Abstract
The article discusses two productions, respectively of Julius Caesar and Macbeth, by the experimental Italian theatre company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (SRS). My wider scope is a reflection on what I may call the ‘peregrinations’ of the sense of the tragic in our times; my more specific question is: How is the Shakespearean tragic envisioned by SRS? What does their ‘performative thinking’ reveal about tragedy and our sense of the tragic today? As the performances are in Italian, based on Italian translations of Shakespeare, the question of the different language will also be briefly considered, to listen to the ‘ear of the other’ in critical action.
In 2014, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (SRS), possibly the most challenging experimental theatre company in Italy for the last 35 years, proposed two Shakespeare productions: Giulio Cesare. Pezzi Staccati. Intervento drammatico su William Shakespeare (Julius Caesar. Broken Pieces. A Dramatic Intervention on William Shakespeare) by founder Romeo Castellucci, and Macbeth su Macbeth su Macbeth. Uno studio per la mano sinistra (Macbeth on Macbeth on Macbeth. A Study for the Left Hand) by co-founder Chiara Guidi. The Julius Caesar performance was an afterlife-in-fragment of a previous SRS production, the 1997 Giulio Cesare. Da Shakespeare e dagli storici latini (Julius Caesar. From Shakespeare and the Latin Historians). In this article, I will discuss the Macbeth staging alongside the original production of Julius Caesar, with brief references to the more recent Giulio Cesare. 1
My wider scope is a reflection on what I may call the ‘peregrinations’ of the sense of the tragic in our times: What happens to the tragic today (as a genre and mode, compared to, for example, tragedy of the Attic and the Renaissance period, which George Steiner deemed to be the only two exceptional moments for the flourishing of the genre)? 2 I shall consider more specifically how the Shakespearean tragic is envisioned in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in SRS productions. What perception and notion of the tragic emerge? Are there evocations of locality (national, historical) in the re-visions of the Shakespearean tragic, or do the two stagings move beyond that (in European, transcontinental, ahistorical directions)? How is poetics affected by what may be called the performative thinking of SRS? By ‘performative thinking’ I mean a reflection on and reconsideration of theatre, more especially tragedy, which takes place and realizes itself there and then, in the performative moment – which includes the active participation of the audience as well as language of the performance. 3 As the stagings are in Italian, based on Italian translations of Shakespeare, I shall also consider the question of the foreign language, the extent to which the ‘ear of the other’ 4 becomes a critical and interpretive tool for exploring the plays, contributing to the potential new ‘vision’ or redefinition of the tragic and to the performative thinking of the company.
In 1966, replying to Steiner’s ‘The Death of Tragedy’, Raymond Williams affirmed the existence of a ‘modern tragedy’. 5 He acknowledged different standpoints from which one may approach tragedy: ‘We come to tragedy by many roads. It is an immediate experience, a body of literature, a conflict of theory, an academic problem’. 6 He claimed as his own standpoint ‘the point where the roads cross, in a particular life’. 7 Like Williams, I see a common ground between the literary genre and a wider sense of the tragic, but my approach is from a different perspective; I look at theatre performances such as those proposed by SRS to see if, in staging tragedy, they alter tragedy in any way, if they may be said to be part of and contribute to an epistemological shift that affects the sense of the tragic.
I consider that it is legitimate to consider a relationship between the epistemic space and the sense of the tragic at any particular moment in time and space. I take two examples from what I call ‘enhanced performance’, that is, performance that makes its own performative status especially evident. In a context of new media and digital archives, the notion of a reconfiguration of the present epistemological space may be fairly straightforward; multimedia and intermedial theatre, affecting our perception and practice of theatre itself, can be said to be part of that space. 8 If the key features of tragedy include the special relationship between the spectator and the staged story (the cathartic effect of tragedy as discussed by Aristotle), theatre’s engagement with the digital space – be it in the form of digital performance archives or the use of digital media on stage – affects that relationship and, consequently, the perception of tragedy itself. 9 The second example is from ‘immersive theatre’, which allows audiences to experience theatre ‘from within’ for the duration of the performance, by becoming part of the story (which comes into being through their active, physical involvement): Participation-through-immersion creates a new epistemic space that relies on the sense of theatre as performance, literalizing that sense for the audience too and consequently altering the perception of tragedy. 10 Digital theatre and immersive theatre illustrate how performance may affect our process of knowing, our perception being altered depending on the distance from or involvement with the object of knowledge. In tragedy, what the audience experiences with respect to the staged story is a form of affective knowledge, which is altered by widening the distance between the two through digital tools or annihilating it in the full immersion experience.
