Thursday, April 23, 2015

From the Archives: Fugue

I'm spending some time in my parents home going through old files as I transition from my life in NYC to my upcoming life in Melbourne.  I found this text used in two performances (Cut Your Losses presented at 12 Min Max at On the Boards Dec 2011 and Fugue* presented at Henry Art Gallery in overlay with the Carolee Schneeman Retrospective Nov 2011).
This was written right before I left Seattle. I was clearly in a heavy head space. My head is clearer now but my obsessions with identity, mirror an the intangible quality of home we find in ourselves and others- still holds.
What an interesting time to revisit this as I once again am on the precipice of new life, adrift in a liminal space, seeking mirrors with which to build a home.

 *(Fugue in this instance is a reference to Fugue State- "It is a rare psychiatric disorder characterized by reversible amnesia for personal identity, including the memories, personality , and other identifying characteristics of individuality. The state is usually short-lived (ranging from hours to days), but can last months or longer. Dissociative fugue usually involves unplanned travel or wandering, and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity" -from wikipedia


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Liminal

place of transition

between identities,

 stranger in new land, between selves,  without a home,  hypnotherapy, anaesthesia, dream states, sleepwalking, insomnia,  drowsiness, intoxication, dissociation, meditation, medication,  hanged man, step off a cliff



  usually change is so gradual we don’t notice it until long after it has taken place but sometimes the carpet is yanked from underneath you and you you are slapped with the awareness that you will never be the you that you were  before and the frightening emptiness that there is not yet a new formed you to take it’s place.

you are lost luggage.  no where to land, no home, not   even inside yourself. 

A tame bird set to the sky to circle not knowing where or how to land.

Could this circling ever be called freedom?  This rootless aimless circling, not freedom and all the hope it holds.  But a limbo,  a period of death.  


What if it never ends.  What if the bird never finds a new home, what if you never find a new home within yourself.  What if you live the rest of your life a stranger amongst yourself.  Never being able to settle into your skin again and say ‘now, this, this is me.’  Always looking into the eyes of a foreign body. How long can a human live without the house of identity it builds around itself?

  
 sure it can dress itself up,   wearing masks of selves .  the professional self, the fun self, 

I put on the clothes that I see the others around me put on, but what if it  never leads to a truth?  A realization of a newly developed self. 

What if it forever remains the act,  the motions of dressing and smiling and behaving the motions of brushing and cleaning and working the motions of laughter

 always with a detached eye asking who is this?  This can not be you?  Where are you?  Who are you?  Are you gone forever?  Will the rebirth ever come?  


Is spring dead?  New shoots forever just below the soil’s skin, buds forever on the verge of bursting open? 

Will we ever recognize ourselves as real and vital and solid and breathing again?  Will we ever be a necessity.  will we ever feel a place of sanctuary belonging at home within ourselves?


 Does it depend on the world?  The mirror?  Can it be put right by the reflection of someone who sees it correctly.  Did it fall apart because the environment was wrong.  The “other”  double quotation marks capital O other that reflected back at you reflected a picture so out of synch with what you’d had in your head that there is no reconciling the two. 

The cognitive dissonance imploded your already slightly fractured ego.  Leaving nothing no trace of self.  No sense of solidity. 

Could it all be fixed with the right mirror.  The right town? the right community?  A single person to see what really is there and give it back to you in the mirror of comraderie. A mirror showing that indeed it is you alive and breathing in a recognizable body, a recognizable costume, in a geographic location. 

A you with purpose place and future.  a you with a present. no longer a collage of so many broken and failed pasts but “YOU”  Capitol  y. o. u. 

here in this place standing  now.  but still moving towards a future, a future that can hold all of you every last shard of self and be big enough and strong enough and tacky enough to keep it all together and beautiful enough to give it a sense of freedom a place to fly to and fly away from.  Because freedom has an anchor a home. 

Freedom is the choice to have a home or to leave that home.  Choice requires hope. Hope doesn’t exist with out desire. desire has no home without identity.



But the mirror the right mirror maybe can build a home



give you hope

 an exit strategy

 from  endless free fall

 endless vacumm

 black hole of the future 

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