Sunday, December 30, 2012

back to the sea

There's this.
Something about storms that bring the ocean into my house, the one I carry with me, the one that has rooms I don't even know about yet, the one that has rooms of memory and nostalgia and longing and hope, the one that holds children, dogs, lovers, and spaces for meals where you have to eat on the floor to be closer to the ancestors.
I am at the edges of the sea, and this is the place to be ending a year and starting another one, the edges of a ghost sea, the one that used to be here before the land rose up and made it look like a desert.  There's magic here, and ghosts here, and the whole place is made for ghosts, but it's also made for dancing.
The difference between our gods and theirs is that our gods like to eat, and like to dance.
Without dancing, without the drums, there is no way to look into the red eye of god.
And there's more than one hooded figure here with me, definitely more than one, and it seems like I should be believing by now that I don't have to enter into this next place alone, but I don't believe it, because it feels very much alone.  My feet are loose on the ground and my eyes are clear in the night wind and I can see all that I am supposed to see, and that's enough.
I don't understand the half of it, what that last year was all about, what the next year might mean, what anything that anyone told me recently might mean, I don't think I'm supposed to think about any of that very much.
This is the edges of the sea, and who knows what this means, or what happens here, I like the feeling of this wet wind in my lungs.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Love potion #8 (&1/2)

It was becoming harder to blow anything like life into the animal metaphors, they were becoming ridiculous, as if we were starting not to believe in each other any more.  I started off the year as a dog, and ended it as a horse, absolutely, but not entirely, if such a thing were possible.  Instead of being the one who can run freely back and forth across the dividing line between the living and the dead, I was one who carries, one who is mounted, one who has to respond when they are called.  It was bigger, a much bigger role than the year before, and there was more limits to my movement, but there was also a sense that this sense of place would give me more freedom than I had ever imagined.  Eventually.  I wish I could say I found it all on my own, but it happened the way it always does:  I am sleeping, someone calls me, and by the time I wake up and answer, she is sleeping.  Sometimes we wake up in time, but usually we wake up when it's already too late.

The boy in me wanted to improve his reflexes, to narrow the gap between call and response, and I found myself waking up earlier and earlier, turning my body leaner and more graceful, more like a horse than a dog.  The adult in me just goes along, pretty certain that closing the gap won't make a fucking difference to anyone for anything.  If the soup is only ready for a short amount of time, maybe it's better if we don't eat.

"Kikiribu Mandinga, Kikiribu Mandinga," is a coincidence, a video of a woman dancing her way into the head of a drunk, or just one of my muertos come teasing, trying to wake up something I'm swallowing, because if it opens up my mouth won't stop, and I don't know what my mouth wants to do right now.  I'm stuck somewhere between high school and that soft poetry that happens on a couch in the middle of a grey day when the house is warm, but the muscles in my chest keep emptying and filling with blood, and this is more like magic than anything simple.  It's possible that everything that has to do with falling in love is a kind of bewitching.  Always a spell, always an enchantment, someone is doing something they are powerless over, and when it's better (or much worse), it happens to two at once (or three).

I can never tell the difference between the image and the reflection, and I'm more aware to the idea that both of these things are where everything gets lost, and it might not matter if there is a difference, practically speaking.  I have a perfect love somewhere in me, and by the time it reaches my head, it's way too many other things to make any clear decisions.  Sometimes the best thing to do is to keep waking up in the morning, that gives me the chance to see if these things are still true for me.  Most mornings I wake up and my house is wide open, the doors unlocked and the windows blowing through with cold air, all the ghosts are still here.

Love stories that end in pornography are the ones we always really want, but are afraid to say out loud, where the couple rolling around in the waves eventually get carried away, and the clothes are gone and the line around the belly becomes the central point in the adventure.  Those stories that play out in real time almost seem enough to take away the pain of the love stories that end with one or the other lying awake at night, alone or with another lover, wondering suddenly if they might have missed something.

And that's where my stories stop, and I would like it if they stopped stopping right there, with that sudden turn at the top of the trail, looking back only to realize that the one that got left behind has already turned into a pillar of salt, and there's only a road ahead.  I like to think that there might be one last thing we could say to each other that might make the story turn, so I try, I always try, but my mother is one who destroys utterly, where there are only endless combinations of traces, notes and lipstick stains to puzzle over while the next story is starting.  I would like to think that we get second chances, but we rarely ever do, and they even more rarely come when someone is waiting and hoping for it.

I also like to think that you can't lose someone too many times, that eventually we wake up somewhere a little older, and realize that we have a chance.  But I've woken up plenty, and gotten older plenty, and understand now that I tend to lose the same people again and again, and I'm lost to the same people who don't want to lose me again and again, and on some nights it seems funny, and on others it's the worst pain in the world.  This isn't hard, but it is impossible.

"Everyone thinks they love differently, and in more complicated ways, than the rest of the world, as if anything about this can be original.  Everyone thinks they reinvented it."
"I know," I said, "I meet them all the time, and it's impossible."
"Them?" she said, "I'm talking about you."

I was trying to keep my eyes on the road up ahead.  I thought about how she said this looked promising, and that sounded right, and I wanted to be able to feel what it might be like to feel like something up ahead was promising.  But I was aware now more than ever that the tightness in my belly and the dryness in my skin meant that I was either bracing or being braced, for something large.  I knew it was going to be dangerous, but I also knew it was bound to be beautiful, and if I could have told her all the secrets about the ground beneath our feet, I would have, but she would have to believe me.  And we live in a time when we don't believe each other.

It was very hard to tell if this were sunrise or sunset, and even though I had plenty of ways to find out, I decided that just for now it was probably better not to know for sure.  It looked like I was ending the year in the same shape in which I began it, a little restless, a little beat up, and very hungry but not ready to eat.  I wasn't unaware that I kept losing the same person over and over again, and my heart was no less tired that it ever was before.  I also wasn't unaware that I kept meeting the most beautiful person in the world, and every time I lost her, I got closer to telling her what she was waiting to hear in this life.  It was not my favorite place, but that was me at my best.  Close, on the verge, ready to burst, that painful intercession between the thing that wants and the thing that knows, it made for sweet music whenever I was in between things.  But in that particular moment, it was too much, much too strong, like the open vein of the earth where the lava flows through; that, she said, is what makes the poet drunk, makes the dancer lose their footing, makes the one who counts the moments of time lose their ability to speak, and takes the breath away from the prayer.

So if I keep looking for her, then I'm a fool, but if I stop looking, I'm a coward, and I've never been able to stay not brave for very long.  She matches the holes in my favorite shirt, the space between my teeth, the space between two pairs of shoes wrapping around each other awkwardly in a car on a cold night by the ocean.  She has plenty of faces, and plenty of names, but there are some I'm more drawn to than others, and anyone who understands reflections like that, anyone who knows how to weigh hearts, and anyone who can understand that one of the most gorgeous things in the world is to wake up and realize that you are no longer changing your mind about this, knows what it's like to lose something, and that's the one I want to keep.  

she hates the smell of sperm: a love story

plot: odysseus is on an island, and his battery is running out, but he's still texting this one woman because, well, we all know why because...

Sunday, December 23, 2012

writing with salt

this might need to be covered with salt, and i hope it's to seal it, not close it.  those are different things.  there is a difference between a spell and a work, and i can't talk about that.  there are too many secrets here, too visible on the surface of things, that anyone who knows the signs and knows how to work with salt and skin can decipher clearly.  it's not been coded carefully enough, and the ends are all left untied.  biology is messy, and there's never any good way around the mess unless you decide not to live in a body, and i promised the angels that surrounded me when i was singing in the crib that i would never make such a decision.
i know that it's a story that could end, and it could already be ended, closed and sealed and wrapped, and found years later when our feet are no longer making marks in the dirt right here.  and i know that it's a story that could unfold, and decode itself like secret numbers in the air, that only we get to see, numbers that hold the secrets to some distant sunrise that only we'll know.  but i also know that it's a story, it's already a story, and i like this story very much.
it has all the things i like, furtive glances, cold fingers that are shaking, mango, cream, and hot spice, and a thousand ingredients from a place with a thousand revolutions, charms and works and a beautiful girl with a sharp mind and an agile tongue, and the ghosts of fireflies from fields somewhere on the east coast.  and a conversation that starts somewhere in september and keeps winding itself through all the branches of days in between then and now.
that's the foreground.  in the background there are sea monsters, family members who are physically and mentally sick, dogs that get lost in the other world, lovers who try to come back, and a recurring theme with dead owls.
and there are destinies that are shifting and taking radical new turns in all of this, subways in new york city and stage lights and projections that we're still not sure of, because we don't know if they really work or not.
and i talk to the stars, one who is given to projecting and projection, and having come out of a long period of mourning for the things that i cannot see, and doubt for the things i can.  having recently come to my senses, rocked awake by the ghosts of another world back to my senses, i see these curious threads that are open on the ground at my feet, and understand some things.
i wish i could give away the ending, but i don't know anything about the ending, all i know is what i've known all along, that this is something that i want.  i was given a chance, to lose everything i no longer needed, and to sit empty in a room and wait for something to happen, and i didn't think anything would happen, i found myself in the room, and i didn't think anything would happen.
and it didn't matter that my faith was somewhere else, a circle opened and i was asked to say out loud all the things that i was looking for in someone i would meet, someone i would want to know, someone who could turn me inside out and make me lose my footing.  and i didn't know a name, but i knew there had to be something about being capable of falling to pieces and capable of being put back together.  and i didn't know a place of origin, but i had ideas, i know what i like, and i know what languages make me want to forget how to sleep.  and i didn't know a voice, and i didn't know anything about the voice, but i had a feeling i would know it when i heard it, and when i heard it, it would wake me up the rest of the way.
and i was told that this was true, that this would come true, and that i wouldn't believe it, but it would be true, and i would keep doubting that it was true all while it was unfolding, but it would still be true, and that it didn't matter if i believed or not, because it was true, that it was outside of my control.
and i said, "oh," because i wanted them to think i heard them, and think i believed them, and i didn't.  but i remembered what they said.  so september came around and i had a feeling there was something important happening, and i wasn't sure i believed it, but by the next month i believed it, it had everything to do with the voice, and it stopped me short, and i said, "oh," and that.is why.the story.begins.with.an.O.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

