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Notes on the Writing of "Spasm" 
            by Charles Borkhuis


While watching Elevator Repair Service's brilliant adaptation of the first 
chapter of Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury," at New York Theater 
Workshop in 2008, I was struck by the fragmented and repetitious patterns 
of speech, sound, and movement used by the company to approach a 
mentally-disabled character's thoughts and sensations. I was originally 
interested in how the body-as-language was performed at various angles 
to itself, which opened gaps or spaces that needed to be jumped for the 
next movement or speech to take place.  I started describing the gestures 
and movements in the play and soon added my own free associations to 
the process. 
 

. . . rolling words on the floor / picked up and put back in the 
chair / squirming in place / sprung and tightened / phrases 
repeated between feet / looping movements, half-animal, half-
chair / awkward hand gestures / a poetry of nerves, corrected 
by head shakes and pigeon pecks / beside yourself listening to 
the wall / ghosts in the overhead word / the one crawling 
through the chair / what is seen between the legs / head 
looping / jerking to find a spot / hiding in the crook of an arm / 
mother carried out / behind the head / shards of broken sky on 
the floor / spittle caught in knots of hair / close relations with the 
door and floor / words dropped, picked up, swallowed or spat 
out . . . 


I started taking notes on associated themes and reflections as they 
occurred to me.  After rereading my notes, I found that in some indirect 
way, I had been tracking the physical and psychological trauma linked to 
displacement. The following are excerpts from my notes that eventually 
led to the writing of the poem "Spasm."

* * *

A voice stuttering on a scratch . . . The convulsive spasm that stumbles 
into speech . . . The mouth that talks past what it has to say.  

*

Bending an ear to the schizo-logic of the dislocated mind, so as to dwell in 
the spell of displacement. To sit beside myself doubled in thought, which 
is to say, to be what I am and what I am not in the same breath.

*

Remembering the boy who keeps his appointment with the "invisibles," 
while still dining with his parents, whom he knows are both real and phantoms 
from another world, come to eat.  The special knowledge that 
we take from childhood, namely, that we are inhabited, and that there is a 
second world parallel to this one, which leads to an infinity of others 
. . . The boy who dines with monsters as easily as his parents, looks away  
from his plate to find himself staring compassionately at an old man in a 
hospital bed, who, at this moment, is facing his monster.  
 
*

Displaced, one might cast a spell to induce an adopted voice that talks to 
itself in the midst of others, at a party let's say, as if the guests might be, 
for an odd moment, ghosts in the speaker's mind, or as if the speaker 
were aware of the others but chose to talk to himself while in their 
presence . . . Interior monologues delivered in public still indicate 
encroaching madness, at least in this town. But how splendid it would be 
to hear for once a politician forget where he was and start talking to 
himself in front of the press corps.  In that case, we would be listening not 
so much to what he was saying, as to the degree of displacement that 
marks the speaker as "not completely here" with us in this agreed-upon 
reading of reality. We may look at each other for reassurance. "We're still 
in the same world, aren't we?" Uncomfortable laughter there. 

*

Memory of the monster in my closet at seven . . . I post a soldier at the 
door, so I can finally close my eyes. But as soon the soldier thinks I have 
dozed off, he falls asleep, standing up like a horse. The closet door opens 
slowly, and the monster with horrible teeth drools over my paralyzed body.  
I know he will bite through my skull, and I will die there in bed, unless 
somehow I can leave my body and enter his, so that I'm not there when he 
eats me. Curled inside the monster's brain, I watch as he devours my 
body, yet, strangely, I am not consumed. Throughout the process of eating 
and being eaten, my displaced voice talks to itself inside the monster’s 
brain, until the monster takes my voice to be his own and starts to 
question his motives.