care (push-pull)

When I last saw G, my neighbour in Western Australia, he was in his early eighties. A delightful, sensitive man who had once been an engineer. We used to chat at length over the fence or out walking with our two dogs. For over forty years, G had been caring for his bed-bound partner A; she had a rare brittle-bone condition so extreme it meant that even a sneeze could result in a broken rib. Sometimes we had tea with A around her bed; she was both fragile and extraordinarily radiant. Out with the dogs, over time G revealed his frustration and exhaustion. After so many years the imperative to care for A, the push-pull of having to meet her every need and demand, had ground him down. He loved A but wanted her to let go now, to slip away; it was time, he said, while there was still time. Sometimes, despite himself, the weight of his tiredness manifested as irritation or even anger towards A, and he felt crippling guilt for not always being up to giving away his life for another.

 

G had an escape, and perhaps, he said, it was now ‘the love of his life’. Once a week for a few hours he would go gliding by himself, and whenever he talked about it, he was utterly transformed, lit up. The sheer joy of riding invisible thermals, the miracle of soaring and hovering, the wedge-tailed eagles. The silence, adrift in skyspace with the world laid out far below like ‘a beautiful old faded carpet’ (his words). Freed, for a moment, from gravity and care, while A lay immobilised by her illness on her bed, as light as a bird. When he came home afterwards, he said, he was troubled about whether it was okay to feel such pleasure. I told him I felt sure it was, more than okay. He invited me to come gliding with him. But then A died, and for months G was bereft. Grounded.

 

Extract from ‘Diffractions: record of a passage’, an afterword for the collection edited by Karen Christopher & Mary Paterson, Entanglement: duet as form and practice, Intellect Books, published in August 2021. Image from www.aerospaceweb.org, 'Birds, thermals & soaring flight'

the singing of the real world

‘If I could catch the feeling I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world …’ (Virginia Woolf)

At times like this, when so much feels divided and broken, when public discourse has dissolved into a cacophony of colliding opinions, and our politicians seem to have ground themselves into an acrimonious stalemate, there is something genuinely necessary and moving in Action Hero’s intimately epic project Oh Europa. In a gently playful and invitational way, their reimagined mapping of Europe in a time of apparent unraveling seeks to affirm connections and exchanges between people, through an affective cartography of places, encounters and feelings given resonant body in hundreds of love songs. All of the materials in this multiform art work – the 6-month journey undertaken by Gemma and James in their motorhome last year, the songs they collected, their video ‘postcards’ along the way, the live performances after the journey’s end, and this video installation with its ‘atlas’ detailing the location of the 41 beacons transmitting songs across Europe – all of these things celebrate our differences as well as a deeply felt sense of what we have in common, across borders and languages. The event of love, and the resilience and compelling mystery of its deep currents. Longing and its tangled relations to belonging and to ‘home’. The courageous intimacy of song as an embodied address to others: singing as soul-portrait, a gift of oneself in which breath becomes music and calls us together in the heart-land.

The choice of locations for the beacons was determined by a number of different conceptions of threshold, border and edge. To date beacon placements have occurred at sites of current administrative, political or cultural divisions, or of disputed territory; liminal spaces, hovering between territories; sites of encounter, blurring, mixing or integration – of rivers, seas, cultures; deep-time geological structures or rifts; sites of historical protest or activism in the emergence of democracy; redundant historical borders and archaeological remains at places of past conflict; sites bearing traces of cultures no longer in existence, or of unfinished projects (the disappeared ‘dreams’ of the past); rivers and former connective routes between zones, now disappeared or closed; and territories with mobile, fluid or indeterminate boundaries (notably, in the far north of Europe, the shifting position of the Arctic Circle, and the uncertainty of the Sami people’s geographical terrain).

The beacon locations detailed in this atlas offer an alternative mapping of Europe that is off-centre, and complexly layered in time and space. Conventional fixed notions of ‘centre’ and ‘edge’ are reconfigured here; old hierarchies of place give way to something plural and in flux, and many supposed edges reveal themselves to be singular and interconnected centres in their own right. Cumulatively this mapping produces layered networks of places and people in relation, rather than the fixity of discreet territories. Some of these places are ghosted by their social and political histories, but without melancholy; for alongside the presence of the past – the re-membering of conflicts and divisions, ancient and recent – there lies a quietly insistent invitation to actively imagine other possible futures. Other ways of being in relation to others. The journey, the sharing of songs and the placement of the beacons are all interwoven elements within an art project that is both poetic and political; they each perform the possibility of connection, passageway, repair, change and exchange. Like acupuncture points on the body of the land mass of Europe, marking a diversity of thresholds, fault lines and pressure points, the beacons seek to vibrate and reanimate circuits and flows that risk becoming blocked, forgotten or overlooked. In this way, sites of separation can become contexts for the staging of reparation and free, unimpeded movement.

