LIGNES

When I was a student I was obsessed with lines – lines that vibrated, bendable lines, lines that traversed barriers to join two realities, lines that posed questions, lines in infinity, shape forming lines, lines that measured. I built an environment of lines, bendable lines measured in square cubits running from ceiling to floor and from wall to wall – a three-dimensional maze of elastic lines. When a person entered the maze they tried to move freely but were inhibited by the strength of the lines – their movements bent the lines in a configuration that defined them, described their shape, their mass, and in a peculiar way their personality. A film I saw brought me even closer to lines – Pasolini’s Teorama, a quasi religious-psycho-political-poetic account of a young man (dressed in white) who came to visit of a rich Italian family and radically changed their individual lives including their impressionable teenaged daughter. The visitor’s departure left a vacuum in the heart and soul of each family member – eventually the vacuum overwhelmed the girl.

In an extraordinary cathartic moment while infused with love for her father and realising how much the visitor meant to him, she ran out to the backyard of the family estate to the exact place on the lawn where her father and the young man would sit and talk on long summer days. She had a cloth tape measure which she used to measure the space occupied by the young man when he used to lay on a chaise longue. She had taken photographs of him so she could recall his position. She proceeded to measure the space – his length then his width thus creating lines in two directions. She contemplated her measurements for a moment before turning and running back to the house – to her bedroom where she stretched out and stiffened on her bed with her fists clenched and eyes frozen open. This was how she stayed until the ambulance orderlies took her away – thus ending Pasolini’s scene about lines and human spaces. I think I’ve always lived on or close to a streetcar line – my place on King Street and other apartments in Toronto. The King car – eastbound and westbound – running until two am, taking a break, then beginning again at five am – every ten to fifteen minutes, never exactly on time but rhythmically all the time – my clock to live by. There I slept north/south with my head at right angles to the passing streetcars, their approaching and leaving panning from ear to ear through the medium of my head – and the shaking and settling of the house as they rumbled by – creating unconscious expectation. Now I hear the waves of the Caribbean Sea, feeling their rumbling – like streetcars, never in perfect syncopation but incessant. Here I sleep east/west as if being rolled in and delivered by the waves – now parallel lines gathering – and a new feeling of expectation. These are my confused thoughts as I look out over the vast horizon of water and sky having just wrapped the first semestre of my course.