19 Août Other ©carine roth
“The Other said :
I am Other, who are you
I said:
I don’t know you
Other said:
You know nothing about me.”
Do you care?
Tree is the Other, the one standing in the heat dying from drought and slowly becoming skinnier and skinnier. I am lying flat on the soil, having my body embracing the ground, for this 3 days and 3 nights conversation.
“Tree doesn’t know they are tree, naming is a way of controlling when not a way of caring”
Tree is the Other, what does it mean? I am thinking “I love trees”… and I m having this ritual of having an honest conversation with this one tree here. Here is all there is, for Tree. Wind in the branches, very very little rain one morning, tiny birds making such a loud sound, is Tree talking to me or is it again my own voice pretending to be Other? How is Tree doing, how is Tree being…
More I listen less I hear.
I only realize I thought I knew… and I know No thing, no such thing as thing, it is alive, and it is not me, it’s Other. And Other is pure mystery (if I am really paying attention.)
Then comes the question: do you care?
As the final destination of my own ritual.
Do you really care?
And if all of this was about care?
Romantic queer revolution of true care…
Thank you Other. I go back home now
I know you are dying
I know I care
I know despair is ego refusing to die
I know you are not talking and you are alive
I know i know nothing about you
I know I don’t need to know anything to care
I know I will fight fascism
and I know we are all and all each other relations. The fascist and racist are members of my own tribe.
All my relations include Other.
We are dancing
We are dancing
East Coker
by T. S. Eliot
(1888–1965)
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobodys funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on
darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between
stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.