The stage performance is the thing, then. William B. Worthen has stated the importance of performance as an act of critical thinking: ‘stage Shakespeare articulates a vision – a critical vision – not of Shakespeare but of its medium: contemporary dramatic performance’; Worthen relies on Hans-Thies Lehmann’s notion of ‘postdramatic theatre’ (1999), which ‘sidesteps a print-inflected view of theatre troped to the text’, and appreciates performance as no longer a mimetic repetition of the text and certainly not coming after it. 11 As the stage is the only space of the performative act (both acting and spectating involved in it), theatre can ‘represent actions in the world precisely because they are not of the world, only of the stage’. 12 Worthen therefore considers ‘the uses of Shakespeare performance as interpretive pedagogy and cultural politics’ that ‘does its deepest work through the means of its medium, performance’. 13 He is interested in ‘the function of changing performance technologies on our knowledge of Shakespeare’, 14 and I shall draw on this when considering the epistemic space of SRS’s experimental theatre and its articulation of the Shakespearean poetics of tragedy in the present. 15
There have been innumerable definitions of tragedy and the tragic
16
; for the purpose of this discussion, I shall simply recall two features: the idea that tragedy is ethically charged and is therefore a privileged space for the presentation/realization of the human; and the already mentioned, related idea of a special relationship between tragedy and its audience. The question of tragedy has been central to SRS’s productions. Castellucci writes: The starting point is the reasonable assumption of the contemporary impossibility of an authentic foundation of tragedy. Nevertheless the way tragedy has of presenting to the audience a dramatic node still remains the unsurpassed model for any intimate human representation. … Our time and our lives are completely detached from any concept of the tragic.
17
The time of tragedy: Leaps, breaks, continuity
Both Giulio Cesare and Macbeth su Macbeth… come across as radical, experimental versions of the original plays that rely on a negation of traditional dramatic conventions. Together with Amleto. La veemente esteriorità della morte di un mollusco (1992 and 2004), which I shall leave aside for a further investigation, and Primo Studio su ‘La Tempesta’ di Shakespeare (2015), a theatre workshop for young people held in Cesena by Chiara Guidi, they constitute the corpus of the company’s engagement with Shakespeare to date. 18 In staging the Shakespearean tragic, the productions under analysis undermine the integrity of the tragedies. Time is reduced to a series of isolated moments or points in time, with scenes of the original playtexts left out. 19 In Macbeth su Macbeth… 16 sequences cover the plot highlights from the opening scene with the witches to Lady Macbeth’s madness to the realization of the prophecy about Birnam Wood, staging a tragedy ‘in leaps’. Establishing the connections requires the active engagement of the audience, who may rely on their personal knowledge of the playtext and story. My own spectator experience (at the Teatro Auditorium of Arcavacata di Rende, 22 April 2015) is of a series of fragments, which could also be seen as holograms, each of which almost contained the entire play, as they were all distinctive moments of the story; for those already familiar with Macbeth, spectating also involved recognition and composition, completing a mosaic, for which some ‘tiles’ were offered by the performance, others being provided by one’s own memory of the text. What if you did not know the play? You were taken by the modulations of the voices, the physical performance of the three witches and the live cello music; experiencing the show would rely on suggestive impressions and, I think, be equally rewarding.
The two productions featured a prologue of sorts or opening scene. In Giulio Cesare, a ram (the ancient weapon) pointed through the closed curtains at the audience, before withdrawing as a board with a name appeared from behind the same curtains. The latter stay closed during the first scene, so that a continuity is established between what went before and the actual play. 20 In Macbeth su Macbeth…, a short opening sequence called ‘Falso Inizio’ (‘False Start’) 21 takes place as the audience enter the house and are seated: the three witches walk up and down the auditorium, mingling with spectators who may not realize that they are actresses/characters. While the ram seems an attack on the spectators, an oppositional confrontation, the wandering around of the witches suggests a confusion between the stage reality and the reality of the audience. In both cases, the added scenes directly target the audience and provide a metatheatrical entrance to the performance. They disclose, at the outset, the director’s critical approach to the playtexts: a reflection on the status of tragedy, an attack on tragedy and on the act of identification of the audience with the story and its characters, to make spectators aware that they are indeed involved in and target of the tragedy. Just as the ram in Giulio Cesare may also remind one of the sacrificial goats that originally gave its name to tragedy (tragos goat + ōidē song), the opening moment here may be read as the adoption of tragedy itself as a weapon to use against the audience.
