COLLABORATION
Text by Andres Felipe Torres
Stillness. Is a feeling. No, an appetite. No, a fullness. An emptiness. Nothing in between. A breath. That movement is stillness for us. Imperfect humans. For otherwise, we would not be human. The attempt at divine stillness. Proximity to the perfect. That is our own way of expressing perfection. We are the trying animal. Perhaps though if we stopped trying, we’d go beyond being animals.
Does the child fade away? Or is he simply buried beneath the years? Has the true child even appeared yet? Or is his existence perpetually postponed? Is the true child none other than nature itself? Even a boy is moving away from childhood toward manhood. And yet the dying man seems free to be childlike again. Where is the child, the true child?
Shadows and gold in the streets that map out our memories. There is no destination in that world. All paths lead to more paths. No dead ends. No arrival. I am always walking away and walking towards simultaneously. Leaving is a thorn-twisted art form. Returning is easy, too easy. The undoing of a man is always his return to the earth. The spirit pushes skywards but gravity, gravity lures his body back into the soil. Heaven must be exactly coextensive with the unending realm of all memories. Our flesh falls away but the story, the loving story, the disastrous fucked up story, persists alongside stories innumerable in God’s mind, in our mind, in the one and only mind we share.
Before and after: we never seem to be anywhere else. We, humans, are lost in a sort of time that perhaps isn't time at all. It is always a memory of time. Or it is hopefulness...or dread. But is there actually a time that we can call "now"?
Maybe time itself is a displacement from now. The threshold of now is not a place where we get to be. We are only ever in transition. To just be, without growing or weakening, without leaving or arriving, without doing or undoing, would be to not be at all.
To sit still, to meditate, to practice unmoving, inaction, unbecoming is to serenely greet the infinitely expansive now. Here we simulate death to get better acquainted. But in the end, even death cannot withstand being in that now, because that now is both still and moving, silent and loud, loving and ruthless, spoken and unspoken.
What happened to us? Where did the time go? And you? Where did you go? Before, I could feel the silence between us. It was uncomfortable, palpable, unavoidable. In those moments, I knew you were thinking. But now, in this forever now, the silence extends in all directions and only nature seems to speak its whispers. You and I though, we had a conversation, a real one, one that would expand and push back the world around us. We needed room, always more and more room. I felt big when we spoke, cosmic, I felt I was at the center. Where am I now? A center that is a new center. And I hate new things. But time, it always ensures that the new fades away and that we return to the mysterious eternal, that which cannot be forgotten. Like you. And maybe, me.