Miss Julie

Happiness consumes itself like a flame. It cannot burn forever, it must go out, and the presentiment of its end destroys it at its very peak.
AUGUST STRINDBERG

I was sitting at the Belvoir Theatre on tuesday night to see Miss Julie by August Strindberg. My divinaton was that it was a depressing but profound psychosexual drama, or so I'd been told. I found it to be more, and strangely pressing for those who search for love.. Miss Julie, the trapped aristocrat and her servant, Jean, who represented the seed of the nouveau riche are unbridled by dreams, that turn in their way into an inner crisis of truth. Their relationship in its class tension and emotive exasperation existed as a grand metaphor for the narratives of modern escapism. In their dialogue it called itself love, however, it was more a way to cope, to shake the boundaries, to tear up the footlay that was so dauntingly repressive. For that the pain of the character's situation, their delusions found a justification. Did they need it? I had to ask myself "had anything really changed? Was love of that kind an ideology of abandon, of escape from self?"

The stage was constructed of a simple plank of timber that stretched out as a kitchen shelf, suspended two metres or so above and out to the ends of the stage. Upon it objects were placed, and the plank was used as a sort of balancing scale. Every object; every person's perspective never allowed you to hold that objective sympathy with a defined protagonist; a quantative judgement. This was the success of the play for me. Strindberg asked questions I simply couldn't answer everytime the plank-scale swung like a seesaw. All the protagonists' situational dilemmas were never denied their pertinence.

Their situation displayed something, in a hyperbolic fashion that i can't seem to shake off with relationships, or their form in any current version. It's as if feeling in such speed, in such a desperate attempt to escape self is a deep contract we make with pleasure, with sex, with the ecstacy of abandon. Affairs and desires are more than simply an interplay of mind and sexual relations. We sell out for that vivacious sense of abandon and dreams and forget friendship, love. The themes were so heavy on the nostalgia of the life i'd experienced in that strangely austere and vacuous place we call society... that amalgamation of clubs, bars, glam, drunk modernity. The place where postmodern identity politics replace the humble family. I thought we drink, we make a contract to abandon, we make eyes at that dark figure whose face won't show itself in the light, and find ourselves in the dark of a bed, fumbling, hands across each others bodies. Or we deny it and we find platonic contracts, friendships of a greater scope, that let idealism breathe out of that overly reduced obsession with the perfect aesthetic - bleep, bleep, bleep, boom boom, boom.

Strindberg definitely made the suggestion that happiness was a flame for the desireful, and most people i know have had a difficult time lighting it. The play presents this dilemma in that place of modernity, some furious and frustrated abyss, that we've come back out of but can't help but look back at and wonder, and i'm not ashamed...

"What is happiness?"

A list of heavy and grand words, that cast their shadows and their light... states that are always with the "presentiment of their end, causing the suffering, resolve of (de-con)struction at their very peak"

Perhaps.

Nomad

A curious character was sought out by the civilized as a primitive.
They disliked him - he was clothed in secrets and mysteries.

His identity was found
between swaying motions of seas - the slow movement of terrain
between eyes and feet
desire of a home is cradled in hands and heart where shapes move,
fumbling back, cutting around in a slippery surrealism;
dark broken by the sun
morning.

Nomad
was woken abruptly by city
traveled down new streets built in seconds
cultures were singing songs cut-up into transient echo
mouths tasted insatiable fats
bodies loved, and minds were dulled into muddier pathways
all traded in a magnificent aroma that wafted further
to nether -
ether in home.

Reflections on Phantasm, the enactment of my own piece of writing.

Rose Purse (O n&On) and Danielle Maas (Simulacrum)

Theatre is the last beacon of knowledge, stir, critique and substantially the last resort of thought, in our march in this veiled life upon obscure ages.

-- Tandasi Susuki

The theatrical plane stretched out into a concentration, a stage. The excitement of theatre beset me. I sat behind, thudding heart, intimate with exposition and watching my work move in and over heads, missing ears, making some receive, confusing others, angering some, boring the non-believers. It, out there, was no longer me and I was humbled, satisfied. I could have critiqued the awful setting, the dissonant sound of the bar behind us, see the heaviness of my words, or the lightness of enlightenment they might bring in someone. I could critique the actors’ performance, see where they could have reached a greater implication or more of a tension, subtlety or reaction, or been more physical. Yet it was that silence of wonder, of moving within understanding, the presence of moment-um, of a delicious spectacle, a ritual of meaning, life of death and death of life; to know that we’d communed. Could i ask for any better parliament of humanity?
I think not.

