lystn

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman   In the Corridor By Saskia Hamilton I passed through, I should have paused, there were a hundred doors. One opened. In there, someone whose name is not yet known to me lived out   his middle years in simple terms, two chairs, one place laid for early breakfast, one plate with dry toast and butter softening. There his mind raced through writings   he had memorized long ago while he tried to get hold of himself. Once in his youth he had studied with love in the corners of old paintings   matrices of fields and towns, passages intricate and particular, wheat, columns, figures and ground, classically proportioned   in lines that were meant to meet, eventually, at vanishing point. They continued, nevertheless; they troubled the eye.   He collected sets of books printed in the nineteenth century, unyielding pages, memoirs of the poets, engravings of rurified private subjects   in times of public sector unhappiness, frescoes of human oddity in gatefold printing. Why does it continue to chasten me, he says to no one.   It does. It is a painful mistaking, this setting something down, saying aloud, “it is nothing yet” when he’d meant, not anything—   but then nothing peered through the keyhole, nothing took possession. Snow on the roofs, snow in traces on the ground,   passersby with wet trouser-cuffs looking to the pavement as the hill rises, light gathering in the river and gradually spreading.