What are the effects of SRS’s practice of fragmentation, or ‘ruination’, which, as we shall see, also applies to other features of the two tragedies?
22
Does it produce a continuity or a break with the Shakespearean tragic that is being staged? I would like to consider two critical perspectives. One is from Raymond Williams, on the notion of continuity, when referring to tragedy and the sense of the tragic: It is not the contrast but the relationship between modern and traditional that concerns the cultural historian.…To examine the tragic tradition…is to look, critically and historically, at works and ideas which have certain evident links, and which are associated in our minds by a single and powerful word. It is, above all, to see these works and ideas in their immediate contexts, as well as in their historical continuity, and to examine their places and function in relation to other works and ideas, and to the variety of actual experience.
23
The second critical approach is the one proposed by William Storm, who points out that while the historical sense in tragedy cannot be denied (tragedy having been ‘traditionally preoccupied with empirical structures of time and history’), there is also an extent to which the tragic event is ‘profoundly anti-historic’: Even though a given play may be utterly dependent upon a particular juxtaposition of circumstances, on the exact timing of events – markedly so, for instance, in Romeo and Juliet or the Antigone – the essential thrust of the action and intention in high tragedy is aimed toward the isolation of pinnacle moments that, in effect, stand outside the constraints of time. Tragedy means to fashion moments that are unarguably real and immediate – albeit fleeting – in stage time but which are nonetheless transcendent of historical dimension.
26
SRS’s productions share a common ground with Raymond Williams’ vision of the tradition of tragedy. By cutting scenes and advancing through leaps in the time of the story, they enact a ruination of fluid and consequential events and thus produce their difference from the time of tragedy. But this difference is also in continuity with the Shakespearean tragic, as I have argued above; the radical staging can be read in accordance with the cultural approach proposed by Williams, who detects continuity in difference. 28 In singling out and highlighting moments of the tragedies, in reducing tragedy to a constellation 29 of essential instants sophisticatedly reworked with respect to the original scenes, the two productions enhance tragedy in the sense discussed by Storm. This sense is transhistorical; thus SRS’s works put themselves in continuity with Shakespeare and foreground an idea of atemporal tragedy.
The tragedy of the text: Excavations, dissections, (dis)abled fragments, viscera
As well as breaking the sequence of tragic time, Giulio Cesare and Macbeth su Macbeth… intend performance as an act of dissection of the Shakespearean plays. The texts are heavily cut and, in the case of the Roman play, interpolated with fragments from other texts. 30 Similarly, a reduction in the number of characters is surprisingly combined with either the addition of extra characters or a disquieting proliferation of actors who interpret the same character at different moments.
In Giulio Cesare, the text is reduced to its most important parts, which include the opening scene with Flavius and the commoners in the street, the death of Caesar, Mark Antony’s funeral speech and, in the second part, the relevant scenes with the deaths of Cassius and Brutus. The bodies of the actors/characters reveal features that make them conspicuous presences on the stage; their respective peculiar physicalities are like the irregular bits and pieces of the body of the tragedy that are left after SRS’s forays into it: On stage, they have a great visual impact, which is ‘absolute’ in the sense that each body catalyses the gaze of the spectator – to the extent that any relation of the character to the other characters is forgotten and each one seems to be there in their individual and isolated tragedy. 31 The title character has the small, decrepit body of an old man; he is a silent, passive figure, appearing on stage only for the time of his death – in which, incidentally, no stabbing is involved. Cicero, on the other hand, has a large, obese body, which seems almost an objectification of his art of rhetoric; from under what looks like a nylon stocking covering his head and face that inflates as he speaks, Cicero pronounces excerpts from his De Oratore. Mark Antony is played by a man with laryngectomy, who speaks with great effort but ‘does the deed’, exposing the hole in his throat during the delivery of the funeral speech, literalizing the labour of recitation and reducing poetry to its material essence of a voice produced by a body, altering with the alterations of the body. 32 There is also an extra character, the Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavskij, his name amputated to ‘Vskij’, on a board held by a hand through the curtains at the beginning of the performance. His presence on stage – he, or at least the actor playing his part, is there, alone, in the very first scene, reciting Flavius’ cue – and his maimed name point to the Stanislavskij method of acting (and its inadequacy?) in a metatheatrical reference to the art of the actor, while underscoring that this production adopts none of these techniques. Cassius and Brutus are played by two male actors in the first part, before being dis-membered in their manliness and re-membered as two anorexic bodies, interpreted by female actors in the second part, which corresponds to Acts 4 and 5.
