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'

blow wind blow

‘Say weather take this adult from its box’ (Robertson 2001:14)

In those art practices that most engage me, there is always weather. An environment in process, a ‘field’ rather than an ‘object’. An invitation to predictive interpretation of signs, patterns, behaviours in atmospheres characterised by complexity, variation, possibility, anomaly, disturbance, ephemerality, unfinishability; the core dynamic lies in the relational axis between stability and instability. An implicatedness in sensory, phenomenal events: temperature, wind speed/direction, humidity, pressure, atmosphere, resultant phenomena of various kinds (e.g. optical). Weather is always contextual, and at the same time in the ephemeral spatio-temporal events that characterise its happenings the local is invariably implicated in the trans-local. Where does the weather begin, and where does it end? ‘Any event is a fog of a million droplets’ (Deleuze & Parnet 1987: 65).

Blow Wind Blow / You are my Sunshine / California Sun / I Don’t Care if the Sun Don’t Shine / Just Walking in the Rain / After the Clouds Roll Away / The Wind Cries Mary / Come Rain or Shine / It’s Raining / Jamaican Hurricane / Let the 4 Winds Blow / Stormy Weather / A Place in the Sun / The Summer Wind / Uncloudy Day. (Playlist from ‘Weather’, the first episode of Bob Dylan’s recent US broadcasts as a DJ on ‘ Theme Time Radio Hour: dreams, schemes and themes’).

Consider weather’s centrality in histories, politics, cultures, economics, science, bodies, identities, emotional lives. Today our media is full of weather and/as catastrophe: the floods, droughts and other eruptive anomalies, the ‘storms from Paradise’ of global warming throwing us all backwards into the future. Then there’s the potency of weather in the imagination: different poetics of weather. Hovering in my mind is a cloud of artist-practitioners of weather, their noses to the wind, including authors of haiku (with its obligation to include kigo, a season or weather word), Walter de Maria, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Nancy Holt, James Turrell, Denis Oppenheim, the Harrisons, Gary Snyder, Andrei Tarkovsky, Bill Viola, Olafur Eliasson, Tacita Dean, Min Tanaka (‘body weather’), Richard Long, Simon Whitehead, Lisa Robertson, Ben Marcus (author of the terrifying ‘The Weather Killer’, 1998). And what of weather and/as consciousness? Both involve dynamic, non-homogeneous environments forever in process, mutable, an ever-changing flux of micro-events in a relational field of infinite complexity …

As a most pervasive, protean and powerful force, perhaps weather suggests a dramaturgy of unfolding through a ‘logic of intensities’, an ‘eco-logic’, concerned ‘only with the movement and intensity of evolutive processes. Process, which I oppose here to system or structure, strives to capture existence in the very act of its constitution, definition and deterritorialisation’ (Guattari 2000: 44). Here we are close to Lyotard’s ‘theatre of energetics’, in which what appears is ‘the highest intensity … of what there is, without intention’ (Lyotard 1997: 288).

Philosophy sometimes intertwines promiscuously with meteorology, particularly in Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche - perhaps above all in Deleuze whose staging of thought is a veritable becoming-weather. The shock of thought as lightning strike, the book as perfect storm and weather-factory. Consider the lexicon of Gilles the weatherman: the thisness of the concept, its event; difference and repetition; relations of speed and movement, symptomatologies of force; immanence, assemblage, anomaly, multiplicity, rhizome; connectivity, encounter, flow; the outside, the fold; intensity, sensation, ‘non-subjectified’ affect; haecceity, becoming-molecular, ‘a Life’. It’s all there.

Of course all outdoor site work necessarily engages with the unpredictabilities of weather, either opening itself to the generative possibilities of weather’s creative agency within the work – weather as co-author of events in contexts where site is conceived as active medium - or (fruitlessly) trying to deny it entry to the site as ‘container’/ backdrop. But what about encouraging weather indoors? In studio or gallery-based practices, weather can occur in the form of phenomenal events generated, deliberately or otherwise, by a particular set of conditions. Sometimes weather’s intervention is formally representational and consciously framed as artifice: e.g. the hosed indoor ‘rain’ in Brith Goff’s Gododdin, 1998, which seems to have been generative both in terms of its excess in the scenography’s ‘material imagination’ and of an invited recognition of the predicament of performers. Or, more complex in terms of perception and embodied immersion, Olafur Eliasson’s installed Weather Project in the Tate’s Turbine Hall (2003), with its sublime indoor ‘sun’ and haze of ‘clouds’, and its elaboration of an anomalous behavioural ‘field’ indoors. At other times, weather’s presence represents an opportunist preservation of the by-product of felicitous accident: e.g. raindrops falling through the broken glass dome of Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord and landing in a small pool in The Mahabharata.

