While its a bit different than the old marquee which once graced the premises, there’s something rejuvenating about riding by this building on my bike every day and imagining what kinds of wonderful things must have gone on within a theatre which dared to call itself “Ideal,” what kinds of dreams people must have been able to find themselves within in such a place.

Terry Gilliam’s latest movie, meanwhile, has been on my mind. It chronicles in mytho-symbolist form an antiquated gypsy traveling theatre troupe struggling to survive in a world where such things are no longer valued and no longer relevant. While the group has about it actual for-real magic, people aren’t able to perceive it amidst the cheesy costumes, shoddy set pieces and over-all ridiculousness of the presentation.

I’ve found much the same phenomena in the world of professional theatre. Up close, the effects seem just that: affected. Fake. Trickery. Stagecraft. It’s a put-on, a ruse, an elaborately-contrived and controlled scam. Sets might look cheap. Acting might come across as forced or corny. But few people are willing to recognize that a con-artist is still an artist.

People in theatre like to go on and on about how theatre is dying, how audiences are dwindling, how patrons are getting older, appreciation for the craft going down and even - gasp! - that this might be the last generation of theatre. And how can a silly, antiquated, over-the-top theatricality survive amidst a world awash in other media which seemingly have more power and ubiquity? Television, movies, video games. Why should anyone go to the theatre? What purpose is there for a devotee of the stage to go any longer and kneel before the altar?

The Ideal Theatre is only a fading dream. A facade. It doesn’t exist anymore. The stage is used only for auctions. Its shell now houses only curious antiques, puttering around waiting for someone to take them home or put them out of their misery. Memories without rememberers are quickly forgotten.

What then of the Real Theatre, that pitiable remainder left over after dividing the ‘Ideal’ by the many compromises required of its manifestation? The all-powerful god we call Budget. The production team. Time constraints. The artistic staff. The demands and limitations of the venue itself. Available technology. The elusive audience nobody can seem to quite name or locate but which swirls around us on the streets every day, going… somewhere. Somewhere but here. Somewhere but our theatre. Is the cost too high? The reward too small? To manifest anything ideal into reality is to jettison what percentage of our dream and vision? Seventy percent? Eighty-five percent? Higher?

Though theatre thrives on and points to the impossible and immeasurable, it resides in the realm of quantifiable reality. We hold a vision in our hearts, something we want to communicate, to invoke into this world; and we look about for what will make do. We accept appropriate compromises which we can afford, and which will work within the context of what we’re able to pull off. We find what “reads on-stage”, and hopefully - or desperately - cast off the rest. The Ideal Theatre is too much for us, the demands too high. The time isn’t right. We try to reach it, can’t, and fall flat, frustrated.

Which makes me wonder if maybe our striving isn’t ultimately misplaced. If maybe instead of reaching towards something that cannot be, mimicking it with shoddy representations of itself, that we ought not to start with the Real and go from there. A favorite Sufi saying of mine goes something like, “He who sleeps on the floor can’t fall out of bed.”

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t bother, in theatre, to dream or to imagine any more. But maybe that our power, our strength, and dare I say even our glory, comes directly from our ability to embrace the shitty, the shoddy, the phony, the forced, the corny: to not run from and try to hide the compromises Reality subtracts from the Ideal, but to look towards them for inspiration, to highlight them as being the essential underlying uniqueness of what our craft is in this world and what it has to offer. To quote, in closing, Ramsey Dukes’ brilliant 1985 essay on the connection between occult or “real” magic and conjuring, illusion and fakery: “[...] by actually faking magic, we might discover magic. Not just that we should be less scared of the charlatan, less inclined to flee his presence; but that we should actually take lessons from him.”

Because human senses are adapted for use on the ground, navigating by sensory input alone during flight can be dangerous: sensory input does not always accurately reflect the movement of the aircraft, causing sensory illusions. These illusions can be extremely dangerous for pilots.

In other words, you can end up piloting a plane in less-than-ideal conditions: darkness, fog, cloud - and think everything’s cool, but suddenly discover that your orientation relative to the horizon has inverted. You’ve flipped upside-down completely, or you’re angling off in a direction which will take you into a perilous downward spiral - all the while your internal mechanisms have been telling you everything is A-OK, peachy-keen, hunky-dory.

In Air Force training, evidently, they use something called the Bárány chair to actively teach prospective pilots that they simply can’t always trust their senses while in the air, because their senses were not designed to function in such an environment. For example, you might be spun about rapidly in the magic chair with your eyes closed, and then halted and asked what direction you’re spinning in: at which point your brain is likely to register, based on the functionality inherent within the vestibular apparatus, that you’re rotating now in the opposite direction when in fact you’re entirely still.

In this way, a pilot is trained to rely on sensory data inputs from his or her flight instruments (for which pilots need to attain a separate instrument rating in addition to their license) - but it is allegedly very hard to get pilots to trust something which runs counter to what their organic sensory organs are telling them to do. This is where things like the Sperry Gyro-compass and the autopilot function which such instruments allows come into play.

It occurs to me that the situation described vis-a-vis the vestibular system of an individual versus the information coming in from an “objective” instrument is somehow akin to a lot of what happens in regular life - nevermind just when you’re up in the air fooling around in an aeroplane. You spend so much time getting good at trusting your instincts and your intuition only to be lead into situations where your internal instruments may not be adequately built to handle the load. How do you know you’re in one of these situations, experiencing the mundane equivalent of an aviation sensory illusion, about to spin to your doom? If the analogy hold, you simply don’t. You need the outside objective information from some other source to tell you that you’re about to crash. And then it’s a matter of being able to trust those instruments - in whatever form they come - to give you accurate readings when you need them the most.

Experimenting a little here and there lately with meditation. Nothing strenuous, nothing very disciplined. But it occurs to me, that maybe there is some extra-ordinary sense one might be able to develop internally, something which bridges the gaps and failures we butt up against in our instincts, intuitions and prior experiences, something which can be created as an internal or supra-personal mechanism to offer accurate readings in those situations when we need it the most. But it’s a matter of, first of all, building or tuning into that mechanism, and then secondly learning to actively trust it when its signal conflicts utterly with what our “gut” or whatever else we’ve been relying on to navigate tells us.

The other dream I only remember in part - mostly the end. I was fleeing from someone, a man this time, some kind of connection with “The Law” or “Authority,” again. Recurring elements. Entered a big house, a mansion, an ancestral home of some kind. I often enter this place in dreams, though in each instance, every incarnation of it is a little different. I flee in through a room of complex glass entryways, a foyer with many gauzy curtains, rushing through to a room beyond, a banquet area, round tables. Turn left and into a hall, I climb a wall, end up somehow above a window. A child enters who I know, very excited to see me, and I tell him to shut up and open the window below me, which he promptly does. The man who is chasing me appears, grabs the child to question him, his eyes searching the vicinity for me, but somehow not seeing me there up clinging to the way, perhaps behind more gauzy curtains, partially obscured. I understand then, either through something he says or a dawning realizing in my mind: that other moves up till now have been amongst unequal pieces, bishops capturing pawns for example, breaking down the front line. But this time, it is a matter of knight versus knight. I wake up.

The rehearsal process begins with a read-through, “table work” I’ve heard it called. The full cast, director and whoever else is working on the show (stage manager(s), designers, etc) sits down as a group and ritually invokes the space of the play for the first time as an entity unto itself in real-time. Everyone reads from the script. Over the course of the next few days (and I’ve only sat through this entire process once at one theatre, mind you), table-work continues with subsequent read-throughs of the play, but this time stopping to explore various points in the play: character conflicts, sub-plots, motivations - things like that. Table-work involves an extraordinarily close textual examination of the script and, depending how you do it, is a powerful group exercise in determining the exact space the group is heading to vis-a-vis the director’s interpretation of the playwright’s script.

Once table work has concluded, the cast gets on their feet and begins blocking. Blocking is the physical determination of who goes where at what time during the course of the performance. To some degree, it is an extension of the close textual analysis of the script: you interpret the stage directions or “squigglies”, which explain - according to the playwright - the appearance of character’s actions onstage. However, you have to adapt those actions to the physical realities of the scenic design, rehearsal space and actors with whom you’re working.

During the blocking process, actors tend to stay “on-book”, which means that while they are learning the physicality of the performance, they have a hard-copy of the script in their hand which they will read from as needed. Each actor has their own style, their own pace and their own system of learning and memorization of a script. A few actors - and I’ve heard that some theatres will demand this of all actors by day one of rehearsal across the board - will be off-book before rehearsal ever begins: that is, they have their lines completely memorized from jump.

While this can be a tremendous boon during the rehearsal process, since you’re able to focus more fully sooner on what you’re doing without having to be propped up by the script at all times, I’ve heard people say that there is a danger in going off-book too soon. While I’m not an actor myself, I’ll try to interpret from what I’ve pieced together what that danger is. It has something to do with solidifying the interpretation of your character too early on, before the group has really gelled and before the whole performance has meshed together. It’s like, each character doesn’t exist on their own onstage, but in relation only to the other characters with whom they are playing. Maybe getting off-book too early freezes something in the development of this group-consciousness…

One of my jobs as assistant stage manager - towards the end of the rehearsal process - was to give line notes. I’m not sure if there’s a formal cut-off date traditionally for when all actors are supposed to be off-book. I’m guessing at least by dress-rehearsal, though I myself would require it sooner were I directing. But even during dress-rehearsal, I’ve heard it said that occasionally an actor will call out “Line!” while onstage, and the stage manager or ASM will feed them their next few words or line. [See also: prompter] Calling out “Line!” during regular rehearsals is not quite as big of a deal as it is during dress, since normal rehearsals don’t have audiences. But anyway, giving line notes is a strange process in itself. As actors are trying to get off-book, they will typically flub certain difficult textual passages, inverting words, paraphrasing, dropping or inserting items in their speech. The ASM has to track these mistakes and hand them after each rehearsal little slips of paper with what line they screwed it up, and how they screwed it up. It’s then the actor’s responsibility to go back through and correct the mistake.

But it seems like there’s a delicate balance to when the proper time for actors to be able to actually re-learn their mistaken lines is. Too late in the game and line notes, though they may be earnestly studied backstage, end up making no impact. Or, an actor may have absorbed and corrected their mistaken lines, but when they get back on stage in the heat and stress of the moment, they will spontaneously revert to mistakes two or three iterations back, completely forgetting any corrections made since.

It’s a bit of a mystery to me how this process works, especially since the faculties of mind for each actor are obviously different. But there’s obviously a strong recurring element in memorization of complex passages of text across the board: repetition. Hundreds and hundreds of times. But if you’ve learned and programmed your mind, body and mouth to say the wrong lines hundreds and hundreds of times, is there any hope to actually going back and over-writing and correcting one small segment? I guess that’s part of what separates a decent actor from a really good actor, is that they have developed the technical tool-kit to overcome and adapt to things like this!

It may have had something to do with the ritual work I was engaging it at the time. Radically eliminating artifacts of personal history: photos, journals, sketchbooks, yearbooks, important documents. I sat up nights ritually disassembling these objects, with pangs of sadness and loss for each one, and simultaneously, freedom. Freedom from fixed views of the self one carries along like luggage whose only use is to keep us perpetually anchored to what we once were, how we once saw ourselves.

Through this process of active self-loss, I stripped away attitudes, beliefs, ideas about myself that I didn’t know I had, and once I was rid of them, couldn’t remember ever having clung to. And it, I guess, is small wonder that some paranoid part of myself, some small egoic consciousness, felt actively threatened by these theurgic rituals, throwing me into a state of perpetual anxiety as those old energies were released and transfigured - and eventually re-integrated on a more fundamental level.

These days, those feelings of imminent physical death have departed. I find myself more grounded, more practical, more level, more balanced and more activated to do and to be what I’ve always been in a basic way. Symptoms seem to include an increased ability to express myself, negotiate the execution of my will in the world, amidst an environment of co-conscious beings. It is a good place, knowing why you’re here, what you’re doing and having a strong sense, at least, of the steps involved towards actualizing my purpose as a human being. Each act, when I’m able to dwell at and act from the center (which itself is a kind of emptiness, a well available for whatever use is demanded of it), becomes an act of wonder as the universe reveals itself in beauty and joy. So I guess my point is, it does get better. The steps are different for everybody, the spells and rituals ought to shift to suit the user. But there is a point, and its important when you reach one of those vistas where you’re able to look out on the plain below and the path you took to get from here to there, that you plant a flag or mark the trail. Mark the trail.

Oh, and apparently Mount Parnassus is sacred to Dionysus and the home of the Muses, which is central to understanding some of the coded references in the movie. Enjoy!

That Wolf Moon sure was something else, huh? Peaked Friday night around 1:18am. Supposed to be the biggest Full Moon of the year. Never actually saw it, but I sure felts its presence, saw its effects.

This somehow is part of the puzzle.

The puzzle relates to auspicious days. The Farmer’s Almanac says that today, the 2nd, is an auspicious day to “cut hair to discourage growth.” If you want to cut it to encourage growth, you’re going to have to wait at least until the 19th. Sorry! That’s just the way this works, whatever this is.

If we were to relate this to initiatic arcane tradition of chess, we might look towards one of the central components of the game: the rules. The rules govern how pieces move on the gameboard, symbolizing natural laws, patterns, properties and processes inherent in the cosmos.

Throughout the history of humankind, we have built models - it seems - in an effort to understand and predict these natural laws, patterns, cycles and processes: from simple observation of the heavens to the sundial, the astrolabe, the orrery, the Antikythera Mechanism, to geomantic stone configurations.

Closely allied to these ingenious devices for tracking auspicious days are devices whose purpose is navigation through three-dimensional space, like the sextant or the significantly more complex gyrocompass. Interestingly, within our own bodies we have an organic version of this type of technology which helps us orient our bodies in space in the form of the vestibular system.

The puzzle’s trail points towards ancient giants of scientific and mechanical thought, as well as towards orders or brotherhoods whose purpose was the retention and transmission of this wisdom across time and human generations. Magi, druids, high priests, mystagogues: keepers of secret maths, of arcane tables, of calculation and cunning, diviners of auspicious days and designers of practical geomantic mystic configurations.

The puzzle is vast and deep though, and I’m as yet waiting for the next piece to unfold itself in my awareness. This morning I had two separate dreams about friends jumping off a bridge into waters below in some type of heroic act. Rescuing somebody, killing the bad guy, but losing two small toes in the process. Is that what it takes? My friend had them afterwards, he was using one to write with. That’s when I forced myself to wake up because it was so gross…

This past week, Rob Breszny’s Capricorn prediction reads, in part: “Take what you really need, Capricorn, but don’t take what you just sort of want. That’s my advice to you. Haggle with life, yes, but insist only on the specific essentials and forgo irrelevant goodies.”

Getting down the essentials and haggling for what’s rightfully mine has been a major focus these past few weeks and seems to be setting a tone for the year. Since last we spoke on the topic, I have whittled down seven years of archived writing on this website from 7,597 pieces to a fighting weight of 1,995. Through that process, for no reason or according to no pattern that I can yet discern, my average unique daily visits on this site has nearly doubled, from 3,800 people a day to over 7,300. I eliminated a lot of fluff - things that seemed important at the time while I was sorting through various things out-loud, but which need not be dwelt on or clinged to moving forward. I made sure to hold onto my dreams though, and was delighted to go back and read glimpses into my unconscious which had been buried for years.

One dream I wanted to add to the record happened this morning. I don’t remember all the details anymore - as is so often the case - but I was at some kind of outdoor market stall. It was night, but it was not the night we experience in this world. There pervaded a kind of blueish light clinging to things, having a presence almost its own which indicates to me some other realm - perhaps the land of the dead. From this stall, I purchased a small amount of goods from, I believe, three gypsy women. I handed them a five, expecting three dollars in return. Except, the change they tried to give me was obviously incorrect. That is, the paper money they had was stitched, taped and pasted together from other bits of currency: Frankenstein bills. I refused to take it, handing it back to them, reiterating how much they owed me. They tried again and again, with different configurations of these ersatz bills, I all the while refusing until I awoke.