intertextuality

I think this might look kind of totally insane, but hold on, just hold on a second.
Oh my gosh please hold on.
This is a prototype for an idea of an inkling of an expenditure for a performance...
This guy, this Alejandro Cesarco guy, this artist I saw in Chelsea, sparked some things in me.
And I think I want to rethink how I use text in my work, completely rethink it, and think of the text not only as text as an art form as text (the pleasure, hahaha, joissance, of the words in their semiological construction), but as an art form in a more visual sense--the look of the words, the crossing out, the erasures that are only partial, the drawings, the things left out, the misspellings, the excesses of the text that spill onto the page, so that the page is a surface* to capture desire. (*filter?).
And so there's this:
And questions about whether or not desire is a radically phenomenological experience, if it is the radical possession of the body (radical because it grabs the root chakra), or an empirical experience that always already necessitates a new taxonomy.  I feel as though if I say ontology that could turn this into either the sexiest thing ever written, or the most pretentious.  Maybe those are the same thing.

And the only way I could ever feel comfortable about writing as a desiring subject is through radically subjective experience, which might just be another word for method acting.  Jajaja, that's ironic.  Me, a method actor, even after all of that other stuff in all those cities and after all those years.  I cannot play a smoker unless I am smoking.

Please refer to the goddam dirty war in Argentina in the 1970s, the one in Chiapas in the 1990s, and the one in the U.S. up until the day we widely accepted at least six categories of gender, for more background on this.  For background on the mouth, that is absolutely none of your business, but thank you for coming.  Gracias por venir.  This is the blood that flows in the veins.  Gracias por venir, or rather, Je viens.  

Sunday, December 16, 2012

write over this with salt

(a palimpsest before the smoke)

the spring of disguised vultures gave way to a summer where blackbirds marked our feet with chalk,
and coated our hands with red clay, so that we would leave traces.  and when i was listening to stones speak, i lost everything when i forgot to tie things to myself, but in truth i was already too heavy to carry any of it.  and in the morning, that yellow goddess came to me with three dreams that would come true, but the summer had to wait.  it was not pregnant, and it was not empty, but there were caves being created in my chest while the things in my head were being erased.  and when i left the ocean, i was erased.

the fall of broken dogs gave way to winter very reluctantly, they left their traces on our necks, they left their traces on our backs, and they wanted to tell us all the things we didn't want to hear.  we were marked, ultimately, permanently, not by what they left on us, but by what they could not leave with us, their hearts too worn to travel in this world any longer, not yet ready to travel in any other, and so they occupied the spaces in between, and we were too busy, brushing our teeth, sorting out the things in our pockets, to notice that the world was about to become a little bit emptier.

the winter came, and when the winter came, the animals pretended to be sleeping, so that we might finally have the chance to say the things we were supposed to say to each other.  but when we started speaking, all our animal languages started to fall out of our mouths, and everything that seemed so complicated before was removed when it moved into the realm of animal language.  our coats would not be enough to keep us warm, we would have to find other ways, and we couldn't settle for anything less, and the world kept getting colder, wondering what we would need as proof that we heard each other, louder and bolder than our stylish jackets.

Friday, December 14, 2012

falta

the night got cold and wet and it was not our fault.
everything that we had borrowed was places in bags and was waiting by the door while we slept.
and the trees were still waiting for us outside, hoping that we would wake up soon.
this was far, a night spent far away, and the night went on for months, and at the end i couldn't remember what it was like not to miss you.
there was a lack that opened up when i met you, something larger than i had suspected, and larger than i would still let on, even at the end of all the time spent inside, waiting for the wind to change.
and in between, there were hopeful words, and i thought they meant waiting for you, and maybe they do, but they also taught me how to wait for something with hope.
it's a strange season, one where sea monsters keep trying to find their way into my fingertips, and tell me in dreams that we missed something important back there.
but we didn't miss a thing.
because while we were sleeping the things of the desert continued to grow, waiting to surprise us on one morning.
and you brought sweet music to my ears when i couldn't see past all the speaking subjectivities and the impossibility of signs.
and you taught me how to cherish something that i couldn't put into words.
and the night gets colder and wetter, and i can't find my things, not in time, not in time to get out the door.
and i'm pulled back to the bed where sea monsters sing me the same story, about the hundred ways i want you, and the hundred things that are still between us.
and the gypsy spirit who keeps me writing secrets that are no more, no less innocent than a dance that plays in time.
and i'm distracted by the hundred lines i forgot to write, by the slant of the words you remembered to write, and all the things that still remain unsaid.
and that same lonely song about wanting to know someone from the inside out.
and theories about what a revolution would mean on this ground.
and the weight of the burden to turn a life of longing into something like art, an act of loving to flatter the art of loving, and the things we could speak, the ways we could speak each other back out into the cold and wet morning, a potion for the tongue, something to untie it, something that works like a charm.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

oh that

that moon, that last one, was a monster of a moon and moved things in all directions, and all those ghosts moved out of the way, just in time for me to lose my sense of smell, and i can't remember a thing, except the things i wondered about before the monster moon came in and did what she did to the cards i was holding...and i can't tell all the faces in my hands, but there are suddenly a lot more than there were just a week ago, and the most interesting ones have requests, and my nose is stuck not smelling, and my body is growing itchy from letting everything grow to protect me from the cold...it didn't work, i'm cold and cannot smell and i think that will be okay, because for all the things that moved, there's this, this one thing, this one small thing that i've been trying to ignore, just one small thing that i've been trying to ignore that's waiting for me to pay it some attention, but i think i need to smell first, and i need a shave first, and there's something, i think there's something you should probably know.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

colden

& the one with barnacles on her legs and seaflowers in her hair was sitting at the foot of my bed, poring over a list, getting wet with the sea in her hair, and scented with the flowers she carries there.
and she said, these are the things that will happen to you, and these are the things that won't happen to you, and i couldn't tell which was which, because the words had gotten wet, but she said she knew and that was all that mattered.
& i wanted to know so much more than she wanted to tell me, i wanted to know so much more than this.
she asked why i had black oil on the bottom of my boots, & i said i was just traveling, to a city i wanted to visit again for a very long time, but i had no way of getting there.  & i told her how i told my friend that i wanted to go, and in a few days, i had a reason & a way to get there.
& she said, that's how it is with witches & sorcerers.
& i told her i didn't know if that was what it was, i wasn't really very witchy, i was just lucky.
& she said, no.sir.you.sir.are witchy if i ever saw it if i do say so myself.
it was a very short morning, it went too fast, & she always looked disappointed when i started to gather my things, but this morning was different.
she said that she heard me talking about the things i look for in a goddess who can guide me, & that she had all those particular qualities, & that she was coming with me.
& i didn't believe her, because i am learning that it's ok not to believe, because the things that will happen whether you believe in them or not, that it doesn't have anything to do with who we think we are, what we think we want, or what we say we believe.
& the days are heavy with cold, and the days are golden with light, and the things that i used to think got stuck in the cracks in the sidewalk outside of my old apartment in nyc.
when i lived there, i felt like the place could bring me back to life, but i didn't know it would take so many years before that happened, and when it did happen, i just tell myself i don't believe it, but i know that i'm not right, i'm just not right at all, & that comes as terribly good news.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

first thing you need to know

I had a dream that I fell in love with you.
And I think I just haven't woken up yet.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

almost december

I woke up with three spirits made of white light trailing around my head, on the right (from the actor's point of view), and I said to them, "I think I am going to have to put everything that we've been talking about on hold, because there's this list I have to do, these things I have to make, these things to put out of my head and onto some other surface so other people can see them.  I think it all has to be on hold.  These things that live inside my head, I think they have to go to sleep inside my head, and rest, or fall asleep for a lot longer than I would have wanted, because I have this list, and those things inside my head, I think they only live inside my head, and they very well might live in other heads at the same time that they live in mine, but I don't know that, and if I don't know that then maybe they're not real."

Is exactly what I said (more or less).

((It probably was nothing like that at all)).

And the three spirits of white light around my head said, "No."

They said, "No, you are wrong, but it might be easier for you to think that you're right, just because you like it when the narration changes inside your head, because that makes you feel like you're moving forward, but this is all moving forward whether you know it or not, and it really doesn't matter if you know it or not anymore."

