Four Animal Frolics
[Note: the audio piece is a binaural mix, intended to be experienced on headphones.]
The human being—rather, a monkey puzzle—falters as though it were mycelia
with the means of only a tree.
Anxiety is a state of sticking your head out into the future.
You become guillotined by this leaning forward.
Bright snow off balcony. Images of collapse bend the body image.
Joy is the restitution of presence in the age of anxiety, if anxiety is where it feels like we begin, that groundless ground from which we must build a life.
Learned to start a fire – the hearth burning somewhere between half-hearted and fastidious.
Are there systems or rituals through which we perform a restitution of presence? This question is posed over and over again in various forms: Florida water sprinkled across the shoulders; hikes up the hill to gather rose hips; yarrow bundles that rhyme with long white lines. Ceremony is a speculative proposition; living together helps us lurch towards it.
To improvise music with others is a pinball game of projection, of presence and adaptation, of otherness overlaid; it is communication in an unoccluded state, still flawed but flowing, not subservient to meaning. As an act it teaches us where our limiters are – where anxiety blocks the onrush of expression, all the multiple meshes of self-censorship that add up to habits of composition.
Like murmuration is to the sparrow, the jam is a formation of spiritual and relational analogues.
Loosening.
The thing behind the thing does not create form.
Future memory clenches around a communal sphincter.
Value does not create more value.
Likeness creates the other.
A primal sensation releases the patter of horseflies. Their crispy wings circle a crown around the swollen organ inside a monkey’s skull. His phlegmatic companions gather to translate a mystery that will always become something else. Guttersnipes roil in ancestral sewers, a passage that carries them from the triple burner to the throat. Inside spills out.
A synonym is not a mirror but the seed of difference.
Fire over water, water over fire. Clear lake covered in snow.
