The Daily Dose

Today, which is the third day the new year, The ever-aspiring-and-always-failing-to-be Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words gets a fresh start by meandering for a bit. I might have a point, but chances are I don’t. I have a hunk of junk muddle of notions to dig through, a scrap box of imaginings to plunder, a kitchen full of half baked ideas to serve. I wanted to start the new year off with a bang of writing right on the first day. But life has been complicated, full of the quotidian odds and ends, Sturm und Drang drama and hours and hours and hours over the past month and a half busting ass on a major project while feeling guilty about not working on this and other projects.

After much frantic activity last summer, The Daily Dose rested for a bit. I did write a little, small scribbles, but I didn’t post them here. I’d like to think it was marinating, soaking up some delicious sauciness that will make your mouths water, but it might have been stewing in its own juices- six mouths of stale sweat. I will let y’all taste it and decide.

I needed to re-evaluate what it is I am doing with this particular practice of musings and scriptural interpretation. As I have mentioned before, I define scripture broadly and find inspiration where and when I can. Admittedly, I got frustrated because it seemed that only spambots read my writing, writing I spent a mighty long time on. Hours and hours and hours. People who were supposed to care or dare I say were obligated by the nature of their relationship to me and this practice didn’t read my writing. I know all the complicated reasons why my words were not read but is wounding. Being an adult means I get to suck it up. I hope to follow Badiou’s adage to “keep going” despite the difficulties, despite the various responses, including the lack of response, despite my insecurity about the usefulness or skillfulness of my work.

I finally installed the plugins that should rid me of the spambots’ pesky pestilence, but with their absence, I have to confront my sometimes overwhelming uncertainty about what it means to send out these eMissions (the writings, the Vermons, the live online events) to save the whole wide world and little old you into an electronic landscape mired, bogged, swamped, flooded, drowning in text and images and ideas and emotions. I am not assured that the world needs my works of words.

I keep doing this project because every once in a while, people will tell me how much it means and what it means to them. They may respond emotionally or intellectually or somehow a mix of both-ly, but it did something for them that they appreciated.

A part of me really does want to save the whole wide world and little old you, but because I realize that my vision for a better world is as imperfect as the next, I content myself with more the bittersweet pleasure- the joy of putting words together on a page or stage (live or electronic) to make a train of meaning, which may very well jump the track and crash, but also occasionally makes people feel less lonely in their emotional, intellectual, social, political, economic, artistic, religious, theoretical, psychological skins, now and again.

Today’s- getting closer all the time and coming out more often than before but as of yet, it must be admitted- not quite Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words is a mediation on live performance. I will look at specific words I encountered in specific performances that could constitute scripture. But I also am, in this moment and maybe not the next, willing to suggest that live performance is, in itself, a scripture we can parse.

I have started to go out again- to watch poets and spoken word artists declaim, to listen to musicians play, to applaud actors at the end of dramas and comedies. I had missed the gorgeous, dynamic, deep connection that is possible between performers on a stage and members of an audience. I love being in either position. I, cross my heart and hope to die, promise that I really do love performing in front of an audience. Bu I equally love being in the audience . . . watching . . . responding. (Have I ever mentioned that in pretty much any faux Kinsey Scale that you might devise, in which 0 means exclusively one position and 6 means exclusively the other, that I would be a 3, 9 times out of 10? I am a switch from top to bottom, and I am not just talking about sex).

Over the past couple of years, I have not attended many plays, music shows or poetry jams. I have gone to a shit ton of art openings, which are a species of live performance, if we define performance in an anthropological- performance-studies sort of way. I’d rather not. Occasionally at these events, there have been pieces that I might be willing, at a stretch, to call performance, but not very often and most of those times, I was the one performing. These days I seldom pass up a chance to spread the Good (and Not So Good) Words. I am trying to save the whole wide world and little old you, after all, so I have to seize opportunities to testify when they come my way.

It saddens me to admit that even when I do preach at these art openings, they almost never feed my hunger for communion. The connection with the audience-congregation is slippery, tenous. And my own experience as audience to art is down right frustrating. There is something about not being able to see/hear/exerpience a hanging on the wall or set up on a pedestal piece of art because of the clump of people schmoozing right in front of the damn thing that is the opposite of uplifting. I must confess, that too often, I end up wanting to slap people upside their heads so they get out their pain in the ass, not pane of glass, selves out of my way. I have found I prefer to see art shows before or after openings, far from the maddening crowd.

