Monday, February 1, 2010

o++oii: obsession



This event, not the first of its kind, this event, not the first.

We are living in a century that no one understands yet, and lived through a decade that no one has been able to name. The pre-tens will not be remembered the way we want to be remembered by the ones we love, the ones that we secretly fear are angry and disappointed with us. Those years will be remembered that same way, or even the way we remember a relative who turned out to be a lot angrier and a lot more wrong than we once imagined...moments where there is nostalgia and happy thoughts that suddenly get turned by the overwhelming sense that this was not very good for anyone, and certainly not for us.

That's a lot to throw off the head, off the shoulders, and to excavate from the back rooms of the heart where no one is allowed in after it's dark. We need large, furious rituals to take ourselves out of ourselves. We need skilled shamans to help us to get back into ourselves at the end of everything, so we can be comfortable in our skin again. This, after the end of a long period of darkness, is an act of hope. We want to wake up to poetry, to the sound of the lover's breath playing on the ear, while the sound of children playing outside the window make the line between a dream and a life thin and fantastically fragile and gorgeous. That feeling of the rawer kinds of hunger that live in the belly and that sometimes make us think we will die from the pain of our own imaginations, the way the edge of the bone in the back of the throat starts to rub against the vocal chords when we speak words that mean something. That strange uneasy sense that none of this has ever happened before. The way a leg can shake in the dark, and no one's laughing, and no one's crying.

There is the possibility of living a life from inside the body, inside out, connected to animal thought and animal sense, and moving into the world with an open eye and an open mouth and an open heart. Our sense has always been telling us that these moments where we can connect to vision, intuition, and motion, can help to bring us to life. These moments wake up the awareness of a furious, hard knot at the center of things, and tell us that we don't have to swallow it and figure out how to pretend that it doesn't matter. Instead, this knot is a key to the point where a total stranger might be able to read your mind, and tell you the truths that you once knew through the heart.

This project, o++o: obsession, was a release of the knots in thought where we create an imaginary other for ourselves to play with in our heads, when all the adults have left for the evening. Those traces of an originary imaginary, the other who sparked the thought, get teased out in o++o: desire, where the engine has seized, and so have we, and the only way to go forward is to go through the moment when navigations have failed utterly, and we find ourselves following our hearts and going in a direction that is as real as bone and blood and as terrifying as waking up from a dream.

o++o:iii: desire
will play at the end of february, 2010
timb.org

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