After watching the video from each of the beacons in turn, I was struck by the dynamic presence of different kinds of water in so many of these contexts, and the degree to which landscapes are sculpted and territories defined by bodies of water and their flows. The videos invite us to contemplate various seas and inland lakes (Lake Virmajärvi, for example, on the border of Finland and Russia), as well as watersheds, confluences and many individual streams and rivers that ultimately find their way towards the seas, and wider connections and dispersals. All four of the cardinal points in this atlas – the extreme north/south/east/west edges of Europe – are liquid, as is Europe’s epicentre. Fittingly, Action Hero placed a beacon at the very heart of Europe’s land mass, beside the triple watershed of the Lunghin Pass in Switzerland. From this point on the so-called ‘roof of Europe’, invisible streams from melt water eventually grow in size to become the Rhine, the Po and the Danube, major arteries which run their meandering courses through different countries to three different seas: the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. The transmission of songs from beacons in these watery contexts, and others in this atlas, brings to mind the astonishing gesture of Tibetan Buddhists releasing material from their exquisitely crafted sand mandala paintings. Once the painting is complete, the monks dismantle it by sweeping up the sand and releasing it into a neighbouring river. These particles are carried away by the river’s gravity-fueled flow to be dispersed in the world’s oceans. For the monks, each grain is animate and continues to pulse, containing as it does the full image of the original sand painting in miniature: a peaceful, reverberant anti-toxin or prayer circulating forever in the world’s blood stream.

Like the songs themselves, the videos are also invitations to an attentive listening that is actively receptive. Each of the videos registers a still point in which everything moves: the sky and its weather systems, vegetation, animal and human life, vehicles, light. Each sequence reveals a place to be a complex world-in-process. The only video which comes close to immobility presents us with a surviving section of the Berlin Wall in close-up. However, the wall’s apparently immutable inertia is offset and destabilized by the layered background dynamic of bird song, human conversation, slowly drifting clouds in the small strip of visible sky - and of course the knowledge of the wall’s ultimate demise as impenetrable barrier. Its residual survival here acts as memorial and hope-ful testament to the ephemerality of imposed division.

In addition, the ambient sounds recorded by the camera reaffirm the complexities of place through the dynamically layered ‘songs’ of ongoing life. Each video offers us an auditory ‘situation involving multiplicity’, as John Cage said of Robert Rauschenberg’s combine paintings. Chance compositions draw on wind, sea, river, trees, birds (almost always there), insects, traffic, sometimes voices and fragments of passing conversation in different languages. We hear the sounds of the rural, the urban, the littoral, the elevated, the remote, the ongoing and the fleeting. A chorale of the world’s vibrant murmuring.

Listen, for example, to the dense overlay of city, traffic, riverboats, human voices and lapping river water at Margaret Island in Budapest. Or the chance aeolian percussion of flags and their guy ropes in the breeze at Juoksengi in Sweden. Then there’s the haunting spiral of bird song at the woodland ‘language border’ between Wallonia and Flanders, in Belgium, or the dog bark from a passing vehicle in Beremend, Hungary. Or listen to the brilliantly unself-conscious bee that buzzes the camera, then lands and explores the frame of the lens in the meadows at Trójstyk Granic, near the border tripoint of Lithuania, Poland and Kaliningrad. The placement of a beacon at this and other policed border zones enables the love songs to be heard in different territories. In this way the ‘travel’ of the songs, their reach as transmissions, renders such political separations porous, permeable, insubstantial – as does the movement of birds, or bees, and all such creatures whose passage ignores the arbitrariness and artifice of human borders.

To date this atlas remains unfinished; perhaps it is unfinishable, like all of the richest art and life projects. Further journeys, encounters, recordings of songs, beacon placements and video postcards ‘from the edge’ are planned. The travel/travail of mapping, tracking ‘the feeling of the singing of the real world’, placing matters of the heart at the heart of the matter, continues …

Text published as 'Mapping the heart-land', an introduction to Action Hero's book Oh Europa: Postcards from the Edge, an annotated 'atlas' accompanying the Oh Europa installation, alongside performances of RadiOh Europa. On tour in the UK and Europe from May 2019: premiere at Transform Festival, Leeds

For further details of Action Hero's Oh Europa project, and touring/performance details, see here and here

For a Guardian interview with Action Hero about Oh Europa, 'A Love Song for Europe', see here

Photographs by David Williams  

how do you say goodbye?

For Jane 

 

These texts are a response to travelling to Chicago for the 2003 Goat Island summer school at the School of the Art Institute. Two weeks in an American city I had never visited before, although it left its fingerprints all over my imagination. I read this text as a final presentation on the last day of the summer school, with unedited video footage of the city accompanying me on Bryan Saner’s laptop.

