Working in theatre means always having to say goodbye. It’s a weird process, getting to know a group of people very intimately and intensely for a short period of time, and then having to cut ties as soon as the show’s over.
Have been thinking a lot lately - especially while clowning around on the streets and - about a passage in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: I can’t find it now. Something about learning to live in the way an animal handles an insult. It is nothing to it. It just keeps moving. That and his admonition in “To the States“:
TO The States, or any one of them, or any city of The States, Resist much, obey little;
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved;
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.
I love how Whitman is always addressing “the States.” To me, he’s not just talking about the geographic states. It has rather more to do with states of being - with all the different ways, means, methods and possibilities of life that exist or are employed by the people. What state are you in?
There’s a simple yet profound principle in ham radio when it comes to energy usage. Only use the minimum amount of power necessary to complete a given communication. This is one of the things they mean when they talk about conforming to good engineering and good amateur practice.
I realized yesterday, while talking to that junkie, that one of the benefits of being a mime is that you wouldn’t have to respond when people say things to you. Although, my next step is probably in totally the opposite direction. Gonna start bringing out my harmonica holder and tying percussion instruments to my legs and things. Figuring some kind of one-man-band action, maybe recite some poetry and other annoying things like that. Start really pushing the costume element and totally weird people out. Should be hilarious.
Woke up early this morning and went out before work for a couple of hours for some hit-and-run juggling. I’d roll up on an abandoned, wide-open or otherwise significant spot, juggling for 2-5 minutes and then high-tail it out of there. Had a really fun time doing that, though I didn’t interact directly with too many people. The best foot traffic I found was over by the Johns Hopkins monument, where all the college kids pretended like they didn’t see me, except for a couple of nice black girls who smiled and said hi.
Found an article this morning in that bullshit paper the B Free Daily about the city live entertainment venue bill that the independent entertainment sector has been up in arms over. Their spin on the topic was decidedly different, saying how it would be a boon to crappy bourgeois restaurants in Harbor East - that it would allow people there to dance.
Technically, when Foreman’s patrons got up and danced, it was considered live entertainment–and illegal
**RANT ALERT**
Maybe it’s just me; maybe I’m the crazy one. Some people would probably think so, considering I’ve been spending my free time out on the streets, juggling just for the shit of it. But why the fuck do people need laws to give them permission to dance? This is one of the most retarded and inhuman things I’ve ever heard of. If the spirit moves you, you should dance, you should sing, you should cry out and laugh. Resist much, obey little.
Calls to mind the article about those nice young fellows in the UK who are roaming the countryside singing (or were, maybe they’re done now). One of them said:
“The pub laws are crazy,” says Ed. “Legally, you can’t get everyone in the pub to join in on a rousing version of an old tune like John Barleycorn, but you can shout and swear as loudly as you like and have the television on as loudly as you like. We have to go outside the front door of the pub to sing quite often. Legislation has been put through to control what comes out of people’s mouths.”
Laws to prevent people from dancing are the same thing: they are aimed at controlling the “dangerous animal passions” that lurk like throbbing demons in the hearts of human beings, and which the stuffy buttholes who somehow run things seem to thrive on repressing in society. Put another way, if you can continually disconnect people from the source of Beauty, Truth, Strength & Love™ within their hearts, then you can lead people around by that emptiness, by that lack. You can convince them of all kinds of dumb things: that they have to work, that they have to wear ties and suits and conform to some made up “standard”, that they have to buy things they don’t need, that they have to lay down their souls and resign themselves to a state of waking death. I say, fuck that. Let’s dance those ghosts away back down into Hell. They have no place in our world. Let’s dance in the streets. Let’s dance in the forests. You can only lay cowering for so long before you have to sing out & shout.
- END -
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2 Comments
People who have taken away their own permission to dance, and think of themselves as having done “well” by it, both resent the dancing of others and feel that such dancing can only lead to evil things. They (not quite mistakenly) believe that the free flooding of animalistic joy would wash away the underpinnings of the power they have given up that joy to attain.
Never mind that they’re keeping tight hold an unconscious drip line of animalistic joy behind their own back all along. They’d be dead otherwise, even if they don’t know (or can’t admit) their own hypocrisy.
Baptists don’t believe in pre-marital sex becauase it might lead to dancing.