a walking shadow...

Ghost Dance to music from "The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford," - Song for Bob, by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis

-- an incredible soundtrack. Please buy so they'll make more wonderful music.

---

A walking shadow…

"She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more.
It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing." — Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)

You, the other, are a fiction to me. All others are figments of my imagination, flesh made to bones through the text of acting on a stage. We perform. Even the secret is a performance… not hidden but a performance of veiling – an unveiling of intimacy.
My knowing of “you” – my knowing of others – is now; it is this moment; it is my memory of the last performance I saw of “you.” An act held in the line of the play by my memory of the acts coming before. I read the meaning through the lines and actions of the characters. I deconstruct to find meaning. Actions, Words, reveal logic extending from ethic that is motive.

More directly –
We cannot know others. We can only imagine them based on our reading of their actions – this is the text that we read. Throughout our engagements with others we tend to base our understanding of them on the last exchange yet framed by a context of earlier action. I read the semiotics of your actions but my knowledge of you, the other, occurs as internally as my reading of any text.

It is only after the last last act that the text takes on the sum of its meaning. The character becomes transformed and how we imagine them shifts from the myopic to the gestalt. The fragility of prolonged death falls away and it is replaced by the remembered vigor of youth. The most perfect form stands in place of ravaged minds and bodies and becomes what is lost, what is longed for.

I would talk about my mother in order to really explain but it’s not possible. To say that unto death… until that moment, that moment is inconceivable and it is unto that moment as yet uninhabited that we live in the now and it is now that defines the texture, meaning, state of a relationship. It is in that now we imagine the other until the now can no longer be sustained and while the text may be yet fully revealed, it is written.