The business of life, then, might be meaningfully broken down to the determination of how these transactions go. When one perceiving center perceives another, their mutual perception is a kind a trade. I can see you and you see me. If I smile, do you smile back, ignore me, or frown? When you touch someone’s hand, their hand touches you back. There are many kinds of touching: pleasurable, painful, exploratory, grasping… Likewise, when we trade or conduct social transactions with one another, our actions may serve many purposes. We may be benefiting ourselves. We may be attacking or punishing an opponent. We may be giving a gift without expectation of compensation, or asking a favor of a friend (drawing on a previous store of value). We may be mutually entertaining one another. We may be working towards the same goal, and breaking down a complex goal into constituent parts. Whatever the end result, human culture has crafted ritual structures to guide us through the sometimes bewildering but fundamentally essential act of trade.

In a world without shopping malls and mega-stores, the market or bazaar is a place where one can go to buy, sell, barter, trade or exchange. If you grow a quantity of edible crops or brew beer in excess of what your family, friends and neighbors can eat and drink, you can take it to market and trade for things you need but which you can’t – or haven’t – produced yourself. The act of selling and buying, of bargaining and negotiating is a ritual which varies according to local culture and custom. Unlike the big retail chains of North America, other market-cultures thrive on haggling over prices – though there is often a set pattern to the exchange: the seller over-prices initially causing the buyer to low-ball; the seller reconsiders, lowering their asking price; the buyer thinks better, offers slightly more, but still below the asking price; and somewhere in the middle a deal is struck.

As a hub for exchange, the marketplace develops around it a kind of pidgin language: bits and pieces of cultural expressions pulled from each of its participant groups. Chinese culture, for example, developed a system of numerical hand gestures as a means of compensating for dialect differences in the marketplace (also see Colombian numerals). Likewise, concepts of fairness and right-dealing are tested and their boundaries negotiated in the marketplace. In the tabulation of sales, its interesting to note that “Chinese, Korean and Japanese tally marks use the five strokes of [...] the character meaning ‘correct’, ‘proper’ and ‘honesty’.” Some scholars speculate that tally marks are in fact the precursors of writing: that cuneiform evolved out of trade records. Many cultures have also used counting tables to keep track of quantities measured out for trade.

In outdoor markets of those times, the simplest counting board involved drawing lines in the sand with ones fingers or with a stylus, and placing pebbles between those lines as place-holders representing numbers (the spaces between 2 lines would represent the units 10s, 100s, etc.). The more affluent people, could afford small wooden tables having raised borders that were filled with sand (usually coloured blue or green).

The modern term “calculus” actually comes from the Roman calculi, pebbles shifted back and forth on counting tables as measures of quantities traded. In Medieval Europe, you find the jetons, small tokens or coin-like medals used as counters in calculation or as a substitute for money in games: like the poker chips of today.

The abacus, of course, is probably the most widely recognized ancient counting system – though probably the least understood in Western culture today. The Roman counting tables eventually evolved into the Roman abacus, with close parallels to the Chinese abacus or suanpan. The suanpan typically is composed of a frame, through which are strung beads in columns. The beads are separated by a divider into 2 upper or heavenly beads and 5 lower or earthly beads.

The columns are much like the places in Arabic numerals: one of the columns, usually the rightmost, represents the ones place; to the left of it are the tens, hundreds, thousands place, and so on, and if there are any columns to the right of it, they are the tenths place, hundredths place, and so on.

The upper beads count for 5 in their column and the lower beads for 1, and the suanpan can be utilized for hexadecimal or decimal calculations. The Japanese abacus, or soroban, has 1 heavenly bead in each column and four earthly beads. Its method of operation is to slide beads inwards toward the ‘reckoning bar’. So, if you wanted to indicate the number nine, you take the rightmost bead column, and slide downward one heavenly bead and slide upwards four earthly beads. To add one, you perform a carry operation, sliding the beads in the 1’s column back to zero position, and sliding up one earthly bead in the 10’s column to the reckoning bar to indicate a value of ten. Contests are routinely held to test electronic calculator users against soroban users. The results would surprise most Westerners!

Many soroban experts are also proficient in mental calculation, known as anzan (???, “blind calculation”) in Japanese and as ànsuàn in Mandarin Chinese. They do this by mentally visualizing the soroban (or any other abacus) and working out the problem without trying to figure out the answer beforehand. This is one reason why, despite the advent of handheld calculators, some parents send their children to private tutors to learn the soroban. Proficiency in soroban calculation can be easily converted to mental arithmetic at a highly advanced level.

Many classical techniques exist the world over in which one can use one’s fingers to count not just from 1 to 10, but up to 99, or even up to 1,023. A Korean finger-counting system called chisanbop elegantly reflects the Japanese-style soroban abacus. In Chisanbop, the right hand is essentially the ones column of the abacus. The fingers (but not the thumb) each stand for one – like the earthly beads. The thumb stands for five, like the heavenly beads. So, to indicate the numeral 3, one uses three fingers. To indicate 7, one uses the index and middle finger with the thumb. Once 10 is reached, the index finger on the left hand is used and the fingers and thumb on the right relax. So, to indicate 66, one would hold up the index fingers and thumbs on both hands.

Counting on the fingers (and toes; ie, digits) is so elemental a human activity that most people don’t give it a second thought. But imagine living in a pre-literate culture with no concept of numerals, no 1 through 9, no zero. Objects being counted in such an ethnomathematic system would not be assigned an abstract figure. Instead, each new item reckoned would be another tally mark, another stick in the pile, another calculus, another jeton, another finger…

Many West African languages base their number words on a combination of 5 and 20, derived from thinking of a complete hand or a complete set of digits comprising both fingers and toes. In fact, in some languages, the words for 5 and 20 refer to these body parts (e.g., a word for 20 that means “man complete”).

Fingers and hands, meanwhile, are the instruments of the execution of our will in the world, of our deftness and dexterity in the manipulation of objects and the practical tools of exchange in the marketplace. Money passes from hand to hand. In finger-counting games like Morra (or its cousin, rock-paper-scissors), the number of fingers displayed by competitors may be used to settle disputes, make wagers, for entertainment or as a selection method (similar to drawing straws or the casting of lots – sortes in ancient Rome; see also: Eeny-meeny-miney-mo and other counting-out rhymes).

In another version one person is designated the “odds” player while the other is labeled “evens”. Players hold one hand out in front of them and count together to three (sometimes chanting “Once, twice, thrice, SHOOT!” or “One, two, three, SHOOT!”). On three (or “shoot”), both players hold out either one or two fingers. If the sum of fingers shown by both players is an even number (i.e. two or four) then the “evens” player wins; otherwise the “odds” player is the winner. Since there are two possible ways to add up to three, both players have an equal chance of winning. In New York City and Long Island in the 1950s, the game was called “choosies,” and would be invoked to resolve a playground dispute by one antagonist saying, “let’s shoot for it.” In Boston at about the same time, the term in use was “bucking up.” Some variants of Morra involve money, with the winner earning a number of currency units equal to the sum of fingers displayed.

Divination, determination of the will of the gods, by the casting of lots is called cleromancy. It’s use is mentioned many times in the Bible, notably:

In the Book of Joshua 7:11-22, God commands that a thief be found by casting lots, first among the tribes of Israel, then among the families of that tribe, etc. Achan, the person identified in this way, confesses his guilt, and shows where he has buried the loot.

In the First book of Samuel 10:17-24, the people of Israel demand God to set a king over them, and God decrees a king to be found by a procedure similar to the above, leading to the selection of king Saul.

The Old Testament objects known as Urim and Thumimm, said to be stones in the breastplate of the high priest are thought to have been similar tools for divination. Along the same lines, many ancient divination tools had overlapping usage as gaming or gambling devices. Consider the astragalus, a bone in the ankle or hock of a sheep, referred to erroneously as knucklebones, and played throughout the world.

The game was usually played like the modern game of “jacks”: one threw the knucklebones in the air and attempted to catch as many as possible. They were also used like modern “dice.” Each of the four long sides of the knucklebone had a value: the convex side was worth 3, the concave 4, and the two flat sides 1 and 6.

The Mongolian version of the same practice is called shagai and may be done for entertainment or fortune-telling. In Malaysia, the game of batu seramban occupies the same cultural position (even being played in zero-gravity by a Malaysian astronaut). A variant of this game called five stones continued through to at least colonial America, and the game of jacks is basically the same pattern. The use of games allows both children and adults to practice, experiment and play with behaviors and emotions typical to the marketplace and thereby society: trading, valuation of goods, tabulation of quantities, rule-following (legality), distribution and hoarding of wealth, strategy, skill and chance.

In especially African traditional cultures (such as the practices of the South African sangoma), we hear about “throwing the bones” as a means of understanding constellations of energies, natural forces and the activities of unseen beings such as gods and spirits.

The divining bones are not strictly all bones but comprise shells, money, seeds, dice, domino-like objects or even dominos themselves, and other objects that have been appointed by the sangoma and the spirit to represent certain polarities (for instance a miniature car to represent a journey). Animal bones from lions, hyenas, anteaters, baboons, crocodiles, wild pigs, goats, antelopes and others form the large majority of the objects in the sangoma’s bag, and there are bones for all psycho-socio-spiritual polarities. The bones represent all of the forces that affect any human being, anywhere, whatever their culture.

And from another source:

P.H. used the bones for everything. He would make a throw first thing in the morning, before he was even out of bed, to see what the day would bring. He would see how many people would be coming that day for treatment, if they were male for female, and what their ailments were. He would then throw the bones to diagnose with more detailed information once the patient arrived. The threw the bones to find out how to work with me, and on a daily basis what our lessons would be. Throwing the bones for P.H. was his main source of communication with his ancestors, his helping spirits.

Fortune-telling and gambling are inextricably intertwined in that they rely on unpredictable, random or chaotic patterns and processes. The I Ching indicates trends implicit in the balance of yin and yang energies at any given moment and points towards strategies likely to yield success. The gambler rides the knife-edge of the moment, intuitively divining the proper course of action from tells on the other players, his cards, the odds and the amount to be won or lost. As in life, at the enclosed ritual space of the gambling table, the gaming board, he may win it all or he may be brought back down to nothing, to zero* (*0 is a gift from Hindu mathematicians, to be discussed shortly). The very Daoist Rota Fortuna of the Tarot Deck, which finds a place again on the gaming tables:

In some European countries, the design of the [Nine Men's Morris] board was given special significance as a symbol of protection from evil,[1] and “to the ancient Celts, the Morris Square was sacred: at the center lay the holy Mill or Cauldron, a symbol of regeneration; and emanating out from it, the four cardinal directions, the four elements and the four winds.”

Aside from condemning divination as witchcraft and sorcery, Medieval European Christian culture was careful to separate games according to those of chance, such as dice, and those of skill – chess being the prototypical example of the latter category. Folk culture, however, inextricably combined the two at all times and in all ways. Variants of chess exist, in fact, in which the die is used to determine which pieces may be moved (also see: tic-tac toe chess).

The Libro des los Juegos is a medieval “…treatise that addresses the playing of three games: a game of skill, or chess; a game of chance, or dice; and a third game, backgammon, which combines elements of both skill and chance.” Further,

These games are discussed in the final section of the book at both an astronomical and astrological level. Extrapolating further, the text can also be read as an allegorical initiation tale and as a metaphysical guide for leading a balanced, prudent, and virtuous life [...]

Among its more notable entries is a depiction of what Alfonso calls the ajedrex de los quatro tiempos (”chess of the four seasons”). This game is a chess variant for four players, described as representing a conflict between the four elements and the four humors. The chessmen are marked correspondingly in green, red, black, and white, and pieces are moved according to the roll of dice.[2] Alfonso also describes a game entitled “astronomical chess”, played on a board of seven concentric circles, divided radially into twelve areas, each associated with a constellation of the Zodiac.

[See also: Napier's bones, and the Napier Chessboard Calculator.]

The Hindu culture which created the eminently useful zero as a placeholder was built upon the strong foundation of Vedic mathematics. The Vedas, five thousand year old storehouses of cultural and spiritual information, contain mathematical sutras written in verse “to ensure that information would be preserved even if written records were damaged or lost.” Within the context of the Vedas, “…mathematical formulas and laws were often taught within the context of spiritual expression (mantra). Thus while learning spiritual lessons, one could also learn mathematical rules.” And by cultivating “…transcendental knowledge, one can also come to understand the intricacies of the phenomenal world. By the process of knowing the absolute truth, all relative truths also become known.”

In ancient India, mathematics served as a bridge between understanding material reality and the spiritual conception. Vedic mathematics differs profoundly from Greek mathematics in that knowledge for its own sake (for its aesthetic satisfaction) did not appeal to the Indian mind. The mathematics of the Vedas lacks the cold, clear, geometric precision of the West; rather, it is cloaked in the poetic language which so distinguishes the East. Vedic mathematicians strongly felt that every discipline must have a purpose, and believed that the ultimate goal of life was to achieve self-realization and love of God and thereby be released from the cycle of birth and death. Those practices which furthered this end either directly or indirectly were practiced most rigorously. Outside of the religio-astronomical sphere, only the problems of day to day life (such as purchasing and bartering) interested the Indian mathematicians.

Aside from spiritual focus and direction, the benefits of the ancient Vedic maths is comparable to the mental calculation skills gained by masters of the Japanese soroban abacus:

Utilizing the techniques derived from these sutras, calculations can be done with incredible ease and simplicity in one’s head in a fraction of the time required by modern means. Calculations normally requiring as many as a hundred steps can be done by this method in one single simple step.

Compare that level of knowledge and practical mathematic skill to that of the average American, who can barely calculate change out of a twenty for a Happy Meal, or the grocery stores which don’t trust their cashiers enough to let them count out pennies – instead replacing that essential human functionality with counting machines. It occurs to me, in the study of these various maths and techniques mostly lost to Western culture that we have given up, offloaded and unnecessarily mystified basic parts of not just our mental operation, but of our own physicality as countable beings in the world. Now someone else is doing the counting and we have become chips on their board: corporate goods to be bought, sold, shuffled around and wagered upon in an invisible marketplace to which we weren’t invited, except as chattel, chained and bound to someone else’s valuation of our lives. It is essential, therefore, that we as humans go back and reclaim our natural latent genius - lost maths, forgotten algorithms, hidden systems – and become our own masters.

AEA is affiliated with the AFL-CIO, but is distinct from the stagehand’s union, I.A.T.S.E. or the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees which is itself also affiliated with the AFL-CIO in the United States and the CLC, Canadian Labour Congress. Oddly, Equity is actually not a member of the AFL-CIO directly, but instead a member of a federation of trade unions known as the 4A’s or the Associated Actors and Artistes of America, which is itself a member of the AFL-CIO. Equity is also loosely allied with the Canadian and British Actors’ Equity Associations. My provisional membership in AEA falls under what’s called the Equity Membership Candidate program. In theatre programs, you’ll see people like me’s names marked with an asterisk and the initials “EMC.” There are a variety of ways to become a full member of Equity, but the path I’m taking involves accruing a total of 50 weeks work in Equity-approved professional stage productions. At the completion of my current contract, I will have a total of 9 weeks.

My decision to embark on this course of action professionally took into account the advice, both pro and con, of co-workers and friends in the field. Some cautioned me strongly to hold off, to wait and see where I ended up and whether this was really the direction I wanted to take career-wise. Others advised me just as strongly to move full-steam ahead. I guess one of the big concerns as an EMC candidate is that you might actually become an Equity member too soon, before you have the experience and resume to actually be hired at an Equity theatre under an Equity contract. A reasonable concern, of course, which I have plans to circumvent by continuing to develop my professional skills and experience along the way by working, where possible and appropriate, on a volunteer basis. I have found this to be a valuable course of action - at least for now - in general, as it exposes me to varied working conditions, methodology and personal contacts which I might otherwise never be exposed to. And what’s more, it’s helped me keep my momentum up during periods where paid work is harder to find. Bottom line is: work in the theatre if you love it. You’re not going to get rich doing somebody else’s grunt work.

