Our Brief Eternity

I'd like to say that I can't believe that Bush got re elected. But the
fact is i was expecting it.
I've been picking away at a dance film called "Our Brief Eternity" for
two years. After the tour is finished i will finally have time to finish it.
I have posted the text before but i wanted to have it here because I
think it's a really special piece of writing. And also because it speaks
of a future that is looming for this country. It speaks about nature
reclaiming the wasteland of America after it crumbles from within.
It was penned for the film by William Gibson. Author of "Neuromancer"
and many other famous futurist novels.


Somehow continue:

transits of the plain refugee airports cages of thought,
gray logics old century's city lights, receding, subways,'
wheels, we pray:

continue.

Wilderness of signs, mirror travel burns the throat, scented corridors,
tombs of duty free,
we camp surrounded by the fashionable dead:
our species expedition doomed.
We sleep in lavish shadow on the atrium floor of a vast hotel,
ruin of a previous age.

The signs do not pursue us, here.

We draw lots, post sentries. There is possibility of laughter.
We are discovered by others of our kind,
old differences worn smooth by the extremity of this our age,
erasing race, savageries of language.
Religion is a small smooth stone we take in turn into
our mouths to hold. To Find a place beyond the signs
free of our sleepless, our terrible inheritance,

a country of simple actions of seeds, of rain, of wind,
our tasks our anchor.
Culture consists of sharing water, gathering of food,
defense against the hungry signs of the ancestors;
the loss of an individual utterly reconfigures the whole; be vigilant.

The waters rise through the roots of the city;
deer in the streets of downtown Detroit,
an iris bursts the Paris pavement the old, the Modern,
deconstructs into fern curl, flowers nodding by a wall;
the American Acropolis awaits us.
In the new country we stroll beside the tilted slabs of
highway Stonehenge overpasses dreaming the old geography
and the signs are nowhere to be seen.

The body maps the hours of use, intake, uptake, waring like a tool.
We become our occupations, are sculpted by our habits, repititions,
styles and modes of knowing. Toward the end of the age of signs
we dreamed the body's transformation, prosthetic utopias,
increasingly intimate; now we are uncertain:
we do not know the true extent of our alteration,
the body's way of knowing will not be erased,
but the meaning of the body alters, here,
on the brink of new worlds.

The body, meditated, spreads across the stars of another space,
constellations of another knowledge.