 

The presentation was prompted by certain lingering feelings from the school: by the work itself, by conversations, and by Mark Jeffery’s presentation on endings. It was also informed by the particular group of collaborators, a sense of a wider community of ‘goats’, and certain events at home while I was away. What follows is written in fragments, the ‘little by little suddenly’; it includes extracts from a number of found texts, emails, a letter, some bendings of the truth, the odd out-and-out lie. It’s an attempt to be playful in a purposeful way. It touches on displacement, connection, transformation, ephemerality, and the ways in which memory had taken (a) place for me in Chicago. It’s an attempt to re-member.

 

Let’s start with two poets who wrote in French. Firstly, Charles Baudelaire: ‘Countless layers of ideas, images, feelings have fallen successively on your mind as soft as light. It seems that each buries the preceding, but none has really perished’.

 

Secondly, Edmond Jabès: ‘There are no words for adieu’.

 

*****

 

What is a goat? (1)

A while ago, you asked me: what is a goat? I’m not entirely sure, a goat is many things, and probably not a thing at all, more a process or an event – but here are four qualities I’ve come to suspect are at work, or at play, here:

 

1.  A goat is a kid who has matured somewhat.

2.  It is said that goats were implicated somehow at the very beginnings of theatre. The word ‘tragedy’ means something like ‘goat singing’, but I’m unclear as to whether it was the goats themselves who sang, or whether song hovered in the air around them as they munched – the good citizens of Athens bursting into song in their honour. En-chanted goats, literally. But it may well have been neither of these, maybe this is just a trick of memory …

3.  Never leave a goat unattended in your garden. It will eat everything and anything, including your laundry.

4.  Sometimes a goat isn’t a goat at all. It’s a bird.

 

Skywalk

A few days after my arrival, Matthew lent me a book called Chicago’s Famous Buildings: the first of a number of thoughtful generosities, exchanges and circulations. Coming from a small village in the south-west of England where tall means 6 foot 2 and the bus leaves for town on Tuesdays, it was with some wide-eyed bewilderment that I read pioneering architect Louis Sullivan’s account of the chief characteristic of the tall building: its loftiness.

 

‘Loftiness is the very organ-tone in its appeal. It must be in turn the dominant chord in the architect’s expression of it, the true excitant of his imagination. It must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line …’

 

By this point, there was some excitant in my own imagination, and I felt the urge to experience loftiness such as this, within which every inch of it was tall. Feeling relatively brave, I chose the second tallest building in the city. My ears popped in the elevator on the way up. Then, from an open platform called ‘the skywalk’, I surveyed the city. I saw a man floating alone in a pool on top of a high-rise building. I saw a peregrine falcon riding the thermals, spiraling still as a stone above Michigan Avenue. I saw many things from up there.

 

And here’s some of what I didn’t see but might have seen from up there. I didn’t see but might have seen a lot of things from up there.

 

A young woman rocking backwards and forwards in the subway, singing the spiritual ‘Silver and Gold’.

Spray can marks on a railway-line wall that read: ‘Chica, estas fuerte!’

A man in a leather jacket carried inches above the sidewalk by a silver heart-shaped balloon.

Isabella Rossellini at Virgin Records, she’s just bought a Björk DVD.

Two guys locked in conversation, passing an old man begging, and not hearing his plea: ‘But I voted Republican!’

A white T-shirt with the Innuit word in black: QUINUITUQ.

A black dog chasing a white plastic bag.

A man trying to inhale the world.

John Dillinger reading the sports section of a newspaper before heading on to the Biograph movie theatre.

Two cigarettes in the ashtray.

An old man with a very long beard, playing ‘Yesterday’ on a saw.

A girl with a box bearing the words: ‘Kit for paddling through stars floating on a lake’.

A man with a fire in his head.

A neon sign that reads LET’S DANCE, only the final E is missing.

A man barely able to stand up after breakfast at Lou Mitchell’s. The waitress clears away his half-finished meal, and asks him: ‘Would you like the complementary ice cream?’

Indiana Jones at the Oriental Institute.

A man at dawn whispering to the lake through a megaphone: ‘The air is filled with the moves of you’, he says.

A woman who cooks curries that make her friends hallucinate.

A man whistling and sawing away at the branch he’s sitting on.

The smell of chocolate hanging heavy in the air over the river.

A man on a cellphone in a hotel lobby: ‘We are all Americans at puberty’, he explains, ‘we die French’.

A woman who keeps valium in her sugar tin.

A jetlagged man who wakes at 4.33 a.m. precisely, sees the time and thinks he’s at a performance – or perhaps is one.

An old man directing the traffic with his stick.

Two nuns on a pedalo in the lake.

A woman wearing a necklace made out of pistachio shells.

A runaway horse skidding through the suburban mall.

 

The way she laughed.

 

‘There is no place not the reflection of another. It is the reflected place we must discover. The place within the place’ (Edmond Jabès).

 

Exactitude

As I walk at ground level, Chicago triggers memories, although I’ve never been here before. ‘Like those birds that lay their eggs in other species’ nests, memory produces in a place that does not belong to it’ (Michel de Certeau). Memory as cuckoo.