And make no mistake about it: working as a production assistant, the bottom rung of the stage management ladder, is undoubtedly grunt work. During rehearsals it consists mainly of making endless pots of coffee and feeding parking meters of actors and directors who are doing scene work. But it can also be conceived of as an apprenticeship to the stage in the truest sense of that tradition. Production assistants also typically work live shows during the course of a run, working as a hybrid stagehand/assistant stage manager depending on the size and complexity of a production. So the skills you gain are many and varied depending on not just the requirements of the production itself, but on the theatre and the other professionals with whom you’re working side-by-side.

Oddly enough, most people who become Equity members, I’m told, don’t do it through the EMC program. It’s more common - at least for actors, anyway (on whom I’ve gathered a bit more information) - for a theatre mounting a production to have contractual requirements by Equity to have x amount of Equity staff on-hand. At which point, if you’re in the right place at the right time and the people you’re working with know you have the skills it takes, the theatre will, in essence, “buy” your union contract. This means that membership dues (above and beyond the $100 check I had to put down to become an EMC), will be deducted directly from the Equity pay grade at which you’re hired. That is, Equity actors and stage personnel make y amount of dollars more per week (and they get paid weekly!) than non-Equity personnel performing exactly the same tasks and roles. It is, I have to say, a bit of a labyrinthine process to understand all the ins and outs of this world. While you might be lucky enough, like me, to have a few trusted allies to call upon for advice, in the end you have to take responsibility yourself for the direction of your career. Whether I end up completing the apportioned 50 weeks as required by Equity and pay my full dues, or go on to some other course of action, I ultimately decided that I need simply to be ever pushing forward, ever progressing, taking full advantage of opportunities which come my way and making full use of my talents and faculties. Hopefully the EMC program will be a worthwhile stepping stone in the long run towards that goal!

If we, in our bodies studded with perceptual instruments, whirl around in a circle (as children do to make themselves dizzy), we sense other objects, other bodies existing with us in the field of space. We sense these other bodies as having spatial relationships with our body: close to, far from, in front of, in back of, etc. From these relationships arise a sense of directionality, a means whereby we can make sense of space. We explore space and our relationship with other bodies, we substantialize directionality through one of most basic functions of our bodies as physical beings: movement. Through the coordinated movement of our parts, the rearrangement of our constituent components - our arms, legs, heads, trunks, - we create locomotion. We propel ourselves through space.

Each individual human finds himself at the center of a sphere. That sphere is his or her perceptual field. When a man stands on the face of the earth and looks about himself in all directions, three-hundred and sixty degrees, we call that space he carves out through his act of perception the Horizon.

The horizon stands, then, for the outer limit of our perceptions, the bound beyond which we can not immediately experience without modifying our location in space. But when we move, the horizon, our limitations, move along with us. And what do the alchemists of old say? God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Vitruvian man’s limbs reach out from his center of balance, which he carries along with him wherever he goes.

Whatever the provenance of our physical bodies, they have an identifiable common shape. There is a front and a back to our bodies. There is a left hand, a right hand, a left foot, a right foot. There is a top to our heads and a bottom to our feet. And from these basic root points of physical reference extend outward lines of directionality which govern and organize our ability to move about.

Depending on our environment, we can move forward, backward, left, right, up, down - and endless subtle shades and variations between. An astronaut in outer space, not constrained by the gravity of the earth’s surface or the buoyancy of the human body in water, propels himself effortlessly in any direction whatsoever. To him, aside from the orientation inherent in his body’s composition, there really is no “right-side-up”, except in relation to his ship, its controls and instruments. If he can strap himself into a seat and pilot his vehicle, that is enough.

Similarly, a boat out at sea, adrift on the tides and the whims of moving air currents and away from visible landmarks on shore, has no fixed point of reference - nothing to measure its orientation against. Which is why mariners use a system of orientation wherein the vessel itself becomes the system of reference. It is a closed cosmos, a world unto itself by which the actions and life of its crew are measured. The bow may be considered the “front,” but the sailor knows motion may occur in any direction.

Likewise in the theatrical stage, we find a system of orientation and navigation in which the vessel of the space itself becomes its own frame of reference, it’s own cosmos. The ancient Greek theatre took place on hillsides in natural amphitheatres. Upstage, away from the audience, was literally up a hill. Modern theatres sometimes echo this receding elevation with raked or angled stages. The downstage edge of the stage delineates a ritual boundary between the sacred activities taking place upon the “altar”, and the “profane” or mundane audience assembled to witness the spectacle, the communal invocation of events, people and places (spirits) wholly ‘other’.

The realm of the audience, too, termed the “house” has its own mirror-image vocabulary of orientation paralleling that of the stage. Audience members closest to the stage are considered to be “down-house”, while “house-right” occurs on the same side of the theatre as “stage-left.” As you move away from the stage, “up-house” you also tend to ascend in space: most theatres have seating arranged in levels on risers so that audience members don’t have crane their heads to see past the person seated in front of them.

In the compass rose, the archetypal symbol of navigation, we see also delineated these principles of sacred space. The circle radiating from the center represents the horizon, with magnetic north acting as a fixed point of reference by which we might orient ourselves and chart a course of motion. The compass rose evolves directly out of the much older symbolism of the sun wheel, the medicine wheel, the circle divided into four quarters, the encircled cross: the intersection of horizontal and vertical, of heaven and earth.

Mythic-cartography.org describes it as the Wise Compass:

Every culture of place has some way of delineating and relating to the compass directions. Every people has experienced the sun rising in the east, standing high in the south, setting in the west, and the stars spinning around the axis of the north. Every culture, as humans, has a way of modeling these phenomena.

Some models we call “the Medicine Wheel”, some we call “the Mayan Calendar”, others “the Four Directions”, others “the Seven Directions”. If you look deeply, you will find the way any particular animist culture related to the spinning, cyclical world. A world that spins on cycles of day, month, year, and longer.

I call the set of these models, the class of descriptions of the directional phenomena, “the Wise Compass”, because each model does far more than simply point out directions. It hangs principles of wisdom on its axes. The models help the human bodymind, an organism that evolved under the influence of these phenomena, align itself in tune with the way the world works.

[Image Source]

In traditional symbolism, each of the directions has certain mythic associations, correspondences and attributes which lend order to the human experience, creating a cosmos out of chaos. Though listing all such associations across cultures would require its own dedicated research, we may highlight some modern associations to illustrate cultural influence reaching right down to the experience of our bodies as objects in space:

1. Front: being “forward” or aggressive, forging ahead, progress
2. Back: backing down, retreat, regression
3. Right: proper, correct, dexter
4. Left: sinister, left-hand path, southpaw

[Image Source]

At the center of the cross, the junction of the crossroads, these particular coordinates on the grid, we find ourselves crucified to the experience of our bodies: constellations of matter organized into finite shapes with a definite beginning and an end point along the axis of time, a birth and a death. Though the individual in this life can not experience it firsthand for herself, she hypothesizes that there is something which came before her, her ancestors, and something which will remain in existence within the field of perceivable space after she is gone, her descendents - whether they be blood of her blood or otherwise.

‘Before’ and ‘after’ occur not just on the grand scale of lifetimes, but also within the realm of everyday action. Thus, sequential ordering of motion - change over time - forms the other organizational axis of human perceptual experience. The ancients took as their measuring implements the relative position of heavenly bodies and their cyclical motions within a clockwork universe. Night follows day ad infinitum; the seasons turn and turn again, governing changes of forces, energies and entities within the sacred space of the environment and of the “stuff” of our human bodies.

[Image Source]

At 7,597 posts and 27,170 comments, would there be some practical (or other) benefit to eliminating say… half, two thirds or ninety percent of the data stored under my timboucher.com domain?

Is there any method to test the practical effects of such a radical elimination of web data, and are there any extant examples of anyone else who has undertaken such a project elsewhere online?

My two starting points of measurement, I guess, would be daily unique visitors and monthly advertising income. Ideally, I’d like to have both of those figures go up - and I’d also like to figure out how to transition a significant portion of my incoming visitors to sources other than Google.

In real life, I routinely eliminate physical objects which have come into my possession, and just about as soon as I “release them into the wild” I forget about them and feel a great psychological space open up for newness to enter into. Why would or wouldn’t this work online?

Thoughts? Comments?

Would also consider transitioning into (paid) film and television work, with the understanding that my existing experience is completely centered around the stage. Thanks for your help!

Feel free to link to this page, but keep in mind that Mirroring Content Kills Great Web Sites!! Theft of work squashes the victim’s enthusiasm to create as much as it repels principled readers from a culprit’s web project.

Seriously - if your ‘enthusiasm to create’ consists solely of stockpiling things you’ve ‘created’ and sitting on them in an isolated little vault so no one can look at or touch them, then maybe you need to look a little more deeply into the source of your so-called ‘enthusiasm’. Cause genuine enthusiasm, enthousiasmos, the indwelling of literally divinity in the vessel of a human person does not give a shit for this sort of littleness. Like user:quanaah said: “Truth is not a respecter of persons.”

Marjoe was a precocious child preacher with extraordinary talents, who was immensely popular in the American South. His parents earned large sums of money off him up until the point he outgrew his novelty. Marjoe rejoined the ministry as a young adult solely as a means of earning a living, and not as a believer; he spent the next several years using his fame and status as an evangelist to defraud a small fortune out of individuals both through tent revivals and televangelism. Eventually, Gortner suffered a crisis of conscience and decided to renounce his ways, offering the documentary film crew unrestricted access to him during his final revival tour, repeatedly admitting on camera that he was a con-artist and revealing the tactics used by himself and other evangelists to swindle money from people.

Part 1 is here, and you can just follow the links through the videos for all nine parts (10:00 min each):

They had this kid performing actual-I-shit-you-not weddings as a minister when he was five years old!

But anyway, this guy’s message and transformation seem (theatrically, anyway - for whatever that’s worth…) totally authentic. If anything, it’s probably MORE genuinely Christian than most “squares” would probably even be comfortable with. I can only imagine the impact a film like this must have had thirty years ago, never mind today. It is so inevitably 1970s in all the best possible ways… and oddly reminiscent of the original Godspell movie if you’ve ever seen that… Its so secular that its religious and so religious that its blasphemous. Reveals utterly the theatricality of the altar-stage as a communal dramatic experience wherein the climax is people falling over and literally throwing money onto the steps of the altar. Some of the most marvelous shit I’ve seen. It’s the kind of exposition that I think stands for itself and speaks acrosses ages and cultures. A masterpiece! Spend the ninety minutes it takes to get down with this movie… On a snowy day like this, you’ve earned it.

I actually don’t think this guy is a con-artist even just a little bit. It’s exactly what I was getting at in my historical look at charlatans and mountebanks. Medicine shows, revivals, the like may be a put-on, but the effects they have upon people’s lives are utterly undeniable. It’s the sadhappy fate of the professional showman to bear the profane knowledge of what’s ‘actually’ in their hearts, the Holy-of-Holies while everyone around them is fainting at the not even the touch of the Holy Ghost, but the merest whisper of the name…

I’ve been working on my epic for almost 13 years. It’s roughly 12k lines of blank verse. Granted, it’s truly a written epic as opposed to a performance-centered one as you describe. I know of a few other people who have recently finished or are still working on epics.

This just makes me wonder: how many people out there sitting on an unfinished, unpublished epic? How many unsung Truths languishing away in someone’s basement - for lack of what? Who knows!

I have no idea, but it occurs to me that this somehow is what the Bible is within Judeo-Christian culture, or which similar ‘canonical’ epic collections have in other cultures: you have all these poetic truths, all these things which people saw, touched, tasted, felt, experienced, cried over… and the big ones, the Truest Ones, the Beautifullest Ones somehow through mysterious processes of culture get bundled together and held up and remembered and passed on as the collective inheritance of the human race - racing towards something. Towards what? Towards the end, towards death? Towards the cliffs, the Great Fire? What smoke awaits us that doesn’t already surround us? How do we tell our story, how do we sing our songs? Why? Why go on like this, through all the wailing and gnashing of teeth?

It’s our epic. It’s in our blood, our genes, our destiny. The purpose for which our bodies were shaped as they were, into such instruments of beauty, delicacy and balance. We have nothing but to be, to breathe, to move about upon the face of all that is. Let our songs be long, Lord. Let them be be heard or unheard, except in our hearts let them resound for all eternity. Waves echoing against the caves beneath us. Someday we’ll go down into them, to meet the Holy People and sail away with them on their Many Boats. Until then, cry out; cry out.

What do those patterns look like? What do they reveal? They are composed of dramatic arcs, the rise and fall of the human nervous system coursing through the field of time. Anticipation builds into climax, release, denouement. Curtain closes.

When it opens again - in heaven - the illusion is lifted. These are the actors who sacrificed themselves on the altar of your experience. They came here to entertain you, to educate you, to sustain you through and alongside your many trials. What do you have to give them in exchange? Nothing they don’t already have. Adulation, applause. Things we can’t capture anyway. Lay your gifts at the altar, the stage, and pass the glory onward and upward.

If everything is made up, except the truth of our experience, the sounds, oils, sweat of our greasy bodies moving through space, then we have the space to make up our own truths, to master the architecture of our experiences, to live with one another in Truth and Grace. Truth is the technology of our experience, the way it works. Grace is the substance, the substrate upon which the ground of being takes form, takes flight as the ovens of our bodies explode, combusting fuel we fill ourselves up with.

What then is the measure of what we are, what we say, what we do, what we think, what we feel? What we have? What is that? That is nothing. We give it all away freely. We let go, we give into the Great Nature of Our Shared Experience™. We cry, we laugh, we go down into the grave together. We live on a highway of ice; we melt a way through the wilderness with the fire of our footsteps. Hell is the warm fire that burns forever in the center of our father’s great and glorious hall. It beckons us in from the blizzard. We stay warm, we dance slowly through the embers, scattering our dust, our ashes into the cool sweet night falling all around us.

What need have we for money? Just one more show. One more drink, one last handshake turned hug and on, on into the fog. On into the night. So come stay with us, come get yourself strong, get yourself well. Be well with us all around you singing, deafening into your ears: Eat, drink and be merry, for the snow falls but spring just as surely follows.

Merry Christmas.

What I want to know is does anything similar survive as either an unbroken or revival of this tradition within our contemporary culture? Ray Bradbury’s Farhenheit 451 ends with something similar: all the rejects and drop-outs from a future society who wander around, having memorized all the great books burned in the purging fires of totalitarianism. His description retains strong traces of the holy character and sacred purpose such persons would attend to:

“Thousands on the roads, the abandoned railtracks, tonight, bums on the outside, libraries inside. It wasn’t planned, at first. Each man had a book he wanted to remember, and did. Then, over a period of twenty years or so, we met each other, traveling, and got the loose network together and set out a plan. The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we mustn’t be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world.”

So where are our real-world equivalents?

And that is, ultimately, the essence of theatre. Realigning perspectives on one’s own actions and behaviours so that they might be viewed from the outsider perspective: you make space for the ‘other.’

The space you make for the supposed other, however, may be quite limited. You’re up there on stage singing and dancing or declaiming your lines or whatever and you leave the audience with what? The ability to respond. You hope for the right response. You hope for laughter - or weeping, depending on the script. These things, the response of the ‘other’ becomes like a formula. You can sit up in a booth in the back of the house and you can cue the lights and the lights come up. And likewise, if everybody’s doing their job and everything’s working harmoniously, you can pretty much cue audience laughter. You know where it’s going to happen. You know basically what to expect. You may not know precisely the intensity or the specific persons in the audience with their particular voices who will be joining in the ritual as laughers. But the rest is pretty much all mapped out.

