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PARTISAN REVIEW
uncompromising kind. For if I actively sabotage my acts I did not have
LO
endure the slow seapage of imperfection. I was blinded by my own
overlay. And to me my impatience to have done was the impatience for
a vantage, from which I was no longer corroded by what I produced.
It
was only later I learned the search for a vantage was a delusion, and all
it did was dissipate my acuity. I was always confused about my acts.
If
I
put one foot in front of the other then that movement embodied already
coming to rest, in a hole, with my hands raised submissively above my
head. That endpoint was struggling to get out all through the gesture,
like potatoes through a sack haphazardly slit. The gesture was big with
endpoint. So it was not so much the stare of others that sabotaged me as
my own impatience
LO
come
LO
the end of all gesture. I made my feet do
the work of my hands, my head, the future. I tried to empty myself into
my feet until my feet literally, well not literally but not metaphorically
either, ran away with me. My feet were constantly colliding with things
and yet it took the rest of me such a long time to catch up with the
collision, I had to traverse an infinite distance, through a wind tunnel.
The wind tunnel of my own scruples, you might say.
It
was no wonder
I craved her criteria for the simplest things. She was enough despon–
dent with her own life to ridicule me, out of sheer exasperation. Or to
reassure me, also out of sheer exasperation. Her criticism would
forestall the dissolution of my acts, suspended from the time of her
stricture. Stricken on my toes I would be. For I wanted them, my acts,
LO
end and I wanted them never
LO
end. A foot raised for all eternity I
raised my foot in the garden. She looked at me. From the moment she
began looking I was no longer raising my foot, I was playing at raising
my foot, the raising of my foot was the making of an overture. She
rejected it and condemned my act. She rejected it because I was not
quite sure what acceptance consisted of. So for convenience sake all was
rejection, nay, denunciation. One more act blacklisted, one more
pretext for recoil. Next time I moved I would steer clear of the raising of
the foot, it took its place in the archive, companion to the scratching of
the balls with thumb and forefinger. You can understand how acting,
moving, gesticulating, was becoming for me a steering clear of acts. I
mourned incessantly the death of gesture. I was fast becoming confined
to the wheelchair of my, what, fears, propriety.
It
was only my
harrowing thirst for any kind of response from others, to confirm me in
my phantom identity that pushed me, like a nursing home attendant
gone mad with the routine and the aches and pains of the body politic
(of which it is the phantom limb), into the fray of movement, collision,
commotion. I came to her raw and bloody from L. I was not sure if it