 

I walk and walk, and try to arrive, and one day something arrives at me. A feather floats down from a lofty building and lands in front of me …

 

Then I see that there are others falling out of the sky, a slow silent downpour.

 

‘FEATHER’: from a Greek root meaning ‘wing’

·      appendage, plumage, display, decoration, mark of honour, badge of a fool, emblem of cowardice (a white feather in a game bird’s tail is a mark of inferior breeding): a commodity (‘to feather one’s nest’): a tuft of hair on humans and horses

·      a very small part of anything, almost weightless, of little strength or importance: lightness, discretion, secrecy, flimsiness, a trifle

·      weaponry (arrows), ballistics: to pierce or wound (‘to bury an arrow to the feather’)

·      a blemish, flaw, imperfection having a feather-like appearance (in an eye, or a precious stone)

·      hunting: quivering movement of a hound’s tail and body while searching for the trail

·      related to wealth, health, weather (‘in fine or high feather’)

·      in writing, a quill: usually a swan or goose

 

I remember Italo Calvino: ‘For the ancient Egyptians, exactitude was symbolized by a feather that served as a weight on scales used for the weighing of souls. This light feather was called Maat, the goddess of scales. The hieroglyph for Maat also stood for a unit of length – the 33 cms of the standard brick – and for the fundamental note of the flute’ (Six Memos for the Next Millennium).

 

Questions for psychics (1)

Almost every day during my walk back from the studio, in a gallery space in Greektown, I am handed a piece of paper in the street.  On the third or fourth occasion, when I have a little pile of Jeanina flyers, I think what the hell, and I give her a call. I get her answerphone, and feel slightly disappointed that she didn’t know I was going to call, but leave her a message anyway. For I have one free question: ‘Hi Jeanina, I have a question for you, well, several of course, but here’s one for starters. It doesn’t quite fit the list of what you can tell me, but anyway, here goes … Umm … what is a goat?’

 

Now and now and now

Some years ago, we met in London and she took me to see a German film, Himmeln über Berlin (‘Wings of Desire’). Broadly, it’s about angels hovering around the city of Berlin before the fall of the wall. They are able to hear and see everything in people’s embodied lives, to record but barely able to intervene. One of the angels is frustrated by his detachment from the world of the material, the temporal, the human. He yearns to be able to say, ‘’Now and now and now’, and no longer ‘since always’ and forever’’. He longs to be weighted, gravitied, attached to the earth. In one sequence, he comes across a man who has just been knocked off his motorcycle by a Mercedes; the man is badly injured and in shock. The angel comforts and calms him through a whispered list planted in the man’s consciousness: an orienting list of particular places and things the man has loved, a map of coordinates and phenomena and everyday fragilities. After a few words, the man’s voice picks up the list, they are now his own thoughts, and the angel walks slowly away listening to him whisper these words:

 

‘The fire on the cattle range. The potato in the ashes. The boathouse floating in the lake. The Southern Cross. The Far East. The Great North. The Wild West. The Great Bear Lake. Tristan da Cunha. The Mississippi Delta. Stromboli. The old houses of Charlottenburg. Albert Camus. The morning light. The child’s eyes. The swim in the waterfall. The stains from the first raindrops. The sun. The bread and wine. Hopping. Easter. The veins of the leaves. The colour of stones. The pebbles on the stream bed. The white tablecloth outdoors. The dream of a house inside the house. The loved one asleep in the next room. The peaceful Sunday. The horizon. The light from the room shining in the garden. The night flight. Riding a bicycle with no hands. The beautiful stranger. My father. My mother. My wife. My child …’

 

My favorite place (luck days)

Every day when I go and check my email, I find a text from someone who has been working on the same computer, a Korean woman studying English in Chicago. I have come to think that her words are left there deliberately, as messages for me. This is what she left for me yesterday:

 

‘My Favorite Place. Ka Mir Park, Jul. 4, 2003

One of my favorite pace is empty swimming pool. I used to go to swimming pool in the morning. Some luck days, there where no people in the swimming pool except me. When I swam alone, the feeling was really gorgeous. The surface of water looked really peaceful. The feeling that when I divided the calm surface of the water, I cannot expression by word. Just I cat say that I love it so much. And I do not have to worry about next me, it made me relief. Some time, there are many people in a swimming pool I have to hurry up even I stay in short of breath. When I depressed I saw the dull, it makes myfelling much better. That lucky days, I spent hole day in good mood from the feeling of swimming pool’.