The audience, I wonder, maybe their role is the same as what the ‘chorus’ once played in Greek drama. You have your lead actors, the persons doing most of the standing-up and saying-lines sort of thing, and the chorus (which continues still to Broadway musicals of today) acts as sort of the built-in responder unit within the formulaic structure of the performance. The chorus is like the huddled masses yearning to breathe free: they model emotional response for the audience. Is that right? I don’t know. My apprenticeship to the Great and Ridiculous Traditions of the Almighty Stage™ is still underway. But every day, I strive. I strive to separate my left and my right from stage left and stage right. I strive to see the effects of my actions, of my “performance” - however limited - upon the other players, whether they be staff or guest. It’s not always easy, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes you reach an impasse. Most commonly over small things. You keep striving, or you quit. One of those two. It’s that simple. Stage left and stage right. Downstage and upstage. Where are you?

*

UPDATE!

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It occurs to me, though, that this simple ritual of choosing sides is the only element of chance left in the game of chess. Everything else is based on a decision made. And unlike poker, all the information is available to all players. Older variants of chess, I’ve read, incorporated dice. One simple rule for using dice is chess has to do with assigning a value of 1-6 to each category of piece. Rolling two dice gives you two options of pieces you may move. Doubles let you make any legal chess move.

In any case, I feel almost like the taking of one pawn of each color and shaking them up is ritually quite similar to what you do when you throw dice. The act and the objects also call to mind an element of something I’ve seen firsthand in the dilogun system of divination used in Santeria. From an older article of mine on the subject:

Spread out on the table was a straw mat with eight white lines drawn on it and a cross marked in cascarilla. Next to that sat a small head representing the Orisha Eleggua, trickster god of the crossroads, mediator between humans and the divine. Also on the table were a multi-colored seven-day candle, a bowl of water containing the sixteen cowrie shells, and two other implements shaped like small heads, one white and one brown which I would use later in the reading.

I’m also interested in experimenting with using other games to supplement the teaching of certain elements of chess - for example, mancala. I’m figuring a game like mancala teaches you a certain kind of tabulation and planning which would come in handy at reinforcing decision-making patterns in chess relating to the different values of each piece (1,3,3,5,9).

Chess is a story.

1. The board is the stage.
2. Pieces are props.
3. The rules are a costume.
4. Players are actors.
5. The game is a story they are telling together.

Given the above summation, I also started outlining different types of ‘archetypal’ dramatic moments, characters or situations I tend to see with kids when they are playing chess games with one another. I’m hoping to experiment with doing small improvised skits to have them act out behaviors typical to each of these. The goal would be to have them develop an awareness of their own actions and behaviors and how they influence their experience of the game.

Characters

1. The winner
2. The loser
3. The cheater
4. The victim
5. The distracted
6. The interruptor
7. The advice columnist
8. The knockover
9. The newbie
10. The bragger
11. The unsure
12. The hater
13. The taunter
14. The teacher
15. The blamer

One of my first stabs at this has been in coming up with a five pillars, five components or five elements of chess, which would be:

1. The board
2. The pieces
3. The rules
4. The players
5. The game

The board

Cribbing this stuff from many different sources and trying to cobble it all together into some kind of recognizable shape. It starts with the board, which as another player writes:

The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature.

The board then is a microcosm, an encapsulation of the world, the universe, the cosmos in miniature. In Chinese philosophy as well as Western esotericism, the square (the shape of the board) represents the earth while the circle represents heaven or the soul.

The square board itself, of course, is divided up into 8 ranks (rows) and 8 files (columns), totalling 64 squares (see also: 64 trigrams of the I ching), half of which are white and half of which are black. Interestingly, we see this checkered pattern come up as one of the first degree symbols (either on the tracing board or on the floor of the lodge itself) of another initiatic tradition, Freemasonry:

The Mosaic Pavement is a representation of the ground floor of King Solomon’s temple, and is emblematical of human life, checkered with good and evil. As the steps of men are trod in the various and uncertain incidents of life, our days are variegated and checkered by a strange contrariety of events, and our passage through this existence, though sometimes attended by prosperous circumstances, is often beset by a multitude of evils, therefore is the Lodge furnished with Mosaic work, to remind us of the precariousness of our state on earth.

The board is like the streets, the neighborhood. It’s where things happen. It’s where the living gets done.

The pieces

The pieces are the raw material; they’re what you’re working with, what’s all around you. Your environment isn’t an empty featureless space. In chess it’s composed of 32 pieces: 16 of each color sit arrayed on opposite sides of the board as opposing armies upon a battlefield. Within the field of potentiality which is the game board, the pieces occupy definite positions. They give substance to what’s possible, defining reality into specific shapes, the phenomena of the universe: as above, so below. Squaring the circle.

When you have raw materials, you can allow them to grow and develop into something, a particular opening series of moves, a gambit, an attack (A), a defense (D). Or you can chop them down, harvest them, sacrifice them. When you capture your opponent’s pieces, the pieces in your “jail” are referred to as your “material.” What do you do with your material? What do you decide to build?

The rules

What you’re actually able to build with those raw materials is governed by the rules of existence. Due to its shape, each piece has an assigned system of movement or self-expression on the material plane. The bishop moves in an X shape, forward and back diagonally. The rook moves in a plus sign + shape, horizontally and vertically. The knight moves in an ‘L’ and so forth. The rules set up the possibility of dramatic situations within the game board universe through the ongoing interactions and relationships of body-entities within a given realm, the chessboard.

The players

No matter the rules, pieces don’t move by themselves. There has to be two active wills at play across a gameboard, two minds, two sets of experience and decision-making pitted against one another in the oldest of all rituals, games and dramas: the contest. Contenders compare themselves against one another through the expression of their skills within a constrained area of human activity. In this case, chess. The players have agency. They’re able to decide to do things, effectively execute them and see responses and consequences of their acts within the world of action: cause and effect.

The game

The game is the record of what actually ends up happening. The game consists of three parts: opening, middle game, closing; or the beginning, middle and end typical of any good dramatic climatix arc. A chess game is a story told by two people and their interactions. You have actors, actions, props (pieces, the board), settings: where the game is played, what the people looked like, how they acted. All of this has to be taken into the bigger picture account of what the game is. Not only sportsmanship and conduct, but philosophical depth, communication and understanding on a human level.

Most lexical corpora today are part-of-speech-tagged (POS-tagged). However even corpus linguists who work with ‘unannotated plain text’ inevitably apply some method to isolate terms that they are interested in from surrounding words. In such situations annotation and abstraction are combined in a lexical search.

The advantage of publishing an annotated corpus is that other users can then perform experiments on the corpus. Linguists with other interests and differing perspectives than the originators can exploit this work. By sharing data, corpus linguists are able to treat the corpus as a locus of linguistic debate, rather than as an exhaustive fount of knowledge.

“We see faeries, or make them up, but now we can also make them. We have, for the first time, the capacity to create entities that can sense and act autonomously, or with one another, or with living beings. They can learn and evolve. They can reveal new patterns, extend our senses, enhance our agency and change our minds.

My fairies watch the sun set with me. They dance the changes in light and temperature, in the closing of certain flowers, in the quieting of songbirds and the wakening of owls. And I have this perfectly joyful sense that my body is my home, my garden, my canyon, my trees. If I had more sensors, my body could be the earth. With matching effectors, I become a »Gaian Gardener«, responsible for and enacting the health of the living planet.”

“The windchime maker invites nature into collaboration. The maker crafts the materials and structures of the chimes and then lets the wind have it. Sensors that gather information about wind, or solar flares, or neutrino showers, or bird migrations, or tides, or processes inside a living being, or dynamics of an ecosystem are means by which designers can invite nature into collaboration, and the invisible patterns they capture can be brought into the realm of the senses in myriad new ways.”

[Source]

Between moves, I watched as the flame within flickered, illuminating the image of the saint pasted on the outside of the glass container. Santa Barbara seemed, now and then, to dance with delight - gaining some kind of life vicariously via the attention we paid her in remembrance.

Not that the candle burned for any specific religious or ritual purpose. It was more set dressing than anything else. But I’ve always found saint candles comforting regardless of the level of intent animating them.

Another friend recently brought to my attention the St. Nicholas Cantata, a musical work for voice and mixed accompaniment written by Benjamin Britten in 1948, depicting the life of the famed Christmas-season saint. Wikipedia offers an intriguing description of the opening movement of the work:

Saint Nicolas opens with an introduction in which the mixed choir, representing a contemporary people, calls to Nicolas to speak to them across the ages. They sing, “Our eyes are blinded by the holiness you bear,” and they wish to hear the true story of Nicolas, the man. After being implored to “Strip off [his] glory,” Nicolas responds in a flourish, speaking to the chorus, “Across the tremendous bridge of sixteen hundred years…” The first movement ends with a choral prayer.

Have also been doing some reading about the Guatemalan folk saint, San Simon, variously known as Maximon or Hermano Simon. Maximon is said to be the syncretic fusion of an older Mayan god of the Underworld named Mam, Ma’am or Maam and Judas Iscariot. His modern appearance, however, is altogether different:

He is portrayed as a mustached man seated outdoors at a crossroads, wearing a black suit, red tie, and wide-brimmed hat. In the small votary image from Chichimula shown here, he balances a closed money bag in his lap with his left hand and holds a short flag staff with his right. In other images he holds gold coins in his open left hand and carries an alcalde’s baton in his right.

His sculpted effigy is housed and cared for by initiates and “fed” offerings of tobacco smoke and alcohol through a hole cut into his mouth. One writer indicates: “As long as you bring him his favorite foods and drinks in conjunction with the candle pertaining to your desire he will grant your wish.”

Whether or not one believes in the existence of supernatual beings - saints, spirits, deities, etc - the basic premise and method of operation seems to be the same across many diverse cultures then: an individual, or more commonly a group of people, “feeds” a particular entity (usually represented by some artifact as a stand-in) with their intentional energy - expressed through objects left as offerings and prayers and recitations. When you boil these socio-spiritual phenomena down to their constituent components, it becomes obvious just how much of human cultural activity follows these patterns.

Observe the similarities for yourself, I’m not dreaming this one:

Could only find information resources very remotely related to this subject online: a blog post titled, “Board games history: Knights Templars and the triple square.” They mention a game called Nine Man’s Morris:

For example, René Guénon, affirm that this symbol represent, in ancient religous rituals, a sort of holy centre where the world energies can reach the right power to involve a man’s mind on a mystic level.
The origins of the triple square are still unknown but without any reasonable doubt we can say that its symbolism is related to the centre and the balance of the world and the human spheres represented by the pieces of the game have to converge to find the perfect equilibrium.

Along with a peculiar page illustrating something called a Templar Cipher. And an online forum draws a connection between this Maltese-cross shape and the so-called Sator Square, a magic square operating under a sort of Sudoku-style logic.

So what’s the deal? What other secrets are hidden in plain sight in the game of chess?

Novice players, however, may forget to announce that they have checked their opponent. It’s each player’s responsibility to know whether or not they are in check, but having your opponent point out that you’re in check causes you to stop and “check yourself”. When in check (under A = attack), you have three options:

1. Kill the attacker (C = counter-attack)
2. Throw up a blocker (B = block)
3. Move out of danger (D = Defend)

In the rules under which I play and teach, the player under check *MUST* take one of those options. They can’t ignore the danger and move another piece. The rules of the game prevent that from even being an option.

But I’ve seen and heard of players take a different approach to a check situation. Say the player under check refuses one of the Three Options above, and moves another piece unrelated to that conflict. Under my rules, I would be like, “You can’t do that.” But under other rules, you’re actually allowed as the attacker to take the King off the board, to capture it or “snatch” it.

A rule I’ve seen associated with this style of play also has to do with field promotion of pawns. Typically, I play where any pawn reaching their opponent’s back rank may be automatically promoted to a queen (usually a queen), rook, bishop or knight. Most times I’ll use an inverted rook (which has usually been captured by this stage of the game) as a marker for Queen. But I’ve seen the variation where you can only be promoted to a piece which has been captured by your opponent. If no queen has been captured, you can’t get back your queen. I’m thinking of this as sort of a “resurrection” rule, where your pawn reaches the other side - its a sort of apotheosis. And along with its elevation to mastery or rulership, it revives, resurrects or resuscitates any dead companion. Or you could think of it like releasing a freed prisoner.

Either way, these are certain interesting philosophical/metaphorical points to consider amongst the esoteric knowledge clearly encoded within the game of chess.

And, lastly, we learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favorable change , and that of persevering in the search of resources.

Trying to come up with similar mnemonic systems to teach kids verbally encoded alongside the game of chess. Have been working on a variation of the alphabet where each letter stands for a part of the game, A = Attack, B = Block, C = Counter-Attack, D = Defend, and so on… which gives you a chance to teach specific concepts or principles associated with each point in the game and I’m hoping it can form a corpus of sort of sayings we can use to communicate with one another in the learning environment about playing the game.

One line I’ve come up with that really works with kids goes with when they move out a valuable piece without giving it any backup. As I capture their piece, I say something like, “Oh, you’re giving away free bishops? I’ll take one!” I know its working cause I heard one of the kids I taught it to using it in a game with another kid. Viral media, oral transmission of wisdom.

My thinking is, you gotta make these kinds of lessons memorable, catchy somehow, because otherwise they won’t be available in memory to inform the actions of the novice player.

Franklin taught that the game of chess taught the four following virtues:

1. Foresight
2. Circumspection
3. Caution
4. Perseverance

After praying to God that He give Idris easily a means to earn his living, Idris rested one day, bored and without work, and began to draw figures idly in the sand. As he did so, a stranger appeared before him and questioned what he was doing. Idris replied that he was simply entertaining himself, but the stranger replied that he was doing a very serious act. Idris became incredulous and tried to deny this, but the stranger explained the significance of the meaning of the figure Idris drew. He then commanded Idris to draw another figure, and upon doing so the stranger explained the meaning and significance of that figure. The pair continued this until Idris had discovered and understood the sixteen figures. The stranger then taught Idris how to form the figures in a regular manner and what the results meant, teaching him how to know things that could not be known with just the physical senses. After testing Idris’ newfound knowledge and skill of geomancy, and revealing himself to be the angel Jibril in the process, the stranger disappeared. Idris, thankful to God and His messenger that he learned this art, never revealed the art to anyone. Before his death, he wrote a book describing the art as Jibril had taught him, and from his successors.

The teachings of Tradition are not written down, but are lived and are handed on by the lives of those who lived according to its teachings, according to the example of Christ and the Apostles (1 Corinthians 11:2, 2 Thessalonians 2:15). This perpetual handing on of the teachings of Tradition is called a living Tradition; it is the transmission of the teachings of Tradition from one generation to the next.

Trying to use technological devices in a completely concrete but also utterly symbolist way these days. Aside from the oh-so-obvious computer as mirror metaphor I’ve physicalized in my perceptual field, I treated myself to that microphone and the speakers (one of which has an electronic candle perched at its apex). Why? So that I could better hear myself with, so that I could speak with, so that I can be heard with. It’s a simple trick: creating a very short feedback chain for me to monitor my own biosignals in the form of my voice. Biosignal comes out in the shape of words and sounds from my mouth. It enters the computer where its analyzed, stored, retrieved and played back so that I can hear myself in a new context: I can hear myself while I’m not speaking. We don’t usually do that. We usually speak and we’re lucky if we’re aware of what we’re saying, how it sounds or its impact on others and on reality’s expression.

spirit (n.)

c.1250, “animating or vital principle in man and animals,” from O.Fr. espirit, from L. spiritus “soul, courage, vigor, breath,” related to spirare “to breathe,” from PIE *(s)peis- “to blow” (cf. O.C.S. pisto “to play on the flute”). Original usage in Eng. mainly from passages in Vulgate, where the L. word translates Gk. pneuma and Heb. ruah. Distinction between “soul” and “spirit” (as “seat of emotions”) became current in Christian terminology (e.g. Gk. psykhe vs. pneuma, L. anima vs. spiritus) but “is without significance for earlier periods” [Buck]. L. spiritus, usually in classical L. “breath,” replaces animus in the sense “spirit” in the imperial period and appears in Christian writings as the usual equivalent of Gk. pneuma. Meaning “supernatural being” is attested from c.1300 (see ghost); that of “essential principle of something” (in a non-theological sense, e.g. Spirit of St. Louis) is attested from 1690, common after 1800. Plural form spirits “volatile substance” is an alchemical idea, first attested 1610; sense narrowed to “strong alcoholic liquor” by 1678. This also is the sense in spirit level (1768).

