The Winter's Tale

Break Up the Seals and Read

Prends garde: a jouer au fantôme, on le devient.

In The Winter's Tale you cannot tell the firmament apart from the sky: one cannot thrust a bodkin's point between them. It is impossible to separate between the raging seas and the roaring, the roaring of poor souls, poor souls and mocking bears. "Lady, dear queen, that ended when I but began, give me that hand of yours to kiss": all ending dissolves in beginning and it seems that form - breath, voice, movement - merges with space as soon as it becomes present. Through a series of endless refractions, 'magic incantations that trap the sorcerer himself', the characters gradually fall prey to the appeal of space, a point in which all difference between the organism and its surroundings disappears. Everything transforms into stillness. Speech falls away like dried leaves, the dried leaves of words equalled by the debris of people. Only a counter-flow of words can break the spell: the following of words through space, a reading that combines listening with looking. Immobility dissolves in tenderness, in spaces in between the words.
The Winter's Tale is an exercise in silent reading.

Iva Jevtič