“collaboration does not yield”

“as deviant as it is circuitous”

”you wander off”

“curve your thinking to each other’s”

“ideas without getting”

“manipulate them like phenomena”

“secretively…she conjures”

“the private oasis where”

“needing to adjust”

“quotients of form”

“the enfleshed”

“made plastic”

“by shifting illusions”

“the ecstatic violence”

“a tremor of anticipation”

“the music is written”

“lustres and scars”

“my printed text floats”

“of 35 minutes, converse duration”

“the unwritten so far in the background”

“our fledgling ellipse”

“nurture and destruction”

“(but) I did not create…vacuum”

Acknowledgement: The lines in Paraphrastic have their origin in my article

‘Radieuses Ellipses’, published in mouvement: l’indisciplinaire des arts

vivants 36-37 sept-decembre 2005. The article was commissioned by Chief

Editor, David Sanson. Its subject is my collaboration with composer Liza Lim

on Mother Tongue, a piece for soprano and fifteen instruments, which

premiered at the Festival d’Automne, Paris, 2005. Liza commissioned me to write

the poetic text for the work.