On other occasions, weather’s apparition is both more artificial and actual, more wonder-ful for the nature of its contrivance. I think of the creation of clouds in a number of Lone Twin performances, enactments of a poetics, economy and ecology of transformation, circulation and inter-connection, in which Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters’s hot sweating bodies literally steam to become further imbricated in the hydrological cycle. The clouds actualise an ephemeral passage that soon dematerialises, leaving in their trail a palpable density of associations and metaphorical after-lives, as well as a certain poignancy, an absence. (‘The cloud, then, is no more than this: I’m missing something’ - Barthes 1978: 170. Italics in original). At a time when the cumulative actions of human beings are becoming a ‘force of nature’, clouds and rain always contain traces of other histories, other bodies, elsew/here. Like the best stories, weather always creates an ‘electrified periphery’ (Marcus 2004: x).

In today’s paper, details of yesterday’s weather ‘around the world’; in a moment of drought I look for the presence of rain elsewhere and the local temperatures, scant details of the event of ‘nature’ in different urban contexts; Amsterdam (18), Brussels (15), Copenhagen (20), Dakar (28), Florence (23), Karachi (30), Milan (24), New Delhi (29), Oslo (17), Strasbourg (16), Warsaw (15), Wellington (7). Here today, ’bright spells, but showers are likely later (20)’ - so, another day of multiple weathers, but the showers haven’t materialised yet. Meanwhile, there are tropical storms in the north-west Pacific, one of them developing into a super-typhoon called Saomai which has just struck the south-east coast of China; I wonder what’s happening there right now? Multiplicity and difference in the pliable simultaneity of space. (Michel Serres has explored the fact that the French language uses the same word for time and weather, temps).
As Doreen Massey writes, space is ‘the sphere of the possibility of the more-than-one. Without space there is no ‘multiplicity’ in that sense … That is the meaning of space as a simultaneity of ongoing stories: that sense of ‘right now’. Right now there is someone growing mangetout for your table; right now there is chaos on the streets of Baghdad; right now it is just about noon on the West Coast of America (while it is already evening here in London)’ (Massey 2003: 114). Right now, as the sun falls, people are endeavouring to return to their shattered homes in Southern Lebanon. Right now severe rainfall has produced catastrophic landslides in North Korea. Right now it’s fucking cold and wet in Wellington.
The ‘weather-ed’ works I privilege as models are radically porous, they propose: let what’s out-there in-here. Take, for example, Yoko Ono’s ‘video sculpture’ Sky TV (1966), installed at the Indica Gallery in London. Like so many of her Fluxus-inflected conceptual works, which rehearse a pedagogy of the imagination, Sky TV exists first as an instructional text, a score, that can be effected materially or imaginatively in order for the work to be realised; the work will exist if it is ‘constructed in your head’. A camera is placed outside the gallery, focused on the sky, with a live-feed relay to a monitor inside. In ways reminiscent of Duchamp and Cage, this work undoes the integrity of the self-contained art object. It punctures the confines or boundaries of the gallery, and dis-places a mediated everyday; as with Cage’s 4’33”, questions of authorship, control, perception, boundary and the parameters of art come into play. It introduces a simultaneity of times and spaces, a composite rhythmed space-time, an interface. It invites us to apprehend and contemplate processes and unpredictabilities unfolding beyond the agency or ownership of an art commodity context, while paradoxically riding on the hypnotic allure of TV.

’This weather is the vestibule to something fountaining newly and crucially and yet indiscernibly beyond. Perhaps here we shall be other than the administrators of poverty …’ (Robertson 2001: unpaginated introduction).

