Beckett, Marclay and (in) Silvey Trialogue

Inspired by the film Doors by Christian Marclay and Samuel Beckett's Not I and the way we move through the rooms of our mind.

I enter through a wooden doorway that isn’t my doorway appear on the other side of the continent where the land is flat like a pancake in the morning dew Not pimpled or raised Shoulders on high alert I open a door into the home of a family Little toddler runs around with his binky in his mouth His mother in the kitchen cooks a meal for four with spaghetti straps that hold her tethered to this place to these people The beer can in his dads hand loose and nurtured looms I sit and have dinner on the plywood table behind me the pasta spoon is jade stood up inside a tin cup The laundromat on the outskirts of a podunk town smells of the same soap as Walthamstow No matter which country you visit the same element of clean is captured in their liminality I walk through parking lots their cavernous spaces coffins for automobiles and lonely lunchers stuck in a loop in a rut they may or not make it out of I walk through grocery stores with dusty fruit faltering under the stare of fluorescence and decide which version of chocolate to choose which broadly speaking is more or less the same I walk through bowling alleys with the universal click clack of their shoes The holes always too big for my boney digits into alleyways where the rain falls and forces the taillights to enunciate their names to enunciate their names in the puddles their bodies make I walk through a set of double doors to the rooftop and imagine a man waiting there for me with his sunglasses on on a cloudy day I take an elevator up to heaven The shaft is filled with secrets each face a catacomb of stories I witness I am a witness to It jerks to a stop at the precipice a wide room with endless corridors held up by concrete beams they are the shade of crushed clay of gap of the space between two teeth There are no cars but there could be The light bleeds through but holds no life The aluminum door leads into a restaurant Cross the boundary to a home with a languid wrap around porch in a swamp town The woman plays her music in her headphones her manicured finger flips the page in one go just like that in one go Through a door with hinged mesh for fly traps lies a library The shelves lined up in rows their textures jump out at me and beg for closed distance Across a glass doorway pushing rough on the handle a man with dreadlocks sifts through his collection of dubplates in his store in his record store Through a mosaic set of tulips in mucous green with a brass handle I step into a hospital ward lashing with the simultaneous sensation of limbo and silence The floors hold onto the memories as do the canyons of a nurse’s palm Through a set of pale sterile curtains I fall on to the forest floor with rows and rows of ancient saplings The air fills the lungs you breath it out meticulous and cautious as if wanting to be sure You jump through a well I dive in I dive into the feeling of being here I find no fault in the slow extinction of self.