Nick Piombino

After Between

                                                                                        for Douglas Messerli
 

Perhaps  an oboe concerto by Poulenc. This bitter-sweet concoction
evinces a meditation on adolescence. Thoughts circle back to an idea
which emerged in the park. The adolescent is betwixt and between.
A child finds him or herself struggling to become extricated from
the almost inescapable reveries of childhood. Certain charming
deceptions enabled the child to peek into the adult world as into
a crack in a doorway. Or, in a dance, a child turns and spins towards
a beckoning path, but one that is beset with dangers—most of which
seem laughable, in the end.

                                *

Equivalencies among categories.

                                *

        "I am interested in the way words begin to get where they are going
not where they have gone." Douglas Messerli from The Walls Came True.(13)

        Conversation, or—no—a duet. Harmonizing—as in 50's rock 'n roll—
a cappella.

        Going beyond the images themselves into their categories and then
into the assimilation of those categories.

        If your words are only your words, who would they speak to?

        An occasion of categories, that is to say, an occasion of occasions.
Like a fragrance, generosity is best enjoyed when it doesn't draw attention
to itself. With pain, impulsively, we move quickly to avoid it. A very
complicated circuit underlies such mechanisms, true, but it still comes
down to knowing what button to press.

        It may be that anything is possible within certain interstices. Although
words bring forth pictures of faces, they don't belong to this or that person
alone. Words are worn by anyone, that way anyone can put on a costume
and assume a role.

        We live within the tracks laid down in the relations between things,
never still long enough to encompass a single characterization. An earlier
version doesn't celebrate precisely this. An infinite machine must meet
mouth to toe. The horizon that was lost became like that cave in between.
What was substituted for a line was a representation, a transitional object
with one particular object becoming the fulcrum of all relationships, for
a time.

        The categories, in accumulating dimensions, accumulate
personalities. Shouting in arrival, we are each becoming parts of each
other, all swish, a dramatic event. The substantive relation between things
is a series of moments which resolve themselves into a chord. To the poet:
THE PEOPLE ARE STARVING FOR LANGUAGE.

                                *

At the beach, I was asked: Is the horizon an inspiration to you?

                                *

Relation is an attribute of all categories. Thus, under the rubric of relation,
all categories may be assimilated.

It is as if I ran my fingers across all the keys at the same time and
resolved the sounds into melodies, chords and voices.

What comes between, is ghostlier still. Only by surrounding it can it be
captured; and it is still not completely here in these virtual regions.

                                *

Until he asked me, I had lost the lostness in "Lost Horizons" but
the horizons were still there. Only the question brought the words together.
A question came between and between is not usually what comes in
the way. A question asked words to present themselves. And the lost still
warms the horizons in "Lost Horizons."

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