And then there’s the verb, ‘to weather’, and the effects of weather(ing) over time. Brecht’s costumes at the Berliner Ensemble, sculpted and grained by bodies. The pitted back wall of the Bouffes du Nord, scarred by fire and water. The landscape of Beckett’s face. The scuffs, smears, stains, rubbings, wear, tear and other traces inscribed by humans and others into the very fabric of the urban and domestic, through the habitual, the unintentional, the accidental: the stuff of a forensics of anonymous histories and overlooked behaviours, and of deep mappings of location, occupancy, the passage of bodies now absent … (I am thinking in particular of performance maker and scholar Mike Pearson’s work on ‘archaeologies of the contemporary past’ and the ‘restoration of an absent present’: see e.g. Pearson 2006)


References
Barthes, Roland (1978). ‘Clouds’, in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (trans. Richard Howard), London: Penguin
Deleuze, Gilles and Parnet, Claire (1987). Dialogues (trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam), New York: Columbia University Press
Guattari, Félix (2000). The Three Ecologies (trans. Ian Pindar & Paul Sutton), London: The Athlone Press
Lyotard, François (1997).’The Tooth, the Palm’ (trans. Anne Knab & Michel Benamou), in Timothy Murray (ed.), Mimesis, Masochism and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 282-8
Marcus, Ben (1998). ‘The Weather Killer’, in The Age of Wire and String, London: Flamingo, 81-7
Marcus, Ben (2004).’Introduction’, in Marcus (ed.), The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, New York: Anchor Books
Massey, Doreen (2003). ‘Some Times of Space’, in Susan May (ed.), Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project, London: Tate Publishing, 107-18
Pearson, Mike (2006). ‘Marking time’, in Judie Christie, Richard Gough, & Daniel Watt (eds), A Performance Cosmology: Testimony from the Future, Evidence of the Past, London & New York: Routledge,
Robertson, Lisa (2001). The Weather, London: Reality Street Editions

First published as 'Weather' in Performance Research 11:3 (‘Lexicon’), December 2006:© PR/David Williams. Reproduced here to mark yet another wild August day as gales rip through Devon & the south-west. Summer time ...

plumbbob

eleven songs for the hydrogen jukebox

‘everything, even the explosions in the distances might stay as long as they were to no purpose … as long as no one had to die … couldn’t it be that way? only excitement, sound and light, a storm approaching in the summer (to live in a world where that would be the day’s excitement), only kind thunder?’ (Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow)

Introduction: eleven songs

In 2003, I made a performance called Eleven Songs with a friend Katja Wolf, as part of the Goat Island summer school in Chicago. It was in 11 parts. The materials I generated came out of drifting around an area on the South Side of Chicago to consider what remained of things that were no longer there – and where sounds went when they’re not heard anymore. In particular, I was drawn to the Slaughteryards – ‘Packingtown’ – ‘Porkopolis’ – the biggest meat processing site in America which had closed in 1971 after more than 100 years in operation. It was huge - a square mile of scientifically rationalized ‘dis/assembly lines’, in which it was claimed that every part of the pig was used ‘apart from the squeal’. By 1893 1/5^th of all Chicago workers were employed there in notoriously appalling conditions. It’s clear it was an extreme place, full of noise and blood and poverty – and the primary air polluter in Illinois for many years.

In Upton Sinclair’s famous book about the Union Stockyards The Jungle (1906), he wrote: ‘One could not stand and watch very long without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe. Was it permitted to believe that there was nowhere on the earth, or above the earth, where they were requited for all this suffering?’

In one of many books about hauntings in Chicago - mysterious presences located in particular places around the city - I came across the story of the pig’s squeal that some people claimed could still be heard in this area.

So, I walked and drifted in search of whatever traces I might find: in particular I was looking for whatever remained of one building. After a great deal of getting lost, eventually I found what I was looking for: or rather the empty space where it once stood …

On the edge of the former Slaughteryards, at 4300 Halsted, an abandoned site that had been the International Amphitheatre - this was where the Beatles had played a concert in 1964, on their 1^st national US tour, it was the time of ‘Beatlemania’, the Ed Sullivan show, and so on. A young Lin Hixson was there with her older sister. All she could remember were tiny figures in the distance, she could barely see them – and the incessant screaming. During my research, I discovered that the Beatles were showered with thousands of jelly-beans after a casual remark by George Harrison that had been picked up by the media – it was his ‘favorite snack food’.

