to live & to die.
photography
avatars
This past weekend I performed at the Patti Pace Performance Festival, in Statesboro Georgia. Though I love to talk about my own performances, and probably will soon enough, what stood out for me at the festival was the last performance. Rather than explain why it stood out to me, or what it was about, neither of which I have a decent answer for, I’ve compiled the following list of words and images that may give some insight to the performer’s madness. The performer’s name is Amy Burt, and she is a communication scholar from Georgia College and State University. The first thing to note is that Burt is hilarious. She flows back and forth between a serious tone that draws us in and forces us to listen, and a comic tone that had me, at times, falling out of my seat. Nearly, at least. None of the images seemed poignant for the longest time. I wanted to find meaning in it, but she didn’t seem to offer any. We just rolled along, like a roller coaster out of control. About half-way through the performance, after the Thomas Kinkade image that frightened us all, bits began to emerge that revealed a [...]
internal harmony
My infant spirit would awake To the terror of the lone lake My infant spirit would awake To the terror of the lone lake Yet that terror was not fright But a tremulous delight And a feeling undefined Springing from a darkened mind Death was in that poisoned wave And in its gulf a fitting grave For him who thence could solace bring To his dark imagining Whose wildering though could even make An Eden of that dim lake But when the night had thrown her pall Upon that spot as upon all And the wind would pass me by In its stilly melody -Antony & the Johnsons
a whisper in the vortex
“The will to system is a lack of integrity.” ~ Nietzsche I must confess that I’m finding it harder, more laborious, to write my regularly-scheduled column for TAG. It’s not that the project is losing its charm for me, because as time goes on I’m finding the work of my fellow writers to be getting better, and the work of the new additions to the stable is maintaining that trend. It’s rather that I seem to be going through one of my periodic nigredo phases, when I tend to regard the productions of my ego with a sort of nausea, perhaps a “metaphysical masturbation” which tosses its generative fluid out into the objective world around me just so I can hold a card game with myself. Indeed the guileless generation of horrifyingly mangled mixed metaphors is par for the course when this happens, so I’m glad I got that writer’s rubicon out of the way right here in the first paragraph. I would like to observe that the weekly themes our Editor has tossed at us seem to unerringly reflect something of earth-shattering personal importance going on at the time, or at least it sure looks that way after I’ve [...]
decomposed before a million universes
My life is measured by this glasse, this glasse By all those little Sands that through passe And see how they press, see how they strive, which shall With greatest speed and greatest quickness fall And see how they raise a little Mount, and then With their own weight do level it again But when they have all got thorough, they give over Their nimble sliding downe, and move no more Just such is man whose houres still forward run Being almost finished ‘ere they are begun; So perfect nothings, such light blasts are we That ere we are, ought at all, we cease to be Do what we will, our hasty minutes fly And while we sleep, what do we else but die? How transient are our Joys, and how short their day! They creep on towards us, but fly away How stinging are our sorrows! Where they gain But the least footing, there they will remain And how groundless are our hopes, how they deceive Our childish thoughts, and only sorrow leave! and how real are our fears! They blast us still Still rend us, still with gnawing passions fill; How senseless are our wishes, yet how great! [...]
that beauty which convulses and expands
The Sacred Geometry of the Tree of Life, Part Two Sephira VI: Tiphereth Carrying forth the theme of symbolic geometry of the Tree of Life (Figure 1) begun with Part One of this series, the sephira of Tiphereth, being the manifestation of the “idea” of the number 6, is symbolized by the simplest six-sided volume, the cube. The cube is thus the second iteration of the square (the first was with the base of the quadrangular pyramid representing Geburah). In addition to the cube, two traditional symbolic correspondences with Tiphereth are the heart and the sun—the combination of these two symbols should hearken back to last week’s column on the “Mystique of Blood and Light.” The cube is the first geometric figure in this series possessed of symmetry along all three spatial axes of length, breadth and depth (or x, y and z in the Cartesian coordinate system). Thus, a 3-dimensional cross is implied by its shape, as is the point at which all three axes converge—the center of the figure. Kether—the point—is thereby implied, as it was in the sephira immediately preceding, the pyramid (Geburah). In fact, given the square comprising each of the six faces of the cube, its volume [...]
rode hard & put up wet
oh, papa…won’t ya’ help me outta my towel…oh, honey won’t ya’ rub mama’s back…sugah’ love…won’t ya’…. brush my hair, oh, you know….make it wet, ride it hard.
the mystique of blood and light
"... these strange-looking figures in green with masks covering their faces so you can only see their eyes, they must be angels. And their hands are drenched with blood, my mother's blood, and they're holding like a trophy a small fleshy something with arms and legs and a face contorted into a scream, and that something is me. This is heaven."
the less you see the better you look
“Because I’m a perfectionist, baby. And you can write that down. In fact, I’ll wait a minute while you do so.” -Bret Easton Ellis
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