I wanted this resolved, however, because it was too much to resolve.  I wanted a new story, not because these stories weren't interesting any more, but because all of the characters in these stories are tied, their hands are tied, and there's nothing that anyone can do, and in times like these, I would much prefer to leave them altogether, because I have a habit of waiting in a room where nothing is happening for much too long, and by the time I leave, nothing has been happening for so long that the figures have turned from flesh into magazine pin-up versions of what they were, and the pages are so worn that I can't even see the sparks in the eyes, and the faces look like they are disappointed in me, and sorry for me because I waited for so long when there was nothing to wait for.  This is how I have learned how to respond when my hands are tied for a very long time.  This is how I respond when I watch someone who's hands are tied for a very long time.

But they said, "No, because in this case, you are wrong, especially about that one, and now you just have to wait because it's cycling, and you can't really know what the cycle even is until you go through it, but you won't be alone."

I didn't want to admit that I really just didn't want to be alone for another New Year's Eve, and I was hoping that I could leave just long enough to find a date for New Year's Eve.  And I'm getting tired of my own narrator, the one who stays in the same story for too long, and longer, way after there is nothing left to tell in the story.

But they kept repeating that this story is the one that I wanted to be in for a very long time, and it would not unfold smoothly, but it would unfold beautifully, because I put it in a boat in the river, and the river knows what to do with the wishes of solitary lovers who have been sprinkled with glitter from the moon when they are asleep and dreaming.

There was a dog.  Before today, there was a dog.  It belonged to the Boy I take care of, a beautiful dog who was already old, and I understood that something miraculous was going to take place that day.  I also understood that this was the day that I was going to see the Boy, and visit the dog, and that this would not be the last time I saw the Boy, not at all, but that after today, the dog would not be there, and I didn't want to say goodbye.

But you have to say goodbye, because that is the cycle, and it's not up to me to decide where we are in the cycle, and when the dog has to go, she will just go, and it's up to me to be there and say goodbye, and that's what I would have to live through.  And before I said goodbye to the dog, there was advice, and the advice was, "Maybe you don't have to understand anything right now, there's enough going on in your life that you no longer have to understand, because it's something that's just happening to you right now, and you can understand it later on."  But the advice didn't come to me, it came from my mouth, and I was saying it to someone who has been in my head for a very long time, it came out of my mouth but I think the three spirits of white light were speaking it because they were using me.

And so it's like that.  And maybe it's something miraculous.  Because the room inside my head is not the same room I woke up in, but I've suspected I would be in this room for a long time, I was just not sure when that would happen, or when it would happen to me.

And I'm not broken or lost in this room, it seems like a place I would like to get to know, and there's room for these things to wake up, and there's room for me to avoid putting my restlessness into their faces and tell myself they are disappointed and too restless to hear what we might have to say to each other.  And I suspect that the things we have to say to each other will be very loud in the bigger picture of things, and that this room is made for those things to be spoken out loud.  But I can't know them tonight, all I can know is that it's not up to me to understand, but to stay in the room.  My eyes are too cloudy from crying over a dog that I will miss.  There is always a dog or a cat who has to leave before a story can start, and it's not up to me why that is, I'm only tracing patterns in the dirt with my foot, and wishing for something in the dark, even if I forget that the river knows everything, because the moon already told her, and we get to live in these rooms lit by moonlight, glitter in our eyes and something very loud that's waiting to be spoken.  

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

there was this

this doesn't belong here, but i don't know where it goes.
this is the same space where i am, not quite belonging here, looking outside of here and looking forward and facing backward, this whole universe is set falling forward is set in motion falling forward, we always looked forward to this, and we always looked backward when we were awake enough...
but this, this here, something new.
i know in dreams, i know, i mean, i know i see you there in them, one or two at least, not many more than that, not that i remember, not that it's important, figures, they don't repeat as much as animals or places, the place, that city in between cities, you were there in that one, behind barbed wire, just your eyes, in that one.  it's too hard to describe, and doesn't belong here.
but this, this is the point, there was this, yesterday, and the day before, your name, i saw your name, written in the dust, written on the ground, on my floor, i saw your name written on my floor, that combination of sounds, the 431, on my floor, and i saw it, and it wasn't a dream, and when i saw it i just had to stop myself, but couldn't, tried to stop myself, from saying out loud, oh no, there's her name written in the dust, this has been going on for a long time, or longer than i had thought, this is going on for a long time, is what i tried not to say out loud to your name in the dust.

Sunday, November 25, 2012

dream

captured an eagle or the eagle found me half alive and trapped in between live and death, a muerto, parents there, and berlin people there, and someone secret there too and in a desert but also a city and school and totems and blood and memory, blood memory a space of blood memory, and an impossible high building with no windows something i am trying to learn how to climb, hahaha, a tower, it's an ivory tower, hahaha, eagle and love old and new (they are three at least three, i recognize two, yes the same two yes, old and new, and they are twined round each other, like a candy cane, and wrapped round each other wrapped up in chicken wire) that and memory ah

Friday, November 23, 2012

What my plays look like to the people who hate me

(Scene One: A philosophy of methodology into the inquiry of desire, blabla, talking dog, talking dog, I'm so smart oh look at me I'm so smart.  We enter into a room, or rather, the room enters us.  Woo.  Wrap your head around that, it's deep, bitches.  We are entered by our setting, not the other way around.  This is based on a new theory of space that no one else but Matt Watkins has read, but I quoted it in my play first.  Hot fucking damn, watch me.)

(MAN#23 enters the space, naked, with angel wings, covered with white powder.  He is supposed to be a man who is somehow in between spaces, or liminal, and represents something entirely problematic to begin with.  Is this the male gaze at work again, even though it's couched in pseudo-feminist theory about representation?  Even if we quote Laura Mulvey, there's little doubt that this MAN#23 is ChrisDanowski, and not even very thinly veiled.  He even has the same obsessions and talks like him.  Listen to this.)

MAN#23: Oh, hoho, kiddies, this is not an easy night for anyone, no, not at all, and in fact, specifically and statistically, that is to say, why am I?  Why why why?  I lived in a war-torn country once and saw a tank in the street once and that's why I think I'm the goddam angel of history.  Now watch me puff out my chest and quote Pablo Neruda in Spanish:

Porque en noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos,
mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Aunque éste sea el último dolor que ella me causa,
y éstos sean los últimos versos que yo le escribo.

That was Pablo Neruda in Spanish and I won't translate it just to make you feel dumb for speaking only one language.  Now here's something about the moon with a lot of rhythm.  It's nothing about the moon, I will just use the word moon, with rhythm.  With rhythm.  And repetition.  Of words, like the moon, and the moon is a word that repeats, and maybe the only word that repeats is the moon.  No one reads Borges anymore and that's just so very very stupid of all of you.

LITTLE GIRL (enters.  She represents innocence so she wears a flower on her head, and she is trying to eat the flower but she cannot, because it is on her head.  How will the audience know this?  They never will.  They are too stupid): I was the one who was left in the streets after all the parades were over, and before they came to carry away the bodies of the dead.  I suffer for everyone, and it is sad, and entirely your fault because we are all complicit in the pain of the world, especially the blood running through the streets of your own city.  You people with your day jobs and your supermarket debit cards and your refusal to learn how to read Pablo Neruda in Spanish will be the death of everything that is good.  Let me remind you of a few more things to make you wish you were home smoking pot and watching the Family Guy.  Hurry, hurry, hooray. Bo.

(But it is too late, because not only has this scene already ended but the next one is already started and I don't care if you're lost, that's your problem, it's not because I'm sloppy or distracted.)

Scene Two: A Park

MAN#23: Oh, you, I wish we had something to celebrate with, like a, like a bag of psychedelic chocolate, or a beanbag, or a, what do you call it, an Arab Strap.

WOMAN#8: I don't know what that is, but I do know what phenomenology is, and that makes me so fucking hot.

MAN#23: Oh, you really have no idea.

(She takes off her shirt and they make out.)

(Note: WOMAN#8 is the same character that runs through all of his works, and she might represent something like Robert Graves' The White Goddess--nothing to do with race--which, interestingly enough, is a theme that some critics say runs through Dylan's songs, and this is no accident.  Because Danowski listened to way too much Bob Dylan when he was in high school, and thinks somehow that he might have the same thing, except for the expensive leather coats and the hair.)

Scene Three: A Park (except it's a different park, and there's no way for you to know that unless you are smarter than me, which of course no one is, hahaha.)

MAN#23: I don't want to always have the first word.

WOMAN#8: First word, last word, words don't matter, except when they do, but we are matter even before we become speaking subjects.

MAN#23: Oh my gosh that is so hot.

(He takes off his shirt and they make out.)

Scene 9: A Park (Why scene 9? Because fuck you is why.)

WOMAN#8: I don't know what I mean, I don't know how to mean, I just wish, I just wish, we could see an end to this goddam war.

MAN#23: Here I will say a line about something meaningless, to demonstrate a resistance to clarity that disguises itself as absurd, but is really an agressive stance to keep anyone who tries to figure me out at bay.  Because it will show that I am deep, and just in case you decide you don't like me anymore, some of your smart friends will want to date me.

