Dreaming of a beautiful living thing

Last night I dreamt of a bright white light coming from within a huge web like dome of interlocked shadows. The edges of the shadows were soft and vaguely human shaped. The light was harsh on the black dance floor. The network breathed together as one beautiful living thing. From deep within the mass a poet’s voice emerged crystal clear. As their voice grew nearer the light shifted from below the knot to above the speaker as the limbs disassembled in the darkness.

I am in a rehearsal hall addressing the ensemble of sweaty artists emerging from the darkness. I am giving notes to the team to spend extra time working with their bodies between rehearsals to build stamina to hold the sculpture, “This will be different for each of your bodies, look inside yourself and see how you need to make adjustments to the sequence to suit your body”. As the group disperses I am already pouring over my notes making adjustments to the calendar, and drafting emails to the design team with the adjustments from today. There is a level of calm in my brain that is so rare in my waking life.

The thought disrupts the dream state. I wake up going over the schedule again, and determining the web image should be moved to the end from the beginning.

Bookends.

Thanks Mr. Rose.

work in progress

I’ve been having a hard time sitting down to write lately. Not because I lack time, but because I lack empathy for my own process therefore how could I hope to have empathy for anyone else’s. There are a lot of things I could say about depression and creativity and in fact I already have said some here, but I don’t have the strength to go there right now. I am writing to here now to give the smallest of updates and the smallest of motivation to myself to keep going, to keep writing. Because in my experience writing helps put a frame around my experience to be able to look at it from that place in the mind that does not experience pain of living, the essence of being if you will. I promised you two books of poetry exactly a year ago, and truth be told I’m scared to release them. These poems were written in a very dark period of my life, and at the time they gave me a reason to keep on going, to keep on writing, but reading them now is painful. Painful that I hurt so much, and painful that I would wish to share that sort of hurt on the world that is suffering so much already. It’s a hard thing for me to reconcile with myself in my current black disposition. I have made a promise to finish them by the end of this year regardless because people have directly asked me to, people I respect, and people that have paid me money in order that I might keep going, keep writing. If it weren’t for these people that have invested their good faith in me I would probably give up on the project entirely. Which is depressing in itself. There is this idea that the only kind of pure art is art for art’s sake that the artist creates in this vacuum regardless of who will appreciate it, but I also believe that the creative experience is not complete without someone to receive the expression of the soul. It’s like trying to have a conversation while no one is listening. Between these two beliefs I feel a little lost about how to feel about the release of this body of work. It is coming though regardless if only so I can practice having empathy for the parts of myself and my work I do not like.