Vindauga

[UPDATE: Joseph's writing from the improv event can be found below. ]

Last night I had the pleasure of participating in/documenting an improvisational event at Bellhaven College. It took place in the dance studio of the new performing and visual arts building. Click on the image above to view the album with all the photos.

New

Arrange, arrange, arrange for the new, the glorious is and never has been. Is it really true that these lines have never been drawn before? Is it really true that what we’re doing here tonight is … new? Something is being born, yes, but new? A long time ago there was a wise man, considered by some to be the wisest mortal man, who said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Later the tinkering scientists said, “Nothing is either created or destroyed; things just change form.” A law of Thermodynamics, discovered, not new, the idea as old as wisdom. So where does that leave us, all of us? What are we doing if not something new? We have never been here together before, each one of us sending out these extensions of ourselves like crystalline forms in the same snowflake that has never and will never be matched on earth again? Is not our gently melting snowflake new? Are not the church bells tolling for another dead new? Today, at least, they must be … new. How can the creative mind survive a world where newness is impossible. Paint a picture, dance, sing, and tumble through a living you never could have imagined. Live anew, love anew, suffer anew, just don’t tell the prophets and scientists; disregard the endless cycles; feel as if your dying has never been done, and let the saints cheer for your rotting creations.

Used

“Holy Lord, look at this, look at that, look at what we’re doing. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s new!” we say. The artists, the writers, the musicians of the world, dancers and singers and physicists and architects, together we chant, it’s new, It’s New, IT’S NEW…. Is it? How can we say such a thing when even every molecule has come and gone and been in and out of the Nostrils of the Ages more times than number can comprehend? How can we even imagine newness when every moment is used before it passes? To create is then a farce. To imagine just a dying man’s wish list. Sad, the dying and shameless reuse of the dead. Sad, right, sad? … Maybe not. The scientists said the stuff just changes form; they said that from the initial BANG of Creation, from that one truly new moment, the stuff of everything was created, everything was born. Oh how far we’ve come from that shining newness, the infant universe, and who knew we would try so hard so far into the future to capture something of those times when God and Creation danced together like innocent children. Who knew we of stardust and recycled light would feel so lovingly entwined with something we’ve never known. Or have we never known it? Neither created or destroyed, just … changes … form. Where are we getting this stuff that feels so new, these beats and images and movements that our bodies are so sure of having never been known before? Where if not from that first moment of shining newness? We still know it, used as it might be, we still feel it in us like the universe still feels the ambient heat of Creation.

Broken

Trying to get up there was a pain in his thigh, up by his groin, but he stood anyway only to watch the floor jump back to him. He tries again, the same pain, the same jumping floor and allusive atmosphere. He touches his thigh, the pain so old he no longer even calls it pain. It is life, he says; he calls it life and somehow he manages to believe that this is true, and in so doing he stops the crying, stops the hair pulling, stops the gratuitous murdering of any insect that passes his floor mashed face, and manages to compose himself as a mature adult, like he was taught by his parents, by his mother and father on the dirt floor of a barn, all stifling the wailing hatred of their burning thighs.

Put Back Together

I nudge the guy next to me to find no one there. I want someone to see what I see, but I’m the only one coming from my perspective. What I see is a hundred and forty-four thousand sitting in darkness, a hundred and forty-four thousand barely alive in the half-light. The silent suffering is so thick I can feel it against my skin, where inside my own suffering loathes the thin fleshy veil that contains it. Again I try to elbow someone next to me, but no one is there. I hope the sun comes up tomorrow. I hope the multitude will see The Day, will see what is happening in their very own laps. And with this inclination, hope, one of them out there stands and steps toward another. How did he know? They begin crying on each other. I hope this happens again, I think, and it does, and again and again until the hundred and forty-four thousand are now one, one crying, feeling, loving mass. There is still very little light, but they are feeling their way to each other, skin to skin, hands dripping with tears that run down forearms and collect on chests, where before all things were dry, all eyes empty. Again I try to nudge someone, but it is only me.