 

What is a goat? (2)

In Michel Tournier’s novel Friday, Andoar was born on a tropical island, the very same island on which Robinson Crusoe was stranded – and although Andoar ended up as a kite, he was of mixed human/goat heritage. The human side comes from Friday, whose own ancestors (we are told) were probably coastal Indians from the central part of Chile. Friday was playful, light, solar; he greeted everything with laughter, not a naïve laughter but one that emerged from a sophisticated form of acceptance. In his eyes, there is always ‘a hint of derision, a touch of mockery defeated by the drollery of everything he sees’. Friday was aerial: for example, he had a passion for shooting arrows to see how far and long they could fly. As for the goat side of the mix, we know that Andoar’s other parent was a powerful and fearless goat with startling green eyes and a terrible smell which, we are told, could be detected from a great distance.

 

But to understand Andoar, you have to know not only the elements of his hybrid crossing, but also the miraculous circumstances of his birth. After several combative encounters between Friday and the goat, they engage in a great final contest. At the end of it, entwined in each other’s bodies, they tumble over a cliff and emerge as a new composite creature. Andoar (and/or) consists of the man formerly known as Friday, now thoroughly impregnated with eau de goat and sporting an aerial accessory – the old goat’s skin, now scraped, cured and polished, is attached to a frame of twigs and connected by a vine to the old Friday’s ankle. Andoar spends his days ‘battling with the tricks of the wind, diving to its sudden gusts, turning when it veered, sinking when it slackened, and in a soaring bound regaining the altitude it had lost’, as the more terrestrial parts of his body and its awkward shadow dance alongside on the sand.

 

Tournier’s novel as a whole is a tale of how to become solar, ‘an angel of helium’. And I am drawn to Andoar because of his talent for boundless flight, for lightness and mobility, while retaining some contact with the ground. Andoar activates the wish to fly, to extend the limits of one’s current embodiment; to escape the confines of biography, culture, training; to expand the horizon of the conceivable. Andoar’s mobility activates a desire for what Tournier calls ’something else’. He offers encouragement for the space to become otherwise. For the exercising of faculties. For playing around. For shuffling the deck. For changing places. For messing with things. For responding to shifts outside and in. For keeping one’s foot in contact with one’s shadow on the ground …

 

Encounters and crossings bring new things into being. A goat-man-kite becoming.

 

Specific natures

Opposite my apartment on State Street, just underneath a sign for Ossama’s Hair Designs, there’s a vacant storefront. Above the windows in gold letters: ‘Incomparable Quality’ – ‘Impeccable Fashions’ – ‘Exclusive Styles’. In two neighboring windows, two life-sized casts of human bodies – a naked man and a naked woman, lying down on their backs beside each other. Asleep. Or dead, maybe. Each body is caked with earth, and inlaid from head to toe with thousands of grass seedlings. In this piece (‘Specific natures: a living installation’) and other work by the two British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, the grass grows to the point of its natural depletion, then withers and dies. On my first day in Chicago, the specific form of each body was visible, the grass no more than stubble length: a beginning. By this morning, all distinguishing features have been blurred and concealed by the grass. They are now generic bodies, ungendered, turfed outlines.

 

I imagine two goats grazing in the vacant storefront on State Street, quietly discussing their meal, ignoring the traffic, the passersby. ‘Mmmmmhhmmm, this grass is incomparable, impeccable. How’s yours, gonzo?’ ‘Exclusivo, compadre. Hey hey, ain’t this the life’. I imagine the grass spreading gradually out of the storefront, across the sidewalk, making its way oh so slowly up something really very lofty … grass that is every inch a proud and soaring thing …

 

How deep in your mouth (laughtears)

I loved it when she laughed. It was like discovering a tree was still alive, although it had no leaves because it was winter.

 

At her 21^st birthday party, she laughed as if laughing was the joke, and the joke was spinning the world around faster and faster so that only the joke held and didn’t get dizzy, it just threw off light and flecks of laughter and grains of sugar and with its head back swallowed vino spumante, and played with the bubbles and gave them to her friends with a kiss when they joined in her laughter.

 

We were partners for about two years when we were undergraduates. I studied French, she studied German. We have been friends for almost a quarter of a century. Then a year ago, she became ill. Last Thursday I dedicated my talk about animals to her. She was the person who told me that Kafka called his cough ‘the animal’. Earlier this week on Monday morning, this email from her sister fell out of the sky and landed in front of me in Chicago. A breathturn.

 

            Dear David

            Jane finally died at 1.15 this morning. She had spent the previous couple of days in a coma and was very peaceful. Whilst we are devastated at losing her, we are all relieved that her suffering is over. She has been so incredibly brave over the last 13 months, but has had to put up with more than any one person should have to bear.

            I got your email yesterday evening, having been in the hospice for the past few days and nights, and fortunately I spoke to Kate who was there last night and made sure that she whispered your message into Jane’s ear. I believe she could hear us right up until the end, and we have been reading and chatting to her for the last few days. I like to think that she heard your message.

            I will let you know what the funeral arrangements are once they are organized – I don’t expect you to fly back, but I am sure that you will want to think of her at that time and maybe mark it in your own way.

