A History of this Moment

This is a A kind of history of this moment  and how our comfort offends  Even us   I’ll start in the middle We are offended by empty rooms and There are just a few responses to an empty room, the best one is to begin, to step in again and  realize - again - that  nothing is as   satisfying as bartering with space for  a taxed moment,  or the  touch of movement  or being mis-lead-by the  imperfect beauty of  bodies in the abusive embrace of a too honest mirror or the thrill of thighs  in  sweats so worn  so strained pass the point of return  so wasted on their last legs and struggling to survive dancers in  the chase of immediately created histories, that you feel for them And nothing so satisfies as  Histories so fragile,  so convulsively built, torn, rebuilt and living next to the heart beats that play out futures,  danced by others in front of us in this moment and lived in the next ( this time again by us) before  more repeated deaths expressed in equivalent spurts of time run out in a few bass beats  or a look from, or feel of …   time to begin to understand  how empty rooms send us into a tizzy and we lose all sense of propriety .    the uniqueness of this beast is proven by the sensations it feeds. We move and are moved by the  pull of  nerves triggered by the absolute allure of  ass, breasts,  catching time, drowning weight, elevating  moments, forcing perfection, going again, heaving bodies insisting on everything at once, joy at the top, kneading tension, a lasting motion’s absence , nothing else mattering, overdoing it, petite excitements, qualified anarchy, undeserved praise, stopping, toppling , veering, exuberance, teeth, hair, feet, chin, back , aesthetics engorged by motion, the complicated relationship to space that changes size and shape each time someone in the room prefers motion to stillness,  feeling artists enter without being seen, twinned senses that devour the territory of the other, the language of  size that acts as symbol , how the challenge of the space never ends,  our comfort offends,  the smell of the room, glanced signals and the security of  stepping up onto that  hard wood  floor with nodded permission, negotiating where and how to stand, sit or move when you’re are not dancing , the attempts to live up to the legacies of those that warmed the room and warming it for those that enter next , shared commiserating glances with friends unable today to do what was done yesterday,  stepping off a sprung floor, leaving, and  being moved by a lift after having elevated yourself for a hour and half, walking  into a strange fresh air, walking into a empty world and imagining you can do it out there as well:   It starts there.   On the floor:   we take it in, and fall for every part of its promise, we intuitively understand the possibility offered of spread toes,  as slit skin delivers accurate understandings of the discipline’s maiden costs  of exploring those well made sensuous bottoms patterned for bellies,  backs, and thighs, the variously oiled and tacky sticky surfaces that invite coupling, impossibly beguiling planes of sand, or a mottled grey sky or colored sackcloth,  or  the press of wood in a single plane stacked one next to the other like side by side overlapped staggered alters, each board a near infinitely retreating temple of parchment  grain by grain burnished with flesh and blood, ceded over time and measured in lives.  Too much?  Yeah, some times we have to reign it in. Let me take it down a notch. I’ll try again Let’s take time.  Gone as soon as it  arrives  and impossible to hold  but we have control of it too. We can stop it, snatch little bits, show it, we bend and drop, pick, ignore, and talk to it, learn from it as we wallow in it. We marry ourselves to it. The more we help it find it self the more spent on it  the stingier it gets, it is not limited but it is impatient. It will move and we will look back on it and the special bonds we shared with it with a particular sense of loss. Skin, flesh and blood are our  ledgers;  Bruises, and strains  account for our debt and solvency, not as simple as  the sweat rolling down our back or the opening and closing  of the books of effort, responsiveness,  rule dropping,  the time spent,  or the acknowledgement of  another debt. This relationship  is  a low guttural impulse too couple through  a kind of motion only bodies create,  felt like a grunt;  in this world refinement  and impulse are used to get closer to the raw.   Impulse’s ability to command to nurture refinement, to illustrate, to communicate,  to fire aspiration, fuel  awareness and hone your thoughts is crucial. Refinement is a kennel holding a barking dog. Dance is felt as well as seen and done, without impulse and refinement  what the music, theatrics, shock, bring is muted by a vague  understanding of what was missing.  We are citizens of these territories   That’s  the start.  Artists  lives aren’t  mysterious; they are closed cloistered  ritual, offerings of energy, and they are acts of imagination, totems in lands of time, sensation and more. We are in service, on a foot path in the midst of  proselytizing pilgrimages to those willing to listen with a look.  We are The cryers from one age to another that burden themselves with worthwhile prophecies the have the effect of mother wit wasted on the newly grown.  Over time, with each creative utterance more is gained. Each bone lengthening time sapping bit of growth goes  unnoticed until second nature tales over and we use all we have on what comes next. At your new height you reach for  another rung.   And there are no secrets .Only retelling and effort. We are citizens of these territories And so because of this there are daily betrayals of the cloister to others, to those not in the group , to the cafeteria catholics, too non believers: to everyday  life.  That is as it should be  The last thing that should be an obvious part of your art is you.  Lie  the  work is there to teach us about ourselves; it is not. The truth is that through the work we tell what we already know of the world and ourselves. The work is only itself.  Artists are and are not their work as we go through this we find Both are true. But the  containers we pour from( our lives) are fragile and those we pour into (you and this moment) unforgiving. I will try to remember that part.   we cross The bridges of humanity that allow the swapping of civilizing  spit. Those bridges are able to hold and bear anything not everything.   They don’t  fail. They just can’t carry everything sometimes that includes  the  “point”.  ======**************** Vamp I’ll start there.   