evening solo performance with installation and audience introduction/greeting. April 28,29 2017 Text When we had walked for hours, night fell and stars began to appear. I noticed them as in a dream, being somewhat feverish on account of my thirst. My flower is ephemeral and I’ve left her all alone Others looked and were sad, but they did not show it and spoke politely. We are climbing to a thousand feet, You never falter, never stall, To stall is disgrace and it is dishonor yet here you are unashamed Stretching, stalling, falling once more Stalling falling, today today we read the story of a quest. Every morning when we wake we ride the lines between the impossible, the desired, the credible and the fantastic where to question is to stumble and to fail. We tease ourselves that the things that serve us best are selfless, we dress our self-interest in altruism and, for the good of all, we say, we chart elaborately engineered exchanges with human faces. See, it is all imagined, all improbable, the designated voice of reason turns out usually to be the voice that serves the interest best. we are the story being written. we slam ourselves repeatedly onto blank pages, hoping to be deciphered and well-read. Here. There was a prince and a boy and snake and a bird and a fish and a man. And me. And you. And scars. And wonder and so much wide unknowing. So much imagined and improbable. I wonder, In your fiction, where you are the hero, is your villain drawn from my fears or yours? The thing you are afraid of isn’t hiding in every place you already know not to enter, it is right next to you, whispering, stroking. It’s already writing your story. Slamming you into your own pages. Where what you see falls right between the thing that happened and your imagination of its meaning. We have always been improbable. You and I, when we step out of our pages into other stories. Whether I stumble, crash, wake up dusty and disheveled or simply drift in quietly. We break. Everything. Everything ruptures and fractures looking for its expression and its balance. Everything happens in the cracks between. Everything is born from effort. Everything rips open, spills and pours itself into existence. Everything is built on ashes and memory. Everything used to be something else. Before it broke. It is a brittle build from here to now, the fact of fracture. What it was falls right between the thing that happened and the imagination of its meaning. Wrapped up too tightly to remember how to say its name Coiled up in good company with others of its kind Everything breaks open, the other side is here. Falling feels like everything at once, perfectly full. Layer on layer on layer on layer Built upon the fact of fracture Carved into scars and growing something different Falling feels like folding in Broken and unopened It is a brittle build from here if it does not speak and does not reach and does not stretch and does not break, it does not grow, it festers and it ceases to exist. the fact of fracture is that to exist is to be broken Everything rips open, spills and pours itself into existence All our pieces, hastily glued, carefully cemented, precariously balanced, mismatched, edges, fit. Somewhere. Make space. We are already fiction. Looseleafed reinterpretations of collective imagination. Let it go. Crazybstory She was seen at the intersection of bridge and high streets, directing evening traffic, smiling and singing softly. she stood in the center, her clothing folded neatly at her feet. Her feet were bare and moved in careful patterns as she alternately faced the approaching lanes. They never did find her shoes. By the time the police arrived, the entire intersection was at a standstill and inordinately quiet except for the occasional blare of a horn from someone down the line that didn’t yet know why their 6pm commute was halted. As with most gatherings around such events, the observers had not yet made the leap to action or intervention. At most there were whispers, some waves of uncomfortable laughter and almost comically exaggerated nods of sympathy. Even those who knew her seemed frozen. Humming through the air was that odd sense of relief in watching something other than yourself come apart. While the group is distracted with the immediate crisis, you can take one more deep breath and potentially suck in enough air to outlast the next proximal implosion. Then you can freely offer sympathy, counsel and enough retrospective insight to ponder out loud the inevitability of this moment; sagely quoting lists both of the contributing factors and the sequence of events launching this headlong propulsion to disaster. Someone always knew this would happen Someone would never have expected it Someone felt so badly for the family So