Something like desire, something like life

This is all messy prose. Desire is all just some big, wet morass, tangling and tangling around itself knots and moments of hatred and thick blood, moments of greatness... but only delicate moments, volatile moments, that come crashing down to just the bareness of your body-mind alone, bleeping out to nothingness. Find me a reprieve from it, some part of me heavy to the stomach calls. Yet pleasure is coming, oh pleasure, up and up through my throat, till I come to the slight strangling sensation and feel I’ve arrived somewhere. I look into Siddhartha’s light, into Art’s humble- cushy touch, to God’s paternal arm, to friendship, the most altruistic thing I know, embracing me as my self, resolved. This happens to me every day, until it cracks and the cycle starts again, and night falls and the sun breaks the world above, and it sends me hurtling back to a half déjà vu where I gleam again new light and swim in the somber beauty of the dark.

Being past

The grandfather clock,

Humming --- tock

Over sleeves of wet flesh,

Spilling tea over

Dusty sheets --- tick

Moment of there and now,

Tocking ---

tick ‘til it filled,

This word housed room

with the old oak smell of curving strokes

on paper

somewhere other than

ancient men --- tocking

primordial prose --- ticking

the present of dust

the passed from now

to the place of the ticking tock;

--- the tocking tick

PJ Harvey's Music - The Soundscape of a New Flânerie.

“Flânerie is a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness even though it is actually a final resignation to it…” (Keither Tester)

PJ Harvey's Sound posits an insatiable tension somewhere between musical flânerie and dialectical playfulness; a sound that is addictive to my generation’s ear. She pulls me from the infinite, finite, organic, city-bound, the body, mind, distilling them all. She ruptures the eternal from the transitory reaching up to those independent, intense and impartial spirits, conjuring that psycho-semantic world that runs down into my bones. Perhaps a bit much? Let me explain with a few fragmented lyrics.

Is This Desire?

“Catherine liked high places,

The hills

Chapel

Washing herself

Wind

Listen

Children’s voices

Women of the hills

A view of the city,

Now she sits and moans” (The Wind)

“Beauty of her

Under electric light

Tears my heart out

Every time…

waiting” (Electric Light)

Stories from the city, Stories from the sea

“Teach me mummy,

How to catch someone’s fancy

Under the twisted oak grove” (Grow Grow)

“The ceiling is moving…

Like a conveyor belt above my eyes

When under ether,

The mind comes alive…

Something’s inside me

Unborn and unblessed

Into this world and to the next” (When Under Ether)

Lyrically, the idea of the city seems to represent heartache, chaos, and the uncontrollable. Nature some place of refuge, where we only gain moments of culminate feeling when her odes to love climax, always being taken forward by her melodic narratives. The city is present more as a motif than a subject in the background, foregrounding all her undulating sound-concepts and nature-based imagery. This is one of the places where her music gains its dynamism and power from a movement and interaction of extremes, between desirous chaos, and romantic reprieve; city and nature; authenticity and deception; a sort of musical Flânerie, always imagistically tied to, yet anterior to the city. Her music is always bound by some sense of modern idealism and the abyss, yet some paradigmatic opposite is constantly bubbling up from an expression of her subjectivity.

Her music is in a perpetual state of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and affairs, and fathomless points of silence crossing path ways and the nostalgic wilderness of feeling, from one great rhythmic throb to the perpetual discord and dislocation of all opposing rhythms. Overall, I feel like her music's taken me on “a turn from the seething bubbling fluid in a vessel consisting of solid materials of buildings, laws regulations and historical traditions,” (Robert Musil, 1954), and out into some ethereal other and for this I can't but feel that she has some quality as a quasi-heroic, journeying flâneuse, placing herself always in a liminality of being.

The Politic of Conversation

Bombs set off out of my open eyes,

Shapes revolving in a vein structure;

This ethereal rhizome romping,

Tied to beings of ground,

Lost out in air.

Dipolar voices

Make each divide,

Branch after branch,

Ruddy liquid truth never still, astride

Until it spreads and crosses

Blocking beneath,

Another vein shooting beyond

the now and the then explosion of eyes.