WOMAN#8: You've heard the sounds of the blood running in the streets, and that's why I say take me.

MAN#23: I can't.  I still haven't gotten over the girl in San Diego.

(Someone else takes off her shirt, and they make out.)

(Last scene: Apocalypse with clowns.)

(You would think there is spectacle, but there is not.  You would think there is going to be music, but there is not.  You would think there might be some kind of orgy of the flesh, but no, instead, he just walks out naked in the angel wings and pours white powder over his head and you all have to sit there and watch it, and pretend that you have not seen this before, and that you didn't understand it the first time, either.)

(Lots of long words on the screen that no one could possibly read.)

(End of play.)



Wednesday, November 21, 2012

stutterer/1

I can't say this out loud/I couldn't say this/I wouldn't say this out loud.
I was with my friend, and we were talking, and I wanted to talk about you the whole time (but I didn't want to say it out loud).  I wanted to tell him I couldn't stop thinking about you, but I couldn't say it out loud.
But I don't really know if it's true, if I can't stop thinking about you, because I haven't really tried, and I don't know if I should try because I don't see any reason why.
That's too much.  I won't say that out loud, and I won't even think it any more.
I wanted to say it out loud to see how it sounded when I said it, but I couldn't speak it to anyone, because it's a prayer that I say to myself, and it's holy there, between my mouth and my ear, and I like how it sounds when I say it to myself.  And I want it to live there, like a prayer without an answer, because there's no space for an answer right here, because here is complicated.
I almost started saying it out loud to you, but then I stopped because it was the wrong here, and when I realized that, I wanted to tell you that, that this is not the right here, and the now is not the right now, but it's hard when you are floating outside of time, not stuck in between moments, and you start to see things that seem true but not yet, or things that you want to be true, but not yet, and these moments of being outside of time start to add up to something that becomes like a weight, like a weight pulling the body down to earth in time, and things start to unravel, and the things that are hidden in the knots in the tongue start to untwine themselves, and everything just pours out, but the here and the now are strong, and there are so many people in the way, and every one of them becomes like a barrier between the thing that you want to say and the thing that you are supposed to say, and in that space, you have to say something else, and that something else becomes the thread that you have to follow for awhile.
And that's probably ok, you tell yourself, because if you follow the thread well, eventually everyone will forget that you were just about to say something else entirely.  And so you find yourself living in a space that's in between the things you want and the things you know, and you live in that space because you have to live somewhere, and it's warm enough for now, but not quite right, because it's not even your dream it's someone else's, and the narrator is not you.
If I remember that, then it will unfold on the earth like the tongue of a story that happens in time, and this is that moment in time when there are so many things that I can't say out loud, and birds fly from my tongue because they escape, and if you listen carefully, the words aren't giving anything out to anyone who shouldn't hear it, but you'll know that they have the rhythms of the moon, and you might understand that I'm not sleeping because something in me is busy rehearsing for a scene that has not yet happened. 

Saturday, November 17, 2012

monsters of the sea/back again

This is the story here, the Land of Death, the shades of the living...
http://www.mythweb.com/odyssey/book11s.html
and episode with Nausicaa (after Calypso) in the wedding veil.
Bathing and olive branches and lots of oil.  Mm hm.
And the release through Athena weaving a spell.
And Penelope weaves...
And Laertes, his father, lives like a peasant.  (not a pheasant)

I have trained to keep my thoughts singular, so I could follow them backwards and forwards in time, like they were the lines on my own hand.  But my hand is less than it used to be, and things have gotten out of order, and the events don't follow each other in the way that they once did.  And those things of time that help the mortals to live their lives stopped applying themselves to me, and I lost the luxury of knowing this moment as singular, and instead am stuck in between spaces, where the threads between the past and the future are visible, and I see it the most clear when there is a full moon, and when there is no moon, I cannot see any connection at all.  There are those who walk among us, the ones who have a strange glow about them when the day is on the verge of turning to night, who have what I have, that secret that shows the spaces between worlds.  They are neither here nor there, all at once and not at all, and entirely willing to be torn to pieces, but they cannot be torn, and neither can I.  I am that image of the thing I used to be, and in certain kinds of light, I am at once whole and present, but the light changes, and it never does last for long enough to find my way in the world again in the skin of a human being.  I am somewhere in between the living and the dead, and not alone, and never lonely, but never, ever home.  And I carry the shades in my chest, they move me from one place to another, and when the light is right, they are outside of me enough so that I can see them clearly as if they were still here, already here, born again here, come back again here, or come from the future into this place with a secret vision of what we are, but everything fades when the light changes, and I'm left with my own images in my own mind.  Of what was, what is, what will be, but there is no order.  And I suspect that this is that thing that poets speak of, that place where we live when we have learned secrets, lost ones that we love to death and madness, and not been given the luxury of losing our minds, or given the gift of a simpler mind and a heart a little less complex than what we have to carry.  We are neither crazy nor stupid, then, and this means that we are supposed to do something.  And the clouds turn red because the moon is growing fond of us, and wants to show us something about ourselves, something true, but it will be mixed with the things we have loved, and the things we will love, and there is no way of knowing which of these might be a direction to tell us how we can love in this place, in these shades of ourselves, right here, and so we always have the sense that this might be wrong, or not quite right just yet, but those senses are as much an illusion as anything else, and our task, then, in these bodies, in this space in between space, is to learn the way the spider spins the webs of our own minds, until the web becomes less important than the action of spinning, the eternal love affair between the spider and the branches, where the web becomes their poem to each other, but not the love itself.  

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

risky sea chanty

there are way too many ghosts that spring out on a night like this, cold and starry and full of some kind of new music that i haven't been able to hold firmly in my hands, the notes flip in and out between the murmurs in my heart, it's a strange dance, and every time i give in, i can't sleep and the room fills up with characters that are almost but not quite familiar.  there's a parade of agendas trying to catch my attention and all i say, it's the same thing every time, all i say is i don't know if she knows, i don't think she knows, she has to know, but i don't think she knows.  and the birds keep singing to calm us down, and i don't know, and i decide, this is my decision, i'm going to say this very clearly, and i can lay out the maze of my heart on the sheets and say, i think she knows the way in, of all the people who think they know the way, i think she knows the way, and i can tell you, i can tell all of my ghosts, but i can't tell her, not directly, so it's a season of careful patterns that have a hundred meanings that change direction, and we can only talk in morse code on the old tree trunks that make their way to the bottom of this place, somewhere the waves can't reach.  it's a strange enchantment, and it's songs and pattens keep repeating, and i don't even know if they'll look the same by the time they reach the surface, and the sounds are all muffled.  i sleep alone, and i like it that way, whenever i settle, i always miss the one i am always looking for, and it's been long enough, enough moons between then and now, to understand that we have something important to teach each other, but i can't say the words. i can find the words, i know the words, but every sentence begins with something that i can't complete, not out loud, not here, or not yet, and i'm like that god, the one that gets torn in a hundred pieces and scattered over the water, and every piece wonders what that would be like, or if it would all be forgotten, by the time the human voices can say the words, if the maze of this murmuring heart would be so tangled up in its own sentences that it might forget that it's amazed, enchanted into amazement, because i think you know the way.

Friday, November 9, 2012

plotting ana mendieta's plot

The plot is the body, the Russian body, the Slavic body marked with the unlack, and the note written from A.M. before I was scratched before I was crowned, this is my plot, this is my body, unable to take on her ghosts, unable to represent her, unwilling to try, unwilling to try to represent the one who created her own representations, on the ground in Iowa, on the ground in NYC.  I can only represent my longing for her, for that body that is now gone, that is not here, that I never knew in the flesh, this is a song about my longing for her body, the love affairs between the living and the dead.

begin with a short lecture, then, a talk about her, her life, the basic facts, the birth date and the death date, and the passages and exiles in between, and the iles she created when she made things on the earth. a lecture without coded signs talking about coded signs, and then the lecturer removes the clothes and starts to speak in code, the naked body writing a code on the ground, and sprinkling it with omi tutu, ona tutu, tutu ile, tutu eggun, tutu espiritu de ana mendieta, this is a party for you.

create signs and marks on the ground, and in the center, draw the chalk outline of her body, the silhueta, the first one, the one that opens the ceremony.
stand at the feet of the body, cover self with white chalk, candles at the five points of the body, cover self with chalk, then lay in the center of the drawing, cover self with cloth, and then attempt to eat the body of the dead in a ritual communion with the dead, by inhabiting her space for a period of time.  over this is read the words written in the first paragraph above.

while in the space of ana mendieta, over this the voice of the lecturer says the words from the last post about the ceremony, the post about the longing for the body of the living, so that this rite is the lecturing body becoming the dead, speaking from the dead about longing for the living.  the love affair between the dead and the living.

a love affair across time and in time, moving in to sacred space of the dead and speaking the desire of the living, mixing this life with this life's own mortality.  under the cloth, the body grows very still, and then, toward the end of the words, starts to whisper the words with the recording, speaking himself back to life, ending above the cloth, standing above the body, back to life, eyes closed, speaking the words above the cloth, then opening the eyes, and spilling the water and wiping the other marks but leaving her body marked on the floor, and end performance.  