            Much love, C x

 

A few months ago, in late spring, I sent Jane the following text from a section called ‘Our Cancer’ in Matthew Goulish’s book (Matthew is quoting Odysseas Elytis); Bryan Saner spoke a version of this text at the end of Goat Island’s The Sea and Poison:

 

‘I felt abandoned by everything. A great sorrow fell upon my soul. I walked across the fields without salvation. I pulled a branch from some unknown bush, broke it, and brought it to my upper lip. I understood immediately that all people are innocent. We walk thousands of years. We call the sky ‘sky’ and the sea ‘sea’. All things will change one day, and we too with them’.

 

I mentioned the goats, told her about coming to Chicago for the summer school. Some days later, she phoned me with a question: ‘What is a goat?’

 

I loved it when she laughed.

 

Questions for psychics (2)

I try Jeanina three more times. Always the answerphone, never anyone there to respond. As my questions remain unanswered, I figure I still have one free question each time I call.

 

Here are my questions:

1.  ‘Jeanina – I want to be milked from the udders of a cow. I want a pine tree to grow inside me. I want to hang by my fingertips between the tops of two mountains … And you?’

2.  ‘Hi Jeanina, me again … what if I just suck?’

3.  ‘How do you say goodbye?’

 

The only dream worth having

Dear David

 

There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible. Honorable. Sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth. There are plenty of warriors whom I know and love, people far more valuable than myself, who go to war each day knowing in advance that they will fail. True, they are less ‘successful’ in the most vulgar sense of the word, but by no means less fulfilled.

 

The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead.

 

Which means exactly what?

 

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated nor complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try to understand. To never look away. And never to forget.

 

What is a goat? (3)

Before I left, you asked me: what is a goat? I’m not entirely sure, a goat is many things, and probably not a thing at all, more a process or an event, but here are some qualities I’ve come to believe or suspect are at work, or at play, here:

 

A goat is the mystery of an encounter.

A goat is responsibility in the face-to-face.

A goat is connection and exchange.

 

A goat is attentiveness, exactitude/imprecision, interruption, contradiction, invitation, possibility, small miracle, crossing, overflowing.

 

A goat is a widening of wishes.

A goat is loftiness in small things.

A goat is an active vanishing.

A goat is the arrival of memory.

A goat is a letter to the dead, and a letter to the future.

 

A goat is a sensuality accomplice for the one that is one of a kind.

 

A goat is a breathturn.

 

Goat is also a verb: to goat. To goat is to be light (embodied, gravitied light – light as a bird, not light as a feather: Paul Valéry). To goat is to hold on tightly and let go lightly. To goat is to fall into the open, to fly a little with one’s foot touching one’s shadow – a shaggy, raveled thing – on the ground. To goat is to give the gift that gives.

 

To goat is to graze.

To goat is to laugh.

To goat is to whisper.

To goat is to listen.

 

*****

 

Chicago, SAIC, 25 July 2003. Includes texts from Italo Calvino (Six Memos for the Next Millennium), Peter Handke/Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire), Jane Bennett (The Enchantment of Modern Life), Matthew Goulish (39 Microlectures in proximity of performance), John Berger (To the Wedding), Arundhati Roy (The End of Imagination), Charles Baudelaire. Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan, Roland Barthes, Alfonso Lingis, James Joyce, Deborah Levy, Ka Mir Park.

 

games to chase away fear

Some of the questions, invitational triggers, and 'games' devised by Pina Bausch for her performers to explore while devising the performance Valse (1982):

- Set a trap for someone
- Think of a simple phrase, say it without words
- Tell a story using sounds
- A photo album: poses
- Defend yourself
- How to kill an animal
- What can you do with one hand?
- Razor blade
- Invent a new peace sign
- Games to chase away fear


- How do you open a boiled egg?
- What do you think others want to change in you?
- Something for which you could use a drum roll
- Pairs in love walk in the street touching each other: how?
- A song about a tree
- You have to pack very quickly, you only have a tiny case, you don't know how long you'll be away: what do you take?
- Mark injurable parts of the body on your partner: show why they are injurable
- Your reactions when someone makes plans for you
- An exercise to make yourself stronger
- White handkerchief
- Express delight in six notes
- Leg art
- Plan revenge
- Erect a monument to someone
- An animal kills another: how?
- Curiosity
- Five laws for marriage
- Which parts of your body do you prefer to move?
- What does an animal say when caught in a trap?
- Magical formulae
- Ways in which you amuse yourself on your own
- Back to the wall
- Different ways to warm yourself
- Babies' movements
- What do you do to babies?
- Play a game with your own body?
- Animals' games
- Distress signals
- Pas-de-deux with two fingers
- Degradation
- A goodbye pose
- A sign for good luck
- A dance phrase addressed to your bed
- Up to me
- Do something for when you want to be loved
- What are you best at?
- Softening
- The plan's no longer working
- Mini-twist
- The language of curtains
- Photos for eternity
- Look who's there!
- A game to do with time
- Make something go away
- Parental advice
- What do you have of your parents?
- Summer
- An important thought in a rainstorm
- The way in which you hold on to someone when you're afraid
- What do you only do alone?
- A love poem
- Here's a bear, and you have to make it laugh
- Small, smaller, smallest
- Where is it?
- Carress
- They used to embrace like this ...
- Games with a piece of string
- Do something with your nostalgia
- Throw yourself into someone's arms
- Ports and ships
- A mini-show for oneself
- A bagatelle for an audience up there
- Fear of messing something up
- Look at an object with malice
- Excuse me
- Make a movement of expiration
- Shame
- A little movement you make when you have goose-flesh
- Hiss
- What you need to survive
- Waiting for news
- Pity yourself
- I hope we'll see each other again
- Wanting to escape
- Good news
- Have a good journey
- Go on, just a little burp
- Reflect on something to do with wind
- Be modest
- A hymn
- A baby massage
- The language of curtains