Macbeth su Macbeth… similarly operates a cut in terms of actors/characters as well as playtext and introduces extra ‘characters’. Only three women players are on stage, and Guidi is one of them; the composer and cellist Francesco Guerri is on stage at some moments to play his music, composed for the performance and intended as a ‘character’ in its own right, with the bow dramatically catching fire at the end of the performance even as he plays on. At one point, a man enters the stage, sits on a chair and places a golden, round object on his head – it evidently signifies a crown, but is not one. The man, who is dressed like and has the looks of a stagehand, stays there for a few minutes, without saying a word, staring at the audience, then exits. The women act as the three witches and sometimes as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. They deliver the cues of all the characters (e.g. Duncan’s ‘There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face’). 33 But it is not as if the women alternatively interpreted those other characters – already a common practice with early modern all-male companies. Rather, when on stage, they are always there as the witches, occasionally appropriating the identities, and cues of the other characters. The performance shows the story of Macbeth as residing in and emanating from the few elements on stage: the witches’ voices and bodies, the music and a few original props. It is as if the ‘weird sisters’ externalized the essential ‘reality’ of Macbeth’s world, so theirs must also be the cues of the mortal characters in the story.
The spoken parts are kept to a minimum, with long moments of silent acting, when the women arrange themselves in tableaux vivants, some of them inspired by Fuseli’s paintings of the witches; in semi-darkness, most of the time the players move in very slow motion, in imitation of the cinematic technique, as if the movements were also the exteriorization of a doomed destiny. Mostly, the parts (which are in Agostino Lombardo’s Italian translation of Macbeth) are very brief cues, sometimes reduced to just one word. They are made to signify the tragedy in their semantic meaning as much as in the soundscape produced by the modulations, overlappings and repetitions of the voices that utter them. The study of the voice has been one of Guidi’s strengths and in Macbeth su Macbeth…, some words or cues are uttered more than once, reiterated as in a vocal fugue by the three witches or repeated in litany-like fashion; some are immediately recognizable, such as ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’.
I read the productions as the result of an excavation of the texts (as in an archaeological site): The ‘essentials’ of the tragedies are dug out and transformed into what may appear as excessive, performative presences that leave out all the other elements, so much so there seems at time to be no relationship with the original text. The performance is what emerges after all the ‘scraping’ and ‘shovelling’, and the result is a critical intervention on Shakespeare that redefines the sense of the tragic for and from the present. Worthen describes the scope of Shakespeare Performance Studies as the exploration of how performance represents a genre of Shakespearean knowledge, framed in the distinctive idioms of the stage, 34 and SRS’s work may be defined as Shakespeare Performance Studies from the Italian stage. I find validation for my reading in two features of the stagings. Giulio Cesare opens with a video, which is projected onto a black curtain while someone speaks the cue of the First Tribune. The actor sits on the stage floor, facing the audience, reciting Flavius’ opening part, but the character he is interpreting seems to be Vskij, as the board with this name has appeared through the closed curtains, just before the start of the video. As the actor/Vskij/Flavius recites the exhortation to the commoners to leave the streets and return to their homes and activities, he appears to be fiddling with something – it is difficult to tell, because the scene is in semi-darkness – until the interior of a living, pulsing body is projected onto the curtain, the larynx of the actor on stage, who practises an endoscopy on himself even as he recites his cue. The magnification of the interior of the body exposes it to the audience in the same way that actors and their acting are exposed. In the violent, unexpected revelation of the vocal chords, that is, of the material locus of the aleatory voice, there is the intentionally crude reduction of theatre to the physical and therefore vulnerable elements that make it possible. This is not the only moment of the performance when the company’s interest for the material possibilities of the voice is made evident; after the murder of Caesar, the male Brutus inhales helium in order to alter his voice: in exposing in such an ‘obscene’ way first the place, then the alterations of the voice, the performance is also producing its own critical exploration of theatre and its distinctive elements.
