If you survey four centuries of Passions, and: Roll tape

If you survey four centuries of Passions

If you survey four centuries of Passions, from Lassus to Johann Sebastian
Bach to Arvo Pärt, you come away with the sense that Jesus was not un-

like James Bond, whose character is passed like a baton from one actor
to the next, and we're expected to believe each of them as if there were

only one. Jesus doesn't know if he's a tenor or a bass. One day he's more
intrigued by the dying, one day it's the rising out of sheer boredom from

a colorless slumber some mistake for death. There are many documented
cases of people being buried alive. Along with drowning and burning, it

must rank among the fates we'd least like to encounter. We think and say
these things as if we had the thumb on the stopwatch. How many times

has 007 lost his youth, regained his hair, softened his accent? Depending
on how you approach it, passion is: suffering: a kind of harm: a vastly

misunderstood endurance. It's even a destruction of sorts. Slice what
seems like the final layer and you have: scarcely [see pathos, see this

unfortunate unraveling]. Every Passion hinges on a Judas, necessary
antagonist in the carpenter's tale. His place on the staff is just as fluid

and his power runs the same risks. The town can only spare
so many
Magdalenes and Bond is on his way. Which Bond, no one can tell. When

he passes by, the tenor and the bass - having learned each other's lines
and feeling somewhat overconfident - are engrossed in a game of dice.

Roll tape

roll tape. The subject is entering the building. Detached and safe as
a man behind a smokescreen. But the subject is not a man; it's
a wide-

open noun cut loose from the predicate. This is what happens when terms
become ambiguous. A spot grows on the lens; we watch until we cannot

see. cue voice-over. If this were for you and I'm not saying it isn't if
this were somehow intended to convey emotion if this were the beginning

of what Bogie suggests in the fog that swallows Casablanca the pretense
of the stoics the burst of strength one needs to remain composed under

the pressure of knowing that one can really get away with anything if
this were the invasion if this were the retreat. Rewind. The building

will not accommodate our ideal bodies. It's a notion that a layman, even
one who thinks as if setting a formal table, would never call the poetics

of space. Why is it that those immersed in the most pragmatic of the
arts - the housing of the body - rarely think in brick and mortar? They

run past the clearing in the field and past the field itself to where all
that is said comes out twisted, the way we imagine the car around a

tree when we hear the story of last night's accident. If it was indeed an
accident. Pause. We were talking about buildings when the car came

gunning for the tree. It could've just as easily been a building. Fear can
make of an architect a man of words, his words the builders of ruins.