MEDITATION FOR UNWAVERING ENDURANCE WHILE BESIEGED BY UNSEEN FORCES
MEDITATION FOR UNWAVERING ENDURANCE WHILE BESIEGED BY UNSEEN FORCES
by Lantana Starr
The title is not a joke. I want to be clear about that up front.
This piece runs twenty-six minutes. It is structured in cycles — an introduction, four sections of twelve segments each, a concluding passage — and every segment holds for thirty-two seconds before the next one begins. Fescennine's score drones underneath all of it, patient and uninsistent.
What you are watching is simple: dark shapes moving through a light space, encountering forces they could not see until they arrived at them. The white is the ground. The black moves through it. And then something white emerges from inside the black, or cuts into it, or simply appears — and you realize it was always there.
Most of the encounters are quiet. A shape meets another shape. They negotiate the space between them. Sometimes the resolution is gentle. Sometimes a needle enters a circle with complete indifference to the circle's feelings about this, and there is nothing to be done about it.
Twenty-six minutes is a genuine ask. The rewards are small and they are not evenly distributed. Each new segment is a surprise, but a modest one — you will not see it coming and it will not be enormous when it arrives. This is the structure of certain kinds of endurance, and also the structure of this piece. Whether that qualifies as meditation is between you and the next thirty-two seconds.
