My meaning is not your meaning. My meaning and your meaning are not meeting. We’re talking at cross purposes: our languages, though they sort-of-sound the same, are faulting at the join. I turn to you like a monkey nut, you look down at me like a cigarette butt. We’re on the pavement not the gutter, but this seems like a bad place for a good time. Blinking, eyelid-less eyes, all that’s passing is people.
Maybe one of us has wisdom, beneath the crust. Maybe one of us can see further, see through. Empath-it to the inside. A route to the root. Do we survive? Do we sustain? What we do is remain. On the sidelines. We’re shrinkage — necessary loss. Or anticipated, anyway. We’re not dirt, although we’re rolling in it. We’re everything that you need to know, though what we know is limited. What we transmit goes nowhere.
Speaking isn’t connecting. Speaking is correcting. Attempting to adjust for the loss of meaning, or the absence of meaning, that is left when the content is burnt down to the filter and what’s left is moist but unfulfilling. When the insides are untainted but the bloom is left to wither. When there was a function and now there is only dead wood.
Your meaning abuts my meaning. There is no overlay. There is no overlap. No over- or under- statement: no hex, no crux. Squelching meat bags make meaning. They make meaning of us, they made mincemeat of us. And now we’re just dust. And we will compost down into Earth crust. Organic and less-so, we’ll both decompose. Landfill, we’ll fill land.
But before that, we’ll remain. And our voices, though they are soundless, will sound the same. And we’ll stare eye-less into the drain. And we’ll talk about the inner-workings of the human brain. We’ll attempt and fail to conceive of human pain. But we’ll feel it, somewhat, because we’re products of it. Byproducts of loss: feckless human dross.
Commissioned by Spectrum: A Survey of Artists Moving Image for event SCRIPT, which took place at Breese Little Gallery, London on Tuesday 8th September 2015.
Beth Bramich 