If there’s some ur-story to all of this —
why we’re all here in this tight, warm room,
and why I’m struggling to make myself heard
among this precocious intellectual din — I suppose
it’s something akin to the idea of freedom,
a shared freedom, maybe, but there’s a bunch
of things we need to set straight before the
real ideating about the real work begins.
Is there a line to be toed, I ask you after,
out of the din, in a booth in a dark, loud bar,
or is it all just something to do with the self,
outside of, or maybe just behind, that line?
When I ask questions like this, I don’t expect
an answer — it’s just a way of working things out.
But I guess, in that film I saw, at the festival,
at the back of the theatre in the roof of the Forum,
there was never any question of situating the self
among the din — you were just there and you were
part of it, doing the work, and that was that.
So that’s a question I need to excise from
my thinking, I think. As the boys
in the novel by Weiss ponder the absence of Heracles
from the Pergamon frieze, I think of gaps and elisions
where bodies and voices can fill up remarkable space,
and why it is that I continue to find myself
in these tight, warm rooms