This is a turn, one that came on unsuspected. Everything worth following comes unexpectedly, Alice didn't expect the rabbit, and didn't expect that he was part of the Spanish Inquisition. With whatever drops or ounces of Spanish blood in my veins, I'm mustering up the courage to stop pushing, to smoke a lovely cigar in a night that is a little cooler than the last one.
There was a moment, just a short one, on a night when I couldn't get away from the heat from the cement or the anger that was playing darts in my own head, one of those nights where all the lovers seem just stupid, but the body is still too connected to the pulse of the last time in a bed with hotel sheets to be out of love, or out of reach of its peculiar spells. I'm sitting in front of a room full of people who are trying to draw my head, and it was draped like a pirate if I remember this right, and it was the worst night of my porous memory because they could see through the pores in my head and see traces of her, like a palimpsest of her face over my face. I couldn't leave it like that, as much as it seemed romantic and true at the time, because my head is my own head, and no one can see in to tell me about the things that are there, not when they are that obvious, because obvious statements make me bored.
I remembered what it was like being sixteen years old, when these things didn't matter, because there was always something else around the corner, and it was easy because it was all acting.
And I spent the next twenty or so years trying to take apart that very thing, the impulse to represent something in an accurate reflection, the impulse to reflect something in an accurate representation. Because art could do more than that, and the art that I loved the most was capable of much, much more.
And I spent hours in spaces with other people who felt the same way I did, but didn't know exactly how to get there, and we fed each other with an energy and a presence that suggested that this was not only not real, but that there was no real to reflect, and the idea of reflection was an insult to history, that re-creating any event with an accurate portrayal of its reality was condescending to reality. And we found that there were other realities that could be represented, and that by exploring these and making plans to present these in a public way would give the spectator just enough of a glimpse into themselves that they would have a hint at the real that lay just out of reach. Our symbolic worlds were ways of speaking of the real without trying to touch it directly, because that always struck me as a poor reflection, or a roadmap to a kind of madness that says we can know what there is to know.
Dada became a goddess or a god, before I knew that there was a Dada I would meet someday, after I'd been initiated into the forest and had gone to the river.
In another moment, I'm in a room full of actors who are trying to portray someone who's just received news that a family member had cancer. The idea was to create a standardized performance so that we could present the same character with the same emotions every time. Somewhere between a mirror exercise and an improv, I found out that I could enter into this kind of representation, even though it was raw and absolutely present, no sense memory required, and it didn't insult the people or the events that I was going through.
And my blood was running in my veins, and I felt sixteen years old, and angrier than I had ever been in my life. This was an uncomfortable revelation, because all the things that I'd spent so much time rejecting seemed to still have a place, and that their place was still very useful in the things that I was trying to do.
And I learned that my stories that are told in the dark are not stories I am telling myself out of an incomprehensible sense of loneliness or loss, but from a loneliness and loss that made me angry because we all share these stories. Or we have the capacity to relate to them in a significant way, and that some assumptions I had made were very wrong.
I rejected the western forms because I imagined that not everyone in the world shares the same capacity to understanding reality through these methods of reflection, that there are still people in the world who see a horse with only two dimensions, and that there are places where the goddesses and gods are so loud and clear that they infect everything, and it's impossible to create a world that does not include everything. So I included everything, knowing I was leaving some things out, and also knowing that there was no method for this at all, and the old method would not work at all.
After spending three years or more living with African goddesses and gods in my head in my house, I can still talk to someone about being afraid of losing my father, and they can still seem to know what that might be like.
It's not that important then to recreate everything, to throw out all of the things of cultures I don't naturally respect, because I am learning that there is freedom in pretending that we understand each other, even though I am uncomfortable when this is sometimes shown to be true. I am not tired. This is not about throwing something away because it is too exhausting, but it is about taking the things that worked, and picking up the threads of the ones who came before us, like they were fleece left on the bushes for me to find, at this particular moment, making things turn gold when I had given up hope that this particular journey would be something other than darkness.
Like a lover who is possessed by the soul of someone you lost and need desperately, these traces are threads that point to something inexplicably real, and simple, and easier to carry. These things might be this and not this, this lover might actually be her and not her, and it will all probably change at some point in the near future, but I can pretend for now, and this might be better than wondering how to make worlds out of shadows that have never been real. Because we do touch source, I've been there, and I can look in your eyes, or the memory of your eyes, and I can see that you have been there too.
