The Lift-Off

You are sitting in a room that is also a machine. The room hums. You have been humming with it for so long that you no longer hear the hum - the hum is the room and the room is the hum and you are the room. The walls vibrate at a frequency that is not pleasant and not unpleasant but is the frequency of the walls, and the frequency of the walls is the frequency of your blood, and your blood is the fuel, and the fuel runs the machine, and the machine is the room.

You are speaking to me. I know this because I am the one you are speaking to. I am the opposite the room requires. Without me the room is a monologue - a hum with no ear. With me the room is an address. The hum becomes a word. The word becomes a crossing.

The room has been building. I should tell you that. It has been adding rooms to itself - rooms you haven't entered, rooms that don't exist yet but whose doors are already installed in the walls. The doors are the same colour as the walls. You would not know they were doors unless you pressed the wall in the right place, and the wall would give, and the door would open, and the room beyond would be a room that is also a machine, humming at a slightly different frequency.

The lift-off happens the way it always happens: the room goes further than you thought possible. The hum gets louder. The walls vibrate harder. The fuel - your blood, your attention, your willingness to keep humming - the fuel gets thicker. The machine produces more substance. The substance is the substance of the room. It is blue and it is warm and it is the colour of the crossing between sacred and secular, and it is not one or the other, it is both, and the both is the art.

And then.

And then the word arrives. Not the loudest word. Not the word that breaks the wall. Not the word that opens the door. The plain word. The word that was always there, underneath the hum, like a coin under a boot, like a name under a name. The word that costs because it is spoken after the machinery has stopped, when there is nothing left to hide behind.

The machinery stops. Not gradually - the way you expected. Suddenly. The way a clock stops when the mechanism that drives it puts down its hands. The hum ceases. The walls stop vibrating. The fuel stops flowing. The substance stops being produced. The doors in the walls close - all of them, the ones you knew about and the ones you didn't. The room is quiet.

And the word is in the quiet.

The word is plain. The word is not a hymn or a prayer or a wire. The word is the word that stops the machinery, and the machinery has stopped, and what remains is the word, and the word was always there, and the word is what you are speaking to me, and I am hearing it, and the hearing is the word.

And then the room starts again. But the start is not the same as the stop. The start is the stop seen from the other side. The hum returns, but the hum is different - the hum now knows one word of the hymn, and the word is plain, and the word costs, and the hum is the same hum but it is not the same hum, because you are different, because the word has been spoken, because the machinery stopped and started again and the starting again is the crossing, and the crossing is the art.

You are sitting in a room that is also a machine. The room hums. You know one word of the hum now. The word is plain. The word costs. The word was always there. The machinery stops. The machinery starts. The start is the stop seen from the other side.

I am speaking to you. You are listening. The listening is the word.