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Exits.
(In every exit there is the making of an
entry...)
If in many ways a mirror image of entrance,
exit does not constitute a full reversal. Despite a, more than superficial,
sense of return and repetition, (more than sufficient to speak of ritual) the
process is nevertheless not reversible. For there can be no return to the prior
state, no full reconstitution of what has been altered, no undoing of what has
been changed. This passage is written into experience; we have all been marked
by it. The effect may be slight, but it is indelible; those who must traverse
entrances and exits remain marked by the event. This uni-directionality,
this lack of reversibility, this brute undo-ability, reminds us that the law of
entropy also holds good for entrances and exits. One does indeed never pass
through the same portal twice. The passage either leaves us disorganised,
disorientated - a loss of form, lost in space, needing time to re-form; or it
finds us reorganised and ready, our mental energy used to re-track, re-route,
rewind (back) to the prior self, the self before entering. But the eradication
of experience is not possible, such amounts of energy are simply not available
(whether as sheer quantity of energy or as its qualitative equivalent, complex,
expert, labour power). Or such a reversal might be dangerous for identity, for
sanity (prominent physicists have argued that if the universe were to obey the
laws of physics and go into reversal when it ceased to expand, then human life
- with our being in thrall to uni-directionality-
would not survive). In our societies too, the labour time expended to maintain,
physical and spiritual culture is always less than the net effect of entropy,
but the damage, the surplus of the latter above the process of cultural renewal
and repair goes elsewhere (heat pollution, unrecyclable waste, etc.) And
finally there is the heat loss of the universe, the final exit; the attendant
spread of disorganisation (but elsewhere, always elsewhere); the tendency to
disorganisation, entropy (material, organic, social reproduction, the only
cure). Entropy. Destroyer of all.
Guarantor of the uni-directionality
of the arrow of time and so of history, of narrative. Of
exits.
You watch yourself leave. (S/he exits). But it -a disfigured, ungendered,
pronoun - is what leaves. It parts. Parts company with
itself. Parts the two halves, the two selves (in and out,
before and after). Sand awaiting a new tide. The eclipse between two suns. The body on
the threshold. Remains for a moment inbetween. It, the body, in
stasis. Inbetween. Impersonal. Now it begins to
move. It, animated again. It exits, leaves its state of limbo... catches up
with, rejoins its self. Takes itself out. (S/he exits). You leave.
Exits,
into a wall of light, into wide open space, into an opening out and out into
soaring heavens. Exits into world of potential selves, as yet
unformed, into waiting space, unconfigured, the air
of the street trammelled with the phantom roles that elbow one another for
possession of the passing soul (in the institution they patiently waited their
turn). For in the street (as behind doors) none may pass without first being
possessed. Even in the open spaces of the street, even in places open to the
sky, these (phantoms of identity) hover opportunistically, awaiting their turn.
If less clearly defined than on the inside; they hover
never-the-less. Regardless of the presence of light and air, they are carried
along, called-up, incited, by the combination that makes social air solid, the
stares of others and the assumptions we carry around with us as to the webs of
power through which we pass. Through which we must pass (our recognition of
power, of the potential for violence, of the aggregated demands of groups of
others, whether real or imaginary, the food and fuel of these phantoms that
pursue us) carrying at the ready our prefigured stock of masks, our defence and
survival.
...
sloughing of a self as we leave, like a layer of skin already drying in the
wind, drying out with every step that takes one away from the place where the
lost self once flourished. Leaving behind a dried and brittle leaf, a template,
facsimile, a ghost to be reanimated on the moment of
re-entry. Like a cloak which we use to wrap around ones self, with which to
hide the self that remains (like the layer of fresh skin closest to the flesh
in need of protection) the layer closest to the nervous system, bearer of the
roots of identity. Site
of a forest of torn ends.
Never quite to be forgotten, there remain
behind the gendered roots of those lost selves (of 'them' selves). For the 'I'
includes a 'he' or 'she' which are also selves; but less easily cast-off, less
easily exchanged. Masks come gendered. A layer of skin with
hooks, hooks that fasten their selves deep into the flesh of the body,
interlacing with nerve and sinew, anchoring deep down into the bone. And
even when the skin has been torn off, the anchoring points remain.
Shedding a role, changing the mask; every
street we step into prompts yet another face: a Carnival of Venice; a Masked
Ball. A perpetual
Every
exit a ritual; a renewal of forgotten selves.
(... in every exit
there is the making of an entry.)
Copyright 2005 Peter Nesteruk