In Macbeth su Macbeth…, the tragedy is signified by fragments of the original play, through a few props that are present on the stage or used by the players at different moments. Some are more immediately recognizable as ‘objects’ of the Shakespearean play, others less so. The props are (1) a book; (2) a cello; (3) a white sheet of soft paper which will be burnt by the witches; (4) a shiny, metallic-looking chair, placed on stage facing the audience; (5) the ‘dagger of the mind’, suspended in mid-air; (6) aluminium panes coming down from the ceiling and also left suspended in mid-air, screening at some point the upper half of a witch’s body, and of the seated cello player; (7) ropes and ‘soft shields’ used to tie the witches’ right hands and arms to their bodies, so that they can only use their left hands; (8) white sellotape used by the witches to make crosses on the floor and ‘wrap’ Lady Macbeth’s dead body; (9) a golden, round object that stands for the king’s crown; (10) a huge, dark sheet or blanket, which will also be suspended at one point; (11) a heavy wooden log; (12) a lit candle for Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene and a sheet of paper burnt at the candle; (13) golden paste used by the witches to smear their left arms; (14) a door with a hole in place of the knob for the Porter scene; (15) dried roots or possibly a tree branch; and (16) the bow of the cello on fire. At the end of the performance, some of these are left to lie on the empty stage.
In SRS’s performative thinking: excavate the voice and you find the vocal chords in their vulnerability; excavate the text and you come up with a series of objects, a treasure trove of fragments that suggest or hint to, rather than narrate, the tragedy in which they belong. Dissect, expose, itemize; look for the tragic part(s) in tragedy. Show the tragedy of this reductio: one way to retain tragedy in the present.
The Italian performative thinking of SRS
Language is a key element in the company’s performative outlook. Shakespeare is read and staged in Italian, and some choices would not be possible outside the language of translation. In Macbeth su Macbeth…, the Italian word for ‘king’, ‘re’ (also the name of the musical note D), re-curs, uttered at different times by the witches, in a crescendo of voices and pathos, to become an obsessive beating sound that reflects Macbeth’s ambitious craze for the throne and anticipates the ruin it finally provokes: ‘re re re re…’. The English noun ‘king’ would not have produced the same compulsive effect and would have inspired a different performance. Another example: ‘Il bello è brutto e il brutto è bello’ (‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’) enables an interesting rendering through the modulations of the voice: Guidi’s witch utters the cue with a deep, prolonged breadth in the pronunciation of the sound ‘è’ (‘is’); before that, she pronounces the two words ‘bello’ and ‘brutto’ as isolated terms, stressing the sense that they are opposites that become indistinct: ‘Il brutto. Il bello. Bello. Brutto. Brutto. Bello. Il bello èeeeeee brutto, il brutto èeeeeeee bello. Il bello èeeeeee brutto, il brutto èeeeeeee bello’. The frightful indistinctness of fair and foul is rendered by drawing out the sound of the copula ‘is’, in combination with hand and head movements that signify the passage from one to the other, so that the extended sound ‘èeeeeee’ almost acquires a material reality and becomes the rope that ties together fair and foul.
