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I got to the show a bit early. They didn’t seem quite ready for me. Neither was I quite ready for them. What was going to happen? Most likely not very much. I didn’t know. Live music often took the edge off my depression. Often but not always. Or so I told myself. Maybe that is only the way it used to work. Did certain things really used to work? Lately I’ve been describing my mental state as some sort of nervous breakdown. Calling it a nervous breakdown sounds so dramatic, but I’m not quite sure what else to call it. Everything needs a name in order to exist. What else might I call it? The end of something and the start of something else, something unknown. The door is now open but I’m sitting just outside of it writing this. Sitting just on the other side of an open door feels like a kind of hope. That there is some opening and I will eventually find a way to go through it. When you’re going through hell, keep going. A nervous breakdown divided into four stages, like the four seasons, like four curses. The other day, when asked, I said I didn’t keep a diary. But I suppose these poems are a bit like a diary. A bit like therapy (that doesn’t work.) When I publish them (online) it is not because I think they are good. Automatic writing. A search for some kind of opening. Thinking aloud. The internet is filled with this stuff. As is my notebook. I realize that the door is still not open. The set up must be taking longer than previously planned. My experience is that everything takes considerably longer than planned. What does music do to me that nothing else quite seems to do. What do artists do when they hit a wall the way it seems I’ve currently hit a wall. On the other side of the door they’re still trying to figure out the soundcheck. This is only what I assume. My fear is a door will open and yet I will not know it’s open, and therefore not know how to go through. As if my nervous breakdown had a way out that might be either open or closed. If I had a bad cold I might stay home. But having a nervous breakdown I continue to go to work, as if work were both the cause and the solution. Can something really be both a cause and a solution? I wouldn’t publish these thoughts in a book or magazine, but it seems I have no problem putting them online, where they can easily be erased. Just one little click on the garbage can icon. And I haven’t even touched upon politics yet. I often think my despair has absolutely nothing to do with politics, even though politics gives much reason for despair. If I had an idea, we probably wouldn’t be able to do it for another four or five years, at which point I probably wouldn’t want to do it anymore. So there is no reason to have an idea now. But when is the right moment to have an idea? There never seems to be a specific moment set aside for just that task.
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October 31, 2022
October 26, 2022
To make a compromise, but the right compromise...
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To make a compromise, but the right compromise, the compromise that pays off. To make a compromise like you’re making a bet. A strategic gamble, a calculated chance. To make a compromise that doesn’t turn out well. To believe, at the time, that you are being strategic, only to realize much later just how misguided the strategy actually was. To know that your compromise is only a guess. That your guess might, in the end, turn out to be completely wrong. But what if it had in fact paid off? It being the right or wrong compromise might only be a matter of luck. Or, then again, instead, to refuse all compromise.
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To make a compromise, but the right compromise, the compromise that pays off. To make a compromise like you’re making a bet. A strategic gamble, a calculated chance. To make a compromise that doesn’t turn out well. To believe, at the time, that you are being strategic, only to realize much later just how misguided the strategy actually was. To know that your compromise is only a guess. That your guess might, in the end, turn out to be completely wrong. But what if it had in fact paid off? It being the right or wrong compromise might only be a matter of luck. Or, then again, instead, to refuse all compromise.
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October 21, 2022
A text alongside Senescent Vivarium by Kyath Battie
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I wrote a text alongside Senescent Vivarium by Kyath Battie for VISIONS (and the film can also be viewed online for one month). You can read and watch it here: https://visionsmtl.com/2022/kyath-battie-2/
"Do we see what we know or see where the image is most tender."
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I wrote a text alongside Senescent Vivarium by Kyath Battie for VISIONS (and the film can also be viewed online for one month). You can read and watch it here: https://visionsmtl.com/2022/kyath-battie-2/
"Do we see what we know or see where the image is most tender."
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October 16, 2022
Bookshelves
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I guess reading and writing are the two activities that most take my mind off how miserable I am. Therefore I read and write a lot. But for some reason it doesn’t seem to be working as well as it used to. Which I find rather irritating. What is this slowly collapsing building we call the now? Not so slowly collapsing. A sudden awareness that I was about to make a considerable strategic error. A gradual awareness. Reading and writing are not the opposite of action but neither are they action. The question that continuously burns through my mind: what is going to happen? A space is opened by the lessening effectiveness of reading and writing to balance out my mood. But I cannot think of anything with which to fill this space. Or at least not anything I want to do. What do I want to do? What is going to happen? This is such a specific time in human history, in the history of all plant and animal species, in the history of all reading and writing. When I have nothing I want to read I often experience a great anxiety. Similar, but not quite equal, to the anxiety I feel now that I am finally running out of bookshelves. All the bookshelves are full. A feeling of ending as meaningless as my life.