Translated by David Williams: from Raimund Hoghe, Pina Bausch: histoires de théâtre dansé, Paris: L'Arche, 1987

Photo: Detlef Erler

the tears of things (for pina)

'I'm not interested in how people move, but in what moves them ... We are very transparent. The way somebody walks or the way people carry their necks tells you something about the way they live or about the things that have happened to them. Somehow everything is visible - even when we cling to certain things ... Everything I do is about relationships, childhood, fear of death, and how much we all want to be loved' (Pina Bausch).
_________________________________________________

In no particular order, some images, culled from a reservoir that has coloured and buoyed my imagination for 20 years or more. These (and others) are indelibly etched into my psyche, and they proliferate and animate still: in my 20s and 30s, this work changed everything for me...

A group of women scurry across a leaf-strewn floor in pursuit of a man who plays the same short extract from Bartok's Bluebeard on tape. Rewind, replay, shuffle. Later, a slow somnambulist dance of partners, the women bowed and passive, their faces hidden, the almost-naked men masquerading their bodies - performing body-building poses to the audience, displaying them to both comic and alarming excess (1).

A woman in her underpants walks through a field of carnations playing an accordion. Around the edge of the field, guards patrol with alsatians on leashes. Later, Lutz Forster 'signs' the Gershwin song The man I love. Comedy and pathos in this overlaying of nostalgic heterosexual song and signing. The overlay doubles and re-doubles the song's lyrics, making them un-familiar and re-writing them. The male body mimes and 'tells' - through an iconic corporeal discourse of a possible love to which a dominant ideology is metaphorically 'deaf'. Forster himself is both source and site of the narrative, and detached from it, consciously showing/dis-playing it to us (2).

A group of besuited men repeatedly touch a solitary woman (Meryl Tankard) like a child - pinch her cheek, tousle her hair, pat her. Cumulatively over time, their actions constitute a kind of rape; intimate, patronising 'affection' is defamiliarised through repetition to reveal the shadows this infantilising tactile economy suppresses (3).

Two dinner-suited men, smug, self-congratulatory, mask-like smiles, posturing an image of suave gentility, wealth, sophistication. Then they squirt or dribble little fountains of champagne from their mouths - straight up, splashing down over their faces and suits, 'wetting themselves', like children. A kind of critical comic display of the infantile drives that underlie and inform their masquerade (4).

An environment of towering, bristling cacti, peopled by a discontinuous dream-like array of figures. Couples waltz. Passers-by pass by. A woman in bra and pants hangs immobile and upside down, her body apparently suspended from a cactus's spikes. A man force-feeds a woman, like a goose, coercing and constructing her; she lies inert. A man in a balaclava wheels another woman around the space in a glass tank of water; it's uncertain whether she has drowned or is dreaming, her body literally floating through space. A man in a skirt, shades and a leather jacket dances alone. A woman with two black shoes in her mouth struggles repeatedly to lift herself from the floor. A blindfolded man dances alone, a tea bag held over each eye by a red cloth, his partner a tea towel. Then there's a dancing pantomime walrus, and a group standing as if ready for a rather odd family portrait: a masked woman (one of those 2-dimensional Victorian paper cut-outs sometimes used for parties); two others beside her, their hats suspended above their heads, as they wriggle to fit inside them; and a slumped woman on a chair in front, her hair covering her face (5).

A man struggles across a field with an enormous wardrobe balanced precariously on his back. A drunken woman with a bottle in her hand shouts and lurches at the centre of a flock of sheep; the sheep respond to her every move, instantly and collectively, her impulses rippling out through this animal corps de ballet. A man, gravity-bound, chases a flock of starlings as they swoop and soar. Dominique Mercy in a ball gown, pinned to the wall of a room by a model helicopter hovering in front of him, buzzing him, its whirring blades pushing an updraft under his skirt (6).

A woman with impossibly long limbs and hair, a spectral somnambulist presence in a white night slip, dances through a maze of tables and chairs in a deserted cafe. A man clears her passage, his attention to his task all-consuming and selfless (7).

