Transmission: Kate Davies

My damp skirt slaps against my legs. Her my, my me. Her highly personalised me. Her… ‘Voice’ over filmic new media. She presents from the stage. Centre. Left. Stood, stark ~ but not. Dark jeans and ‘T’, face in shadow half-light picks up the contours. Cups her peaks her trunk and thighs. Liminal. Half lit. Lectern. The affect of a ghostlike part presence. The narrative reading clearly emanates from the surround-sound-speaker-system around the walls than from, herself. Presence self negated the effect is a very close thing to be able to pick up on. She becomes not here. I would rather have ‘said’ not all there, but I cannot. Superego. Speaks to us from somewhere else. On, or around the bridge. Unseen. ‘A ghost in the machine’. A liminal being. Betwixt. Between. Present…~ation. Assist affect. The style. Materiality of present~ Of words. The  gaps – between… Posit. This idea [art]. Of the bridge. As spine. From. The solid, undeniable and objective, ‘concrete’ bridge ~ to ~ the body. Flesh. ‘Drift’. Fluid. Feel. Change. Unknown workings. Tacit knowledge. The supposed and philosophical space of duality. ‘From head. Down. To hole – below. The spine. The bridge.

The centre of the middle. Journeys are for ‘others’. Bridge is place. Bridge is host. Bridge transmits, from head to whole. My damp skirt slaps, against my legs. Feel. Evening. Turning, into. Night. Dusk, mid~point, liminal, dangerous. Limen. Threshold. Diapason. Busses as they gear away. Middle distance. Away. Away the end. Journeys are for others. Upon the bridge. Time. Dérive. The draw of water, through. Drift. Green tints. Brown clouds blow. Half light early a.m sky, lens of ora street lamps glow. Night comes damp to morn/ day slow. Black dark river, forces, through, below. Damp skirt slaps my [my not your ~ become, your ] legs. PISS, CUM, SPIT. Startled cack-laugh pan-mouth clacks. Cityscape lifeform. Mind. Separate. From. Body. Though still the same. Bridge – conduit – spine. From head, down, to hole below. Dérive. Body. Host. Open. Hole. Open body. Open share. Private[s]. Intimate[d]. Her mental space. This place. This host. This hole. Separate. Same. Shared. Both hers and yours. Damp skirt slaps against my legs. Again… again, yet not against. Analepsis.. The bridge was the last place I saw him. The bridge connects. Back. Leading down, from head to hole. The bridge. One side… the other. Camera. Pan. Scan. Across. Slow. Surveil. Scan. Time and time. Night to-day and back again. Abridged from here. Foreshort. Her non~place. Fort. Host. Bridge and omphalos. ‘ The now’ Bridge. Back to the city. Where he is? One leg through the first railing. [..] They brought me drinks. Talk, swallow, cry, piss. I swore if I ever walked again. Invalid. Rash. Rash.. Rush, water, head. From head. Down. To hole. Headwater, brush brow, trunk now, past bough, down to, dark, wet, open holes below. Dérive. Flow. Water. Through. Pull. Dérive…My damp skirt slaps against my legs. CUNT – SWEET CUM and VOMIT. The centre of the middle, in~between. Joins one. Joins ‘other’. Separate. Same. Now.

Anon.

Closing Crossing, Transmission

Kate Davies Transmission

Closing Crossing

A bridge, a voice. An invisible body. Total silence. Total darkness. Here, tiny spots of light, water from a river flowing under a bridge: Sheffield.

Water as a passage of time, the time of separation. As a fixed place in a space, a bridge crossed by different cars, vehicles, buses. A nowhereness animated by memories of two separate beings. The water flowing under the bridge carries a text full of emotion. Words uttered slowly by a feminine voice. On her tongue, a flavour of love lost, of kisses exchanged. The smell of bodies entwined. The author of this text is an artist, Kate Davis.

Plunged into the darkness under the bridge, a body of perdition, carried by a voice, is awaiting a presence, the presence of an invisible yet unnamed beloved, a burst into his reality ravaged by pain. He does not manifest himself. “It’s raining and the river rises” this phrase chanted the text until the end. Dreams intersect in the absence, the reality is filled with ghosts, voices, gestures, elk unfulfilled, scents of enlaced bodies, kisses exchanged.

Tears reach the river, the river rises, emotion wins, the night is darker. Nothing can stop that voice, not even brushed memories. Nothing has come to end sleepless night under the bridge. Nothing can stop her melancholy. If the body is a city, the bridge is its spine, the river is a mixed blood of lovers through which memories are vivified by words.

Closing crossing. A sunrise. The narrator’s body is a red spot blend into the dawning day. Her white voice is masked by the noise of cars passing over the bridge. Between two runs, her figure is draped in a red cardigan. She walks. The voice of shadows is hit of clarity but no presence of the missed one on the bridge. She walks like Jensen’s Gradiva. Without destination. She stops, appears and disappears. What did she expect? No promise can justify her coming and going. Expectation is the only justification, the ceaseless flow of coming and going without reason. Walking aimlessly, with words of love, forgetfulness and lack sole sacrament.

Walk, live, fall, get up when fatigue wins. She is still living under the appearance of vacuum in a rubble of memories, words of missing, kisses exchanged, clasped hands. “ I’m here to catch your eyes. I am here to catch your glaze”. No glimpse, no glaze, no promises. The gift of peaceful words is not the promise possible of elsewhere. The hands of the invisible lover have long left her body, caresses have vanished in a glowing oblivion. Walking is the only resource for the one who claims to have lost everything. Crossing the bridge to the other side of life, where all could be reborn, love renewed. The bridge is a memory, a gap between two possibilities, in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately for her, the bridge is still a place where nothing happens.

Walking, falling, walking : is the only way of the vacuum. “ Closing, crossing, closing the gap crossing.” The words continue to flow in a steady stream. Hope stumbles against a wall with red bricks ; red as the melancholy of days without events, without caresses, without the taste of lover’s kiss on her abandoned lips. Red as the color of her coat, as the blood of a sealed pact. The bridge connects two definite points of a city but the lovers are still separated. Illusion of possible meeting on the bridge is brought by a hopeful voice. The truth is : absence prevails, the reality is punctuated by a lack, a  vacuum filled with memories and distressful gestures of the past. Under the bridge, considered as a body junction between past and the present runs the water. The water carries her illusion where it belongs: in the nothingness.

What else happens when you lost everything? Your voice, your words, a body of solitude, your treasurehouse. Is talking the only issue, as said Novalis ? Maybe. Walking, falling. …Speaking is trying to get the balance. Talking, caressing the running present, kissing the memories of the past, brushing the same gestures of tenderness and deep love. Closing crossing.

It rains and the river rises.

The voice falls silent.

Bona

Silence Therapy

By XESKO (World – 2009)

The towers fell down

And everyone was shocked

Then they talk about terrorism

And everyone was afraid

They invaded Afghanistan

And everyone applauded

They invaded Iraq

But was on the other side of the world

They supported the Gaza Conflict

And no one cared about it

They attacked Abu Kamal

And no one talked about it

Now they are on our door steps

And everyone is silent.

Want to read more? Writings from my Head