Anton Semic: A Manic Fragment
Anton Semic is going through a bout of cracks again.
“I am seeing words and reading pictures again,” he told me. “Where they meet feels like sandpaper-clad, never-ending slopes. I don’t sleep for fear of dreaming and sliding down into the abyss between them. And never waking up anymore. But how would I know I am awake anyway?”
He has always been plagued by this condition, to a greater or lesser extent. The in-between is really not where you want to be. I have seen him manic. Trying to “work it out” – literally.
You can’t talk to him during these phases. He once told me of the state he gets to when he’s trying to speak then. “I feel like I am squeezing images out of my mouth in Perspex boxes that are too big and make me faint. And somehow these faints have colours – yellow, red, blue. They feel different, but I don’t know how or why.”
Anton will be jumping across the abyss again, back and forth, like a sewing machine, making that rent disappear before it swallows him up.