The everyday defamiliarised. The image as aggregation: the conjunction of bodies, objects, rhythms, music, space as psychic landscape. Even smell (the peaty earth in Rights of Spring). Bachelard's 'material imagination'. Brecht's gestus ablaze, signalling through the flames (8). Accumulation and repetition (what repetition?) Masquerade. The voyeuristic economy of spectating: the 'dis-play' of performing. Montage. E-motion: the continuous leak of affect. Excess. A corrosive theatricality. Irreducible ambiguity. Layers of fragmented narrative. Reversals. Ec-static exposures, uninsulated. Identities on the move. Possible worlds. The heart-land laid bare, in its resilience and fragility.

Love's work, its grain, its shapes.
The tears of things.

_______________________________________________

Notes
(1) Bluebeard.
(2) Nelken.
(3) Kontakthof.
(4) Two Cigarettes in the Dark.
(5) Ahnen.
(6) Die Klage der Kaiserin ('The Lament of the Empress').
(7) Cafe Muller.
(8) 'Gestus is at once gesture and gist, attitude and point: one aspect of the relation between two people, studied singly, cut to essentials and physically or verbally expressed. It excludes the psychological, the sub-conscious, the metaphysical unless they can be conveyed in concrete terms' (Brecht).

Images: Pina Bausch (photo by Donata Wenders, 2004); Nelken at Sadler's Wells, 2005 (photo by Tristram Kenton); Ten Chi, 2004.

To watch Lutz Forster's The man I love (from Chantal Akerman's 1982 film One day Pina asked me...), see here

For a listing of other Pina Bausch materials on YouTube, see here

Obituaries for Pina Bausch: Guardian, Independent, Times, New York Times

on the way to something else

It's late on Boxing Day, and I'm reading Thomas Pynchon's unnerving and hilarious magnum opus of channeled paranoia, Gravity's Rainbow - it's a section about a Boxing Day evening in another household somewhere in wartime England:

Inside the bowl, the two goldfish are making a Pisces-sign, head-to-tail and very still. Penelope sits and peers into their world. There is a little sunken galleon, a china diver in a diving suit, pretty stones and shells she and her sisters have brought back from the sea. Aunt Jessica and Uncle Roger are out in the kitchen, hugging and kissing. Elizabeth is teasing Clare in the hallway. Their mother is in the W.C. Sooty the cat sleeps in a chair, a black thundercloud on the way to something else, who happens right now to look like a cat. It's Boxing Day. The evening's very still. The last rocket bomb was an hour ago, somewhere south. Claire got a golliwog, Penelope a sweater, Elizabeth a frock that Penelope will grow into.

A page or so later, cut to Roger and Jessica in the kitchen, and Roger's fears of her leaving him for Jeremy:

Oh, he feels a raving fit coming on - how the bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true ...

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are "yours" and which are "mine". It's past sorting out.

We're both being someone new now, someone incredible ...

dance (look at your eyes)

for vicky & gareth

We are so small we can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside us?
Look at your eyes. They are small, but they see enormous things.

Loving actions are the seed of something,
A living-place.

Love means to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that ways heals their heart.
A bird and a tree say to them: Friend.

Look as long as you can at someone you love
No matter whether they are moving away from you
Or coming back towards you.

Some nights stay up till dawn,
As the moon sometimes does for the sun.
Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way
Of a well, then lifted out into light.

I want this music and this dawn
And the warmth of your cheek against mine.

Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance when the bandages come off. Dance in the middle of fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly free.

But no words will ever mean as much as a life.
So let the words stop now.
Open the window in the centre of your chest,
And let the spirits fly in and out.














Text read at the wedding of Vicky Major & Gareth Wolf, Saturday 4 July 2009, Harbertonford, Devon. Poem adapted from Rumi and Czeslaw Milosz

your moon in bella luna and (love dog)

Lonely little love dog that.

No one knows the name of.
I know why you cry out.
Desperate and devout.

Timid little teether.
Your eyes set on the ether.
Your moon in bella luna and.
Howling hallelujah ...

Nameless you above me.
Come lay me low and love me.
This lonely little love dog.
That no one knows the name of.

Curse me out in free verse.
Wrap me up and reverse this.
Patience is a virtue.
Until it's silence burns you.

And something slow.
Has started in me as.
Shameless as an ocean.
Mirrored in devotion.

Something slow.
Has sparked up in me.
As dog cries for a master.
Sparks are whirling faster ...

Lonely little love dog.
That no one knows the ways of.
Where the land is low is.
Where the bones'll show through.

Lonely little love dog.
That no one knows the days of.
Where the land is low is.
Where the water flows to.
And holds you.

'Love Dog', tv on the radio / tunde adebimpe, dear science (2008)

For tv on the radio's myspace site, see here

Photos: Bantham, Devon, 31 December 2008

for sue