There was a moment, just a short one, on a night when I couldn't get away from the heat from the cement or the anger that was playing darts in my own head, one of those nights where all the lovers seem just stupid, but the body is still too connected to the pulse of the last time in a bed with hotel sheets to be out of love, or out of reach of its peculiar spells. I'm sitting in front of a room full of people who are trying to draw my head, and it was draped like a pirate if I remember this right, and it was the worst night of my porous memory because they could see through the pores in my head and see traces of her, like a palimpsest of her face over my face. I couldn't leave it like that, as much as it seemed romantic and true at the time, because my head is my own head, and no one can see in to tell me about the things that are there, not when they are that obvious, because obvious statements make me bored.
I remembered what it was like being sixteen years old, when these things didn't matter, because there was always something else around the corner, and it was easy because it was all acting.
And I spent the next twenty or so years trying to take apart that very thing, the impulse to represent something in an accurate reflection, the impulse to reflect something in an accurate representation. Because art could do more than that, and the art that I loved the most was capable of much, much more.
And I spent hours in spaces with other people who felt the same way I did, but didn't know exactly how to get there, and we fed each other with an energy and a presence that suggested that this was not only not real, but that there was no real to reflect, and the idea of reflection was an insult to history, that re-creating any event with an accurate portrayal of its reality was condescending to reality. And we found that there were other realities that could be represented, and that by exploring these and making plans to present these in a public way would give the spectator just enough of a glimpse into themselves that they would have a hint at the real that lay just out of reach. Our symbolic worlds were ways of speaking of the real without trying to touch it directly, because that always struck me as a poor reflection, or a roadmap to a kind of madness that says we can know what there is to know.
Dada became a goddess or a god, before I knew that there was a Dada I would meet someday, after I'd been initiated into the forest and had gone to the river.
In another moment, I'm in a room full of actors who are trying to portray someone who's just received news that a family member had cancer. The idea was to create a standardized performance so that we could present the same character with the same emotions every time. Somewhere between a mirror exercise and an improv, I found out that I could enter into this kind of representation, even though it was raw and absolutely present, no sense memory required, and it didn't insult the people or the events that I was going through.
And my blood was running in my veins, and I felt sixteen years old, and angrier than I had ever been in my life. This was an uncomfortable revelation, because all the things that I'd spent so much time rejecting seemed to still have a place, and that their place was still very useful in the things that I was trying to do.
And I learned that my stories that are told in the dark are not stories I am telling myself out of an incomprehensible sense of loneliness or loss, but from a loneliness and loss that made me angry because we all share these stories. Or we have the capacity to relate to them in a significant way, and that some assumptions I had made were very wrong.
I rejected the western forms because I imagined that not everyone in the world shares the same capacity to understanding reality through these methods of reflection, that there are still people in the world who see a horse with only two dimensions, and that there are places where the goddesses and gods are so loud and clear that they infect everything, and it's impossible to create a world that does not include everything. So I included everything, knowing I was leaving some things out, and also knowing that there was no method for this at all, and the old method would not work at all.
After spending three years or more living with African goddesses and gods in my head in my house, I can still talk to someone about being afraid of losing my father, and they can still seem to know what that might be like.
It's not that important then to recreate everything, to throw out all of the things of cultures I don't naturally respect, because I am learning that there is freedom in pretending that we understand each other, even though I am uncomfortable when this is sometimes shown to be true. I am not tired. This is not about throwing something away because it is too exhausting, but it is about taking the things that worked, and picking up the threads of the ones who came before us, like they were fleece left on the bushes for me to find, at this particular moment, making things turn gold when I had given up hope that this particular journey would be something other than darkness.
Like a lover who is possessed by the soul of someone you lost and need desperately, these traces are threads that point to something inexplicably real, and simple, and easier to carry. These things might be this and not this, this lover might actually be her and not her, and it will all probably change at some point in the near future, but I can pretend for now, and this might be better than wondering how to make worlds out of shadows that have never been real. Because we do touch source, I've been there, and I can look in your eyes, or the memory of your eyes, and I can see that you have been there too.
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