<<|| [05.10.11] Stephen Gropp-Hess: Mise En Abyme ||>>

Between two faces, a third face, reflected in the two opposed faces.

Any situation in which an individual stands between two portraits facing each other.

In traffic, queue, and other moments of self-directed schadenfreude—hating the image of both those before and behind oneself; hating all of those who must wait and, as bodies, represent the necessity and exacerbation of waiting.

An archipelago of cities and towns within given boundaries and without end.

An airplane that sees nothing but airports and the space between airports.

A pedestrian who spends the majority of his/her time in the intermediate space that, as a destination of its own, expels the more distant ‘destination’ (e.g. the places we say we want to go) to the realm of fantasy and dream.

That which can be both parcel and autocannibal—that which exists wholly within a divisible self.

One speaks and takes it back and says it again, referring to such processes as ‘sincerity,’ ‘insincerity,’ and ‘the new, insincere sincerity.’

One speaks of something else to someone else and goes home, referring to the bed as ‘an escalator which carries its subject away from the thoughts and proclamations of the day, and back to oneself, as if someone else.’

The three-way conversation which perseveres inaudibility, and the subjects—baffled by this continuation of things despite their so-called ‘poor ability to participate’—experience an intensified loneliness when walking home.

The four- and five-way conversation, often made impossible by a lacking and/or conflicted hierarchy, angering all the subjects.

To be in a smoke-filled room among people; to be a moonface among moonfaces.

To be a body in motion among other bodies in motion, or to be catatonic, observing the bodies in motion, as if one’s own body—the still and observing body—were also in motion.

Sitting next to or more distantly gazing upon the object of one’s desire, or sleeping, as if there were no difference.

The innocent face revealing everything from which it wishes to be exonerated, replicated and intensified and replicated to such ends again.

The condition of getting whatever one wants and only that thing, copied over and over so that it constantly arrives upon its familiar self, exposing the impossibility of a singular ‘motive’ or ‘reason:’ here is the similar face—if not the same face—fashioned to its specific and momentary and multifarious use.

Making confessions or receiving them; the inward reflections cast.

The occasion of playing voyeur to one’s own private moments, seated—a certain number of years having passed—and watching someone else.

To play house sitter in the house in which oneself or someone else grew up, or otherwise as an adult in an adult house that knows nothing of innocence, only this interminable and non-developmental state of being-adult: to reflect in oneself, no matter the rules, the rules of the house.

To say that one’s own name is a nonsense mottling of words; individual purities and philological wholes debased in combination; an infinitely disputable condition of being-bastard.

As one arrives upon the style and crowd of a strange bar, one arrives upon a foreign country: there is a mirror behind the counter.

Stephen Gropp-Hess lives in Tuscaloosa, AL. More of his work can be seen in Unsaid, Mud Luscious Press, and others.

|| home || archives || news || submit ||masthead|| 5¢ense ||