Thursday, November 8, 2012

the ceremony

Because it is so dark so sudden, because it is rain, because it is colder, because it is a series of significant not yets in the middle of a storm of last gasps, because it is more here than there, more now than ever, we wake up feeling called to enter the ceremony, we go to sleep entering the ceremony, we have been called.  There is another moon coming, the one that happens after the ancestors are fed, after the thanksgiving that opens up this season happens (it happened, our thanksgiving happened)  ((*already distracted, already a side note, this ceremony is composed of margins, of in-betweens, of hybrid identities performing here and there, in writing and in speech, in codes messages in between pauses, those moments where we can't quite remember what we were about to say; the ancestors gave the sign of yes, nodding vigorously shaking graveyard dust from their chins, emphatic nodding, but with the idea that this yes is all light because it's too much light and there's not enough darkness yet, but it will come, the hidden things will come, and everything will change when we become aware that there are hidden things--and these clouds, this sudden dark, the messages that get lost because we assume they must be meant for someone else, the missing letter that would make us mean what we meant to mean))....
Because it happened, because they were fed, because it is rain, we enter into the room, and the room has a name, and the room is a place that is not what it was before we started decorating it to become this other place that we all remember, we enter the room and there is darkness at the very beginning, and there will be darkness for a very long time, because we don't know where we are yet, because we have to remember, and that takes time.  The room takes its shape, it gives us its smell, and we smell like the room, because this is where we were born, and this is where we enact those things we are meant to do while in these bodies on this ground.  My dead were not born here, far from here, I am not from here, I am from somewhere else, is what my blood tells me.
You may be from here, your dead may be from here, but before that, and before that, and before that, somewhere else, and perhaps we knew each other there before that even.  Because of this, and because it is rain, and because I know these things, I know all this and more, I am not, I am no longer, I am not able to play, I don't want to find the thing in you that is like Marilyn Monroe, I don't want to inhabit that thing that is like the movie star with the shaved head and the muscles, because the ones who inhabit those things never get to live there for very long, once born as other in the other's eyes, there is no escape, and no tricks of language can help us find our ways out, because of that, because of that very that, I don't want to play, I can't play, but the undertows of the situation keep sucking me in.
And when I come to, when I come back, I am made real, in my own flesh again, once I've taken off those trappings of my gendered body, the t-shirt that's too small and the jeans that hang beneath the pelvic bones and the big black boots that entitle me to the cement and roads that I learn every day, I have ideas, I have a hundred ideas to go with the ones we've already spoken, and none of them are entirely speakable.  For obvious reasons.
This is an enchantment, and this is a ceremony, there are more things at work than just the clothes we wear, but the clothes help us to present the alternative identity that might make us more readable when the light is too dim.  There are movie stars and idols dancing in our heads, and we recreate them as best we can, poses that are seductive and ridiculous at the same time, but before that, before that, before that even, there is the dance between the thunder and the lightning, perhaps we met there, perhaps that is where I recognize you from, and perhaps we are still that, thunder and lightning for each other, cold rain on hot earth, and the endless eternal longing of the ocean for the land, eternal shifts of waves that sing of not yet, not this not yet, not just yet, and it could play out for another hundred lifetimes, and we still wouldn't know a particle of the longing that the ocean has for the land, but the taste we do know is almost enough to build a ceremony on.
But here we are, this is the ceremony, this is the dance, this is the tango that possesses our feet when we are much too tired for any more dancing.  I will not create myself with words, and I will not try to create you with words, my words will only want to capture you, and I don't trust them, and perhaps you shouldn't either.  I trust the gypsy clicks that move my hands after the children have all gone to bed, I trust the desire to travel the earth, the earth is a body that we want to know from the inside out, I trust in those things that move me out of bed before I can speak myself into myself, before the endless lists of what's next, which shirt to wear, and which pair of underwear will paint how I live below the waist, what I might be able to do with my face to make it look more authoritative, I trust those things that hide in the cells beneath the skin, I trust the hunger of the skin, I trust the goddesses that brought me here, to this empty space, no longer so empty, no longer the space it used to be when the light was too strong, I trust the rhythms of the blood, this blood right here under my skin, I trust the ancient pulse of this new blood, I trust the age of the blood that runs through our veins.  

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

unlocking

They told me that I could unlock your heart, and that this would be the thing that would consume me in my sleep, and that this would play out in perfect harmony with the changes in the weather.  And I just want to sit somewhere that no one can find us, and listen to you talk about the changes in the weather, because there is so much that we should talk about when it comes to the weather.  Para recuperarme entre las phrases, entre las lineas, entre las lenguas tan seperados, entre un camino y un otro, desconocido, casi desesparecido, casi aki y ahora.  Y aunque no puedo encontrarlo en la claridad del dia, en las vesperes es algo en cada direccion, buscando y buscando, yo me estoy como un perro con la nariz tan mojada, y como the teenage boy who stutters when the girl steps in too close & he starts to lose his sense of direction.  They told me that this ground would be dry, too dry to take in any new writing, that the words would not scratch the surface for long enough to make any impression, but inside my body it would be raining all the time, and everything would be written on me first, and that I would have to wait.  They told me that I would have to wait, and I didn't want to believe them, and the day I learned how to run, with that song in my head, that same song in my head, the one you gave me, that was the day I knew what they were telling me was true, and somewhere in learning how to run I learned how to wait, and how to fall in love with my own rain.  

Sunday, November 4, 2012

and then there's more music

And it's not always so easy, oh, no no, it's not so easy, to hit the right note at just the right time, or to come in deep and low at just that particular moment, it's not easy at all, unless you slow down way down slow down everything just enough to get caught up in it, and once you're slowed down then you have the wherewithall to jump in and find the speed and the rhythm right there, it's right there in the center of it, but it's hard to get to the center, but if you're in the center, then it's all right there, it's already laid out and waiting for you...none of this is none of this any of this there's nothing of this is very hard at all from inside the storm, but i think you have to get inside the storm first and then this is not so hard...listen...i'm carrying all of this with me...there's that terribly confusing thing, that terribly crippling indecision thing that's so confusing to be inside of, there's that terribly charming thing, that absolutely charming delirious gorgeous thing, it's the same thing, they're the same thing, i'm taking you with me into this storm, and if you hear me singing and think i might be singing about you, but couldn't possibly think of you enough to sing about you, you are wrong, i took it with me and i take it with me, that bird that pecks on my ribs is writing your name inside my ribs, and that's why i sing what i sing...those terrible things about fathers and mortality, and the weight of the epic of a life behind you, his full of reflection and thought from inside the body in paid, mine full of magic and loss and a thousand cities and five or seven women with my name written on their ribs and a thousand conversations in cafes all over the world, what will we tell our daughters about the curve of a rib, the shape of a journey from here to there, what will we tell our daughters when we want them to calm down, and stop crying, and feel the pulse of this magnificent thing, even when our legs are tired and our hearts feel like this may not be worth it, those terrible anxious birds that come and go, now and then, come and go, what will we tell our daughters when we are not sure what kinds of cyclops are hiding around the bend, around that next mountain, the one that curves like a rib, i take you with me, i pull you like thread and take you with me, into the center of this storm...and that one that was me, this is me in high school, and there are girls who are distracting my attention, but i'm acting, and i have another role, and i keep acting, and this work is the place where i know who i am, and my parents think i'm too busy, and the girls are distracting, there are curves underneath a blue windbreaker that make me crazy and i keep saying my lines, and it's hard to sleep because i don't know where any of this is going, but this life is fresh and as real as the promise of a blue windbreaker on the dashboard of my father's van, this is the same song, and the same desire, there's never more than one desire it's always the same desire, and if the thrill is as strong as it ever was means i have not grown, i have not changed, then i have not changed, and i take it with me, i would have thought desire would have slowed itself down by now (with my terribly advanced years) but not so much, so be it, i'm helpless in it even if i know some things, but i'm helpless and this is all hopeless but it's thrilling and i take it with me, i take it with me into the center of the storm, and learn the chord progressions, slowwwwwwwly, and i take it with me, this is the storm, this is the center of my storm, and i did not create the storm, i just got caught in it, and i never changed i just got better at it and this is a song, this is why and what i sing, this is the song i was born with, singing from the cradle, this is the song, and it's all about you.

