39 Microlectures, page 3
I don’t remember my teacher’s reaction to this paper. By some pedagogical miracle, she must have accepted it. To this day I follow this method, more or less. I consider the entire library my rough draft. I go in search of lines to add to a paragraph. I pick up a book I feel affinity toward. I look to certain writers for certain qualities. Mostly I copy and rewrite lines, then forget where they came from, and whether I wrote them or not. I have to track them down all over again when I collect the source notes. I think the sources section of this book recognizes all the borrowed texts. I think I actually wrote the rest of the lines, but I can’t be sure. Although I have aged more than twenty years in the blink of an eye, in many ways, I haven’t learned a thing. Maybe I found the path to my own words in borrowing enough of the words of others. As Calvino said, “Today I will begin by copying …” The texts must be related somehow. After all, both Rip Van Winkle and the earthworm “awake.”
4.3 Thanksgiving-2: An introduction is a book from the outside
When one sees a car about to run down a child, one pulls the child onto the sidewalk. Not the kindly man does that, to whom they put up monuments. Anyone pulls the child away from the car. But here many have been run down, and many pass by and do nothing of the sort. Is that because it’s so many who are suffering? Should one not help them all the more because they are many? One helps them less. Even the kindly walk past and after that are as kindly as they were before walking past. The more there are suffering, then, the more natural their sufferings appear. Human beings so easily put up with existing conditions, not only with the sufferings of strangers, but also with their own.
Sometimes change begins with refusal. I had a teacher who refused to tolerate existing conditions, not only through her teaching, but also through her example, her presence, her simple place in an average classroom of an ordinary public school in a medium-sized midwestern town, known primarily as a producer of automobile parts and accessories.
How strange we are in the world, and how presumptuous our doings. We feel helpless and incongruous, each with our tiny candle in the mist. Only one response can maintain us: gratefulness. Is not all thought, as Heidegger pointed out, a form of thanksgiving?
THANK YOU TO MY TEACHERS
(in reverse chronology)
THANK YOU TO VALUED COLLEAGUES AND FRIENDS
I owe a debt which can never be repaid to everyone who is now or has ever been a member of Goat Island performance group, especially Lin Hixson, who kept me alive, and who never blinks. People have asked me for my definition of music. This is it. It is work. In Chicago, many talented artists have worked in relative isolation and undeserved obscurity: Iris Moore, Lucky Pierre, Robert Metrick, Julie Laffin, and many more. Lawrence Steger has left us while I was writing this. That door, once opened, can never be closed.
Rabbi Mendel’s hasidim asked him why he did not write a book. For a while he was silent, then he answered.
Rabbi Mendel:
Well, let’s say I have written a book. Now who is going to buy it? Our own people will buy it. But when do our people get to read a book, since all through the week they are absorbed in earning their livelihood? They will get to read it on the sabbath. And when will they get to it on a sabbath? First they have to take the ritual bath, then they must learn and pray, and then comes the sabbath meal. But after the sabbath meal is over, they have time to read. Well, suppose one of them stretches out on the sofa, takes the book, and opens it. But he is full and he feels drowsy, so he falls asleep and the book slips to the floor.
WHAT IS AN INTRODUCTION?
Here it is a book seen from the outside. A book is only a book when seen from the outside. Seen from the inside, a book is not a book, but a train ride at night: one might glimpse a drive-in movie screen playing a film in a field. Somewhere in a laboratory all the windows have cracked, and now the inventor traces the fracture lines, thinking they might suggest the pattern of poetry. Can there be joy and laughter when always the world is ablaze? We need the introduction to see the book, to see it as a book, as one book and not as many, as one more book in a world with too many already, where each book’s paper was once a different book and before that a tree, and one day might become a tree again. We have unbalanced the equation. The introduction is there to plant the book in, wait a lifetime, and read the tree it grows into.
A stranger asked a monk why he sat in front of a tree.
Monk:
I am listening to this tree. This tree preaches zen.
Stranger:
I don’t hear anything.
Monk:
KEEP LISTENING.
4.4 On proximity
July 18, 1994. We arrived by train in Fribourg, Switzerland at dusk. We had waited in Geneva for ninety minutes because British Airways sent one of the It’s Shifting, Hank trunks on a later flight. When the trunk finally arrived, we trained the two hours to Fribourg. Adrian, a young man volunteering with the festival, met us at the station. He drove Lin and the luggage in a car while the rest of us walked to Belluard Bollwerk, the three-story circular fifteenth-century fortress converted to a theater, where the festival takes place. By the time we arrived, the evening’s performance by a Belgian dance group had already begun. We found the car parked with all the lugagge, but no Adrian or Lin. We looked through the small group of latecomers who, like ourselves, had been locked out. The summer sun seemed to take an hour to set in Switzerland. We walked around in the soft half light. Finally I spotted Adrian who motioned quietly for us to follow him. He led us through a stone gate into a courtyard around the side of the Bollwerk. “There is a hole where you can see,” he whispered.
