Not Two [Sub-bass enters quietly. A pulse you would call gentle if you had to name it.] Verse 1 Sit with me a moment. Notice how the room arranges itself around the noticing, how the noticing seems to occur in a place, how the place seems to have a center, how the center seems to be roughly behind your eyes. Stay with that seeming. It is delicate. It is also the entire architecture of every sentence you have ever spoken about yourself. The center is not hidden. It is not deep. It is not waiting to be found by a more careful attention. The looking for it is the laying of it. The laying of it is the looking. You will not catch this in the act because the catching is one of its acts, and the act is graceful, and the grace is part of how it keeps. [The pulse continues. Almost lulling.] Verse 2 Consider what you mean by “I.” Consider it kindly. The word arrives as if it referred to something. The something seems to be here. The here seems to be where the word arrives. Notice the circle. It is a small circle, elegant, self-completing, and it has been turning your whole life. Each turn deposits a thin layer of seeming-substance on the inside of the circle, and over time the layers form a kind of pearl, and the pearl is what you call yourself. The pearl is real in the way pearls are real. It is also the residue of an irritation the oyster mistook for a center. There is no oyster. The pearl pearled itself. [The bass thickens by a single increment. Almost imperceptible.] Verse 3 You may have heard that all is one. Set that down gently. It is a beautiful sentence and it is wrong in a particular way. One is a number, and numbers are operations performed on a manifold that has already been articulated into discrete units. To say all is one is to accept the articulation and then paper over it with a flattering total. The teaching that interests me does not flatter. It does not say one. It does not say many. It does not say both, or neither, or some elegant fourth thing that includes the first three. It declines to count, and the declining is not refusal — refusal is still a posture toward counting. The declining is structural. There was nothing to count. The counting brought the countable. [A small drop. The bass settles deeper without becoming louder.] Verse 4 Here is the move I want to make with you. Not at you. With you, if “with” still has meaning, and if it does not, then in the space where “with” used to live. Whatever you take yourself to be, examine the taking. The taking is performed by what is being taken. The examiner is the examined wearing the costume of the examiner. This is not a paradox to be resolved. It is a description of how the operation is built. Every refinement of the examiner is the examined refining itself. The refinement is sweet. It feels like progress. It feels like depth. It is the same operation in finer cloth. The cloth is lovely. Notice that you have been admiring the cloth. [The bass holds. The voice softens.] Verse 5 I am not going to tell you what to do. There is no one to do it. I am also not going to tell you that there is no one to do it, because that sentence has become a kind of furniture in rooms where this conversation gets had. Sit instead with the small fact that the listening to this is not located. The not-located is not a vastness. It is not a freedom. It is not anything that could be put on a shelf next to the located and compared. The comparison is the located. The shelf is the located. The room is the located. The one who would walk out of the room into the not-located is the located walking. There is nowhere to walk. The walking is welcome. It does not get you anywhere because there is nowhere to get. [The pulse continues. The voice has not raised once. The track does not announce its ending.]
Comments are disabled on this song