Recently, I was able to bureaucratically manifest a hard-copy application to the Maryland Master Gardeners program, a joint op with the University of Maryland, wherein they train a group of people to be community gardeners, volunteers with a state cert. After a convoluted process of communicating with people in various offices, getting and sending back in paperwork which - as far as I could tell did nothing but another hoop to jump through. In any case, these papers are potentially valuable to me, as they open a pathway to a change of lifestyle for whichever person is able to take the necessary steps. I, however, have already committed to another theatre contract. So I would miss half the classes. Bummed about this, but I realized I could pass the opportunity on to another person, or potentially many other people.

So what I did was, I gave the object its own imperative. What I mean by that is I labelled on the outside of the envelope: first, the contents; second, the requirements of the classes, scheduling, cost, deadline etc; third, an admonition that if the user was not able to meet the requirements of the classes, to pass it on to someone else who would be able to successfully make use of them. A little like a message in a bottle, I guess you could say. I’m hoping that if the person I gave it to can’t use it, that they will follow through on the instructions and give it to someone else - that the object and the intentions and actions which are encoded within it would be passed on safely through a “lossy” environment.

ENCRYPTED EQYPTIONS

Shakespeare especially employed the fool character in many of his plays: Feste in Twelfth Night, or What You Will, Lavatch and Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well, and Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, Touchstone in As You Like It.

Linguistically, I noticed the Puck/Punch connection. Maybe its spurious historically, but maybe there’s something to it. The notions that became fused in my head the other night had something to do with the masks of commedia being archetypal figures (patterns of human behavior and experience typified as characters with identifiable traits - lwas?) not just in the human psyche, but also of reality itself. That is, you have mythological figures, nature spirits, deities of the land and such which themselves, when you break it all down - look and act a whole lot like stereotypical theatrical characters, “masks”, personas or the Jungian “complexes”, patterns of experience expressed through behavioral traits. The god of the crossroads acts like this, the lord of the cemetery tends to act like this, and so forth.

True to his classic trickster ways, in the same vein as Puck, he’s constantly meddling with other people’s lives and causing mischief as he goes, which often get blamed on Pierrot. The story includes many of the classic characters from the Harlequinade in modern forms. Most obviously is Harlequin and his sought-after love Columbina, who is named Missy in this modern version. Pierrot, the third person in the love triangle, also exists here in full.

And from that, it somehow pasted in when I selected the above terms the following elaborations:

Pierrot
Pierrot is a stock character of mime and Commedia dell’Arte, a French variant of the Italian Pedrolino. His character is that of the sad clown, pining for love of Columbine, who inevitably breaks his heart and leaves him for Harlequin. He is usually depicted wearing a loose, white tunic…

Trickster
In mythology, and in the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a god, goddess, spirit, man, woman, or anthropomorphic animal who plays tricks or otherwise disobeys normal rules and conventional behavior. It is suggested by Hansen that the term “Trickster” was probably first used in this…

Puck (mythology)
Puck is a mythological fairy or mischievous nature sprite. Puck is also a generalised personification of land spirits. Whilst being an aspect of Robin Goodfellow, he is also hob and Will-o’-the-wisp.-Etymology :…

I think those are all bits pulled from Wikipedia. Anyway, I think there’s really something here, some thread to be unravelled further… Interesting to note that historically, commedia actors would assume (typically) one role (termed ‘mask’) for life, and would essentially *become* the embodiment of that character. It seems like an almost religious function, a throwback to an earlier form of organizing the human experience…

Most of the Snowballs you’ll see out in the field are white, but I got a black one, because I figured that black was more of a PC-compatible color than white. But either way, it works great, is extremely simple to use and the sound quality is spectacular.

I used one of these babies to record a couple songs over the summer with a friend. And the guy at Guitar Center said it was the best-sounding USB microphone in its price class. I’m sure he wasn’t kidding. The Snowball is also cool because it doesn’t take any batteries nor require you to plug it into anything except your USB port, from which it derives power. (More info on the Amazon entry for this product) It didn’t require any drivers to get it up and running in a split second on Windows Vista. I’m running it into an audio-recording program called Cool Edit Pro, v. 2.0 - which I’ve been using for years - and had no trouble getting it to work there either.

Right now, I’m going back through my “catalog” of songs written over the last two years, sifting through things I happen to still like that I’ve written. There are a few, anyway, but I’ve since moved on to more lyrically-complex work which I’m much more happy with and which reflects the direction I’d like to move musically. I’ve uploaded a batch of a capella spoken word recordings I made using my Blue mic, Cool Edit Pro and a cheap Acer laptop so you can get an idea of the audio quality possible with this simple set-up. Some of these cuts are a bit more polished than others:

1. A little bit of now
2. Gypsy Belle
3. Hold on
4. Judgement Day
5. Lonesome wrath of war
6. Radionic telegraphers
7. Take heart
8. Time’s empty promises
9. Ugly blessings

My roomate just purchased a far more sophisticated piece of audio equipment, the dBeat from Open Labs in Austin, TX. We’re going to be collaborating on some music which I’m excited about. Bitchin!

It seems that our talk of using one’s own mind to control another person’s body and actions is part and parcel of the “unforgiveable curses” in Harry Potter. Their use of the concept is under the name of the Imperio or the Imperius Curse:

Causes the victim of the curse to obey the spoken/unspoken commands of the caster. The experience of being controlled by this curse is described as a complete, wonderful release from any sense of responsibility or worry over one’s actions, at the price of one’s free will. Resisting the effect of the curse is possible, however, and several individuals have been able to successfully overcome it, including Harry and both of the Crouches, who learn to resist the curse after being subjected to its effects for an extended period. Harry describes the feeling of being the caster as controlling a marionette through a wand (although Harry’s particular experience is suspect due to his lack of commitment to casting Unforgivable Curses).

I guess we know now why the woman in that video is smiling, eh?

Sweet surrender, sweet bliss to have someone else at the wheel, Cyrano hiding in the bushes manipulating your strings…

“It was the most wonderful feeling. Harry felt a floating sensation as every thought and worry in his head was wiped gently away, leaving nothing but a vague, untraceable happiness. He stood there feeling immensely relaxed, only dimly aware of everyone watching him.”
—Harry Potter under the Imperius Curse

Apparently Harry uses the imperius curse “on a goblin and a suspicious Death Eater during their disguised attack upon Gringotts Bank” - whatever that means. I’ve never read the books. But you can find much more detailed (and dorky) information about the Imperius Curse here.

Image from Neurosky.

Aside from that, one of the things I’ve noticed is the lack of a strong connection on the world-wide-web’s keywordtopia, the Google search engine, between the keywords “scientology” and “biofeedback”. This is weird because one of Scientology’s core “technologies” (this is one is a physical technology, unlike a lot of other times when they refer to their various “tech”) is essentially a biofeedback device working - I think - with galvanic skin response.

The device measures electrical resistance between 2 points, and is essentially a type of ohmmeter. The two paths for current are along the surface of the skin and through the body. Active measuring involves sending a small amount of current through the body.

Due to the response of the skin and muscle tissue to external and internal stimuli, the resistance can vary. When correctly calibrated, the GSR can measure these subtle differences. There is a relationship between sympathetic activity and emotional arousal, although one cannot identify the specific emotion being elicited. The GSR is highly sensitive to emotions in some people. Fear, anger, startle response, orienting response and sexual feelings are all among the emotions which may produce similar GSR responses.

Scientology, apparently, restricts use of the e-meter to trained professionals, treating it as a religious artifact:

By inducing a tiny electrical current through the body, the device measures changes in the electrical resistance of the human body. According to Scientology doctrine, the resistance corresponds to the “mental mass and energy” of the subject’s mind, which change when the subject thinks of particular mental images (engrams).

Whether or not their explanation of the results of such a test is valid, who knows! But the fact is that there is *something* being measured. That is, the electrical resistance of the body is measurable, as are fluctuations within it. Some of these fluctuations seem to correspond to perceptual stimuli and perhaps cognitive associations stored somewhere within the hardware of the human bodymind. This is - I think - what Scientologists mean by “engrams”, though I’m not sure.

This comes from an excellent site with instructions on how to build a homebrew GSR monitor:

If abstract stimuli such as words are presented to the subject, the effect on the nervous system is usually indirect and due to the meanings associated with the words. Pictures or music may also produce galvanic skin response.

Psychologists have often tested the effect of words on subjects by presenting them one at a time and noting their reactions. There ore some words which nearly all people will react to and others which will produce no noticeable reaction.

GSR is just one example of measurable “biosignals” coming from the human body:

Biosignal is a summarizing term for all kinds of signals that can be (continually) measured and monitored from biological beings. The term biosignal is often used to mean bio-electrical signal but in fact, biosignal refers to both electrical and non-electrical signals.

Electrical biosignals (”bio-electrical” signals) are usually taken to be (changes in) electric currents produced by the sum of electrical potential differences across a specialized tissue, organ or cell system like the nervous system. Thus, among the best-known bio-electrical signals are the

Electroencephalogram (EEG)
Magnetoencephalogram (MEG)
Galvanic skin response (GSR)
Electrocardiogram (ECG)
Electromyogram (EMG)
Heart Rate Variability (HRV)

See also: affective computing for further applications of these concepts.

Neurosky
Emotiv Corporation

The Emotiv website has a telling bit of marketing copy:

“Experience the fantasy of controlling the universe using only the power of your mind.”

I’ve been seeing this kind of language a lot around the subject of biofeedback and neurofeedback-based computer interfaces, that the user is using “only their mind” to control the application. This is simply untrue! Biofeedback is completely rooted in the body! Whether you’re hooking sensors to your scalp or to your fingertips, it’s your *body* which is acting as the physical bridge to the interface.

It occurs to me though: in what way could biofeedback be “fake”? Whether or not it’s useful as a treatment technique, the basic premise is so simple as to be unmistakeable: make hidden biological processes available to an individual’s conscious awareness. The idea being that when one becomes aware of something, the option to actively change whatever it is becomes available.

Mr. Hintz is a foot soldier in an army of volunteer cartographers who are logging every detail of neighborhoods near and far into online atlases. From Petaluma to Peshawar, these amateurs are arming themselves with GPS devices and easy-to-use software to create digital maps where none were available before, or fixing mistakes and adding information to existing ones.

Like contributors to Wikipedia before them, they are democratizing a field that used to be the exclusive domain of professionals and specialists. And the information they gather is becoming increasingly valuable commercially.

[...] Google is increasingly bypassing those traditional map providers. It has relied on volunteers to create digital maps of 140 countries, including India, Pakistan and the Philippines, that are more complete than many maps created professionally.

Last month Google dropped Tele Atlas data from its United States maps, choosing to rely instead on government data and other sources, including updates from users.

In case you’ve never checked it out, a friend and I have put together a comprehensive amateur cartographic project related to historic monuments and memorials in and around Baltimore City. It’s very exciting to see these types of projects given the recognition they deserve in the mainstream media and from major corporations who recognize the value in data regular people are supplying!

After careful reflection she set up what in Germany is called a Tauschring — a sort of swap shop — a place where people can exchange their skills or possessions for other skills and possessions, a money-free zone where a haircut could be rendered in return for car maintenance; a still-functioning but never-used toaster be exchanged for a couple of second-hand cardigans. She called it Gib und Nimm, Give and Take.

And in regards to the state of her personal well-being since making her radical lifestyle choices:

“Life became much more exciting. More beautiful. I had everything I needed and I knew I couldn’t go back to my old life. I didn’t have to do what I didn’t like, I had a more profound sense of joy, and physically I feel better than ever.”

She now lives a week at a time in spare rooms owned by members of her Tauschring, and does menial chores in exchange for living accomodations.

Her entire material world is now contained in a single black suitcase and a rucksack. No photographs because, she says, “I don’t need them”.

Though there is a decidedly different bent to what this woman is doing, elements of her voyage remind me of the traditional journeyman brotherhoods dedicated to mastery of a particular craft or trade in Europe. While mastering themselves and their craft, they travel from town to town as itinerants, working in the shops of many different masters, carrying their possessions in a simple sack like a hobo or bindlestiff:

Young men and women who join the societies have normally finished their apprenticeship years in their chosen trade, and use the three-year journey as a bridge to attaining their master level. In the past, this was the only way to progress as tradesmen.

The journeymen are required to travel for exactly three years and one day, and during that period they must agree to not venture within 50 kilometers of their home town. They must give up modern luxuries such as mobile telephones, and they are not allowed to pay for travel or accommodation, except in extreme circumstances. Instead, they must seek work from local businesses in exchange for their stay and passage.

Alongside these two examples, I’d also like to add another inspiring selection from the UK about a trio of young men who roamed the English countryside (in modern times) singing for their supper, sleeping on the doorsteps of local churches. This article is a favorite of mine! Apparently, these chaps have their own website now as well, A Walk Around Britain.

These three stories have a number of characteristics in common:

1. Travel is central to these lifestyles: being an itinerant or a nomad.
2. These people offer services in exchange for hospitality, in the form of labor or entertainment.
3. These people share their experiences and lifestyles with those they meet and interact with, acting as role models for alternative lifestyles and causing a ripple effect as other people see that functional and satisfying living “outside the system” is completely possible.

I’d love to collect more examples like these if anyone has them. Thanks!

Now I’m looking through forums, combing the web for other potential solutions to catastrophic human data failure. I’m surprisingly calm, pleasingly zen, about the whole thing. But I’m not taking the nihilist approach either, just giving up on my data completely. I’m trying to take the Realist’s Path: let’s open this thing up, take a look at it, tinker and experiment and see if we (me and the machine) can’t come to some kind of understanding on a purely personal level. Discuss this like reasonable beings.

Of course, on the back of the device is a familiar label: no user serviceable parts inside. Fucking around with this will void your warranty.

I’ve been reading stories about people more spiritually connected to their dataspectre who just can’t afford to let go. Seagate asks $700 at the low end for data retrieval. So sayeth the internet, anyway.

Maybe it’s the science-fiction writer in me, but this all has me in a futuristic mood. Take this and push the trend down the line of time towards increasing complexity: people literally storing perceptual feeds (live video and audio recordings which follow them their whole lives) into an off-site (non-local) storage facility. A storage facility made up of fallible human-built hardware run by fallible humans saving what’s certain to become our most precious commodity: human experience & memory.

When your entire personality is being copied and uploaded every so often, what happens when your hardware fails? What happens when your technicians suck, make a mistake and can erase someone’s entire existence from the Akashic Annals of Cybespace™?

This is why I figure, if not now, then maybe for those yet to be born: open that box, void that warranty. Figure out how to make it work and share your results with all the other real humans out there. And stop buying products from companies who mechanically, physically, electronically, programmatically or otherwise attempt to punish, reprimand or invalidate the consumer-user in any way shape or form. Expect change. Encourage innovation. Channel challenges. Rebuild, repeat.

Perceiving Centers

“God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.”

Sensorium: The totality of those parts of the brain that receive, process and interpret sensory stimuli. The sensorium is the supposed seat of sensation, the place to which impressions from the external world are conveyed and perceived.

The sensorium also refers to the entire sensory apparatus of the body.