They played for 34 minutes – they played 11 songs – and were paid 30,000 dollars.

This same building had been used for big political conventions: during the Cold War era, half of all Democratic & Republican National Conventions had been held there. Including in 1968, the infamous Democratic National Convention – scene of anti-war protestors, the Yippies’ “Festival of Life”, Mayor Daley’s notoriously hard-line police crackdown – conflict between the ‘flower children’ and the ‘pigs’ was broadcast on national TV. Allen Ginsberg, who was there with Jean Genet and William Burroughs, wrote about it. These chaotic and repressive events led to the trial of the so-called Chicago 8 in 1969: a high-profile scapegoating of 8 people indicted for conspiring to incite riots – including Abbie Hoffmann, Tom Haydn, Bobby Seale – all of them were eventually acquitted.

Nothing remained of this huge complex in 2003: just bare earth, some blue and white wild flowers, some footprints in the dried mud: an empty space. It had been bulldozed in the 1990s after playing host to its final events: a Mexican rodeo, and a Halloween season of the ‘world’s largest haunted house’. Now it was just a still point in the turning world: a place of erasure, disappearance, absence – although perhaps its emptiness still contained holes in time-space, after-images, echoes, if one only had the eyes to see and the ears to hear …

On the way back towards the train station to go back to the city, I stopped in a café for a bacon sandwich, a kind of small perverse thank you to all of those pigs. Outside on the wall, a sign which read: ‘the world’s best chili, beef ground daily on premises’. Inside, an old guy called Lou, wearing a rather battered Stetson, was doing animal impressions for the waitress. He would make a noise, and then there’d be a pause while she thought about what it might be. After one particularly mysterious sound from Lou, she thought long and hard, and then finally said: ‘Is it a zebra?’

*****

My materials today are also in 11 parts: ‘11 songs’. But whereas the Chicago material was about layered temporal strata within one place, and the connections their contiguity seemed to enable, today I’m proposing to hover around a particular moment in time as a mechanism to invite a fleeting gathering of other places, people, events occurring at that same time. So, a spatial drift within a precise temporal frame.

The time is early June 1957, when I was born into a nuclear family in the southern part of central Africa, with scar tissue on my lungs from intra-uterine foetal TB.

In large part the materials I’ve assembled today – including almost all of the images projected behind me - spill out of a copy of LIFE magazine that I found in Chicago in 2003; it’s the edition from the week of my birth. The lead stories concern misgivings about the safety of nuclear tests in the Nevada desert; and the joys of big game hunting in Africa. Elsewhere, and at exactly the same time, in San Francisco Shigeyoshi Murao and Laurence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books were arrested and charged with obscenity for the distribution of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl - and in Hollywood, at MGM studios, Elvis Presley was shooting Jailhouse Rock. Along with Gillian Welch, and some fragments from her album Time: The Revelator, these are my coordinates and companions on this associational drift. Oh, and my mother …

When I was a kid, I remember two cards my mother had tucked into the corner of her mirror in her bedroom: one was of a young Elvis Presley, from the late 1950s; the other was of George Best, looking like a Beatle. Her name was Brenda. Just before she died in England, I sent her a card from Australia with a Glen Baxter cartoon of a man in a pith helmet sprinting away from a towering volcanic eruption & ducking for cover from the cloud of debris. The caption read - ‘I’ll never forget the first time I met Brenda’. After she died I found it propped up in front of her mirror, between two ivory pigs.

This is for Brenda.

1. I want to sing that rock and roll

I want to sing that rock and roll,

I want to 'lectrify my soul,
'Cause everybody been making a shout
So big and loud, been drowning me out.
I want to sing that rock and roll.

I want to reach that glory land.
I want to shake my savior's hand,
And I want to sing that rock and roll.
I want to 'lectrify my soul,
'Cause everybody been making a shout
So big and loud, been drowning me out.
I want to sing that rock and roll.

I been a-traveling near and far,
But I want to lay down my old guitar,
And I want to sing that rock and roll.
I want to 'lectrify my soul,
'Cause everybody been making a shout
So big and loud, been drowning me out.
I want to sing that rock and roll.

I want to sing that rock and roll.

