that any second might be the one in which my self ’s sound might finally become silent, slip to nowhere, become gone. Instead I saw colors, prisms, tunnels, smudging; the room packed full of eyes; the light sometimes from TV alone at 4 AM like a long and grossly narrow hall. I lay on the bottom half of what once had been a bunk bed, a thing I’d begged for years ago for Christmas though there was no one there to share it with, as if in the night I split into two and needed both, terrified by the way the room around me, in those hours, seemed as well to bore new holes in the walls.
Also visible from the room, via its two other glassy surfaces, were (a) the kidney-bean-shaped swimming pool where as a young child I nearly drowned, my mother having turned one moment in the light to look at something elsewhere and turned back to find me having somehow flipped facedown, and where in
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