Your evening merits being suspended in the tale that is the Little Bang Theory performance (as I was, last night at Theatre Aujourd’hui).

You, whoever you are reading this, if you’re in Montreal you still have a chance to see it.

Little Bang Theory’s current project consists of a sensually magnetic two-person dance (choreographed by Hanako Hoshimi-Caines with Louise-Michel Jackson); infused with a starry instrumental spectacle and Lhasa’s vocal soul; projected into March Hutchinson’s animated vestige of an antique childhood’s wonder as it unthreads in James Irwin’s myth, which sucks its audience outside of time.

And with that breathless mouthful, I mean to say that all of these elements wove together so wonderfully that I left the theatre with some friends, still absorbed with the creativity of the performance. I notice they’re performing again on Sunday, 14th of June at Sala Rossa. Go.

The creek's water stopped flowing
arcing to reach
outside its bed and up
against the pear tree,  Continue »

A triangle of trees were lassoed with tough ropes. Each trunk, encircled with a padded harness, held itself stoically to the ground. Two men bounced, wobbled, and periodically traversed the rope between trees with grace. One floppy, determined child tried. Outside the triangle of tightropes, a woman practiced spinning a large hoop in a series of tricks. Sometimes she jumped through it, which caused her to drop it. A man juggled, imperfectly challenging the play of gravity.

These people appear, unexpected but welcome in our park on a glowing 16° C day. The girl continued to prop one leg on the tightrope but she never managed to get both simultaneously above it. A passerby audience paused between accidents. We watched one of the men bounce his rope into a swinging surf which he managed to ride in place, his legs moving and body keeping to a central spot. That impressed. With practice, someday these will be performers and the passersby will sit in a tent applauding.

Last night I discovered I can taste through my fingers.

I brewed some tea from boldo leaves, green tea, and kombucha. While waiting for it to cool to a drinkable temperature, I passed my left hand through the steam. I like the downy accumulation of dampness, the almost-burn of heat. I relaxed my eyes, letting the focus blur with the steam passing around my fingers.

My finger tips didn’t just feel warm though, some other familiar sensation confused me. Trying to identify the sensation, it reminded me of the flavour I anticipated from drinking the tea. That’s how I realized my finger tips were tasting.

But that’s not possible I thought. I hypothesized different explanations. I hadn’t drunk any of the tea. Nevertheless taste and smell, I always hear, are closely related. I must have smelled the steam. I held my nose with my other hand, thinking this would end the sensation. But I couldn’t deny that the next minute, with my fingers hovering over the cup, I still tasted the tea.

What should I think of this sensation? The tea tasted pleasant both on my fingers and on my tongue. It’s subtle though, this new sense. Perhaps I’ve had this ability for some time without noticing. Perhaps it always blended so well with my sense of smell and tongue taste that I couldn’t distinguish. Or does everyone experience this? If it’s a normal aspect of touch that I’ve lacked for years–how haven’t I noticed?

As I sat back into the sofa to consider this, I put my hand on the cushion. It occured to me that the cloth on the sofa feels bland to the taste. I wished I had a creamy chocolate bar to hold. Will I recognize the salt of my wife when we walk holding hands? I’ll need gloves for the gas pump. Soap is worrying me. And if I suck my thumb, will I taste taste?

I jaywalked diagonally from one sidewalk to the other. At 7:30 in the morning traffic is light. But I hadn’t noticed others on the sidewalk. Except for a well-bundled family, which walked up the hill I was going down. A tall husband, wife, and their two children. The man made eye contact with me and said “Monsieur, monsieur.” I stopped and looked at him, realizing he’d ask me for directions.

People look at you a certain way, like a dog gazing up submissively, when they need directions. And pedestrians tend to be good choices: a man on foot knows his way through the thoroughfairs, back streets and alleys, and wherever else feet tend to go. Except, I don’t. I remember it in my unconscious gut and I can go anywhere by gut, but I don’t know how to explain this.

Once I tried. I confidently detailed instructions for an old lady… in a series of directions that had nothing to do with where she needed to go. I realized my mistake five minutes after leaving her. Worried, I turned back to find her but I was too late, she’d already gone too far for me to find. Now I usually apologize first and leave people to ask a more reliable source.

The man asked me in his inquisitive Russian accent “La Grand Central Station?” I wondered for a moment where that could be. The name sounded familiar but I couldn’t imagine a Grand Central Station. This time when I offered my “désolé” I really meant it. But as I walked off, I considered that I’d been to a Grand Central Station in New York. Had this Russian family come to the wrong place? Maybe I should go back and tell them that they need to go to New York? Then I remembered La gare Centrale. Good thing I have a policy about giving directions.

Redless black morning chimney mount;
a two-dimensional relief
stamped on white-blue sky.

With ventilated hat,
in brick composure
the ragged outline of domestic industry
stands upright, dormant

while altocumulus float beyond,
sunrise igniting their pink.

“Ugly! Eyesore! How could people think it was a good idea?” A giant slab of concrete in the middle of the outer edge of the park. For shame, city! This was no sculpture, I thought.

Monument between Parc La Fontaine and Sherbrooke

Why preserve and move the edge of a utilitarian-designed building to the park? If the rest of the building had been demolished, why save this? What a hoax this artist made.

Every day I passed the thing, monument of ugliness. Every day, for months, I felt the same about it.

The other evening though, I had an aesthetic transformation. Over the course of approaching it, passing it from the sidewalk, and reflecting on it, I suddenly loved the thing.

