dead heart

It begins with bright light shining into your eyes. It snaps to black or perhaps just a very low light. It takes three minutes for your eyes to notice a beige mound in the space, the space that you knew was there but couldn’t see. It takes a further three minutes to realise that the mound is a body. The body has been very still and is folded into a very ‘unhealthy-for-the- joints-looking’ shape. If it is a body. You haven’t taken your eyes off the beige. You swear it has remained still. But somehow there is now something protruding from the mound. An arm? Once it has been brought to your awareness, it’s impossible to imagine it not having been there. You can’t un-see it. Until, you cannot see it any longer. You begin, instead, to see movement. Not of the mound, but of the space around the mound. There is no use of trying to distinguish the mound, it is unrecognisable. More sections of the space begin to move at once. The 8th of the space that is closest to the floor begins to circulate, a pattern detectible. You try to relocate the mound, to draw your attention back to the centre but you are unable to catch its form. As it begins to unravel, you can identify it as a body. But there is never a moment where a part of the body is not somewhere new. In the exact moment that you think you have grasped the location of the body in relation to the moving space, a strobe light begins flickering. Intensively. You’re looking at a flip book. Each page a new image. Each image has potential for its own beginnings but also magically ties to the image before and after. Every now and then you follow the tangent image and drift off. When you are pulled back to the forms in the space you can’t gauge how much has or hasn’t changed. There are no anchors offered, which you could utilise to locate the ? It is only at the end of the “performance”, when the space has settled, that you notice that you yourself have shifted. Not within the space, but rather the space within you.