Lin was already on tiptoe, peering into the hole.
The three-foot thick stone walls of the fortress featured a few of these oddly placed windows, each one with a nine-inch diameter circular hole at the interior edge, tapering open to an horizontal oval, three feet wide and eighteen inches high, at the exterior edge. This shape allowed a wide field of vision for somebody looking out, but a narrow field for somebody looking in, like us. We took turns at the hole, grasping the bottom of the sill and pulling ourselves up for a view. The position and angle of the hole viewed the dance at stage level from the side, with the audience not visible off to the right. In this way we watched about ten minutes of the performance. I remember one image of two dancers in underwear with their pants down around their ankles, cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths, hopping in profile. Under the stage lights, from my viewpoint, they resembled a miniature moving diorama.
Many of the old cathedrals of Europe feature an architectural innovation known as the hagioscope – a small notch cut through a column which allows those standing in the side aisle to view the altar. Maybe renovators added the notch in response to unexpected overflow crowds, or maybe the notch simply resulted from bad planning which placed the column obstructing the altar view. Architecturally, the notch exteriorizes some of the participants from the ritual. The notch, a small window, mediates the ritual for those behind the column. Without the notch, the cathedral has only one space in relation to the altar, and the column simply interrupts that space. The notch creates two spaces: one in front of the column, and the second behind it. The hybrid name derives from hagio (saint) and scope (vision), a device through which one may view the saints. The hagioscope was less formally known as the squint, and the squint has a legendary double life in the form of the leper’s squint, a similar feature of disputed existence. This notch sometimes appears on the south wall of a cathedral, and “lepers” or otherwise undesirable individuals, forbidden entrance, could view the ritual from that exterior vantage point by congregating at the squint. In both cases the ritual transpires in deliberate relationship to an intentional audience, and the excluded viewer, watching through the leper’s squint or hagioscope, sees an unintended side view which takes in the performers, or the performers and intended audience, in profile.
On Sunday evenings as a child, I rode in the back seat of my parents’ car on the way home to Jackson after the weekly family visit to the relatives in Flint. Sometimes in summer, when night had just fallen, as we drove a big sweeping curve of the highway, we would see the screen of the Lansing drive-in theater with a movie starting: the rectangular image of an actor’s talking face, or maybe the quick colorful movements of a Woody Woodpecker cartoon. The rectangle looked gigantic, bigger than any movie. For a moment it appeared as a window into an impossibly lucid dimension, propped up and illuminated silently in the blue and brown stretch of field. The image flattened, distorted, and finally vanished into the empty back of the screen as our car continued past. Of that brief experience, I would think, “How unlike a movie, and how much more memorable.”
Saturday, the last day of the Fribourg festival, I returned to the courtyard to watch some of the final dance concert, a duet, through the hole. Over the past week, we had unpacked our trunks, given our two performances of It’s Shifting, Hank, taught a workshop, re-packed. In the morning, we would leave. Now, once again, the long Swiss sunset had begun. Four children played soccer in the dusty courtyard. The youngest, the goalie, fell and started to cry. His older brother grew impatient and hit him with the soccer ball. The mother arrived, hit the older brother, and sent him inside. The younger brother stopped crying and watched his brother’s punishment in awe. Then he followed them inside, the other two kids wandered off, and the courtyard was empty again. I took a look through the hole. One or the other of the dancers, dressed in white, passed quickly through my line of vision. The rest of the time I could only see the blank lighted stage. I heard a child’s voice speaking French, and turned around. Basil, the six-year-old son of the festival director, had arrived with a friend. Basil had been talking to me in French all week, not seeming to care that I didn’t understand. I picked him up so he could see through the hole. Then the friend said something in French, so I put Basil down and picked up the friend.
I held the child up to the hole. I didn’t know him or speak his language. We stood like that and together watched the side of the dance duet, or watched the empty stage when we couldn’t see the dancers. A kind of accident, a coincidence, brought us together in that way, in proximity of a performance, with the sun going down. It lasted only a moment.
The stage became dark. Then the lights came up, and in profile the dancers bowed. Basil’s friend said something in French, and I put him down. As the two of them walked away, I heard an odd, oscillating, far away sound. It was coming from the hole. The audience was applauding.
5. TO THE LISTENER
When listening, please bear in mind: I have tried to compose some of your most particular experiences. I realize that you may consider it impossible for one to compose the experience of another. I realize that you are not a typical, but very particular, listener. You have begun to listen in such a way that you attend only to the note being played at the moment — you try to forget a sound as soon as it stops and not to anticipate what will happen next. Your concentration lapses frequently. You are not a thorough listener, and proud of it. You have a sense that almost anything can happen next: across boundaries, with many connecting threads.
