Ok, so first: this is not a love story.
Hahaha, it is, actually. I mean, really. I mean, Real-ly…..
Decompressing from the TI residency was short, if it happened at all. I don’t think it really did.
During the residency, the month in Berlin was filled with Love and Death. Not the same thing as Eros and Thanatos, but the parallels are worth looking into, especially for this next project (right now the title is: Monsters of the Sea II: romeoandjuliet (void). In Berlin, there were two things constantly on my mind: the day before I left, I fell in love with this woman I knew from long ago, but met again at a coffee shop. She had to talk to me because she was having visions. When we met, she told me about these visions, all of them filled with images of Oshun, and she didn’t know who that even was, but started looking into it, and decided that we needed to look into that. It was like someone put a love spell on her, and then put the same spell on me, and the whole month of Berlin, we were writing back and forth and fell into a very lovely love spell that isn’t a spell at all, but something that seems to be real, not in Lacan’s sense, and it also seems outside of Lacan altogether. Hm. The other thing, my father was getting sicker, going on morphine, and then eventually hospice. From what everyone was thinking, he might only have a year to live, and maybe less. So there was that.
Every morning, I would wake up and read messages from Heather, the woman from the cafe in Phoenix, or from my mom, about my dad’s health and mental state. I would go to the gallery, crying on the metro, crying because the world was beautiful and tragic.
When I landed at the airport, Heather picked me up, and we started what seems to be far, far beyond any imaginary that might have been playing in our heads, and seems to live comfortably outside of language (pre-verbal, or post, does it matter? Everything that is matter matters, ok, true).
She met my father, and even rubbed his feet. He was lucid, and he loved meeting her, and loved it that I was happy. It was lovely.
A week later, he was not lucid, and a few days after that, he was not any longer at all.
She was there in the hospital room with me, and everyone in my family got to meet her.
Three days later, my brother went into the emergency room from an accidental overdose.
It’s been a very rough month, and it’s been a wonderful and beautiful month.
I want to write more about the night I spent in the room with my father, seeing spirits dancing around the place, and sensing that I was seeing something real (here, I do mean in the Lacanian sense of the term), and there are things I don’t want to forget.
This next work, a version of Romeo and Juliet, will be about the first moments of falling in love, told from the perspective of all of the characters in an underworld, where death has already happened, and the stakes are obvious.
I have the cast together, and we get to start in just a couple of weeks. I have to write most of the text, still, but I can already hear it and see it in my head, so that part will be easy. The characters are Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio/Benvolio (folded into one), Rosaline (the inaccessible Other), the Nurse (the ritual leader, I’ll play that), and Susan (the Nurse’s daughter, the void of love, love unrealized, the unrealizable hunger for love). I’m not using any sitcoms this time, and the tone won’t be very funny, I’m going for something much darker, to be honest to my own recent experiences.
In my research, my friend, Isis, a santera, priestess of Ochosi the hunter, and a scholar from Brazil, gave me this book: http://www.amazon.com/Kongo-Graphic-Writing-Other-Narratives/dp/1439908168.
We met one night because her father died earlier this year, and we had things to discuss.
I’m working my way through this book, that takes the stance that Kongo signs are a form of writing, a real honest to goodness language, and uses the idea of the Charm as a metaphor for how these signs work. It’s exactly how I’m working with this material, and I’m excited that it’s published right now, it’s perfect.
In the meantime, my godfather came through town, moving from San Diego to Macon, Georgia. He’s a priest of Oshun, and he took Heather and I to the river for some ritual work that opened me up, and healed a lot of things. And we all did a spirit cleaning at my mom’s house, and right before he left, we refreshed each other’s heads.
I still need a few weeks to get my spirit calm, but I’m sensing that starting work on this next project will be important, and I’m imagining the themes of grief and love will play a bigger part in everything as this fall starts to fall on us.
It’s been very hard, but also amazing.
I feel the spirits of Fellini and Kantor, very close. My father, even closer. And Heather, ha, she is really right here, in a material form. I will be ok. And all, all of this, all shall be well.
Sending blessings and kind thoughts from Phoenix–
cfd
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