BERNEVAL

It is the title of an opera by Robert Wilson that resounds in my mind as I lay down here a quotation from Aaron Shurin’s “Generation” piece which concludes Unbound: A Book of AIDS. The title: the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down. The quotation:

[B]ut the radical size of these toppled beings was commanding. You never see them horizontally where their enormity can be measured human-scale. They were at once desperately, environmentally, evolutionarily sad, like beached whales, and gawkingly thrilling. A hundred years lost, but the integrity with which their falling rewrote the landscape drew me to their monumental sides again and again to gape.

After a storm, even the devastation has a beauty.

And so for day 820
12.03.2009

What arrested my attention was how the growing distance between gesture and its spoken description leads to a performable piece. Let’s let Bill T. Jones explain as he has with Peggy Gillespie in Last Night on Earth.

I began to make solo works drawing upon my mother’s and father’s penchant for narration […] My mother’s praying was the first theater I ever saw […] In the first part of the dance, I repeated an improvised gesture until it was set — mastered. then I began to describe my movements as I performed them. Through repetition, the gesture and its spoken description slowly changed. I relished these changes — exaggerated them, in fact, until the movement and its description were related by only the freest association. While performing this evolutionary piece, I found that I entered a trancelike state [… described by critic Arlene Croce as a tizzy …] This “tizzy” is something I have claimed as an inheritance. Perhaps in her experience it did not seem genuine, or perhaps it seemed too genuine — embarrassing, even — but for me it is an integral part of the strategy that allows me to make art.

In the forward to the book, Bill T. Jones thanks Peggy Gillespie for “her masterful blend of focussed passion and tactful prodding”. It is a description that is also suited to his style.

And so for day 816
08.03.2009

After some two hundred pages, the reader who has read the introduction is rewarded by the anticipated description of destruction by fire. Bonus: the protagonist sets aside the implements of a would-be suicide and out of sight of the burning structure lights a fire of a different sort.

Then I noticed the pack of cigarettes in my other pocket. I took one out and started smoking. I felt like a man who settles down for a smoke after finishing a job of work. I wanted to live.

Yukio Mishima. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Translated by Ivan Morris.

And so for day 815
07.03.2009

This is a bit more than nostalgia for a past technology.

My dad had listened to vinyl long after the invention (and intervention, if you asked him) of CDs. He told me once that it all came down to sound quality, “the texture of the sound” is the phrase he used, though I have no idea what that really means. He liked the objects themselves liked to hold a record in his hand, place it onto the turntable, position the needle into the groove. He used to lie on the couch in the living room with his headphones on, eyes closed, hands clasped on his chest, listening. He sometimes bought two copies of a single album, one to play, the other to store, to keep in its finest form.

From Michael Murphy A Description of the Blazing World this small excerpt encapsulates in a tiny space the theme of duplication that is the motor of this novel’s exposition. And it is no coincidence that the duplication is connected to the figure of the father.

And so for day 814
06.03.2009

In revisiting her Earthsea world, Ursula K. LeGuin invites the reader to ponder how notions such as equality hang on the vision one has of the afterlife. This passage for me is peculiarly compelling with its echoes of Lucretius.

“I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

From the novel, The Other Wind. This in contrast to a land of the dead where the shades roam without engaging encounters, without intercourse and exchange. A good part of this later novel is about releasing the dead — not only an intriguing premise but also a fascinating story.

And so for day 813
05.03.2009