The downhill path
The downhill path: notes on poetic subjectivity (collected by way of conversations with friends during self-isolation: speculations on cultural dynamics: dramaturgy for a cultural non-act)
[An empty stage. There is no light or dimension, only a dim glow. In the darkness, the faint outline of a chalkboard can be seen. And a table. Someone enters. Mumbles. Raises a hand, begins to write.]
1. movement strategies: primary relation (interweave) of body & space (positionality, spatial politics, relational proxemics: I am myself the moment “I enter” / am called into being = I take up space) – to evoke space: into, against, trespass, return, occupy (insideoutside, againstwith, contactconflict): where am I? I am always where: somewhere. Frame of address (situatedness), from social intimacy to social distancing: with/draw, drawing with (I carry space with me / I am a placeholder: holding place, held by place).
2. voice-agency: one speaks – to whom? (to negotiate a lingustic pressure – “speak up!”), being named, unnamed: holding the tongue (“I refuse” /// I give you my silence), occupying the tensed border of non/sense – one must aim for laughter!! to speak this body, for itself, for you: the intimate, the speech that touches, that navigates loneliness, that wants to travel (to sing) / and what of the collective voice, the transmitted: garbled. A garbled choir today.
3. the crowd (gallery view): the few becoming a sum (adding up: these others I find myself next to), to be: alongside and with (the vitality of others, I brush against (“skin ego”: I give you my skin – the impossibility of not sharing)), the caress (the bruise / ouch!): to be in company: passion/compassion, consensuality = common sense: the collective project: relational intensities – co-emergence (interruption): togethering / mediated public: the screen / flat ontology, a being-with(out): connectivity (minus the flesh) – politics of touch (fear of /desire for contagion); sharing disinfectant / open source antibodies.
4. constructions/a material drive: acts of making something, to give form to this coming together (knitting, stitching, suturing = masked matter): I want to live here! (to shelter, to house, to conduct a scene (with the animals): a stage that announces: we are here (territory: the boundary as threshold: of networks (how to meet?))): a web trembling with rhythms of self-organization, the assemblage of things (noise: the diverse doing) / practices of composition; manners of living that find a way / the social form(less) = the living room as maker lab (long distance cooking, lonely yoga).
5. we must celebrate: perpetual festivity, spirit of joy, loving relations, ethic of the open body: erotic-becoming (community = being on the verge of collapse: let us party like it’s 1999): death drive /// life drive (work): to enact a “passion play” (collapse/renewal, jouissance/revitalization: bliss): creativity/exhaustion (model of energy: expenditure / conservation; diagram of distribution); proliferation (procreative / engendering) – expressivity, against the postponed event (turn up the volume)(what of slowness, the balcony parties, the tele-therapies).
6. memory, remembering (what is held: in the limbs, the heart): the act of reflection: this something that pierces me (that I carry): I am captured by this memory: it drives me forward (movement, longing, primal progression / repression): I have been here before and I will nurture the conditions for its continual manifestation; to repeat the pleasure / pain: to never give up (to dream: to return to the beginning again, again, so as to retell: the narrative / inscription into the cultural body): a passing on, a documentation: the archive (to resound) – a library of bones, things, artefacts, messages. To remember this moment.
[Curtain. The audience is left in darkness. Hesitate. Prolong. While the stage is often a scene of illumination, even revelation, here we prolong the silence. An expression of postponement, the logic of delay.]