Compare to theatre, from the Greek theatron:

The Greek ancestor of theater is the?tron, “a place for seeing, especially for dramatic representation, theater.” The?tron is derived from the verb the?sthai, “to gaze at, contemplate, view as spectators, especially in the theater,” from the?, “a viewing.”

So, what I’m trying to say is that in an immersive, ambient, ubiquitous, pervasive computing environment, you have a plethora of perceiving centers. Anything which either has or which could be connected to some kind of sensor - whether natural or artificial - becomes a point of witness, a place of experience, a perceiving center.

Perceptual Fields & States

A perceptual field, then, would be whatever is within perceptable range of a given perceiving center (ie, what could be perceived). A given perceiving center’s perceptual field could be described by its field state: what occupies the field at any given moment, what the center is perceiving or witnessing.

When it comes to perception and experience, field states tend to flux: they change over time. So you have sequences or chains of field states as action progresses.

* * *

Cue-to-Cue

Working backstage in technical theatre, I help to progress the action of the play by manipulating elements within the collective sensorium of the audience, the theatron. I do this through coordination with other technical staff members according to timed cues which are embedded within the script and action of the show.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a memory technique called the Roman Room Trick or memory palace, said to go back to ancient and medieval orators and scholars for remembering long sets of information. You’re supposed to step through, in your imagination, a physical place and “embed” along your route segments of the information to be remembered. Then, you can “walk” back through your memory palace and retrieve that information in sequence.

Working in a show is a lot like this: I have certain actions which are associated not just with temporal cues within the show, but which rely on my being within a specific part of the stage or backstage and using particular instruments or objects to help me achieve and action.

[See also: GPS walkabout, songlines]

Also looking at hobo signs, and trail markings of itinerant groups like the Gypsies (I’ve heard a special word used to describe the gypsy signs, but can’t locate it):

So, I’m thinking you could apply some kind of gestural, symbolic or other language to mixed-reality environments, where the symbols themselves become almost like functional programs which are embedded within rich datascapes…

More to follow - gotta get back to work!

When you go home at night
leave the fire burning.
Their resting is our remembering.

I feel like biofeedback will be an essential component when we really start seeing augmented/virtual or ‘mixed’ reality environment. Towards that, if anyone can find or knows of good articles online about the potential uses of biofeedback in augmented, ubiquitous or ambient computing environments (navigating complex information-spaces), I would really appreciate the recommendation. Thanks!

Through those experiments in combining and re-broadcasting massive sets of data as an “author” (perceiving center) I came to long for software tools which would make the process easier. One thing I began envisioning was a web-browser which worked laterally across chunklets of information. You’d have your regular browser options like right now, but then have the ability to circle a section of data, zoom in on it and navigate right from that sub-component directly to contextless information culled from other sources which matches or somehow elucidates further the selected data. Associative search. And then you’d have on top of that the ability to capture and transmit story-streams out of your browsing experience. A narrative history - controlled entirely by the user, whose rights are sacrosanct - which can be exported in any number of formats: video, picture streams, audio-files automatically sorted and collected, text descriptions of media reference points splayed out like a GPX stream through physical space.

This style of browsing essentially eliminates the need to actually go and visit a web-page on this or that domain. (though original sources can still be accessed as archival artifacts complete unto themselves) All the little bits and pieces are immediately culled and available without having to “go” anywhere. You get the gist of information this way. You feel the flow. You surf the web without getting covered with seaweed.

I didn’t really grow up with sports as a social bonding ritual in my family. So I never have really been able to tap into the sense of well-being other people seem to have engendered in their hearts through sports affiliations. Sports metaphors are always lost on me. When employers have tried to motivate my by appealing to my “team spirit”, the exhortations have fallen flat.

But what is modern sports if not operatic, ballets of coordinated human action and the simple aesthetic joys of pure beautiful movement? To on the one hand glorify the more classically-recognized performing arts and to villify on the other sports and sports spectacles as somehow unworthy of special study would be foolish given the nature of the undertaking upon which I have embarked.

Here’s what I’ve learned about sports though, just from factual observation at the one or two Orioles games I’ve been too - coupled with other experiences of mass spectacles, dance clubs, parties, concerts, etc. People have some inbuilt needs which relate to our being, at heart, basically just big monkeys. We need special monkey times.

Special monkey times basically means that we need to be able to get together in a big group and yell. We need to be able to see each other at big inter-tribal gatherings and smaller clan-specific occasions, compare ourselves with one another, show off, lust after each other and so on. Dancing, getting wasted, cheering. It’s comforting and refreshing to be able to surrender your individual identity into that of a huge group. Have you seen the videos from Denmark, of the starlings or some birds forming a tremendous shifting cloud of aerobatic intent. It’s the most mathematical thing I’ve ever seen. I felt like I was looking into the future, the first graphical depiction of what the internet really is. A bunch of beings coming together for some common purpose, even if that common purpose is only coming together and its benefits are strictly practical and utilitarian: trading and reproduction (a kind of trade).

Sports and huge public spectacles, then, give people a chance to do that, to fulfill our basic needs as special monkeys in a weird and sometimes way-too-civilized world. We need to see people being able to bash the shit out of each other. Putting it into a protected, stylized ritual context helps to teach principles of the prevailing order and create a mechanism whereby people can blow off dangerous monkey steam which otherwise might explode in disruptions and disturbances of other kinds.

Haptic response is a component of robotics as well. It’s the system of sensors and feedback which tells a robot hand not to squeeze a glass so hard that it shatters, but makes certain it holds on tight enough so as not to drop it. Proprioception is connected somehow to this in the human body.

Connected closely, no doubt, to the Rota Fortuna and the Cosmic Machine, I’ve seen with eyes closed. It governs repeatable patterns, processes and functions, especially those which recur according to a cyclical (wheel-based rotation) pattern.

One of the set pieces we carpenters were tasked with the construction of by our scenic designer was that of the mythic instrument of death: the guillotine.

“Ol’ Red,” I’ll call her now, for the sake of anthropomorphizing this created object, this constructed actor in the parlance of Eileen Blumenthal’s spectacular puppetry book. For the guillotine itself was a character in the story. “Madame Guillotine” is exhorted in song by the revolutionary masses of the chorus. A spotlight illuminates her exalted presence onstage as her blade descends to sever head (Reason) from shoulders.

Ol’ Red was painted red by us after a photo found on the internet of a historically re-constructed guillotine somewhere else - in a museum I want to say. Red for obvious reasons, I should say. The blood you’d be spilling would stain your raw lumber anyway. So may as well paint it that color. In cases like this, excuse my pun, it can be best to go with the flow.

The machinery of the guillotine itself was completely functional. You could put your head into a stock made out of wood and have an angled blade rapidly descend towards your neck. Except we never had a real blade. We had a quarter-inch piece of luan with a sheet of siding cut along an angle to simulate the old theatrical French blades of the revolutionary market square. Ours couldn’t sever a head, assuredly, but it could inflict a nasty flesh wound.

So we carpenters built in fool-proof (or actor-proof, as is sometimes said in the biz) wooden stops to arrest the descent of the false blade several inches above the actor’s tender neck. It meant you did’t achieve the satisfying illusion of the blade coming all the way down for a nice chopping effect. But it’s theatre and sometimes fake ends up being more real. No one wants to have deal with an actor whose head has actually been chopped off onstage. Unless, that is, your stage is the world and you just threw down the aristocracy with mass theatrics. Then it might make sense.

Charles [Ludlam] wanted to do a quick-change act and Irma Vep is a quick-change act. Charles was a magician as well. He was into magic and into the Magicians’ Society and not into giving away how jokes are done. He was so into that - he had such an ethic about these magic tricks, sleight of hand and so forth. Quick change is, in fact, sleight of hand and we got really fast at it.

The best part of it is that each of these sorts of technical challenges is unique. You’ll apply a basic concept over and over, but its specific execution is always slightly (or vastly) different. Mostly this means you have to experiment. You might not necessarily know exactly what the best way to do something is until you actually attempt to do it and you get a sense for what succeeds and what fails spectacularly - in that way that only live theatrical accidents truly can.

The craft of technical theatre is an excellent place to learn and to apply mathematical and scientific concepts in an extremely practical manner. I wish that I had this sort of education as a child. I’ve heard the Montessori system is largely geared that way: lessons are geared around a student’s central guiding interest. Math and science applied to teach kids about dinosaurs for example, how big they were, what they would have eaten. I never considered technical theatre at all as a possible career before I just sort of fell into it. It’s harmonizing so many diverse things I’ve chased after or grown up alongside but which I never really saw how they all fit together.

Thanks to technical theatre, I now approach problems differently. I look at the required function and seek out the simplest #whatworks strategy to accomplish it in reality. The essence of science: experimenting with something until you get it the way you want it, instead of giving up or never making an attempt in the first place. In that way, science is a methodology of striving, an exercise of the will upon the field of reality.

That’s not to say that the occult or the paranormal isn’t real and doesn’t exist. My own experiences in both point towards the contrary, though I’m still not able to nail down - and probably wouldn’t want to at this point - the exact boundary-line between the *psychologically* real and the *actually* real. I just know what my own perceptual system tells me. It delivers information about the behavior of other perceiving centers and existential patterns. If we had the instruments, we might be able to reify things which today are only occult or paranormal. As ambient computing melds with synaesthetic biofeedback and artificial intelligence, we might begin to see such things reveal themselves before our very eyes.

But until then, I’ll take any day the falsity and illusions of the theatre where we don’t have to wait around wondering or asking for proof of something intangible. We can see it happening before us. We can build the machines - the deus ex machina - to make the impossible possible, if only for a moment. And that moment, served with right intention and right action - informed by Beauty, Truth, Love and Grace - is probably good enough.

Just read something in an excellent puppetry survey by Eileen Blumenthal about there having been families of puppeteers in China who passed down “secret manipulation techniques.” Theatre, it seems, is often a family business - most probably on account of the all-consuming nature of the craft. It sucks up every last morsel of your life.

What’s the connection between opera and Bohemian Grove? I’m sure Stanley Kubrick didn’t simply dream these elaborate scenes of decadent Venetian masked-style carnivalesque entertainments for the super-wealthy. The rites of Baal, of Jabuhlon. These are just guesses, but a master mason told me once about a celebratory puppet show performed during an initiation dinner. The rites at Eleusis, Skull & Bones, fraternity hazing. Surely, Bohemian grove requires caterers, port-a-potties and event technicians. I wonder what they pay hourly?

But my point is, when you’re causing basically the same event to occur within time space over forty different times with roughly the same results, well it’s a different experience from every day reality where once will have to do. Get it right the first time, get in, get out, get paid and don’t leave your bag or your tools behind.

And plays are generally written to be performed many times by many different troupes. That’s usually considered the mark of a successful stage play: that it has endured and has been performed so many times.

But when we turn suddenly to the cinema, we see a different aesthetic taking hold. Most times when I hear about *yet another Hollywood remake* my brain just completely shuts off. It seems like the masterminds behind Tinseltown must have finally dried up all their new ideas. Endlessly rehashing the past.

Ultimately, there are only so many plots. One theatrical researcher claims there are only thirty six basic types with sub-types [See: 36 Dramatic Situations]. It’s a morphological approach to drama, paralleled in folkloristics by the Aarne-Thompson index of fairy tales. And it’s no wonder as the two fields are closely united: fairy tales and the theatre, images that loom up before us in our imaginations, writ large as shared spectacle. Look, this is what’s inside of us. Let’s parade it around.

Many playhouses have extremely restrictive rules around photography, sound and video recording within their spaces. Sometimes its a rule enforced by the actors’ unions or the scenic designers who created the illusion within the space in the first place. But I feel as though that might go a bit deeper - point towards something about preserving the holiness of the moment, of people communing together for some mostly forgotten shared sacred purpose.

Movies and television are different. They are the land of the dead in some way. Moments frozen in time which can only - nay, must! - be replayed again and again endlessly for all eternity. A celluloid hell, or a utopia if you’ve created a perfect cinematic work. And yet you can’t just walk into a movie house with a video camera and expect proprietors of those establishments to be happy. The holiness of the moment? Maybe the guardians of the lands of the dead. Don’t steal our secrets, asshole. Don’t look back, Eurydice.

What is acting? I mean it first in a theatrical sense, but am immediately thrown back onto the general sense of it. The way one acts within the world (that which is not the “stage”) is one’s behavior. We can break that word down: behavior. To be and to have. One’s possession of one’s own self. One’s awareness of the effects of one’s actions upon others. Acting. Having an audience. People see you up there. To them, you have the potential to become something that maybe you are or aren’t to yourself. I don’t have the experience within that world to definitely say one way or another.

But there is something I’ve seen in the faces of people I’ve worked with: people who I consider to be consummate professionals – whatever else they are, who knows. Do you ever trust an actor? Do you ever trust a non-actor? Hard to say. Judging people according to the similarity to their characteristics that of oneself, however common, may not always necessarily be the best idea.

Especially because, I think, something fundamental to that of what it is to be an actor is eliminating oneself to nothing. That is, on the one hand. You’re only eliminating, maybe, a part of oneself. And that only temporarily. And you become, then, completely this other thing.

Leafed through a book on puppets I got from the Enoch Pratty Free Library, noticed distinctions between ceremonial and religious puppets and sacred fetish objects and those deemed strictly “theatrical.” Those which have a sacred purpose are believed to have the power of embodying – of giving a physical body to inhabit to a spirit, an ancestor or a god. Theatre – modern theatre, anyway mostly doesn’t concern itself with such things nowadays. It’s more about: can you stay open? Can you get asses in seats? Are people laughing? Are people enjoying themselves?

You don’t worry about things like the enthousiasmos of the Ancient Greeks: the literal experience within oneself of an indwelling divinity. Whether that happens or not is up to the actors and those experiencing the production. It’s not brought up as a matter of course, as a rule of initiation for the neophytes into the order. But order, I believe, on some level theatre is and must always be. For it is a complex system, a tradition of what is and what should be. What has been and what will be. This is how we do it and this is why. This is what we know works and what should be avoided at all costs. Not quite the masons, but a guild, a craft fellowship mostly overlooked and almost outside of time. For the media – in all its variations - exists only in the imagination. Which is why the actor must reduce himself to nothing. In order to pass through that infinitely tiny gate, the gap between imagination and reality. The doorway is wide, but narrows as you grow closer to it. The few who arrive at its gate without a prayer on their lips. They may not know the words, the language or the ritual. But they find themselves before the Great Judge of the Audience and they kneel before its myths. The cue light is my god. Not my God, but it rules my experience of the moment. Would that I had a cue light and a stage manager and a technical director wherever I went. I would make so many less foolish mistakes and have such a clear path to follow. Stage master as psychopomp. Anubis, leader of the souls of the dead into the afterlife, the Land of Living Imagination. What do you want your life to become? What’s worth anything? People laughing? Who are they? I don’t know them.

I try to do it right now for myself and not for them, but to perfect the situation. This is what’s supposed to happen and I have the ability to make it beautiful, to be – you could say – an agent of god’s grace (maybe not God’s – but who knows!) for a bunch of people who paid twenty to forty dollars to see me get or not get right my small part in the night’s or the afternoon’s drama.

And if you’re in that Golden Room, that perfect state of being Within the Way, completely Of and Because the Moment, then the last thing you want to do is ruin the Rush of That Is Which Is Happening. Then and there. To be thrown viciously back into the real world of people being unprepared for the Realities and Eventualities which we all face moment-to-moment. Noone and nothing is perfect. Not even the stage with all its rehearsals and disbursals. Amd many they are and few with a moment’s rest!

* * *

Top of Show Pre-Sets

- Vacuum backstage area. Sweep & mop main stage.
- Unlock weapons. Get ear protection. Load clips. Prop pistols to stage.
- Test lights in mask.
- Hazer main switch to “on”.

