sweaty crease 25

C(u)lling the play.

swcrease25.nfo

1. play the music
2. look at photos
3. play again if music stops


Patrick Cowley - Sea Hunt
pressed in 1981











































She listened because she knew that he was going back over it, looking at it, trying to put it all together, to understand it, to express it.

But he had not expressed it. He had left something of himself back there on the streets of Brooklyn which he was afraid to look at again. "One time," he said. "we got into a car and drove over to the Village and we picked up this queer, a young guy, and we drove him back to Brooklyn. Poor guy, he was scared green before we got halfway there but he couldn't jump out of the car. We drove into this garage, there were seven of us, and we made him go down on all of us and then we beat the piss out of him and took all his money and took his clothes and left him lying on that cement floor, and, you know, it was winter." He looked over at her, looked directly at her for the first time that morning. "Sometimes I still wonder if they found him in time, or if he died, or what." He put his hands together and looked out of the window. "Sometimes I wonder if I'm still the same person who did those things - so long ago."

No. It was not expressed. She wondered why. Perhaps it was because Vivaldo's recollections in no sense freed him from the things recalled. He had not gone back into it- that time, that boy; he regarded it with a fascinated, even romantic horror, and he was looking for a way to deny it.

Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world's experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw, with a dreadful reluctance, why this effort was so rare. Reluctantly, because she then realized that Richard had bitterly disappointed her by writing a book in which he did not believe. In that moment she knew, and she knew that Richard would never face it, that the book he had written to make money represented the absolute limit of his talent. It had not really been written to make money - if only it had been! It had been written because he was afraid, afraid of things dark, strange, dangerous, difficult, and deep.




















inland
empire



















"I'm beginning to think," she said, "that growing just means learning more and more about anguish. That poison becomes your diet - you drink a little of it every day. Once you've seen it, you can't stop seeing it - that's the trouble. And it can, it can" - she passed her hand wearily over her brow again - "drive you mad." She walked away briefly, then returned to their corner. "You begin to see that you yourself, innocent, upright you, have contributed and do contribute to the misery of the world. Which will never end because we're what we are." He watched her face from which the youth was now, before his eyes, departing; her girlhood, at last, was falling away from her. Yet, her face did not seem precisely faded, or, for that matter, old. It looked scoured, there was something invincibly impersonal in it.

"I watched Richard this morning and I thought to myself, as I've thought before, how much responsibility I must take for who he is, for what he's become." She put the tip of her finger against her lips for a moment, and closed her eyes. "I score him, after all, for being second-rate, for not having any real passion, any real daring, any real thoughts of his own. But he never did, he hasn't changed. I was delighted to give him my opinions; when I was with him, I had the daring and the passion. And he took them all, of course, how could he tell they weren't his? And I was happy because I'd succeeded so brilliantly, I thought, in making him what I wanted him to be. And of course he can't understand that it's just that triumph which is intolerable now. I've made myself - less than I might have been - by leading him to water which he doesn't know how to drink. It's not for him. But it's too late now."


She smiled. "He doesn't have any real work to do, that's his trouble, that's the trouble with this whole unspeakable time and place. And I'm trapped. It doesn't do any good to blame the people or the time - one is oneself all those people. We are the time."
- James Baldwin (cut)