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I guess reading and writing are the two activities that most take my mind off how miserable I am. Therefore I read and write a lot. But for some reason it doesn’t seem to be working as well as it used to. Which I find rather irritating. What is this slowly collapsing building we call the now? Not so slowly collapsing. A sudden awareness that I was about to make a considerable strategic error. A gradual awareness. Reading and writing are not the opposite of action but neither are they action. The question that continuously burns through my mind: what is going to happen? A space is opened by the lessening effectiveness of reading and writing to balance out my mood. But I cannot think of anything with which to fill this space. Or at least not anything I want to do. What do I want to do? What is going to happen? This is such a specific time in human history, in the history of all plant and animal species, in the history of all reading and writing. When I have nothing I want to read I often experience a great anxiety. Similar, but not quite equal, to the anxiety I feel now that I am finally running out of bookshelves. All the bookshelves are full. A feeling of ending as meaningless as my life.
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October 2, 2022
a rather specific yet vague and intense fantasy
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I was trying to imagine what kind of performance work I might make if everything in and around the collaborative performance work I currently make were to completely collapse. If I were to no longer be part of a company, no longer have ongoing collaborators, if I was no longer invited to participate in the international cultural circuit. Which always leads me toward a rather specific yet vague and intense fantasy: that I could then suddenly do all of the things that – for whatever reason – I don’t feel I’m currently able to do. And I imagine something almost completely underground. Almost completely invisible and illegible. No publicity. No profile. Somebody tells you that someone they don’t really know heard there might be something happening tonight. And they give you an address. It sounds intriguing, and you have nothing better to do, so you decide to give it a try. When you get there it’s dark, hardly any streetlights, but you sense something and hear faint sounds at the end of a long alleyway. The building itself is hard to decipher, somewhere between a large shack and a four car garage. Really rough around the edges. Not exactly dirty but definitely not clear. When you find your way inside there are some people doing things. It’s difficult to entirely know who is a performer and who is simply an audience member like you. Or if the performance has even started yet. You don’t recognize any of the artists and have absolutely no idea who the work is by, if it’s by anyone. I don’t even really have any idea what would happen or what the performance would be like. Things would happen all around you and you would find yourself wondering what it was all about. But the situation would be so strange, so unlike what you were used to when you go to see a show at a theatre or a gallery. And for some reason you would always remember it even though you would never really figure out just exactly what it was. (Of course I have absolutely no idea how I would pay for any of this.)
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I was trying to imagine what kind of performance work I might make if everything in and around the collaborative performance work I currently make were to completely collapse. If I were to no longer be part of a company, no longer have ongoing collaborators, if I was no longer invited to participate in the international cultural circuit. Which always leads me toward a rather specific yet vague and intense fantasy: that I could then suddenly do all of the things that – for whatever reason – I don’t feel I’m currently able to do. And I imagine something almost completely underground. Almost completely invisible and illegible. No publicity. No profile. Somebody tells you that someone they don’t really know heard there might be something happening tonight. And they give you an address. It sounds intriguing, and you have nothing better to do, so you decide to give it a try. When you get there it’s dark, hardly any streetlights, but you sense something and hear faint sounds at the end of a long alleyway. The building itself is hard to decipher, somewhere between a large shack and a four car garage. Really rough around the edges. Not exactly dirty but definitely not clear. When you find your way inside there are some people doing things. It’s difficult to entirely know who is a performer and who is simply an audience member like you. Or if the performance has even started yet. You don’t recognize any of the artists and have absolutely no idea who the work is by, if it’s by anyone. I don’t even really have any idea what would happen or what the performance would be like. Things would happen all around you and you would find yourself wondering what it was all about. But the situation would be so strange, so unlike what you were used to when you go to see a show at a theatre or a gallery. And for some reason you would always remember it even though you would never really figure out just exactly what it was. (Of course I have absolutely no idea how I would pay for any of this.)
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