Friday, November 2, 2012

i don't think this is relevant

To anything at all.
So I dressed up as Jason Statham for Halloween and no one said anything.  And I practiced my accent for weeks and weeks.  Life is full of bitter disappointment.
I would love to say something without irony or distance or metaphor, but my tongue is frozen (the weather changed), and I'm trying to convince myself that the real things stand in for the metaphors just fine, except they resemble each other too much for that to be true.  I'm unhinged.  My axis is spinning, and I might be the one being spun, in a hundred different directions at once, and when I land, sprawled out on the floor dizzy and reeling, there are these things that seem true:
This may or may not be a rehearsal, but it is a repetition, this is a complex series of revolutions and repetitions, and it's impossible to figure out exactly what these repetitions are for.  But we are given roles, and all we are supposed to do is play the roles that we have been given, and, I think, I might be wrong, but I think, follow our desires, even when they are conflicted, or maybe especially when they are conflicted, or maybe even more especially, when there are road blocks everywhere.  I think that might be the game that our ancestors played, over and over, through repetitions of revolutions in a hundred countries, in a hundred dead languages.
I think this might be a poem about rescue, except it's in disguise (see above, tongue frozen, etc.)
This has happened before.  This is not my moment to figure out what is happening or why, it's a song that's sung by the dead to the living, something that follows us with their breath, hot and thick on a night like this, speaking in shadow songs through the thin veil of the moon (just got thinner, bright behind a blue tunnel made of sugar and that secret list of all the things we really want).
There are several points I would like to speak to first, several pressing issues that I want to address primarily, except I forgot all of them and can't even find a place to start (it was all theoretical probably, and I need nouns to keep me connected to the thread of things these days, and images of secret writings, hands writing in whispers across bodies that are decidedly other).  The veil between objects gets thinner, and even the living and the dead start to get themselves confused, the dead are eating and the living are too anxious to eat, lost in daydreams about the blue sugar tunnel between themselves and the moon, and it's almost too late to notice that the veil between people is also worn away, and at our most sacred moments we start to speak like each other, because the tongue is the voice of the body's sweat and muscle, and everything makes sense without any complicated introduction.
Except.  There is this, this one thing, this one pressing thing.  That I forgot, or maybe I just can't speak about it in most places.  But it's written on my tongue, on the underside, the part that is covered in sugar, waiting for the vision to kick in so that the ceremony makes sense.  But it never does, the ritual never ever makes sense until long after it's over, unless it is a poor ritual, faked by angry children who pretend they know more than they do, and charge way too much for a reading.
Those unlocked faeries come crawling out of the hole in the moon and start to watch the patterns, and the songs they sing that harmonize with the dead are the songs we like, the ones with the beat that begins on the lips and ends on the hips; seven mermaids come crying to the door, worried that no one has taken the trouble to ask them why they are so happy lately; five foxes surrounded by eight wolves, and everyone is hungry and nervous, and it would take the perfect song to remind them that the veil between one dog skin and another is very thin, and we are always at our best when we are made vulnerable to each other; under this thin light, under this thin veil, under the watchful eyes of the dead, we are best when we are vulnerable, hungry and cold but entirely sure that we are who we think we are, and a hundred other things besides.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

monsters of the sea//outline

Working Title: Monsters of the Sea (or Monstrosities of the Sea)

Form: Mix of Live Performance and Media (Film & Sound)

Dates: Spring 2013 (April-ish)

Venues: Theater in My Basement living room (seats 20-30), downtown galleries, other living rooms, Tucson galleries, spaces in México, San Diego (?), living rooms in Los Angeles

What's the story:
The central story, the skeleton or frame, starts with Odysseus setting out at sea by himself, with the intention of hiding himself in the trappings of a new adventure.  He is in a state of permanent spiritual exile, and wants to make a decision to go to Ithaca, but wants to acknowledge that he will never get there.  So it's just an impulse to move into an unknown area in order to have an adventure, because he is restless and anxious.

On the way, he has a memory of someone he used to love, someone who was lost, like a Eurydice who  went to the underworld and didn't come back.  His memory of her is enough to conjure her image back from the underworld, and she joins him on this raft in the middle of the sea, surrounded by monsters.  But she is also a monster, someone who is created from memory, and is not at all who he thinks she is.  He is also a monster, because he wants to believe that she is who he wants her to be.  So she becomes this kind of Frankenstein, someone created out of desire and longing, but is stuck inhabiting a body in time, a body with its own wants and desires, but with no memory of her own to go on.  She begins to become real, making an identity based only on what happens from the moment of her conjuration.  He begins to become less real, living in an identity that only knows versions of a past that are all fragments of his imagination of that same past.  She is also in a state of permanent spiritual exile, and is looking for something to become.

At the same time, he is pulled out of these moments with her when news from the Land of the Dead comes that his father is sick.  He goes back and forth between the realms, visiting the Land of the Dead, and the Sea full of Monsters, trying to find something about his father that can heal the father.  Of course, he is the father, or has become the father archetype, and his healing will come in finding out that he's the one he is looking for.  Coming to terms with a new identity that does not feel like human skin just yet.  Her journey then starts to twist, as his visits to the underworld make her lonely for her home, which she does not yet understand is imaginary.  So she is also breaking free from an old identity, one that defined her, even though it was terribly uncomfortable, and gets to come to life for the first time.

That's the central story, but there's a lot more that revolves in and out of this.

But so far, the characters, there are five.

HE: Odysseus, son becoming father
SHE: Eurydice and Frankenstein
FATHER: A ghost figure who is not yet here and not yet there, a wounded warrior.
FERRYMAN: Trickster figure who controls passage between the here and there.
NARRATOR: She guides the central story, sometimes is a figure, sometimes appears as narrative text and voice.  Throughout the story, she becomes more entangled in it, becoming a kind of mirror of SHE, becoming real, with real desires and impulses.  The Narrator is entirely witchy, but all of these characters are witches.

This is a loose structure, then, for the performance that counters this.  In real time, there are the same characters who may have the same names, but are extensions of the performers in their real identities.  They are, in a sense, then, actors who are trying on these mythic identities, but trying to maintain their own individual lives.  As the work goes on, they become more entangled, and their real desires and impulses start to mirror the ones in the mythic story, to the point where reality and the mythic level of events will overlap.  We all enter into the project with a profound sense of spiritual exile, and  make attempts to find our way home (to our own Ithaca) through the romantic discourse of revolution.  As people/performers, we are trying to articulate a real revolution for our time, one that is based on the possibility to maintain many identities at once (through variations on themes of race, class, and gender). There is also the desire to make these realities manifest, but we are stuck inside a performance, so our tools to experiment with these revolutionary ideas are through magic spells (better to call these "works," or "kangas" in Kongolese cosmology).  There are "works" then, in the central story, but also "works" in live performance, where we can enact these mystical rituals that will also involve the spectators in some significant way (in this last one, then, I'm revealing my impulse here to play with the notions of ritual in performance, looking at how they are effective or affective when they are presented on video, and how they work when they are done by live actors.

So the bulk of the preliminary work, then, will be in setting a space where all the actors can come together and talk about their own experiences with their own constantly-shifting identities.  We will explore alternative identities, altar-egos, for ourselves, and focus on performing the versions of ourselves we most want to see representative of ourselves for any particular moment or series of moments.  Rock Stars, Magicians, Warriors, Divine Lovers, Ghost Lovers, and any extremes that suit the comfort level of the performers.  At no point should anyone feel like they're being coerced into performing a version of themselves that is not based on their own desires of what they want to be (the central story is concerned with the tangle of representations that happen when we are forced into becoming something that suits the desires of another human being, and these meta-narratives are about finding the possibilities for liberation within ourselves for who we desire to become).

So there's a story that serves as a framework, and there's a secondary reality where real life has the possibility of entering into something that will resemble art.  The secondary reality, then, ourselves performing ourselves, is the real meat and fat of the thing, and depends entirely on the involvement of the performers.  But it's basically a framework for allowing us to collectively create a space of magic, a place where magical actions are performed by ourselves on ourselves.  It sounds very time-consuming, but I'm imagining that the bulk of this material can be mined through a few sessions that should feel more like interesting people hanging out than anything else.  From these sessions, we'll pull the bits that we like the best, and integrate these into the live performance that we'd present for the spectators.  The central story is one that can be told with a combination of image, sound, and text on video.  I've put together those kinds of narratives before, and pretty quickly, but this other level, involving the actors in a more personal way, is something that I've skirted around, but never fully invested in.

So the level of experiment in this is very high, which might be anxiety-provoking, but the level of fun is also very high, and I'm much more interested in creating a situation where we can discover things about ourselves, and perform versions of ourselves in a magical act of setting ourselves in a position where we can have an empirical experience of becoming.  And I should say, at the risk of an artistic reputation, that I am always much more interested in creating spaces where we are all able to remain friends, rather than making a work of art that destroys our delight in working together.  Without that sense of delight, there is no reason for doing anything.  I would also love, love, love it if this were a bilingual production, because the myth of Odysseus, that longing for a home that is no longer there, would translate in lots of places in the Americas if this becomes something we can tour.

Monday, October 29, 2012

seamonsters/blast

Wherein he turns into the DOG and she turns into the MOON and they talk to each other for the first time in ages.

DOG: If I could say anything to you right now, I would probably overthink it and end up saying something I don't mean, so I will probably just try to lick you all over for a very long time, and it would be just very friendly that's all, and already I said too much because I was overthinking everything.

MOON: I have no idea where you are right now, and I'm feeling exactly the same way myself, and I guess that just figures when you weigh out all the weight of the years between us.

DOG: It's not years, just months, which might be close to dog years, but it's not years, I mean, look at us, we're so young.

MOON: I feel very old, you have no idea.  And you can't lick the moon, I'm sorry, but you just can't.

DOG: Then I would ask you to sneak into my room through the curtains and you could lie down for awhile, just long enough to get away from all the people and dogs like myself who are looking at you and wishing things from you, because I know you're tired and need to rest.

MOON: You wouldn't leave me alone, it would be messy and complicated.

DOG: You're right, that's very true.

MOON: I wish I got bolder the older I get, just like you.

