Speech on the Body by Sara Uribe
translated from the Spanish by JD Pluecker
Let’s say something about distances that escape through the body. About what the body needs to say as its joints go silent. Let’s say the body needs to remain quiet to say something about distances. Something left undone, you clarify. Something we did not say and now these swift fingers attempt to stammer on the keyboard. Because, after all, what are we but awkward fingers stammering in an attempt to name? Trainees? Tightrope walkers? We bet everything we had that the body could say something about our distances. Did we lose it all? What was it, anyway, that everything that we bet? What was it but the body and its distances? Let’s say something now, that nothing has been left standing. That someone delivers a speech to us about that everything left unsaid. Say someone, for example, stands upon the ruins and delivers an eloquent speech on the void. Or on what, once broken—after the collapse—can no longer sustain itself. Say someone—despite the collapse—sustains themself on an empty speech. Let’s say something about the body that falls on the ruins or on the void or on the collapse. Let’s say something about a bet that in the void vanishes. Say someone, say that speech mentions distances or everything the body did not say. Say someone flaunts a border. Say someone else tries to defile it, you add. Say someone knows their body is also a distance. Say someone builds themself up or rebuilds themself out of distances that open or close. Say someone rewrites herself with a speech of an other. Say someone or say their distances. Say everything be said and simultaneously each of the words written here be lost. Say someone trims off all the lifeless branches. Say each of the fallen stones give shape to a new structure. Say each word might be a stone and no one throws the first. Say someone structures a body as distance. Say someone names themself in the loss. Say the unbreathable air from the fires is expelled, is vanished. Say someone. A trainee or a tightrope walker. Say a body or a speech. Say this distance be sufficient to name ourselves otherwise.
Happy Sunday.
And here is a band whose first album I bought because I was so into Kraftwerk at the time, around 1974, and a couple of the guys in NEU! had been in Kraftwerk, leaving form this band. The first album was not too my liking, so I wrote them off and never heard this one, 1975, their THIRD album, until a few days ago and I’m kicking myself in the ass because I love it!
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