Gym

 

I’m in the room about 10 minutes early and there’s a noise just above ambient, high-pitched and pulsing, is it an alarm no one is sure. Someone calls for admin to come down, they’re not sure either. The room is full of cameras, audio equipment, vents, no one can tell where the sound is coming from; should the class be cancelled, no one knows, not even the instructor. The noise stops but then as soon as someone says something it starts again, eventually it stops seemingly for good and the class starts. The instructor puts on some music, the feeling of alarm subsides: the feeling of command somewhere belonging to someone else for some purpose we do not understand, but is this not also the noise we experience all of the time. As someone who suffers from tinnitus I’m aware of this background whenever I think about it, so I choose not to think about it because it would be too much to always think of the noise in my head, the ringing, the alarm. This is the sound that sounds like poetry should sound, a wound opening into space. The sound exists along layers of probabilities and axes of what is possible as if a voice is asking me in the strangest language don’t you think that you were actually dead and I look down to check my body to see if it is still there and whole and it is but I have to look into myself in case I am not. I discover a whole part of mind that I hadn’t been aware of as if I was a person who had never checked my spam folder before, finding thousands of messages most of them probably nonsense but among them messages from people I had cared for greatly and who had been trying to contact me for years and I had been unaware their thoughts were directed towards me. In the gym I’m looking at the spandex of regression, a discontinuity in which I can’t really see where I am or where I am going, in its own body, this is where I am.

 

 

Giles Goodland

 

 

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