DOG: I don't know if I'm bolder, I'm just hungry, I just missed you, that's all.

MOON: I wish I didn't change my mind all the time, but that's what I do.

DOG: I noticed that.

MOON: You're always the same.

DOG: I don't think that's really true.

MOON: You always know what you want, and it's never complicated.

DOG: I don't think that's true, I don't think that's true at all, I just miss you and I don't know what to do with you, because you're here and I can't touch you, just like every moon I ever loved, but the next moon who comes and stays will want to stay for a long time, because I've rearranged the furniture and made room, and that's probably just enough, and there's a space through the curtain, that's perfect for you, you'll fit through if you come.

MOON: That's what you have to say to the moon.

DOG: Yes.  If you come, there's room, you'll fit, if you come, that's what I want to tell the moon, there's room.

And it's already so very very late.

seamonsters/gum

SIREN/SHE: Oh my gosh I love this gum.

HE: Oh my gosh what kind of gum is it.

S: I don't know, I'm not into labels.

H: Yeah, but I might want to buy it.  I mean, if you like it that much.

S: I fucking love it, it's so fucking awesome, it's the best motherfucking gum I've ever chewed, do you want some?

H: Oh my gosh, I do, I really do.

S: I'll give you your own piece, hahaha, not one that I've already, hahaha, chewed myself.

H: Hahaha, I don't care, I mean, I'd like the gum that's been in your mouth, I mean....hahaha, give me a clean piece please.

S: Clean.  Like I'm dirty.  Hahaha.

H: Hahaha.

(They both chew.  Pause.)

(SHE looks at HE.)

H: Oh my gosh it's fucking awesome.

S: Yes, you get it, I'm so glad you get it, it's awesome motherfucking gum.

H: I know gum and this is awesome fucking gum.

S: You know what I like about it the most?  It doesn't/ break--

H: It doesn't break when you play with it with your tongue.

(Long pause.)

S: Oh my gosh, yes.

H: You can wrap your tongue around it and kind of flick at it.

S: I love that.

H: You can flick at it with the end of your tongue and it's still so goddam rubbery and it feels so fucking good on your teeth and your tongue and you can keep on flicking at it--

S: Not too fast, I mean, vary the speeds, I mean, especially for the first like 8 minutes or so.

H: 8 minutes?  I could flick it for 16 or 32 or 64.

S: 64?  That's too long, that's just fucking ridiculous.

H: Not that I would flick the gum with the tip of my tongue for 64 minutes, but I fucking well could.  I have patience.  And my tongue is like, what's the word, it's in shape, right?  Like a muscle?

S: Yeah, it's a muscle, fucking right it's a goddam motherfucking muscle.  Yes.

H: I know my way around gum, I'm not new to anything.  I'm not new at all, but not like, what's the word, old, I'm not old to it, either.

S: Seasoned.  You're seasoned.

H: No, that's like saying old.

S: Seasoned is like spiced.  You're spiced.

H: Yeah.  That's ok.  Spiced.  And you're spicy too.

S: You don't have to lie to me to get me to like you, I mean, take it easy, I mean, slow down all of a sudden.

H: I'm sorry, I just stopped listening for a second and realized I had to say something so I just said something about the last thing you said but I wasn't really listening.

S: Oh my gosh, I fucking do that, too! That's so awesome.

H: It's fucking awesome.

S: It is.  Yes.

H: Oh my gosh.


Saturday, October 27, 2012

seamonster/the body in shock

Oh my gosh, that was too much, it's hard to believe he just laid it out there like that, so bold and so free.  And all without really saying anything terribly important, I mean, he sounded mad almost, but there wasn't anyone to be mad at, not at all, so it was almost like something crawled into his chest and said, "Now go howl at the moon and say the thing that you want to say," and we're all like, "Oh my gosh, that was harsh almost, except, that was it?  That was almost harsh."  And he. meanwhile, is becoming he meanwhile, and that's something very, very new.

And meanwhile almost, he is in a side stream, a channel diverted, and he is on a raft with his Daughter, and she has not been here before, but she needs to be here now.  Because without the daughter, there really is no reason for any of this.  Because it might be true that there's something being unlocked, something about another daughter, but that's very far away, and in the meantime, this generation that belongs to his daughter, and not to him, is starting to come to the surface of history, and that's where the world continues spinning, and his magic is already something of a generation that's removed, that is to say, he is confused about his place in things because his place in things is very confusing at this very moment in time.  Between fathers and lovers and daughters, there are roles that are getting clearer and roles that are getting very complex, and really, at the root, it's probably very, very easy, and simpler than it all seems.  First. there's this scene.

DAUGHTER: Daddy, there are ghost dogs all over the sea, and they're all white, pale dogs grieving in the sea.

HE: I thought it was just me.

DAUGHTER: Oh, daddy, you don't own all the hallucinations of the world, you don't own all the visions of the world, and what you gave to me, the gifts of sight you gave to me, were never yours alone to give, but came through your bloodstream, and that's very old.

HE: I think I knew that once and forgot.

DAUGHTER: I think you taught me that once, and I didn't forget.

And suddenly he is so sick, all of a sudden, that the hot peppers in his throat start to burn their way through his chest, and his heart is flaming, like hearts do when they are too hot, and now his raft turns into a classroom, and he is teaching the sirens something fun.

He is teaching again about the secrets of the ceremony, the one where you learn how to step outside your body through inhabiting it utterly, this is through song and dance and sex magic, and there's always lots of food with garlic and cinnamon and coconut milk, and everything that is good in the world pours over yourself like honey from the honey trees, and this is how we get to be transformed, by becoming ourselves so utterly that we leave ourselves finally.  He is teaching this all of his life so far because it's some of the prettiest things he ever learned, except, suddenly, here, it's starting to feel very inappropriate.

SIREN1: You've been talking this all over us for so long and you're all talky talk, you're a theory without a pulse, you're just narrating, you're not in your body, and I don't understand anything I can't inhabit.  Let's try this.  Let's try all of these theories.

HE: No, no no, no.  No.  Oh my gosh.  No.

SIREN2: I like taking notes.

HE: Oh my gosh.  That's good.  Good good good.  I like that.

SIREN#1 (WITH A BULLET): Can we try it?

HE: No, oh my gosh.  This isn't something we can do here.  We don't have the right clothes.

BURLEYSIREN: I've noticed that your clothes are getting tighter, are you working out, or are you trying to distract our attention?

HE: Nothing could be further from the truth, all of this is coincidental, everything is accidental, there are no intentions at all behind anything I do or say, I just think this is historically interesting and it will help us when we get to the final.  Which will be a multiple choice final.  Because we are becoming multiple.  And all of the answers will have to be correct, because everyone here can fit into this vast raft of knowledge.  Please don't ask me questions that will tempt me, because now, oh it's already too late, already, now just look at my head sweat, just look at the sweat coming from my head.  Oh my gosh.

But it's already too late because the music is on, it's hard techno thumping and everyone is moving, and it's like a rave movie directed by the bang brothers, just horrible, and he is trying to sleep on his desk because his back hurts.  The SIREN is crouched next to him, her head on his desk, puppy dog eyes.

HE: I feel like I'm missing out on something because I am so preoccupied about this pain in my lower lumbar-sacral-illiac region, I twisted something all out of shape, and honestly, just between you and me,  I think I did it when I was thinking about that one siren, the one who captured my attention when I first saw that first one siren, she had my attention and I was pumping hot molten iron to make myself forget her because it's just a disturbance, I have a disturbance in my blood and it looks like her, racing through my blood, and I was trying not to think about her and that's when I twisted myself out of shape.

SIREN#1: That's the sweetest thing you could have possibly ever said to me.

HE: (Now even more uncomfortable because he just spilled his heart all over the desk, and it looks so messy like that) It was just a metaphor.

SIREN#1: I love metaphors.  I could live in a metaphor for a very long time and not feel like I was missing out on anything.

HE: I twisted myself out of shape trying not to think of you.

SIREN#1: OH MY GOSH THAT IS SO GODDAM SWEET! I love that!  I don't know what kind of magic you have planned for me, Mr. Voodoo Man, but I promise you I will like it.

HE: Oh my gosh, this is very inappropriate.

SIREN#1: I don't even know what that word means, please teach me the etymology of the word.

HE: To take possession of something that does not belong to you.

SIREN#1: Oh my gosh, please do that.

HE: Oh my gosh, you remind me of that woman I met on the raft when I set off to get away from all of my obsessions and desires, and now you're right here, and my back hurts, and you want me to dance.

SIREN#1: TALK DEEPLY TO ME, THIS IS WORKING, GODDAMMIT, THIS IS REALLY WORKING.

HE: But I didn't recognize you until just now because honestly, I think I have a fever, except I'm not hot, my head is cold, please, feel my head, no, oh my gosh, don't touch my head.  See?  I'm confused.  I'm confused and indecisive because now I can't remember why I set out, unless it was to find you, and whatever happens after that might be an adventure, or it might just be something I imagined, a ghost dog, crawling across the waves, telling me stories in the dark so that I wouldn't sleep too deeply and forget everything that brought me out here.

SIREN#1: But this isn't the sea anymore, this isn't the sea at all anymore, this is something else entirely anymore, and all I want to do is pack you up in a box filled with basil and garlic, and carry you around my neck like a charm.  Because you are so charming.

