Minutes of a meeting held at the Nearby Wood, Ipley Manor Farm Dark Bungalow Date: 25th April 2019 Present: KB, AC Apologies: Sorry for failing to give advance warning to others that we were going to meet. Transcontextualisation: we had met during the last PG at the Nearby Wood to explore our projects and out of that had emerged our crystallising piece / Open Day performance, where we had held an exhibition in the shed at Westhay and then moved in spoken dialogue in the garden. We thought we would do it again.
It turns out that what we talk about doesn’t seem to ‘matter’ as much as other things – even though I, at least, still tend to give that greatest value. It also appears that insights of a thought/spoken/idea’d nature ‘matter’ less than I, at least, would like to think. Perhaps I, at least, should spend more time just moving and less time trying to have interesting and insightful thoughts/ideas. Ah. That sounds familiar. But what about the fact that I, at least, would get bored if I were not having interesting thoughts? Or do I only think that?
Kristina said that she felt one thing we had in common was that we haven’t got a very firm grip on our ideas. I liked that very much. There are pros and cons to having a firm grip on one’s ideas. It seems to help with having a firm grip on one’s self. There are pros and cons to having a firm grip on one’s self. Anyway, Kristina said that maybe we could see it as an ‘organised self’ rather than an authentic self. I liked that. She said that the organised self could include granny and fusspot and feminist and and and. Then she said that the self is like a cake. Flour is the common human essence that goes into each cake. Then each is baked according to culture and environment and habits and upbringing and life and experience. We are all made of lour but baked differently and with other different ingredients. Once we are baked it may be possible to pull out the odd accretion (sultanas), but you cannot extract the flour. You cannot get back to flour. Only to cake crumbs. The ‘organised self’, then, is like a well baked and tasty cake.
We talked about removing or cracking masks and finding another mask underneath. Could there be a not.mask? (Like an authentic self.) She suggested that the mask arrived at in meditation is the most.not.mask, but it is still a mask. I wondered why I was still endlessly interested in sex when it’s not, of itself, more interesting than growing vegetables. She said that it might be because we are potentially sexually active most of the time, unlike cows and plants and more seasonal things. And because it underpins everything. I suggested that it might be that I suppose that, on a good day, the ecstasy of sexual abandon might crack the mask in a way that doesn’t otherwise happen and so reveal a not.mask. But we agreed that the ecstasy of sexual abandon actually generates another mask (perhaps an ecstatic mask or a tortured mask). I remembered a website called beautifulagony where you can look at just the faces of people having orgasms. We discussed the idea that a blank white mask is both an imaginative device (it allows us to project anything onto the other) and a literal device (it removes all the associations and memories and fantasies that we have with a face like this or that and that – and just leaves us with a literal blank face). I registered that all the projects I have done have had something to do with desire (and plants; and intimacy; and words and vulnerability). And there was still someone inside (one of my cast of characters), knocking to get out (perhaps to get out of the egg), knocking to say: “you still haven’t addressed the desire thing properly”. Wanting to be heard.
We found an ants' nest, and watched the bees flying from their colony in the foot of a tree trunk, and heard a curlew, and peeled the old bark off a silver birch and found it smooth and without taste or smell, and wondered at how many the tips of the beech trees with their furry young flowers were broken off and lying on the ground, and took four cuttings from what might be a Bird Cherry (Prunus padus) which was not apparently pollinated by bees, and noted that blackbirds seem to be alarmed by everything, even themselves, and noticed how big and sexy.in.the.hand the hazel catkins were, and Kristina remembered a buzzard that looked like an old blanket in a tree and I didn't have to write any of those things down because the body remembers them all. But I had to write down the ideas.
The meeting adjourned. In my first session, I tried to prime people by saying something like this about the multiplicity and ubiquity of desire.
There is, for example, the desire to...
There is, for example...
There is also the desire...
There is black, orange, yellow, violet and pale green desire Material desires include...
The shapes in which desire appears include...
Like potatoes, desire can be waxy or floury There can be sticky desire, varnished desire and initially sticky, varnished desire becoming hard, coated, resilient, waterproof desire There can be nun desire and monk desire and fig desire and chestnut desire. I invited people to move with a sense of desire, to find a gesture or movement of desire, and to move with various tightly wrapped objects inspired by the kind of objects that Caroline makes sometimes. In my second session I invited people to continue their movement in the playground with some of the same objects. They quickly (because it was cold) ended up on a bench telling me what to do. The photos from both sessions are here. The bullet points from the sessions are below:
Hester says:
“...it is very difficult for you to feel loved and you are working very hard in order to battle the feeling of being bad.” Yes. It is difficult. I can see that I am but it does not really touch me. “But the feeling bad is your own feeling, from I to me, so it might not really help if others convince you that you are loved.” Yes that is also true. That is why the feeling loved from above does not really touch me. “Although I also wrote to you the other day that it might be your biggest challenge to get used to the idea that you are very much loved, whatever or however or whoever you appear to be. In a way this is a kind of surrender that is hard for you to make. But then, with surrender...: HOW [to do it]?” |