a thick and wide ocean made of shadows, with the thrum of rhythmic wave rolling breathlessly through; a hundred pairs of feet levitating just an inch from the ground, dangling and disjointed just one hinge from the reality known before exposure to these corners of it, and it transforms around them; or being there as the one voice shakes you to the edges, the pace and force that propels it, the illuminated vision of this performance: variation in movement and the strange idea you are not just witnessing but exhuming something that this is like nothing you’ve known before. The elements of this alchemy all come from their hiding places and come together, meeting, then an eruption of this thing- bewildering, beguiling, rampant, unstoppable, beautiful.
behind the glare of stage lights there isn't an ocean made of darkness but of people and their collective motion, their collected breath, and in the shadow, like celestial bodies clearly glowing in a midwinter night sky, in every eye gazing up at the stage, ebullient and star-cross;d, there glimmers scintilla.
The song // i'm just afraid of the things I love the most // do you think you miss the things you love, or love the things you miss? for I fear missing the person i love, i fear i’m missing out on moments, i fear the moments i might miss.i don't fear the things i love, but i fear losing them, if they are not already gone missing. i fear this loss so much that it can feel more integral than anticipatory, and when you love and admire a thing or a person or a movement or an idea, it's threatening in its capacity to make you weak. it threatens you in its transience, your lack of control over it alongside your dependence on it. If something has the power to lead you to making sacrifices, to give away what is purely your own, to give time and thought and perpetual dreaming; if it can turn your knees weak, raise goosebumps on your skin; if it thrills you just to rest your cheek upon it, and the pain of its absence is almost as potent as the thrill. yes, I'm afraid of hearing Unchained Melody on the radio somewhere public because I'd surely cry. So it's not a fear of the love object itself, but the power it has to drain the love from you, take up so much of your thought power, or disappoint you, or disappear.
The song // it's hard to get some rest when the kitchen feels like it's sinking // walls have little work to do when windows and doors are open for they protect us from nothing but the hallway. i wonder if we are being fossilised into some stillness, drowning as the kitchen and whole courtyard and all the rooms are sinking too, melting as though left out in the sun but really growing colder by the snowfall that washes over us. the sky opened with a flurry of snowflakes, and dropped so much water on our roof and around it that in not long we will be submerged. i wonder again if we are now breathlessly caught in time, suspended in a snow globe. airless and still, we stay together- we are just a hum at the bottom of an ocean. I can still dream but thoughts can’t reach too far. i can dream of Ocean bed orchestra, singing swan ghost songs
And the words to the song // the river isn’t mine, it moves on just like // time is an enemy of mine, never working with me or giving itself to me, always racing ahead or dragging out or slipping away as if through fingers or clinging as if it’s cat hair. I take time to have a cigarette in the nearby park and watch the graceful swans circling and guiding their signets, always ducking and always un-swanlike and fluffy brown. Ugly duckling turning into a swan. Did you ever hear about the ugly duckling who grew up and was a ducking then too? I didn’t think so.
