the timboucher experience

There’s a character in the Chekhov play I’m working on that talks about her ideal life: going from holy place to holy place in pilgrimage. I’m starting to feel like that with the monuments. On break from my “10 out of 12″ (thirteen actually, with crew call), I walked around the neighborhood of the theatre in the slight rain (almost wrote sleight rain), arcing around the Maryland Line Monument (Revolutionary War, not WWI like I thought) in front of the Lyric, and around the bowl that shields the station building from the south winds, but still lets the freight trains in. Across the way there is a WWI monument, the one with the stone flame atop it, Sutton Place rising in the distance. One of the cannons points directly over to the armory, which holds a WWII marker, as well as a Hans Schuler piece - if I’m not mistaken. Looped back around in a slightly bigger arc, forming a sort of banana line of motion through spacetime, if you laid it out as a GPX route and viewed it from above.

I realized something about congruence and confluence at work today. It appeared, I think, because the immediate experiential ritualism of what I’ve been doing with monuments was overlaid against a long work day spent on and off-stage. Something about planning out movements, ritualized repetitive action… it eventually becomes meditative and working theatre - or walking monuments - can become an extremely zen thing. A state of being something like what I might describe as rest in motion. Wherever you go, there you are. And you learn to mark, repeat, improve, modify paths of motion and action through four-dimensional space. Postmaster. Essentialism. Chekhov’s a genius.

I’m not sure where it’s really all going, but the thing I feel I’m learning is that you just learn how to experience and appreciate it all while its happening and move through it appropriately as the situation demands. And there’s that line Hawk says to Cooper before they bring Laura Palmer’s killer to justice, “You’re on a path. You don’t have to know where it leads. Just follow it.”

That method of action lead us into a great little vignette yesterday. We rode down to Memorial Plaza as a waypoint along the overland route to the Fell’s Point monument corridor. We’ve ridden by the War Memorial Building (WWI) many times. There’s a plaza with several monuments and civic art pieces overlooked by a tremendously imposing building most people probably only dimly notice. That’s the thing about these monuments, these significant places where human culture and geography consciously dance together: once you start noticing them, you can’t stop. They come to life, as if they possess a life or energy of themselves. Maybe its just some neo-animist fantasy. Who knows. But you’ve got to have something in life as a frame of reference. It may very well all be arbitrary after all, but I like monuments because they’re durable. They reflect decisions made generations ago about something significant - some state of mind or place or moment where the air felt just right and everybody could breathe a sigh of relief together…

That’s what monuments signify somehow, public rituals and some kind of weird (wyrd) trust in ancestors and descendents. Imagine making a choice that stuck around forever and lingered tangibly in people’s lives. I wonder what that would be like.

• bingo = HOPE
• Web Browser Window Tarot Bingo Divination Tuning Associative Search
• I Ching Ifa Loteria Bingo Sudoku Matrix; Gambling, Divination & Patterns of Change
• Yup
• The 12 Tribes