And  I hope Maybe you can relate.  To this This,  this back and forth, this sharing of  Then now Of  These Wonderings/Ramblings/Metaphoric instructions/Hidden truths/ Of   This  emotional bartering  Of these alternating exchanges, so that these things may pass  on As this exchange slips from one remembrance  to another, And is treated  As if it and  I could ,  slip  And  Imagine our  lives this  and  My own  squabbling,  And remember them as if they we’re as  vicious as ideas,  With  Every-one ended by the birth of another, but ideas,  like lives  are stubborn  some refuse to leave  after death  Imagine That  Abandoned lives  left, like ideas  To begin again I’ll start there.   or  I’ll pass them on to you,  leave them with you. And  If possible ,  I  might have a chance to tend to or spend an un-harassed moment in this life,  to harvest one Un-harassed moment  to see  how  a single tended thought  might grow.  But only after… After the ideas have put mileage on like weight, clogged arteries, gotten ready for death, told us  what’s  acceptable; at  the end of this life,  whispered in the back of our minds they are still here, that they want to be a part of life since  through their decline they’ve been such friends with it.  Some ideas drink too much, live to a ripe old age,  love the right women, fail their sons, love their mothers,  but most of all love themselves and so deserve more than just being gone.   With them we engage in a kind of emotional bartering . We patch, remember, look over, reaffirm a love fogged by exasperation.  I’ll start there.   It’s time, an idea will say after having asked to visit repeatedly.  And I say  How is it that I can be both frantic and frozen? Well, I  am  a walking, branching contradiction.  You are there spurring and arresting; I want to do this on my own but need your help . I need to involve you,  as something more than just an observer or  a sounding board) but I resent you for that because you have already been mouthing off and how can listen to my voice with your’s uninvited in head.  Now as for you  witness and participant  And yes  you are both,  The  witness part is easy your here and you admit to that by listening, watching, judging even while I am in your head. You who have called me two half men under your breath, you who told me I always seen with a book because I think that’s how one carries knowledge, you who thought to letter me go from a job with only a dismissal and even though I had a contract The participant part may be a bit harder because you may not want to admit that you have for the moment purchased my voice and body  and so have agreed to go through this  act with  a faux candor.   you may have been able to side step all this  by not coming this far or you may choose to  embrace the self evident contradiction and say my voice is yours  but it is too late now to stop.  We are bartering.  My freedom for the seat you take when you flounce in.   So I’ll ask that  you keep track of what emerges as we engage  in this back and forth, with “possibility” that masquerades  as idea and ask that you consider this exertion is as much about what’s held as what escapes, as much about what advances as what retreats, as much about what we share as what I treasure and keep. This attempt at openness is not likely to result in a lasting peace, but if I  come to understand what ground I’m on, slackened hostilities will be enough, for now.  Tonight, finally those numb-nut warriors will pop and drop seed.   At least here in my mind  Because  I need them too, because I need to uncover what is behind the trade, the devalued currency of those hard worked  traitorous failures to fidelity ,  I need to define the single mindedness that says  I am,  I know, and  I  think this and now   moved on. this way of stilling my mind is not perfect, but it will do; and it seems to me if I  come up with enough ways to  recognize the gentrified  portions of that volume, (my mind)  and the battered miscreants strewn about it ( my ideas, thoughts, proclivities, inclinations, insights that take part in the cranial brawls that separates  them from your intrusions  I might have peace. At least that is the idea.  I’ll start in the middle  At  forks in the road,  at those forks there are bells that ring in the key of an absence that demands action on  intertwined  paths of yearning and need and necessity.  What we learn at each stroke is decipherable by experience only.  So We take all the roads.  In fact that must be how I wound up here on this page in front of you because  this mania needs to be managed publicly,  in front of as many people as I can get to uncover my mind’s eye. This,  for me, is  radical and though it is unlikely to result in a lasting mindful peace it may pay off in slackened hostilities.  That will be enough for now and since I’ve made you a part of this at least I will have company.  Misery loves that.    And it is another kind of start for me. One where I get you to admit you exist, and one where in you don’t have all the retorts ready One where you are not automatically are at odds with me,  One where you are in my service And  one where I admit I still have a least a few questions that have not been poisoned,  one where I get you to admit that you are not just a fellow citizen but  a fellow pocher  of my mind who when locked in is able come to some sort of armistice.   The violence might not stop but let’s  begin to set terms for the cessation.  How?  Let’s deal with the thuggish dispossessed. As if we were couples or partners  With  the understanding that there are more things at concern here than the ground and pound blood sport of conceptual alignment with its demand for clarity, more than my love of a free thought attempt at an articulated unchained fidelity tied to those malcontents that are trying so desperately to hack at my root experiences, my knot in the wood contentions as turf wars are hard enough to arrest, let alone record, without regression to chickenshit academies so with that in mind I will attempt to reframe                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 my mind’s experience as the hard worked traitorous loss of something unrecoverable,  not perfect  but the frame will do for now ; and it seems to me if I  come up with enough ridiculous conditions we’ll more easily recognize the conquered gentrified  portions of that volume.  At least that is the idea.  So there’s the Judas Hole-  or my mind and the question What remains: on being denied the path to a thought lain .  One moment you are in a struggle to complete a thought, the next you’ve suduced one, a substantial, beautiful, unscalable barely visible monument.