I hadn't finished last week when I said, the eland is looking at me. But there needed to be a pause. A gap. A break in the text. A question of the need to publish, of hitting the deadline and not exceeding the word count.
And also a question of crouching down while remaining in a state of maximum ex-citement. Like looking forward to finding a cinema showing the Wim Wilders film with the 'Dance, dance' title. And finding that same necessity to wait. To pause for an available cinema to come by, the improbability of finding a mobile 'motorola' coming to my local village hall, to my small flickering screen.
So the '^ otherwise ^' in the film title becomes a caesura (^…^ – poetically speaking what goes for a pause in the line), and modifies what follows. We are lost.
We are indeed. We have long been on the losing side. And we are exposed. Crouching. While the eland is looking at me. While the dance is being danced. Exposed in this time of radical insecurity and excitement. Otherwise.
Otherwise: creating what I have also seen called a "fissure in the space of meaning" (Eric Santner, Creaturely Life).
Otherwise: creating this chancy and contingent historical condition of constantly dancing towards a future in which The Coda is and will always be being played.
Otherwise: creating the voice which also holds the sovereign club (I remember that you asked me once which club of suffering I belonged to) under which we all must cringe.
Yes, it is more than a crouch. The tenderness of this cringe. This universal response. In what might be called an exposed attitude of being simultaneosly untamed and restrained, a political opening, the possible practice of 'neighbour love'.