In any act of reading, the ‘ear of the other’ plays a fundamental role, inspiring associations that might not emerge in any other language. This also occurs in acts of critical reading. I propose that in Giulio Cesare, the looming intestine (or internecine) war is anticipated by the ‘entrails’ or ‘intestines’ revealed in the live endoscopy at the beginning of the play. The interior of the body is actually evoked at the end of the play by Brutus, when he says: ‘O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet, / Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords / In our own proper entrails’ (5.3.94–6, emphasis added). 35 Here it was the opening scene that gave the Italian expression ‘guerra intestina’ all its potency for a reading of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
Tragedy for our times
Giulio Cesare and Macbeth su Macbeth… combine the deformation of the human body with the centrality of the inanimate. In Giulio Cesare, there are strange, seemingly pointless automata: a small chair, which slowly crosses the stage when Cicero is present; a hanging iron bar with incandescent light bulbs, during Antony’s funeral speech, with mechanisms that rotate to press against the bulbs, causing them to explode one by one; a mechanical cat, with a head that rotates 360 degrees, when Cassius and Brutus are already on their path to ruin. In Macbeth su Macbeth…, the witches’ bodies are altered, ‘maimed’ through the tying of the right arm to the body; inanimate objects gain centre stage to ‘embody’ tragedy itself. Giulio Cesare and Macbeth su Macbeth… perform a sense of tragedy which seems to suggest a deformation of the human and the triumph of the inhuman. The opening endoscopy in Giulio Cesare literalizes tragedy as a public probing into the inner and most disturbing aspects of the human, which are made visible to all. 36 Furthermore, the disturbingly incantatory ‘disjointedness’ of the ‘machines’ can be read as a rent in the fabric of the tragedy. In Macbeth su Macbeth…, the tragedy is the product of a forced ‘dis-ability’ in action. In Guidi’s original invention, the right arms of the witches are tied with ropes to the body and encased in soft leather shields. The ‘dis-ability’ is effected on stage by the witches themselves as each ties her own arm and helps the others do the same. Only the left hands are free to ‘act’; the right arms are untied when all is accomplished. The ruin of the human is the result of a corruption of mind and heart, externalized in the invalidating constraint on the body. It is the willed doing of a left hand. 37
Giulio Cesare is a critical dissection of Shakespeare’s tragedy, where the ‘critical’ takes the shape of a violent, irreparable crisis, like the wounds spilling blood in Caesar’s body and the rents in his mantle. Giulio Cesare as a whole is one such ‘speaking’ rent. Macbeth su Macbeth… exteriorizes the interior world of Macbeth and puts under the limelight the ‘objects’ that crowd the minds of the protagonists; each item is acknowledged in its individuality, if only for the brief time of its appearance on stage. When tragedy is perceived to be impossible, in SRS’s work on Shakespeare, theatre comes across as both an act of dissection and excavation of the tragic out of tragedy. Faced with the excavated ‘remains’, the audience feel the rending, too, but they are also prompted to attempt a reconstruction of the original tragedy. In the disruption and attempt at reconstruction, the human space of tragedy is preserved for our times.
In the first booklet of Tragedia Endogonidia: Idioma Clima Crono (2002), Romeo Castellucci offered a few ideas on the topic of tragedy for our times. SRS’s Shakespeare Performance Studies are also in this combination of different languages, of theatre and the creative written text. In a passage entitled ‘Haruspicy’, Castellucci jots down what look like initial ruminations on tragedy and relates the latter to the human and the inhuman. The text reads like a sort of Manifesto, made of suggestive propositions on tragedy, and I would like to conclude by quoting a large extract, as I see many resonances with what I have detected in the two productions of the Shakespearean tragedies. ‘Haruspicy’ seems an appropriate coda: I feel that we all need a new Tragedy, capable of calling forth the contemplation. I feel that the new Tragedy will be inhuman and that, because of it, it will be able to penetrate us with the sting of commotion. I feel that it will surpass the Attic Tragedy with a large margin…What does it mean? I still don’t know. I feel that it will be an algid, transparent and clean Tragedy. Unnamed. I feel that nobody will realise…[they are] in front of a real Tragedy and this will be the best proof of its efficacy. … I feel that it will be inexplicable and characterised by a not yet known commotion. I feel that it won’t be ancient and doesn’t refer to ancient things. … I feel that part of it will be completely without human beings. … I feel that part of it will be dedicated to the eclipse of representation. I feel that the representation winning its eclipse and coming out of it will be our unique hope and it will be everything we have. I feel that this representation is made of antimatter. I feel that this representation is made of love. Which love? I still don’t know. … I believe that it will be necessary to work with some techniques that are completely outside the theatre field. I believe that it will be necessary to start forgetting a little bit about theatre… … I believe that the required time is that involved by the circle and density of slowness. … I believe that the sound of a word is everything we possess. Despite the meaning. I believe that the reflection of a thing is everything we possess. Despite the meaning. I believe that everything we possess is just waves. Despite us. … I believe I need an inconceivable saga that might strongly refer to the classical one, but that, nonetheless, remains illegible.
38
