February 20,1997
Dear Terence,
how
went the conference in Mexico? Am about to embark on a road tour myself
soon. Enjoying the state of motivating semi-angst as my paranoid (or is
it realistic?) part estimates the disasters which might attend the launching
of my blood and bones into material space. Going to try and co-ordinate
it with Cyberville by issuing regular road reports. That might solve the
problem of what to do with all that excess nervous energy after the gig.
Debrief!
It's
been seven years since I performed my solo show onstage. Re-establishing
old neural pathways to the guitar and re-learning repertoire has been a
full time occupation. One interesting thing about a long lay-off is that
there's a chance to retrain old habit paths and take a different approach.
One reason I stopped doing it was the feeling that development had become
encrusted with habit. Entropy. A singing stone. Established paths between
memory and reflex become "safe," and safety leads to stagnation.
It's hard to avoid accumulating a repertoire of moves which have proven
successful, and thus avoiding risk. On the other hand, a risk successfully
taken becomes, in turn, a part of the bag of tricks. Stage Darwinism. As
with anything having to do with the law of entropy as regards human habit,
formulating the problem in personal terms is the only workable way of remaining
conscious.
Stage
presentation is a mix of attitude and metaphor, assuming that content is
metaphoric. Attitude inclines an audience to acceptance or rejection of
the metaphor(s). Never mind "real." Real is some kind of breakdown
in the process - a microphone on the fritz, a busted string, a fire in the
theater. But the audience is very concerned with the metaphor of "the
real." They require a beginning, a middle and an end. Stage context.
The audience has a feeling of multiplicity, although they are truly only
multiples of one. Some mighty subtle alchemy in that set of circumstances.
But the performer, or band, or corps de ballet, is also only one - albeit
a different one than the one of the audience: the "presenter"
of the metaphor through the agency of attitude, as distinct from the receiver
of the metaphor. A dissonance is created when a member of the audience decides
to switch roles with the performer and draw the attention to himself. For
a musical presenter, that would amount to catcalls - whereas a presenter
such as yourself, one who encourages discussion, is involved in a more byzantine
interaction with the audience.
From
what you've told me, it sounds like you're often involved in situations
where someone attempts to move the power of presentation from the stage
to their own seat. I would think that grasping the structure of the audience
dynamic in a theoretical way, keeping that in mind along with the actual
subject of discussion, would aid in retaining the modicum of control which
leads the audience to adoption of the metaphor under discussion, hopefully
enlightening them to the nature of metaphor AS metaphor, rather than allowing
the talk to degenerate into picking apart the metaphor itself. Obviously,
every metaphor is vulnerable and attitude has as much to do with defending
it as does adroit argument.
Theorizing
on what an audience "is" is one of my favorite on-the-road hobbies.
It can be one sympathetic individual through whom you address the rest of
the assembled persons, or it can be the self-projection of a hostile aggregate
waiting for you to make one wrong move then pounce! Or you can see the crowd
qua crowd. But one thing is certain - both sides of the stage crave acceptance,
the grounds leading to a sense of mutual respect and unity of purpose which
is the desired outcome of performance art. You might even say it's real.
Not
telling you anything you don't already know! Just articulating for the record.
Hope this burgeoning Spring finds you percolating with health and new ideas.
So far the only word that seems to fit 1997 is "vivid." Personally,
it's like busting out of a thirty year cocoon hungry for adventure. So much
happening at once. My experience seems to fit your metaphor of the cultural
endgame to a T. Useful, that.
As ever,
rh
31 Mar 1997
Dear RH-
It has been some time
since we have talked. Lots of water under the bridge and the world just
keeps turning beneath our feet. Since last we talked I have been to Australia.
It is, as the locals seem eager to tell you, "All desert." Nevertheless
you can see blue gum forests that seem to stretch endlessly to the horizon.
And some of those Acacias are reservoirs of DMT. This is all being studied
by freaks and ethnochemists in the broad and deep Australian underground
and soon they will startle the world with the details. But it is clear that
the Aboriginals have known for some time about all this, like since the
beginning. Since I was in Sidney with some time on my hands, I looked at
and educated myself concerning opals. Australia has the world's best. They,
more than any other stone, seem to bring home the truth of Huxley's observation
that our human fascination with jewels and cut stones is a reflection of
our
nostalgia for the psychedelic experience. They are like visions and hallucinations
and reduced to a gravel spread before the mind's eye. Mere silica in the
same sense that we are "mere carbon".
Then
I came home, hung around for ten days and then got a flu that seems to have
hit everyone around here. It peaked just in time for the Heaven's Gate brouhaha
and while I was reading Ben Okri. His new novel "The Famished Road"
The man writes so well of hallucinatory African village life that after
you read him you have to check the soles of your shoes.But the flu combined
with a media frenzy and a suppurating literary stylist left me spent.
Now
in a couple of days I am on to the mainland for a five city tour that will
take me to Seattle, Boston, Manhattan and Atlanta among other sites. The
spring dash to the mainland for money. I am hoping that it will be dogwood
time in Georgia. And after that a real rest, not just a couple of weeks
but three real months without having to travel or face the public. Can paradise
be more than this?
I
imagine that your life can not be anything less than equally complicated.
If it is not one thing then it is another. While touring I will stop and
see my father, he has had a pacemaker installed recently and is not finding
it a very comfortable experience. I welcome the feeling that life is battle
as long as it is accompanied by the feeling that I am winning. Life is good
but all projects move with maddening slowness. Still, I tell myself, this
is simply rearranging the furniture.I am here, I have the books, have the
connection. Presentation and highproduction values will have to wait just
a little bit longer. And definitely there is a silly season of some sort
in full cry. Heaven's Gate indeed! Raises that question that is raised by
all weird shit: Who writes this stuff?
Anyhow
I hope that life is treating you well and that this somewhat gnarly missive
finds you fit as a fiddle.
Best,
T