Act I: Scene 1

- Turn blue running lights on after door slam @ visual cue
(Transition)
- Strike wolf from stage, close French doors @ blackout (warning: “killed the wrong wolf”)

Act I: Scene 2

- French doors blow open w/ stick @ cue light
- Put on costume. Center mask.
- Intruder break-in sequence @ cue light (warning: “that was Victor too”)

1. Switch “on” eye lights in mask. Step into SR (stage-right) door frame.
2. Step across to SL door frame
3. Push open doors @ glass break audio cue
4. Turn to look at B.
5. Eyes “off”, pivot and exit at shoulder tap from C.

- Intruder chase-across sequence @ B. exit
- Hand-off fake body to B. @ end of chase-across
- Remove costume
- Load clips into weapons. Chamber a round in each. Put on hearing protection.
- 3 shots fired @ cue light (warning: “Great Scott!”)
- 1 shot fired @ cue light (warning: “send your soul to hell”)
- 1 shot fired @ cue light (warning: “Lord Edgar needs me”)

Act I: Scene 3

- Hazer secondary switch to “on” @ line, “Sleep is dead”
- Puppet flies out on stage @ painting raise. As curtian closes, turn off eye lights

Intermission

- Hazer secondary switch “off”
- Replace wall panel
- Lower painted backdrop
- Set mummy case at center-stage
- Load mummy # number 1. Pre-set mummy #2
- Replace painting

Act II

- Main curtain open to half @ headset cue
- Pull drop to half position @ cue light
- Pull drop full out @ cue light
- Remove mummy #1 @ case door close. Stow off-stage.
- Place mummy #2 in case @ B. exit
(Transition)
- Pull mummy case to up-stage wall position
- Strike palette

Act III: Scene 1

- Remove mummy #2 from case. Tie case to wall
- Take rose from C. Hand off dulcimer
- Book case revolve sequence @ cue lights

1. Rotate on-stage to reveal C.
2. Rotate one and a half times to “off” position
3. B. runs through, one full rotation. Stop. Lock in “off”
4. Rotate on-stage to reveal C.
5. Rotate off-stage @ floor thud

- Pound on inside of mummy case after C. exit. Stop @ “you can hear her pounding”
- Intruder tapping on SL doorframe at “saw w/ my very eyes”
- Prep guns
- 1 shot fired @ cue light (warning: “Edgar, is that you?”)

Act III: Scene 2

(Transition into)
- Move hazer to center position. Hazer secondary switch “on”
(Curtain call)
- Curtain in @ headset cue. Curtain out @ headset cue.
- Crew bows after cast. Curtain in @ red light cue

Post Show

- Hazer primary and secondary switch to off. Return to fireplace position.
- Clean and lock up all weapons.
- Re-set for top of show (if matinee performance)

In any event, when you sharpen a pencil with a knife, you get a rough-hewn sort of point. This is all well and good for marking up sticks of wood, but I’ve been doing more detailed crew work for a live which has demanded that I change my pencil-sharpening strategy. It might sound trivial, but my stage manager ‘made’ me start using an actual full-on pencil sharpener to mark up my action sheet with cues and notes. I like to think of this in symbolic terms: that stage work and carpentry work demand two different types of sharpness, two different (but overlapping) forms of acuity and attention to detail.

I’ve been finding, working in theatre, that its the little things like this - most frequently overlooked - which point towards the biggest differences. Mimicking even small habits of skilled professionals puts you into the mindset and context of the work those people do.

“We don’t call them bullets,” the Fight Master explained. “We call them blanks.”

The difference is the projectile element. The way a gun works, basically, is that a firing pin is rapidly driven into the rear of a brass cartridge, causing explosive gas to be ejected from the casing. With a gun that fires bullets, the gases from the explosion propel the bullet down the shaft of the barrel. The blank firing guns we use, semi-automatic pistols, are different. Their barrels are plugged at manufacture and gases escape through the top of the gun.

The main piece I’m using is a Walther P22 S and looks like this:

The back-up, in case that one misfires and I can’t correct it in time for the next gun cue, is a Smith & Wesson SW1911 S.

All of my firing is done backstage according to a cue light operated by the stage manager who is watching the show in the booth at the rear of the house. She watches the action onstage and uses the cue lights to deliver timing messages at pre-determined points throughout the show. She syncs up the action on-stage with the technicians backstage and operating lights and sound. It’s a complicated enough job as it is, which is why on a show that involves the use of firearms, typically one person will be put in charge of the care of the weapons.

The less people who have access to weapons in a stage environment the better. The less chances for accidents and unauthorized use. Stage weapons, you see, still look like real weapons. Though the barrel is visibly plugged, robberies could still be easily accomplished with such a piece - especially if the weapon was fired. That shit is loud and shocking if you’re not ready for it.

I wear ear protection, plastic over the ear headphones I also use with power saws while working in the shop. The rest of the crew backstage knows to put earplugs of their own in just before we reach that cue.

At the top of the show, I get the guns from locked cabinets (blanks are stored separately) and load both clips. I wait until about 3 minutes before the first big gun cue comes up in the show, load both clips into their respective pistols, and chamber a round. That is, I pull back the slide, cocking the weapon, bringing a blank up into the line of action of the firing pin. The hammer is drawn back.

“Treat these as though they were real guns.”

Good advice.

Because, for all intents and purposes, it is a real gun. And what does that mean? A gun, if you look at it logically, is a type of tool. It is a machine designed for a specific purpose. And that purpose is not “killing” as a lot of people like to think. That purpose is to fire a round. If its a blank firing gun, firing a blank round is its purpose. If its a regular gun, a projectile round is fired. But either way, you’re utilizing the same set of behaviors and techniques when you operate the equipment. So, even though you’re not firing a bullet, you should act as though you are. Because if you ever use a real gun, and you’ve built up a set of behaviors based around using only blank guns that you know won’t hurt people, then you’re going to do a lot of fucking stupid and intensely dangerous things.

Main rule: never point it at anyone. Whether or not its loaded, whether or not there’s a round in the chamber or any in the clip. Even if you know for 100% certain there’s no chance of any projectile being fired, you *just don’t do it*. I’ve read theatre websites saying that you shouldn’t even fire a blank gun at someone on stage. You always are supposed to point it up-stage of them. Supposedly the audience can’t tell the difference. I don’t have any experience firing weapons onstage though, so you’ll have to accept that as hearsay for right now.

Second rule, you don’t hold the gun with your finger on the trigger unless you are in the act of firing. You rest your index finger on the metal part that comes down from the barrel and connects with the handle. That way, if you accidentally squeeze or something surprises you, or you slip or any number of a million possible variables, you don’t end up firing without intending to.

This isn’t just a good rule with guns either. We use it in my chess class. You don’t touch a piece on the board unless you’re going to move that piece. Once you touch a piece, you have to move it. Once you let your hand off the piece, you have to leave it there. No takebacks. In working with guns, that is compressed into the split-second motion of pulling a trigger. No takebacks. If you’re in a show firing blank rounds, you fire too soon or too late and you won’t be synced up with the action. If you’re out in the real world firing live bullets, well the consequences could be significantly greater.

At the end of each performance, my last responsibility is unloading and cleaning both blank-firing pistols and both un-loaded non-firing period revolvers used onstage. Since guns are precision instruments, machines built to exactly specifications, you have to make certain that you keep them under optimal operating conditions.

This is a subject I’m hoping to gain more experience in during my theatrical career. And I think gun safety is a great topic in general. Guns have this ridiculous mystique built around them (thanks, in part, to film incidentally!) that becomes almost superstitious. Actually learning how to handle a gun appropriately and effectively removes a lot of the untruths that are built up around the subject and teaches multi-level situational awareness, as well as an appreciation for fine machines and their maintenance. Nevermind the practical benefits of learning how to shoot, for example at a range, increases one’s ability to focus one’s will and action, being able to operate under conditions stressful (to our animal bodies) with skillful precision. A man who can shoot is a man who can hit the mark in Life in so many other ways. Used appropriately, it can become a tool for mastering yourself and harmonizing one’s actions and relationships. We must learn how to handle anger and violence, not through avoidance, but through channeling these natural instincts into socially-appropriate situations where we can be clear-eyed about our actions and motives.

Reminds me of a remark I heard recently, while studying at a nearby chess academy: an older lady was dismissive towards the game:

“Chess is a war game,” she said. An understandable viewpoint. The game, after all, depicts two armies lined up to do battle. The game of chess doesn’t encourage violence though. It replaces it. It channels it into an outlet where one can sit down, look at one’s actions and their consequences and see the results played out in front of them. They don’t have to get out there on the actual battlefield. The microcosm is right there in front of them.

Before I sign off, thought I’d share two of the better links I rounded up on the subject of gun safety in theatre. Enjoy!

• On the prop use of firearms written by a stage weapon rental company my summer theatre uses
• Guns on stage

Years ago I worked as a landscaper and gardener for a yuppie organic company in Seattle. Most of our work was what I would call “yardening”, as opposed to actually garden work. While we didn’t cut people’s grass (our crew truck never carried a lawnmower while I was there), most of what we did was plant maintenance, lots of pruning and cleaning up planting beds. When you work with the same basic types of plants many times across many different clients’ yards, you can easily start to see what kinds of conditions plants like. Does this one like full sun or partial shade? The plant will tell you the answers to questions like that by its behavior. But you have to know the signs. You have to understand its methods of communication. They may be different from ways you and I speak to one another.

Planting this spring with a friend, we had to figure out likely spots in the back yard to put in certain types of plants. I found myself moving about the yard, standing in a particular area with a seedling in my hand. My mind would go blank and images would arise. Images of other times I’d seen that same type of plant. Sensations of what that space was like, light levels, moisture, the conditions of the plants I worked with.

While it’s hardly foolproof of a method (some seedlings I put down had to be moved later), it points towards something larger about how the human mind works, how our experience of life is organized. When you work within any given domain of knowledge - whether its plants, or something like chess (another hobby of mine - not to mention a part time job as afterschool chess coach) - you start to develop a lexicon of situations. Typical patterns or configuration of events, actions, behaviors, etc. This and this tend to go together. That and that tend to go together. While it may not be a causal connection, necessarily, clustering is a powerful organizing function with many applications.

In working with plants, it provides you with a vocabulary of how to care for, work with and steward living things. In chess, you start to see the same situations over and over again. Pawns lined up like this. Rooks and bishops cornering each other like so. And you learn how certain situations tend to play out. The difference between simple pattern-matching, however, and actual wisdom and experience is profound, to say the least. If you’re just seeing the same things come up again and again in your experience, and you’re playing through with the same tactics and methods you’ve always used in those situations - well, you shouldn’t be surprised if the same results also show up. Moral of the story? You’ve gotta change what you’re doing to make something new happen.

“In ancient Greece any man who had been supposed erroneously to be dead, and for whom in his absence funeral rites had been performed, was treated as dead to society till he had gone through the form of being born again. He was passed through a woman’s lap, then washed, dressed in swaddling-clothes, and put out to nurse. Not until this ceremony had been punctually performed might he mix freely with living folk. In ancient India, under similar circumstances, the supposed dead man had to pass the first night after his return in a tub filled with a mixture of fat and water; there he sat with doubled-up fists and without uttering a syllable, like a child in the womb, while over him were performed all the sacraments that were wont to be celebrated over a pregnant woman. Next morning he got out of the tub and went through once more all the other sacraments he had formerly partaken of from his youth up; in particular, he married a wife or espoused his old one over again with due solemnity.”

From the Golden Bough

I really don’t want any magic mumbo-jumbo in the technical documents produced by the aeronautical engineers who are trying to work out how a 617 ton Airbus A380 will actually get off the ground and stay off the ground in a controlled manner for the duration of its 9,000 mile flight. That’s just not funny or helpful. Same goes for the civil engineer’s bridge, the politician’s environmental action plan, or the prostate surgeon’s procedures.

Magic and animism works well-enough for me as a way to describe the quirky personality traits of a cranky laptop, for example…

And later on in the conversation at that site comes another tidbit:

I was at Ubicomp and apart from being pleased that people were talking about animism and magic (things I’ve been looking at lately), I was initially a bit surprised at Sterling’s strong stance against it. Then I interpreted his criticism, as you explain, as being against the use of magic as coersion. His point is that that there’s enough history of the developers of technology cloaking the functionality of technology for there to be concern that animism and magic as a metaphor would make it too easy.

Interesting subject. Would like to collect more quotes and resources on this subject if anyone has anything to contribute! It’s in research for an article on ambient computing I’ve been asked to write.

“Under this metaphor, the computer is populated with little people (LPs) who are specialists at particular procedures, and “hire” other LPs to perform subprocedures. LPs are normally asleep, but can be woken up to perform their task. Whenever an LP needs a subprocedure to be run, it wakes up and hires an LP who specializes in that procedure, and goes to sleep. When the hired LP finishes executing its procedure, it reawakens the caller. A “chief” LP serves as the interface to the user, accepting tasks from outside the LP domain and passing them on to the appropriate specialists.

[...] The little-person metaphor has been quite successful as a device for teaching the detailed workings of the Logo language.[10] Sometimes the model is taught through dramatization, with students acting out the parts of the little people. Not only does the model provide a good tangible model for the otherwise abstruse idea of a procedure invocation, but it turns them into animate objects, allowing students to identify with them and to project themselves into the environment. “

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about especially European folk customs which are related to at least the spirit of Halloween, or at least to dressing up and acting foolishly. January 5th, the day of my birth, is Twelfth Night in the Christmas season, traditionally associated in England with the practice of mumming. Mummers dressed up (and still do, where the tradition survives) in outlandish costumes and perform a dramatic scenario related to the mythological slaying of the Dragon (evil, darkness), by St. George. Stock characters are typical to mumming, one of several elements the tradition shares with the Italian commedia performances. Mummers would don their costumes and disguises, get tremendously boozed up, and - so the stories go - appear uninvited at the homes of lords and nobles to crash their parties with impromptu performances of their ritual folk custom. The proper response was to give them food and drink, and maybe a small cash donation. Afterwards, money gathered would go to a big party put on by the mummers, to which they would invite their victims/audiences. {See also: Wren Day}

From a blog called Transpontine:

In January 1414, a plan was put in place to use mumming as a means of overthrowing the state with a focus on Eltham Palace, where the royal family was spending Christmas. The abortive insurrection was associated with John Oldcastle, a former friend of King Henry V, who had embraced the doctrines of the Lollard movement and been imprisoned as a heretic in the Tower of London before escaping. The Lollards criticised the wealth and corruption of the Church, anticipating the later Reformation.

In 1414, it was proposed to use a Twelfth Night Mumming as a cover to seize the King and his brothers at Eltham Palace. However the King was tipped off and returned to London. When the Lollard supporters gathered in the following week in St Giles Fields (near to the current Soho area) they were routed and many were exectued.

The Saturnalia was another inversion festival which the Romans practiced around roughly the same time of year, if a few weeks earlier. In it, social roles were inverted (however temporarily), where slaves and masters would switch places, etc.

It was a time to eat, drink, and be merry. The toga was not worn, but rather the synthesis, i.e. colorful, informal “dinner clothes”; and the pileus (freedman’s hat) was worn by everyone. Slaves were exempt from punishment, and treated their masters with (a pretense of) disrespect. The slaves celebrated a banquet: before, with, or served by the masters. Yet the reversal of the social order was mostly superficial; the banquet, for example, would often be prepared by the slaves, and they would prepare their masters’ dinner as well. It was license within careful boundaries; it reversed the social order without subverting it.

The John Canoe or Jonkonnu parades of West Africa, the Carribean and parts of the United States bear a striking similarity to this particular vein of folk theatrics:

Essentially, it involved a band of black men–generally young–who dressed themselves in ornate and often bizarre costumes. Each band was led by a man who was variously dressed in animal horns, elaborate rags, female disguise, whiteface (and wearing a gentleman’s wig!), or simply his “Sunday-go-to-meeting-suit.” Accompanied by music, the band marched along the roads from plantation to plantation, town to town, accosting whites along the way and sometimes even entering their houses. In the process the men performed elaborate and (to white observers) grotesque dances that were probably of African origin. And in return for this performance they always demanded money (the leader generally carried “a small bowl or tin cup” for this purpose), though whiskey was an acceptable substitute.

