DOUBLE PATH
chiasmus
tape 2026
[TRANSCRIPT] We’re all caught in the coil of various entanglements and entrapments. I have been having this eerie feeling of becoming aware of being blindly caught up in something and not seeing its danger—though it’s not exactly danger that I feel I am troubled by. It’s more ignorance; not being able to see the true nature of certain things and in particular the motives and indifferences and strange ceremonies of ordinary life, its secret passion. I keep on thinking about the William Blake poem “The [Sick] Rose”: its “dark secret love”, it says.
I am living now in this detached and marginal position in life. I’ve woken up and found myself in this world that somehow I never really understood, never really belonged to and yet participated in, in good faith and even protected by the ignorance I mentioned before (the innocence maybe), following my own path while for a long time staying acceptably, by virtue of patronage and intelligence, within—until a certain point of rupture—the acceptable pathway. But never knowingly treading that particular road. And so that double path: one path innocently followed that for a long time was on the same route as the prescribed path allowed me to misunderstand the nature of the two paths.
And then at a certain moment, by the fact of some act of refusal, protest, desperation and exhaustion—courage as well—finding myself or being left only with a lonelier divergent path from which after a sufficient period of time it was possible to get sufficient distance to then have this eerie, disturbing experience of sensing the hidden psychology and purposes and programmings of the life that, while I was surrounded by it thinking it was my own, I couldn’t see. And then when I was far enough away to see that it wasn’t my own, still there was this chilling sense of surprise and weird recognition of the strangeness, the dangerousness, the inhospitability of what it always was. And so again there is the sense of being caught in the coils of a rope.