The song // In the summer, in your psycho weather // he thought it might have something to do with the weather, like i was a pathetic fallacy, or maybe seasonally affected, and then he went as far as ruminating on whether the stars had any part to play in this, and certainly the moon when it was full if nothing else. This was all, of course, when he found me exciting, and something about me enticed him. I think he liked putting his mind up against mine. I know he liked me because I was different, and he seemed different from most, but he was trying very hard to be. That summer I lost my Aunt Ellen who had practically raised me after my mother died having her pacemaker replacement operation, which happened when I was seven, and my father, Aunt Ellen’s brother, wanted to disappear to the other side of the world and forget his ties to where I was. Most people can only dream about that, whereas he actually did disappear without a goodbye, although he left a letter, an eviction notice, and a spare key to Aunt Ellen’s. In June, aged 76, Aunt Ellen’s cancer got into her brain and then it was everywhere and it killed her. The passing wasn’t poignant or worthy of pathos or even worth writing about, but purely for the purpose of explaining the otherworldly events that followed, I had to tell its story. I started taking prescription pills and a mixture of other drug compounds, not caring what was in them, to help me sleep. I said it was insomnia but it was just fear, being scared of what was hiding in the dark that I had yet to even conceive of yet. To put it plainly, a world without Aunt Ellen was a world plunged into perpetual night and there was no one there to guide me. So I gave up and did all I could to escape, kicked every self-destructive box almost systematically, and nothing worked. That summer I lost my mind to the gentle hum of bees, the smell of marijuana smoke that seemed into my carpet; to the clothes I sweated into as I oscillated through my illusory environment, walking the steps that made a figure eight and went on and on and ; to the buzzing air conditioner in my friend’s house and the sounds of kids screaming and running and splashing at the Lido ; I lost my mind to the ghost of Aunt Ellen. I became mesmerised by unremarkable things such as a rolling pin or by quite abstract concepts, like a picture of a girl holding a picture of a girl holding a picture and a girl holding a picture…to the nth power. Infinity. But also banality. I went through irrelevant job vacancies in the local paper and imagined myself in every job. I spent so much time imagining that I don’t remember breaking his heart. I would occasionally find myself in places quite far from home with no recollection but also no inquisitiveness about what the time was or how I got there and that it could be dangerous. I got a job at McDonalds but found myself by the patty grill tearing my palm open like a letter with the sharpest knife they must have had. They fired me then declared me dangerous, so I finished off the summer in a mental health ward. It was monsoon season. He seemed to find this very fitting. What he couldn’t fit were meanings to what I was doing. It made him feel lacking in sense because he tried to translate my nonsense into something that made some semblance of sense. While the rain dropped from the sky in tidal waves, I drew pictures of what I saw whenever I had a migraine. Distortions, colours, rearrangements, a glowing slash that sucked my field of vision right into it. I had terrible nightmares. He’d always enjoyed interpreting my dreams but after two visits to the ward I was told by a tactless acquaintance on messenger that he was going round calling me a psycho. I laughed and then cried, and then I just went on laughing until I was hysterical enough to warrant nurse attention, and I didn’t mind that because they gave me good pills that felt like blankets wrapping you up and floating you down a stream of silken, fluffy clouds and cushions. Falling asleep with a smile my face. I’m better now and out of hospital but I’m thankful. No one ever knows how they’re going to manage such grief until they are faced with it, and making assumptions about how you are likely to act is redundant because a part of your mind that is to you unfamiliar but that knows you inside out, every unconscious thought or fear or worry or excitement that didn’t make it above the level of your awareness; that part of your mind can escape you, or take control of you, or care for you if you are lucky. Because one certainty is that the grief will make you primitive and incapable of proper conscious thought. Primal shrieks in the endless wilderness of night. Visceral pain and anger but nothing to blame. Confusion and tossed about in your own overgrown nightmares or slowly developing rituals or hardening heart or silencing of voice. The last time I saw him, anyway, was a summer later. I was in a bookshop with ceiling fans looking at books on linguistics and he happened to be searching for some historical biography. The weather was perfectly sunny and almost dusty in its dryness, the light formed a crust on your warm skin, pooled into mirages on the sizzling roads, and poured in almost immediately after you’d declared it night-time. I was holding a fan I’d brought back from a holiday to Venice with Aunt Ellen and my cousins. It’s gentle flutter as I batted it kept my face feeling cool and avoided the sensation of being something stagnant while the sun rotted me away. We didn’t speak, but I did pick up the book American Psycho and almost flirtatiously placed it on the shelf he was looking at, face forward, peering at him with effete yes over the frills of my fan. I did the flourish and I left, feeling a summer younger //
The song // and we’re all just children // we are, we are small, we are not sensible. There are bankers and executive accountants but they’re not us. There are professionals wearing our shoes and being serious. We pose as them sometimes, but other times we overfeed the fish, or tangle our shoelaces,trip over, get grazes, pick the scabs, feel so hungry we hate the world for a moment or two until we get some food, have recurring dreams about baddies surrounding you or dark shadows looming over you, and doodle our names on our papers and folders, doodle everything. We are all just children acting like adults but it’s okay, we don’t have to do this anymore. We can drop the act and start doodling, start adventures, weave imaginary paths into real life ones because we know that more is possible than an adult would know. We can all step out of the roles we were playing and act like children instead, then it won’t be acting. I’ve checked- no one is watching!