2. Plumbbob / Priscilla

Operation Plumbbob was a series of 24 nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site between late May and early October 1957. They included effects tests on military and civilian structures, radiation and bio-medical studies – with bombs placed on tall towers, suspended from high-altitude balloons, and the first ever underground test. One test involved the largest troop manoeuvre ever associated with US nuclear testing: 18,000 military personnel. Another – Hood, on 5 July – was at 74 kt the largest ever atmospheric test in the continental US – 5 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The flash of this thermonuclear device was seen by an airline pilot flying over Hawaii, over 800 miles away.

The radioactive fallout from the Plumbbob tests drifted widely, as far as Oregon and New England.

Priscilla, a 37 kiloton bomb exploded on June 24^th 1957,was the fifth in the Plumbbob series. Near Ground Zero at Frenchman Flat were 719 live pigs dressed in specially tailored military uniforms to test the fabrics’ abilities to protect against thermal radiation. Other pigs were placed in pens at varying distances from the epicenter behind large sheets of glass to test the effects of flying debris on ‘living targets’; they were harnessed in such a way as to force them to meet the blast face first, and their eyes were taped open. The explosion was bigger than expected …

Slightly further away were soldiers in trenches, one of whom, Marine Lieutenant Thomas Saffer, wrote a first-hand account: ‘A thunderous rumble like the sound of thousands of stampeding cattle passed directly overhead, pounding the trench line. Accompanying the roar was an intense pressure that pushed me downward. The shock wave was traveling at nearly 400 miles per hour, pushed toward us by the immense energy of the explosion. Overcome by fear, I opened my eyes. I saw that I was being showered with dust, dirt, rocks and debris so thick that I could not see 4 feet in front of me … A light many times brighter than the sun penetrated the thick dust, and I imagined that some evil force was attempting to swallow my body and soul … ”.

The blast shattered windows at the control point 14 miles away, and blew swinging doors from their hinges. The mushroom cloud rose quickly to more than 40,000 feet.

I was less than 3 weeks old.

3. A little hoarse

A few weeks earlier, on the second day of shooting Jailhouse Rock, 22-year old Elvis Presley was working on Alex Romero’s prison cell dance sequence. He threw himself into it with such abandon that he swallowed one of the temporary caps for his teeth as he was sliding down a pole. Elvis told the assistant director that he thought he could feel something rattling around in his chest. A doctor was called, but he told Elvis it was all in his imagination; he was fine. Everyone scrabbled around on the floor looking for the cap, but with no success. An hour or so later, Elvis said, ‘You know that scratch that I think I feel. It’s moved. It’s over to the left now’. ‘No, no, it’s all in your mind’. ‘It’s in my mind, is it? Listen to this’. He breathed out and you could hear a whistling sound.

It turned out that Elvis had aspirated the cap, which had lodged in his lung. The next day a surgeon removed it. ’We got it’, he said, ‘we just had to – we had to part the vocal chords and put the tool through and get in the lung. Then the damn thing broke in two, and we had to get one piece out, and then … the other’.

Elvis was a little hoarse for a couple of days.

4. Sea-journey on the highway (Howl)

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night […]

back yard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront borough of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on Benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo […]

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox […]

aaah, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time […]

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

5. Just in case

The Japanese-American photographer George Yoshitake was one of a number of civilian photographers employed by the military to document the nuclear tests in Nevada, and later in the South Pacific. In a New York Times interview earlier this year, George (now 82, and one of the few test site photographers still alive) remembers: ‘In Nevada we were maybe 5 or 6 miles away, and we could see the shock waves rolling across the valley floor, the dust being kicked up. We were prepared for the blast when it came, and we could feel its heat when it came about 10 or 15 seconds afterwards. At that time I thought it was only a job and I really didn’t give it much thought’.

'One afternoon I was at Lookout Mountain right here in Hollywood, and I got a call from a Woody Mark. He said: `George, I need you out here tomorrow for a special test'. I got there that night and he said: `Tomorrow morning you're going to go out with five other guys and you're going to be standing at ground zero'. I said, `Ground zero?' He said. `Yeah, but the bomb's gonna go off 10,000 feet above you.' I said, `Well, what kind of protective gear am I going to have?' He said, `None'.

'I remember I had a baseball hat, so I wore that just in case'.