HE: I'm really sick.  Oh my gosh, I feel really, really sick.

SIREN#1: THAT'S SO GODDAM CHARMING I CANNOT STAND IT ANYMORE YOU THINK I AM JUST GOING TO SIT HERE AND DO NOTHING??? OH MY GOSH!

She spends a little too much time, longer than is dramatically interesting, packing him up, which of course soothes him utterly, and he is left not so cold anymore, but with a temperature that is drastically increased, because he recognizes her as someone who can cross through many different worlds at once, and oh my gosh, he reallllly likes that.

She wears him like a charm, and the trancedance becomes so much more groovy than we would have suspected, and by the morning, everyone looks a little bit more like they did the night before.

Oh my gosh I have to take a break from this.


Friday, October 26, 2012

too personal for this right here

Somewhere on a raft, stuck in the middle of a sea of complicated relationships, and all of them or none of them are happening in time.  I can't tell.  I don't know if this is a beginning or an ending or somewhere in the middle, everything has its own music and I'm hearing a lot of different songs that I don't understand.  Somewhere between the Sirens and the song of Persephone when she's going under there are elaborate tangos, and I don't know any of the rules or protocol, but I seem to be dancing.  I liked the lightness of this at the beginning, I liked the lightness at the end, and in the middle I'm always given too much time to start to wonder if I should be here at all.  I always wonder if I should be here at all, whenever there's a break in the music, and that's the worst thing to wonder, because it tells me that I'm not enjoying or afraid to enjoy the ride.  There are sweet noises and notes, and bats fly around my head, and blackbirds come with news, and no one's saying what's really on their mind, so we're all left trying to guess each other's real hidden motives.  And I don't really know mine.  But something about another beginning, that sounds nice, but I don't know if that's really on the table, and I'm not sure if I'm in a position to offer it to the table, I don't understand the table, it looks very messy and complicated, and there have already been lots of meals and no one's cleaned up for weeks, and I'm pretty sure I was there for at least some of them.  I don't relate to myself these days.  I'm too torn around the shoulder of my father, and all the reasons why I want to live in another country.

When I come back to myself, when I'm done resolving these revolving things, I will set out a more proper meal, and it has to come after I've made the meal for the dead.  But in the meantime, let me just go on record saying that if something were offered, I would very likely take it, because the caving in of my belly recently, the new muscles under my skin, and the layers of muscle that are drawing tighter around the nervous bird in my chest tell me that I'm very hungry, but not starving to death, and that is my favorite place.  And I just imagine, in a very short amount of time, when these knots start to untangle, that I would be a good companion, especially for those kinds of journeys that don't have a clear end in sight.  If it's a planned trip, with lots of stops for sightseeing and rethinking the destination, where we wonder if we're eating right or having the right kind of fun, I don't think I need those any more, because I know more than I did yesterday, and what I'm longing for can't be written in temporary images, the ones who keep rethinking themselves for what they mean, and don't know what to make of me.  I like a very complex fruit, one whose sweetness sinks into the tongue like rain, one whose bitterness feeds my fire, one who inspires me to speak tangos in the air, one with the consistency and sureness of the earth.  

Thursday, October 25, 2012

seamonster/ploddingplotting

Ok just so I have it here....
Use Susan Kozell's Body Project...skin of performer projected into space, spectators act with the projection, projection is projected to performer in remote location, who responds to their projections...an active infinite loop, like in the social world...whenever two people meet, no one knows what the other will do, that's why they are other...in this case, the other is self/performer and other/spectator...

For this, though, for sea monsters....something else....not doing an experiment with the technology, but something else....
There is an endless sea between them....they inhabit other worlds, even though they seem to be sharing the same space....he conjures her up from the depths, she comes wearing the skins of old lovers, and he doesn't recognize her as someone he doesn't know but has been missing for a very long time....likewise, she dreams about him in her depths, and when he conjures her, she shows, but she has control of her projection, and is only ever at the most half there....and when she is in her own space, her depths, she brings his dreaming body down to her to help her drown in him....

So they are always looking for the other and the self in this.  Obviously.  Hahaha.  It's all very obvious and simple.  Just like life!!!

So I want to use something like this in a more performance/theater oriented way...the idea of self inflecting and infecting the other, and being inf/l/ected (inflexion) (note to self: inflexion and inflection are the same, but I think it makes me sound clever)...

Also possibly using Paulo Henrique's Contract with the Skin, close ups of skin projected behind performers performing themselves (and so many others)....

But the idea here, the technique, technology...for the parts where they are onstage together but not together (on boat?  in hell?), it's a skype conversation...she's in other room and he is holding her on a computer....and v-v....sometimes she is projected on wall as a large face, and him too to her....and sometimes it's their whole bodies on projection...but life size, so the one missing the other can try to interact with the virtual body, and the bodies are life size...please note these need to be life size (just like in life!!!) and make sure that I want to say life size even one more time and I will not.

Oh my gosh I am so very very nervous these days and my stomach is in knots.

There is no sea in love.
You have to cross over to compassion and bring the c back...

Saturday, October 20, 2012

seamonster/future

He sits with the fortune teller, already a bit of a fortune teller himself, but neither one can see the future at all, only signs that show where things are pointing, but no way of knowing how to get there, because the there is already always somewhere else.  And he is somewhere else, always somewhere else, can't keep himself in his head these days, and not here on a night when the moon is almost big enough to eat, but not yet, he's so hungry and it's just not enough, the moon in the sky is just not enough.  The dogs are always speaking, though, they always show up, and they lead the way, there are directions, and the directions always are already always the same: stay close to water, keep your eyes open, and keep your mind clear (as best you can, it's perfectly reasonable that the only thing you can see are those same shadows made by the moon on a night when it's not big enough to eat, not yet)...and it suddenly occurs to him, because there are cats around every corner, watching him to pounce on him or to hide from him, he can never tell which, he must look more menacing than he ever imagines ever, that this is a rehearsal and he is being criticized, and he might not be the only one playing.  The dead are watching very carefully, and they think this scene was played too quickly, and the clothes weren't quite right, they didn't anticipate the night, and that leather might look all right under certain lights, but under this thin (too skinny) moonlight, no one really believes that it can do anything to keep the cold out.  The dialects are all wrong, they need to be more authentic to the time and place, and should be rooted more firmly in race, class, and gender, and the pitch should be more perfect.  And his hands tremble too much, especially when he is around her, and his eye is starting to twitch too much, especially around her, because of the things that are going unsaid, and the dead want to hear the words out loud so they can believe the story, because they don't believe the story.  As much as he loves the dead, he wants to say thank you and offer them another piece of sweet bread, another cuban coffee, another shot of rum, but it comes out wrong.  He says:  I hear what you say, and I believe what you say, but this isn't your rehearsal, it's this moment that's happening in time, and it's happening to me.  I would love to play every moment perfectly, but then it would not be a moment in time, it would be something else, and this is happening to me in time.  And the worst part of everything is that it won't read right for you, it will never translate for you, and you'll never believe it, because you don't hear the music that I'm hearing in my ears right now.  This music is making me sing, it tightens my body and makes me pull myself together, sometimes so hard that I might start to tremble.  But it's not for you.  This moment is one that I live through in time, and it's something that only the living can walk through, and that's why you are jealous of me, and you can see further down the road, far enough to point out the directions for where things seem to be going, and that's why I'm jealous of you.  But there are some songs that the dead cannot hear, they are there for the living, and I'm on this side of the grass, and I'm hearing songs that make my heart start to hum, and if I tried to explain them to you, they would fall short because they are not your favorite songs, even though they might be repetitions of the ones you knew when you were living in bodies.  Living in a body is terrifying, you might remember, and I just want you to remind me of why you are jealous, because I'm too hungry by now, and forgot what it means to be waiting on the moon.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

seamonster/him again

I don't know how to bring something like that to life, but I know what it feels like when it works.
If I could retrace my steps backwards, and remember every single little thing I did, in this season of falling, I don't think even then I could trace any kind of useful map, because these things always unfold through their own momentum, in their own time and space.  I think the things we do at our little altars to make something come to life are already in motion, long before we walk into the room with our robes and our candles.  But I know there are secrets that set things in motion, and if I hadn't done these secret things, I wouldn't have to pretend I didn't do them, but in truth, I did, I said your name before I knew your name, and I said it out loud in front of too many spirits who were already paying attention.  I didn't think they were watching us so closely.  But I think I understand that they were watching closely because it was already unfolding in our direction, and even though I don't know how to turn things back, I don't know if I really would, or if I really should, because your face makes me smile, and there's something here I'm supposed to learn, something I don't know yet, something waiting for me here, and when it stops being interesting for you, I'll make a prayer and blow out the candles, and I won't make a wish.  These are hard days, and I don't know why things are unfolding the way they are, and I don't see any map up ahead, all I can see are the maps we laid out behind us, the ones we unfolded when we were curious to see how these things would play out when we were awake, awake as children, making new games in a forest that already knows our secret names.  

MANIFESTO OF CROSSED ONTOLOGIES Everybody (and by everybody I don ’ t mean everybody I think I mean one person, and I mean you, in par...