waiting

The beautiful book should not be read but merely looked at. The boring page makes us wait a very long time.¹

To embrace latency goes against the grain of the logic of high performance. The appraisal of latency restores dignity to the unsaid, the unshown, and everything that can’t be dragged out into the open in the rush of high performance when the value of all our potentials appears to depend entirely on our capacity to actualise them right here, right now.²

I begin in the immediate aftermath of “Move Fast and Break Things.” Much is truly broken or in the process of breaking (for good and for bad and for whatever lies in between and elsewhere). Fastness has not relented; the tempo has adapted. Patience is sapped and squeezed into seconds, moments. If I wasn’t dancing myself to death then, I’m dancing myself to death now. A morsel of value every moment for validation from the network. An ever-newer tool for lubricating the interface between us and the tempo. Please, “Don’t Make Me Think.” Everyone experiencing the individual and collective rave—always anticipating the death of rave. Then, a hesitation. The tempo carries on but I’m out of step. I’ve been swept into some eddy in the middle of the current. Here I remain, forgetting how to dance and remembering how to wait. In waiting, the mind returns and is lost again, guided by a rhythm of anguish followed by clarity; a terrible depth of worry followed by metaphysical stillness.

For the anxiety of waiting, in its pure state, requires that I be sitting in a chair within reach of the telephone, without doing anything.³

I am waiting for the telephone call (from inside myself, from outside myself, from elsewhere). I wait in an effort to camouflage myself against the backdrop of history—so that I am mistaken for a breeze and left alone. Or maybe, in my breezing, I function as the elucidating gust that briefly transforms the vibrating urgency of now into something that can be digested and metabolized. Then, I will write this breeze down with utmost urgency (I will swaddle and bind it with my language; I will name it for you and for me) or else it will be lost in the time of my mind. I will write it down immediately because the tempo of the time has completely inscribed its measure on my attention. My hope is that, with a concentrated practice of waiting, I can find a tempo that doesn’t leave me dejected and crushed with fatigue; a tempo that offers the time to remember how amorously I once felt.