For some it’s preferable to wait alone. Others fear the solitude of waiting and tend to call a friend in order to make the process less demanding. Strangely enough there is no correlation between a person’s social qualities, talkative nature or day to day mingling with people, and the person’s preference for waiting. The truth comes closer to opposites attracts; socially active individuals are often keen on waiting without company. It’s as if they feed off a reserve of social interaction when waiting. Not in the sense that they are surrounded by an imaginary crowd but that the social remains in them somewhat like a drone in certain forms of exotic music. Or like, pressing the right pedal of a grand piano, gently with the inside of the foot, just there where the big toe turns into the foot. The sustain pedal, but without touching any of the keys. To sustain the absence of a sound, of any sound.
The social animal waits in good spirits whereas human beings with a less outgoing personalities not rarely are the ones that suffer, sometimes already when facing the possibility of waiting.
One can wonder, although possibly unnecessary, who is strong and who is not. Initially, it seems, not just from a Christian perspective, that the one waiting alone comes out on top. But perhaps, waiting is sustainable because the individual is really just entering a superficial, or surface dynamic of suspending time. Waiting is something else and not at all that cinematic. Dogs are good at waiting, at least we believe so.
To find somebody to wait with can be beautiful but all too often people seek company in order not to disappear. To wait together either transform waiting into something else, but if the attending is precise and intransigent, waiting can open like one of those flowers that close their petals when the light fades but maybe in reverse. Waiting together, or perhaps rather waiting not alone, because not alone doesn’t necessarily result in together, implies to share a kind of vulnerability that social context covers over, almost like a Victorian person would ask somebody to cover him or herself. Together without togetherness. A moment when the only thing we have in common is being here. And even if the attending has a lot in common it’s not investigated. When the common is left alone. Waiting together with nothing in common offers an opportunity to share. Share, however, is not an adequate word, nor expose because how would you share something that is not, and this form of sharing has nothing to do with breaking bread or a deal.
Sharing is a form of exchange that hardly can be considered independent of value. Therefore, waiting cannot be shared. Waiting is not the annihilation of value but the experience of value without valuing. Waiting is like existing in a landscape without expressions, indentations or needs.
Expose is even more wrong. Waiting isn’t a matter of putting on display or showing. That’s why waiting is impossible in the theatre. The audience can wait, that is obvious, but on stage no matter how hard the actor or performer tries, on stage the actor is always showing.
The display of waiting has nothing to do with waiting. Interestingly, perhaps that makes dance, proper dance, dance without storyline, drama, characters and charades, an exercise in waiting, in particular when people on stage do their best convincing the audience it isn’t.
Waiting not alone, together without common, without shared denominator, could perhaps be better sensed in regard to being parallel. It’s not sitting on the same share, neither is it across. Parallel is next to, the only problem is that parallel is static. After all, it goes on forever, and consequently parallel lacks intimacy. Waiting without a shared denominator is an intimacy that evolves but never into a union. It’s an asymptotic journeying leaving behind worldviews constructed through perspectives in favour of horizon. Indeed, horizon without a or the. Nor plural, but perhaps all of them, because horizon is not a sum, a quantity or full circle, it’s what you listen to when you’re waiting.
The idea that two things, maybe humans, come closer and closer. So near the aura of the surfaces mingle, so tight, yet not touching that the rhythms of the two bodies start to reverberate.
Contamination is something different, not directly but undeniably allied with power. Primitive forms of power. Reverberation is more like lobbyism associated but not in the sense of alliance with power. Contamination is linear.
The entire school class was contaminated by the same virus. For a week there were only a handful of pupils still attending class. Contamination is one, the same thing reproducing in many individuals. It’s homogenising, makes no exceptions and is a force. Intensity is instead how reverberation works, it spreads out without proper direction and each inflicted body reverberates in its own ways, through its own dynamics and materiality. It’s heterogenous and diversifying without forgetting its origin. Contamination is invasive, it takes over whereas reverberation is sympathetic to what was already there, more like a support or an embrace.
At times, though, you might not want it.
Closer and closer but never becoming one. Present without demands of confirmation. Asymptotic is the mathematical term for two lines that approach each other but do not meet at any infinite distance. An endlessly postponed process of becoming one.
Maybe there are among the zodiacs those that are parallel, that contaminate, those that reverberate and some that are asymptotic.