I prefer live performance to recorded ones or static art works. Performers- dancers, musicians, actors, comedians, poets, spoken word artists, storytellers, writers reading their work, jugglers, buskers, magicians, vaudevillians, etc. – ask audiences to close the circle and thus create a liminal space. There is something magical about what happens when the audience agrees to play, in a subjunctive tense, with the performers. In that closed what if we pretend this were this way it can be/could be/should be/would be/will be/had to be circle, we open ourselves This entertaining of (im)possibilities relaxes us, revives us, restores us, rebuilds us, recreates us.

I went to two very different types of live performance recently and both feed my hunger for some subjunctive tense. On the day of the celebration of the saint of Valentine, I went to ThirdEyeSpoken’s Valentine’s Show & Passion Poetry Contest, and then this past Friday, I watched Lars Din play some music at Tim & Terry’s.

Even if I hadn’t won 1st prize for the erotic poetry contest by rousing the audience to some passionate amen’s and awoman’s and then leading folks on a guided mediations in which it was possible for every single person in that room to have sex with one another at the exact same time regardless of gender, orientation or relationship status (single, monogamous, non-monogomous or celibate), even if I had not won 1st prize, even if I had not taken the stage, I would have had a damn fine time. Poetry, music, bad attempts at comedy, interpretive dance, storytelling, choreographed spoken word numbers, successfully comedic interludes and preaching all were presented to the audience like a giant box of chocolates wrapped up with big red bow.

Now, I am sure this would not be everyone’s cup of tea, but personally I love events like this. I enjoy laughing at the intentionally and unintentionally funny performances to be had at these sorts of things; both species of funny were in the house that night. I love being surprised by beautiful language delivered with a rough but moving passion. I appreciate how much courage it takes to get up on stage, so even when a piece seems a bit like a talent show act gone awry, I am entertained (and not just in a mean spirited sort of way). It did not matter that the skill level of the writers and performers varied. What mattered was the connection between the audience and the people on stage. It was a night full of memorable moments. We laughed, we teared up, we applauded, we cheered. We gave our attention to the performers; they gave us their time, energy and talents. This was a feedback loop of gifts- gifts that kept on giving and giving and giving.

I offer you a sampling of the night’s what if gifts. Wombats played at our feet and then tried to bite them. A Sapphic Apollo chased Daphne through the audience, touching but never capturing her. We savored five course love feasts. A lecturer with an interpretive dance assistant taught us that losing your butt to bears might be a bigger problem than losing your love.

Fun-fucking-tastic!

When I went to see Lars Din play, I was in search of a different sort of subjunctive tense. I didn’t want a frolicking caper; I wanted a melancholy joy. I don’t know that I need to say too much about why I go out to see Lars Din play, but if I tell that his music is kind of like Woody Guthrie square dancing with Leonard Cohen, dosie doeing with Charles Bukowski, then swinging some punk rock partners, while hoping Emily Dickinson just might give it the honor of her hand for the next dance, then perhaps you will understand why I go.

I did laugh out loud and hoot and holler now and again, but the core of my experience was a beautiful mournful ache for lost loves, for broken down dreams and for the shoring up of the sometimes shaky belief that another world is possible.

To directly quote one of Din’s what if gifts in the form of the song Smoke

We all will be where we can be/ as strong as vines around an old invasive tree/ there are no rules confining how we grow but sun and what we will/ as any chainsaw made by man is bound to choke and then be still/ as the sun dissolves the early morning chill.

I suppose that I can and do have this what if gift of an experience listening to a recorded performance of the song. But when the communion circle is closed by live and in the flesh imperfect bodies in imperfect spaces, performing and behaving imperfectly, the potential meanings, the what ifs and the emotional content are magnified, intensified. They become “as strong as vines around an old invasive tree.”

But then the show is over, and those gifts in a subjunctive tense are gone. Or perhaps, the what if gifts hang in the air like puffs of smoke pushed up by the passing wind from the smoldering embers of our imagined fire. Perhaps the scent of those (im)possibilities linger on our skins.

And so I say to you, in a commandment giving tone of voice, “Go out! Go out, I say. Go out and savor the subjunctive. Ask the scent of its smoke to linger on your skin.”