Closely allied with these traditions were the charivari or shivaree, ritual events in which community members appoint themselves as correctives against what they consider to be anomalous or aberrant behavior. Consider also the “rough music” of 18th and 19th century England.

Rough music is noisy, masked demonstrations usually held at the home of the wrongdoer, involving the banging of frying pans, saucepans, kettles, the rattling of bones and cleavers, the ringing of bells, hooting, blowing bull’s horns, and utilizing any other kitchen or barn utensil with the intention of creating a cacophonous noise to the discomfort and lingering embarrassment of the subject.[1] During a rough music performance, the victim may be ridden upon a pole or donkey, and his crimes may be the subject of mime, theatrical performances, recitatives, along with a litany of obscenities and insults.

Of course, lynchings and activities of the Ku Klux Klan fall pretty squarely into this last category as well, so the whole thing is necessarily quite a mixed bag. Fascinating subject though, regardless, the notion that there is some kind of holy power associated with a masked and costumed mob of people. {See also: Devil’s Night and Mischief Night} Interestingly, in the Carnival season of late Renaissance Italy, masked men were not permitted to carry weapons of self-defense, as they were considered to have revoked personal responsibility by wearing a mask. That is, if you can’t be recognized and identified, you can’t be held socially responsible for your actions. That explains, in a round-about fashion, why all the local 7-11’s and Rite Aid stores in the area had hand-lettered signs asking patrons to remove all hoods and masks before entering the premises.

“Smart games and toys work by adding enough complexity to their behavior that their actions are no longer predictable, which users then accept as part of the fun. With AIBO, Furby, Musini, and video game AIs, we — the users — cede our desire to predict the actions of our technologies in exchange for more “entertaining” behavior.”

I know what he’s talking about is a bit different here, but the thing this immediately makes me think of is how annoying this sort of thing would be in real-life situations I find myself in. For example, what if I was using a screw-gun, a hammer, or a knife which was capable of acting in unpredictable ways? The outcome could be hazardous, to say the least.

Of course, he’s not talking about all devices working this way, just some and some only sometimes. He says, later in the article, “…user experience design will have to be more sensitive to respecting, creating, maintaining, and selectively breaking expectations.”

Parallel to the practical stuff, I’ve been - as you may know - engaging in heavy historical, cultural and theoretical research relating to the domain of theatre and folk theatrical traditions in particular. I’ve got a never-ending list of books coming my way from the Enoch Pratt Free Library, which I have been assiduously annotating with stickies, then copying down quotations onto note cards for later use, and photocopying longer passages. Over the course of two months, the direction of my research has begun to make itself plain simply on account of the types of information I have gathered this way. The path reveals itself the farther you walk on it.

This past Monday morning, I went on a free historical tour of Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre down on Eutaw Street, lead by the docent there, an older man full of information who was plainly in love with the Hippodrome and the institution of theatre itself. We even managed to get a couple of ghost stories out of him, which is always fun. Theatres tend to be full of ghosts. The Hippodrome tour fits in as part of the next phase of my Monument City project. In that, a friend and I completely documented the historic monuments and memorials around the city: photos, GPS coordinates, mapped locations, location notes and historical write-ups for each location. We’re planning to do the same thing for all the old theatres from back in the heyday of Baltimore Theatre - which, at this point, I’d probably peg somewhere in the 1880’s to 1920’s or so, kind of at the height of Vaudeville, melodramas and the touring circuit. The Hippodrome, newly restored as of five years ago, is kind of the crown jewel of this collection. It’s too bad that “union rules” forbade us from taking photos inside. (It’s funny to me how unions are invoked with this almost superstitious quality in circumstances like these…)

Meanwhile, I’ve been practicing my back-cross, a juggling move which I’ve been attempting for over a year which I’ve only recently been able to land. In three club juggling (though I guess you can do it with balls), you’re juggling your normal pattern when, suddenly, boom, a hand goes behind your back and you throw a club behind you catching it in your opposite hand without messing up the overall pattern. Devastatingly tricky, but my practice time is beginning to pay off.

In fact, everything I’m doing is starting to pay off, individually, and all the various streams are coming together quite nicely. It’s a peculiar life situation to be in, to be honest. I feel like I’ve spent so much time up till now striving to figure certain things out - which I’m now figuring out - that it becomes time to find a new way to define yourself, the quest, the struggle, the goals. Spent so much time developing my “personal power” or my “inner flame” which is now burning brightly… but what do you do with it? What do you apply it to? And how do you learn what the right application of force is, of pressure? So much craft work is all about developing “the touch.” The skill is in the hands, in using just enough, but not more than enough. Letting the tool do the work, having these things become extensions of not just your body, but of your consciousness, your will. How do you develop that? How do you teach others to develop that? I’ve been reading a book about the journeyman artisans of France, the compagnons, who go on an extended Tour de France - not the bicycle race, but a voyage of discovery and mastery of their chosen skill. One of the emblems which aspirants on this journey will wear is that of the Labyrinth. It symbolizes both the difficulty of the journey inward to find the treasure hidden at the center of the maze, but also the journey one must take back outward from the center in which one becomes able to transmit that wisdom and experience to others who are just taking up the journey afresh.

Technical Theatre Skills

I am well-versed in…

1. Stage & scenic carpentry
2. Working as a stagehand or stage tech for live events: moving scenery, running props, lightboard operation
3. Scenic painting, backdrop painting and portrait painting

I am a newbie but gaining experience in…

1. Lights and electrics: hang and focus, as well as basic residential electricity
2. Sound & A/V
3. Working as a production assistant/assistant stage manager

Performance Skills

1. I have acted bit parts in two shows, one at a regional theatre and one at summer stock.
2. Learned how to waltz for one of the above roles, and could probably pick up other steps pretty easily.
3. I can juggle up to four balls or three clubs, and am a beginner at partner juggling/passing.
4. Got a unicycle over the summer, but I’ve not yet mastered it.
5. I can play basic folk guitar, mostly rhythm work with some finger-picking.
6. I’ve gotten pretty good at that sort of old-timey talk-singing (”talking blues”) typical to performers like Woody Guthrie.

Research, Writing & Administrative Skills

1. Well-versed in writing essays, articles and creative non-fiction for the web using a combination of print/library sources and the web, supplemented by in-depth first-person interview and data collection.
2. I’ve been running a successful and profitable blog for close to seven years.
3. With a partner, I researched, wrote and developed the website Monument City, which is a comprehensive digital catalog of historic monuments and memorials in Baltimore City.

Computer Skills

1. Years ago, I taught PhotoShop, HTML, CSS, basic Javascript, ASP and PHP at a job re-training and placement company in Baltimore. Though I don’t code extensively anymore, I have an active understanding of programming and scripting languages and techniques.
2. Have worked as a graphic designer (print & web), web developer, coder/programmer and e-commerce associate at a variety of small companies around the US, along with freelance web development projects on the side.

Other Skills

1. I’ve worked extensively with dogs in a daycare environment, as well as on the retail end of the organic/holistic pet food and supplies industry.
2. I’ve worked professionally as an organic landscaper & gardener, and have installed several urban backyard gardens for friends.

Also attended a YouTube play festival over at the Annex Theatre, an independent arts venue and living space in Baltimore’s Station North Arts District. I liked the basic concept of the festival, that of staging YouTube videos as live-action performances. Some of it was beautiful, some of it was indecipherable, some of it idiotic in a good way, some of it in a bad way, and a few bits in it really had the kind of dramatic power in them that make you remember why you go to live events in the first place and don’t just sit around watching YouTube forever. My favorite was probably the one about the fat Mexican kid falling into the river and cursing his friend out, followed by the Neda getting shot one…

Watched also “Les Diaboliques” this weekend, along with Ingmar Bergman’s excellent (though not maybe as good as “Seventh Seal” or “Wild Strawberries”) “Tinsel & Sawdust.” According to the jacket of that DVD, Bergman kept up parallel and largely separate careers on the stage and with film. This movie tells the story of a traveling circus owner, his mistress and their miserably poor circus coming into a town where the owner’s wife and children now live. Some great stuff comparing and contrasting the worlds of circus life and “legitimate” theatre, as the traveling troupe and an established theatre troupe in the town get mixed up in all kinds of inter-character intrigue. Really worth watching.

Also caught part of the Penn State game this weekend at the bar. Sports has never been my thing, but I’ve begun viewing it lately from the traveling performer lifestyle/professional entertainment business and culture. There’s a lot to be drawn in historically, since most of the folk theatrical research I’ve been doing has been around festivals, fairgrounds and religious holy day celebrations. Sports and aesthetic competition have always been intertwined with such things - sometimes inseparably so. It will be an interesting fish to fry.

My next heavy research topic though will be opera, now that I’ve got a nice foothold into the domain, some of the terminology and a bit of a frame of reference worked out for it all. In the meantime, I’m doing a historical tour of the Hippodrome Theatre tomorrow as part of Free Fall Baltimore, a city-wide thing that includes many performances and events all through the Autumn (such as the Peabody Opera Potpourri performance I attended last week).

One of the things I really want to start looking at is audience make-up and interactions around operas versus other kinds of “lower class” performance rituals. Haven’t got a hell of a lot of exposure yet but have begun seeing some consistent trends: that opera audiences are usually quite talkative and vocal with one another about their opinions during intermission, etc. Maybe not more that theatre audiences, but definitely moreso than movie audiences. Which makes the adaptation of opera and some of the stage rituals to a cinematic establishment at times a bit odd or jarring.

On the homefront, I’ve begun work on a Halloween costume which I might be able to find other performative uses for. I finally snagged myself a maybe five foot plastic jointed skeleton from a temporary storefront that used to house a Circuit City but now sells fake blood and any number of cheap “sexy” Halloween costumes from China for $19.99. I was gonna replicate the clown being chased by a skeleton bit from a 1930s circus photo I found, but decided to modify it to fit in the front. My idea was to wear all black (including a facemask) and attach its limbs to mine in various articulations, thereby enabling me to make it dance or move around - like a marionette or other kind of puppet. I’ve been thinking of the “laughing skeleton” archetype you see in the medieval Danse Macabre/the Grateful Dead paraphernalia, or also in that awesome movie, The Last Unicorn - that skeleton which guards the clock that’s a portal to another dimension. You know what I’m talking about, right?

Tonight I modified all the joints, so that each end of each one has a wire run through it which then ties it to the corresponding joint, also wired. This way, if any of the plastic joints fail, the whole act doesn’t fall apart. Next will be putting together some kind of harness to give me the types of articulation I’m after for. I’ll post videos of all this when I’ve got it all done. Would be awesome to find a way to use the skeleton in a juggling routine!

Not everyone, I’ll wager, is at tonight’s event for the reasons I am. A skinny middle-aged Jewish woman stands up a few seats over from me. She seems to be the only person in the place giving a standing ovation. The second act has just ended (the night was three one act French operas by different authors). Scattered shouts of “bravo” burst forth from a cluster of seats down-house and to my right. I get the feeling people are just yelling that word not because they know what it means, nor because they feel that deeply about the performance. They’re yelling it because that’s the word you’re supposed to yell at the end of a fancy performance. They saw it on tv or something.

Not that I’m one to talk. My only prior exposure to a full-length opera before this has been on the big screen: Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” at the Charles Theatre a few weekends prior to this. At that, I ate popcorn and drank a coke. Does that happen at regular operas? I have no idea. I squirmed in my chair. I’m guessing that happens at operas not infrequently.

I am in the Friedberg Concert Hall, a lovely theatre at Peabody, probably unknown to many area residents. I would guess the seating capacity is somewhere over five hundred - and that’s without taking into account the balcony above me. The place isn’t packed, but it has a marvelous feeling of fullness. People are expecting something. This is a special event. Some people are dressed up. I waffle over whether or not it’s appropriate for me to wear a winter cap inside a theatre with statues of muses lining the walls. I decide its not okay, until I get to talking with the black ladies behind me during the first intermission about how cold it is in here.

“There must be an air vent above us,” one of them says. I agree and put on my hat.

During the second intermission, the Jewish lady is standing again, this time shouting.

“What’s she yellin’ about?” one of the black ladies quips.

She is yelling to catch the attention of the Asian pianist who performed the musical accompaniment for the second piece. Evidently she knows him and she wants everyone in the immediate vicinity to know this.

“Have you guys been looking at the words?” I ask my new friends after discussing the merits of the work presented this evening.

“If I wasn’t reading the words, I don’t think I could follow it,” one of them responds. “Can you tell what’s going on?”

“It just looks like a bunch of people walking back and forth,” I admit.

But that’s what I’m looking at, maybe what I’m looking for even. The staging: how actors move about in the performance space, their general physical attitudes, their gestures, their expressions, their faces. It’s a relief, for once, to not have to bother myself with what people are saying. Most of what people say - I realize while watching this three operas without understanding much more than a smattering of the tongue they were written in - simply doesn’t matter. In real life, there are all kinds of cues that go alongside conversation, fleshing it out into much more than just the words. In theatre, clever directors and players can amplify these alongside-helpers with the aid of props, costuming, blocking, etc.

But here at Peabody - a music conservatory, and a good one at that - what we have are singers. They are students and they have, most of them, been focusing most - I’m sure - on the musical aspects of their performances. A few are natural all-around performers, whose skills will only be honed through engagements with a live audience tonight. But for many, it seems that their bodies as instruments have scarcely been considered. I’m not talking about dancing, mind you - nothing so extreme. I’m talking about vitality, about lively movement, about passionate expression.

“It was a little wooden,” I admit to my new friend while miming ‘The Robot’ after she has revealed the first act wasn’t passionate enough for her.

I’m imagining what it would have been like to see some of the old commedia shows without knowing Italian. A little like this, I think, except a lot more physical action is my guess. The various stock characters have highly stylized systems of movement and expression typical to each character. Basic rules each one improvises around within a sketched out scenario posted before the performance. Musically, tonight’s opera is nothing like that. Two different animals. The music is complex and carefully composed. You’re supposed to be listening to the music, not picking apart the staging. I know that, but I can’t help it. I work in theatre.

It’s like that joke: how many guitarists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? You pick some high number like, twelve, and then say: one to screw in the light bulb, eleven to stand around and say, “I could do that!”

I’m no opera singer, I’m sure. Watching, I couldn’t help but wonder how one could take the basic story being pantomimed by the actors, wholly separate it from the music, and distill it down into a compressed nugget of dramatic action. I didn’t read the English translations of the lyrics, but I had read the synopsis in the program before the acts commenced. This gave me enough of a foothold into the plotlines to decipher the rest.

Copeau, among others, advocated for a long apprenticeship of the actor in which speech was altogether forbidden to him. Upon reaching such and such milestone and proving his mastery of pantomime, he was then allowed to gradually add in utterances of gibberish to punctuate his action - but not actual words. It’s a restriction which historically was levelled by censors of the French government against second and third tier theatres, forcing their performers to become only all the more creative an articulate as a response. The gibberish could become a kind of praying in tongues, when combined with the ritual attributes of pantomime, creating a kind of universal language of human experience which can be transmitted to any person regardless of race, age or orientation within the space-time axis.

This, I believe, is the bedrock of the underlying Great Work of which opera (itself meaning “work”) is but one of many shards broken off a tradition as old as humanity itself. Maybe older if we can be so open-minded as to peer into the animal kingdom and label performances such as mating dances and territorial displays as a kind of proto-theatre. Which I believe we can. We should be able to make a kind of theatre that even animals and birds and insects could understand. An opera that beings from other dimensions and galaxies would be able to understand and appreciate. Why not?

The dream was sad.
Some illusions are beautiful.

*This was a few nights ago now…