Transubstance
Doc_1920x1080_23.976fps_H264_121920_V1.mp4Performance. Wine and milk bath in North River, George Washington National Forest, Virginia. December, 2019. Performed with Caley English. Video documentation by Devon Donis.
The hardest part of living is sometimes accepting my own solid presence. Mass and molecules; memory incarnate.Atoms, flesh, and else which make up body. I-- we-- should be fluid, condensation, vapor infinitely expanding and collapsing.It would seem more likely. . And yet--- a body all the same. Unwanted, perhaps-- here, even so. Stillness. Sort of. Potentialenergy, bone-bound.Every body-- every living, dying, digesting, cell of body-- borrows the space it occupies, respirating its rent. We consume,gather, collect, touch, sustain, deteriorate.Self-preservation, endless and oblique. Something to do.There is order and then there is chaos, or so we proclaim (somewhat presumptuously) over that which we do not understand.We try to maintain them into oblivion. Solace in strategy. Magnetic repulsion manifest. We fear and know the loss autonomythat comes. In our blind panic we manufacture markers of our own significance. Immersion. Pilgrimage. Womanhood.Sacrament. We ritualize what we do not understand to make palpable the unchangeable.This is what it must mean, then, to be human. We yell it into the wind and wait.We come from, sustain ourselves by, place. Natural, perhaps-- but manufactured too. Placeness as yet undefined in ourunderstanding of self. Our bodies biograph our own manifest landscape, gathering, building on, damaging. We are written byour spaces.
Dust to dust.
We gather from it, turn it over. Mutual sustenance; symbiosis of the yet and the not-quite. The weight of It All. The weight ofeach other-- or perhaps just of Other. Too much; necessary because of how we live, or how we think we have always lived.Necessity is only a single sensibility, after all.
Body and blood, given. Sustenance and loss at once, ours to suffer.
Wash, wash- you must be clean.
Dust to dust.
We gather from it, turn it over. Mutual sustenance; symbiosis of the yet and the not-quite. The weight of It All. The weight ofeach other-- or perhaps just of Other. Too much; necessary because of how we live, or how we think we have always lived.Necessity is only a single sensibility, after all.
Body and blood, given. Sustenance and loss at once, ours to suffer.
Wash, wash- you must be clean.