6. Elvis Presley Blues

I was thinking that night about Elvis

Day that he died, day that he died
I was thinking that night about Elvis

Day that he died, day that he died

Just a country boy that combed his hair
He put on a shirt his mother made and he went on the air

And he shook it like a chorus girl
He shook it like a Harlem queen
He shook it like a midnight rambler, baby,
Like you never seen / Like you never seen / Never seen

I was thinking that night about Elvis

Day that he died, day that he died
I was thinking that night about Elvis

Day that he died, day that he died
How he took it all out of black and white
Grabbed his wand in the other hand and he held on tight

And he shook it like a hurricane
He shook it like to make it break
He shook it like a holy roller, baby
With his soul at stake / With his soul at stake

When he shook it and he rang like silver
He shook it and he shine like gold

He shook it and he beat that steam drill, baby
Well bless my soul, what's a-wrong with me?

I’m itching like a man on a fuzzy tree, on a fuzzy tree – fuzzy tree

7. ‘Language & themes’

The American Library Association reports that, over the last 20 years or so, the themes in books that are most likely to arouse the greatest number of complaints are – in descending order – sexual explicitness, offensive language, occultism and Satanism, promotion of homosexuality, violence, anti-family values, and subject matter offensive to religion.

Titles that recur at the head of the list of so-called ‘dangerous’ books are: Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut (promoting deviant sexual behaviour, sexually explicit); Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger (sexual references, undermines morality); John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (vulgar language), and Of Mice & Men (filth); Harry Potter by JK Rowling (anti-Christian Satanism); I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (language & themes); Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (language).

Two classics that have made recent lists are Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (lewdness), and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (teaching alternative lifestyles).

8. Open secret

The Sheahans were just one of the families unwittingly caught up in the Nevada nuclear tests. They’d been mining silver at Groom Range since the 1890s, in an area the military conceived of as ‘largely unpopulated’. In the early 1950s, they had a visit from a ‘polite’ man from the Atomic Energy Commission who told them that there would be some testing at nearby Yucca Flats. The Sheahans had just built a new hundred thousand dollar mill.

One night before dawn their house shook, the front door burst open, and several windows shattered.

Some months into the tests, some AEC men arrived to tell the Sheahans there may be some danger from radioactive fallout; they left monitoring equipment for the family to take samples after the blasts. The clouds kept coming, like rainstorms sweeping over the valley, except that dust rather than water fell. The Sheahans began to see cattle with silver-dollar-sized white spots on their backs, found dead animals with the same white spots, and noticed wildlife becoming scarcer.

On one occasion Dan Sheahan encountered a herd of wild horses that had wandered on to his land, with their eyes burnt out, empty sockets left by a blast.

A year later, the airforce began strafing the Sheahan property with planes. Then one day, during lunch, a high-explosive incendiary bomb hit the mill and blew it up.

After Dan and Martha Sheahan both died of cancer, their sons continued to try to work the mine until 1984, when the land was suddenly declared off-limits for ‘national security reasons’. 89,000 acres of Nevada public land – 144 square miles – was forcibly closed, creating a buffer zone: a zone of invisibility, insulating what is now Area 51, purportedly the site of so-called ‘Black Projects’. Formally, to this day, this area ‘doesn’t exist’ - it’s literally ’ob-scene’ / off-stage; although of course it’s an ‘open secret’, and it’s there for all to see on Google Earth …

9. Whichaway to turn

Someday my baby, when I am a man,
and others have taught me the best that they can
they'll sell me a suit, they’ll cut off my hair
And send me to work in tall buildings

Meanwhile, over at the MGM studios in Hollywood in early June 1957, Elvis was being interviewed by a journalist during a break in filming.

In the first few weeks in LA he’d met Glenn Ford, John Ford, Yul Brynner, Kim Novak, and Robert Mitchum. One evening in Elvis’s penthouse apartment at the Beverley Wilshere, Sammy Davis Jnr. had scared the hell out of Elvis with his impression of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

So it's goodbye to the sunshine, goodbye to the dew

goodbye to the flowers, and goodbye to you
I'm off to the subway, I must not be late
I’m going to work in tall buildings

At MGM Elvis had been given Clark Gable’s dressing rooms; and while he talked to the columnist, Joe Hyams, he ate his lunch. A bowl of gravy, a bowl of mashed potatoes, nine slices of well-done bacon, two pints of milk, a large glass of tomato juice, a lettuce salad, six slices of bread, and four pats of butter.