Between the park and the rest of the city–this monument. The side facing the city is straight, segmented like an uninspired, generic modern building. A corner of its simple, mundane concrete at a right angle.

The side facing the park is jagged and uneven. It looks like it was torn from a larger structure. Or intentionally left unfinished. It has a slice of blue paint running through it as well.

Could the straight, uniform side represent the city it faces, while the jagged side represents the “nature” it faces? The monument appears as though it’s part of a larger wall, surrounding the park and framing the divide between human-made structures, and those of the non-human, chaotic natural world. But let’s not forget that a park, no matter how much vegetation it has, is planned by humans and can hardly be raw nature. Of course, even the jagged part of the monument is human-produced so this fits the metaphor of the site. That’s how I decided I’d fallen in love with this piece of art.

In fact for several days, I admired the thing whenever I passed it. Finally, I noticed a plaque nearby. Why hadn’t I ever noticed it before? It explained the monument, a gift and commemoration, and nothing to do with my new aesthetic reading.

Was I impressed that this monument could eke its way inside me and strike that shift in my perception? Was it a function of time and familiarity? I puzzle with this. Or have I projected the aesthetic transformation on to it? Can I love it in spite of the plaque or does the plaque require me to go back to the beginning?

I got something the other day.
After a glass of x knows what
and four men had to haul the
logs out of the corner, we
all might say we got something—
But really, it was I, I got it.

It started when the king fell
over. "No way to play chess"
	I said,
		referring mostly to myself.
But I hadn't pushed him
and indeed not a single other
	game had finished,
	so they said. I saw a
	few pretty close to that
	viperously invisible path,
		which just grows .

That's why I thought, I'd go
chopping—chopping up growth and piling it somewhere to use later.
	someone writes redly in books about that sort of thing.

The leaves fell, big, while
	I chopped.

Soon kings slumped,
	their strong trunks
	chinked, their roots grappling
far underground, supporting
what wouldn't need support.

Or did the roots hold
Earth to its spacey sheets?

I stacked the logs for later
as I mentioned, in the corner, and propped myself
	at their base, unsure
who else had seen them;
so many.
I heard the kings whisper,
"That was someone else's
strategy."

Starting this project, I had no idea where it would go.

Yet on days like today, I joke that I’m almost there.

No doubt I’ll make it, once almost there won’t be.

Happy birthday, me.

1. Caught in a substance imperceptible to humans, like a spider-spun web (as their web substance certainly must be to insects). We go about our lives. One day Bill walks into the substance (the web) scarcely perceiving it. Months pass and he notices his struggle with increased workplace stress. It’s uncanny his desire for fried fat-laden food, ever greasier. Some people remark on his disinterest in physical fitness. Until the heart attack. People’ll say those elements caused the heart attack. But the elements didn’t. They were only indications of having walked into that invisible web—time experienced in a different scale from the predator—and the heart attack? The death bite. A possibility attested by the trap.

2. The air around my flesh, feels to me, indistinguishable from the way water around a fish’s scales, feels to the fish. I must constantly be wary of hooks.

3. God’s abattoir: Earth. Humans talk about an all-seeing, all-knowing, wise God. Of course, nobody understands why little Dana, the age-three tragedy of Brome, had to die of a particularly virulent flu. They’ll say that in God’s wisdom there was a reason. Marcus, age 102 on the other hand, lived a life of acme quality. He fell asleep Tuesday evening and never awoke. And the stutteringly handsome Vincent, back in the day, contracted syphilis—so efficient those sorts. God gets hungry. Or if not God, a few of God’s customers need nourishing. God claims it’s the most humane method of slaughter, which they believe. Humans get to go about living, relatively unaware of what’s in store. No one escapes Earth. But come time for a tender young dish, God readies the flu machinery. Customers demanding something aged to fashionable ripeness encourage God to dispatch more disease, swiftly and efficiently handling the stock.

4. Birdcall serves the ominous function of death siren. We get lazy, we humans. The birds singing, we enjoy or marvel. But there is one, always one designated per person. We let our guard down over the millennia. Birds know it. Birds stick around, calling, trilling, chirping, singing, etc. making us used to their sound. We lost our ability to hear only what we choose. We hear everything now, only selecting some things for consciousness. But we hear it all nonetheless! So there’s that one unique bird, paired with its person, just waiting for its moment. That bird may land or fly nearby. Maybe it’ll wait in a tree or build a nest by one’s home. The moment one hears its song, is the last. Hearing that sound affects one’s singular solo decrescendo into death. Do the birds cheer one another? Are birds satisfied or joyous in their duty? One must practise choosing not to hear one’s paired bird.

5. Waking and dreaming as states of life: the parenthesis between death and inverted potential. While the wakeful may arouse the dreaming, I’m anxious to encounter the counterpart of the wakeful in the inverted potential that accompanies my death.

Starting off in the distance, where the gelatinous ocean rose in spots and dipped in others, waves rolled. Each following another as it finally dispersed itself into the fine sandy shore. One wave followed another but each grew again in the same place. It was impossible to follow one and not feel it also somehow slipped back to where it started–rolling like stripes on an old barbershop pole.

She sat on her towel, partially reclining against her elbows. The paperback du jour (holding the misfortunes of an Indian orphan) rested patiently by her side. She’d read a quarter of it before inserting her bookmark, a fading taxi receipt. The sun beamed beautifully but not too hot. She chose not to go into the water. Even though she’d taken a dip before reading, she needed to stare a bit longer. Ocean air floated through her nostrils, surrounding her thoughts with particles of all that floated on the waves. Continue »