I realize that I have imagined you. Nevertheless, you have one invaluable advantage; you are the one listener about whom I really know something. You are the one I feel closest to, even if I do not know you personally. You are absolutely necessary for me — since it would be impossible for me to imagine this process other than in conjunction with a constantly imagined percipient. In this way creation and perception intermingle and are elements of the same complex phenomenon. In this way, we have begun to write this book together. Now the question arises: How do we proceed?
We proceed in absolute freedom, within certain limits: the limits of our abilities, the limits of work and play, the limits of the next ten minutes, and the limited size of my desktop; the limits of bodies, the memory of bodies, and the motion we make toward and away from our own death; the limits of justice, creativity, natural resources, blankness, the limits of space, time, sound, instability, the fractal scaling of cloudshapes, leaf veins, the circulatory system, heartbeats, the rhythms of sleep and insomnia; the limits of our skill as dancers, the limits of I need a job, the limits of the echo off the opposite wall of the Grand Canyon.
We proceed in almost any direction, across boundaries, with many connecting threads. We proceed like the mosquito that bites the iron ox. We proceed with no need to fear or to hope, but only to find new ways of understanding.
0. WHAT IS A MICROLECTURE?
FIRST BOOK: BOOKMARK (1969)
I needed a bookmark. When I could no longer finish a book at one sitting (One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish) it meant I had become an adult. At least I had begun to read like one. A peculiar item came into my possession, a souvenir from my parents’ trip to the Jackson Harness Raceway: a betting ticket (from a losing race). It listed the horse names and start time, and I somehow resolved to write on its blank reverse side the title and author of every library book I read while using it as my bookmark. First book: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Second book, a couple of months later: Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. With the third book, my problems began. Despite repeated attempts I failed to read beyond the first chapter. Yet I felt determined to add it. Deciding the first chapter represented a substantial enough accomplishment, I wrote on the back of my bookmark: Dracula by Bram Stoker. By the fourth book, I could not read past the first page. My bookmark needed this title, yet if I added it, what then? Would my list include not books read, but simply books begun? Books checked out from the library? Nevertheless, I capitulated to my urge, and after reading only page one, I added the fourth book.
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The back of the racing ticket – the different color inks, the clear passage of time between each entry, the world suggested by each title and the universe suggested by their juxtaposition – had become more fascinating to me than the books themselves. I suspected that in my whole life I would never read past the point at which I entered the book on the bookmark (and this has proved true). A question must have occurred to me which I could not at the time articulate, but which I now understand as this: At what point does the bookmark become the book?
MICROLUDE (JANUARY, 1996)
I had been invited to speak at Dartington College of Arts, Devon, England, my first invitation of this kind. I had nothing to say on the topic of Performance Writing but unrelated fragments. I set my so-called writing aside to listen to my current favorite composer, György Kurtág: Hommage to Mihály András — twelve microludes.
We see in Kurtág’s way of thinking, sentences and clauses, as it were. Kurtág himself once described this as a process in which “a statement occurs — and is then answered”. On the other hand comes the extreme condensing of forms (which at times almost shades away into silence) into minute aphoristic gestures — a sigh, or a joyous breath of musical particles, frozen images: in short, sound objects rather than sound processes. Personal statements, made in the form of private confessions, become statements about the world in general; the listener is confronted with a very subjective view of the musical language. Kurtág’s many movements, though not always so titled, pay homage to various individuals. It is in this light that they should be understood.
A whole fragment has its own beginning, middle and end. I wrote to Dartington that I would present a series of five microlectures.
THE GOLDEN BOAT (APRIL 13, 1996)
Good morning. Thanks to Caroline and Ric, and all the hardworking organizers of this conference. Before I begin, I need to make some important amendments to the description of this talk in your program. First, I will not be discussing performance writing — at least not directly. Instead, through the exploration of related concepts, I will try to approach performance writing through a kind of indirect process of encirclement. This method perhaps reflects my position in Goat Island as a performer and a collaborator, and not specifically a writer. It also hopefully reflects in part the process of Goat Island — a process which values the considered response no more than and no less than the seemingly unrelated distraction or the simple mistake. Second, I still intend to deliver five microlectures, but through circumstances beyond my control, they are no longer all exactly three minutes in length — the first, third, and fifth have grown to a length of four and a half minutes. Finally, speaking here at Dartington gives me the opportunity to evoke the spirit of the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, whose educational innovations in India in the first half of the twentieth century inspired the founders of this institution. In his poem “The Golden Boat" Tagore tells the story of the poor field laborer who at harvest time loads all his crops onto a boat, and then asks the boat’s driver if he himself may also board. But now filled with his crops, the boat has no more room for him, and the farmer sits alone in his empty field as the boat sails away up the river. “I have nothing,” he says, “the golden boat has taken all.” Please think of my microlectures as this farmer’s crops, and be reassured that the golden boat of time will carry each one away in less than five minutes.
