Distribution Automatique

Tuesday, March 11

"I don't have the slightest idea of what you must have meant when you said (wrote) that. I did listen to you- in fact, I almost fell into a kind of trance where I was no longer listening to the words in a literal way, but I was really half listening to your tone of voice and half focussing on the words I was thinking about the words you were saying. I don't know how long I was actually in this kind of state. I was reading something and then I was listening to you, and it was somehow all happening inside my head and the different times were all happening at one time."

"You mean, the words were inside your head, and the things that were happening then in your life no longer were occuring to you in the ways you usually think about them?"

"Yes."

"This is exactly what I wanted to have happen to you, which could never happen in an ordinary conversation. People have a need to call things something, to give a name to them. But this often covers up the way they actually happen."

"I felt like you were erasing my memories, or actually my wish to remember. I expected you to be talking about clouds, and flowers and emotions, but then you were talking about something that was far less literal or concrete."

"You expected me to reveal something?"

"I didn't expect you to induce in me a kind of revery that I haven't been able to shake for days. I haven't been able to open a book, listen to a radio, read the newspape. When I think, thinking occurs in a kind of whirling motion, where ideas, feelings and objects won't solidify, or settle in an everyday way."

"Do you want to stay there?"

"I can't say if I do or I don't"

(1/2/94)