When I’m retired, my life is my own
I made all the payments, it's time to go home
and wonder what happened betwixt and between

when I went to work in tall buildings

'I don’t feel like I’m property’, Elvis told Hyams. ‘I can’t get it into my head that I’m property. People tell me you can’t do this or that, but I don’t listen to them. Ain’t nobody can tell you how to run your life. I do what I want. I can’t change, and I won’t change … If I had to drop it all I could, but I wouldn’t like it … I get lonely as hell sometimes. A lot of times I feel miserable - don’t know whichaway to turn …’

So it's goodbye to the sunshine, goodbye to the dew
goodbye to the flowers, and goodbye to you
I'm off to the subway, I must not be late
I’m going to work in tall buildings

10. Visitations

In the night, the door to my room swings open oh so slowly and in comes my mother, looking elegant and much younger than she was when she died over 20 years ago. She is pretending to be a ghost. She creeps towards me playing the game of spooking her kid. She jumps on top of me on the bed, making ridiculous theatrical ghoul noises, oohs and aahs, and we wrestle. For a moment, I'm genuinely frightened and try to bite her, my heart pumping. After a moment, we pause. My head comes up from under the covers, our eyes meet, and I realise it's a game.

'Hello love', she says, sitting up, smiling. 'I'm a ghost'.

When I wake up in the morning, the door is still open ...

A few nights later, we’re creeping alongside a wall at night, hand in hand, in silence. We don't want to be caught, and are walking quietly but freely on the grass. The wall goes on and on. We keep going where we are going. Then a small warm animal noise in the darkness in front of us: horse breath. We stop.

To one side - the direction we are heading - a group of horsemen are gathering quietly: they look like hussars in uniform, their swords are drawn, the horses' flanks catch the low light. The brief flare of a brass cuirasse, the glint of an eye. The horses paw the ground.

Then to the other side - the direction from which we've come - other horsemen walk slowly into the half-light, like actors quietly taking their place on the stage, their swords also at the ready. Gradually the numbers grow until all are present.

A silent stand-off, as the horses fidget; tiny sounds of metal, bits and blade. The calm before some sort of storm in this field of intersecting gazes.We are caught in the middle, looking one way then the other. The confrontation is nothing to do with us, but we have no choice but to be there as it unfolds around us. Witnesses.

We wait. No one makes a move.

11. Silver vision (I dream a highway back to you)

I'm an indisguisable shade of twilight
Any second now I'm gonna turn myself on
In the blue display of the cool cathode ray
I dream a highway back to you.

Hang overhead from all directions
Radiation from the porcelain light
Blind and blistered by the morning white
I dream a highway back to you.

Sunday morning at the diner
Hollywood trembles on the verge of tears
I watched the waitress for a thousand years
Saw a wheel within a wheel, heard a call within a call
I dreamed a highway back to you.

Step into the light, poor Lazarus
Don't lie alone behind the window shade
Let me see the mark death made
I dream a highway back to you.
What will sustain us through the winter?
Where did last year’s lessons go?
Walk me out into the rain and snow
A silver vision come molest my soul
I dream a highway back to you.

Goodnight. Thank you for coming.

Material drawn from Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams; Peter Guralnick’s biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis; from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl; Peter Kuran’s How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb; Bill Morgan & Nancy J Peters (eds), Howl on Trial; Upton Sinclair's The Jungle; Catherine Caufield, Multiple Exposures; Gillian Welch’s Time: The Revelator, and her version of John Hartford’s ‘In Tall Buildings’.

Images from Life magazine, June 1957, and elsewhere.

Big thanks to Sue for singing with me ...

A version of these texts was first presented as a solo performance-presentation as part of 'The Doers, The Dreamers, The Drifters' at Islington Mills, Salford, on 6 November 2010. The festival was curated by Swen Steinhauser and Laura Mansfield, and supported by ACE, Salford University and Islington Mills. For further details, see here

Later versions of these materials were also presented at an AHRC network symposium 'Representing Environmental Change', The Anatomy Theatre, King's College London (May 2011); and as part of the PSi cluster symposium 'Encounters in Synchronous Time' at Bios in Athens, Greece (November 2011)

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.