montréal QC may 2013

Montreal Circuit Est with Peter Trosztmer May 2013.

 

day one

I begin, Guy is witness, and Peter is audience.

We decide to begin and without much talking, we dive into the form.

Today, because of a weekend session with Linda Rabin, and the form she teaches called Continuum, my body and thoughts are moving with the word and the sense of

“potential” .  The mirror of a cell, I am thinking, as I am moving mirrors, literally around the studio: These mirrors are on wheels, and so become “wheeled potential with reflection” … I image the images I am pushing around, knowing what I am imagining is perhaps not quite exactly what they are seeing, but the potential is there, and their seeing is reflected back through my cells as I am moving.

I think of the motor of a generative space … the way we spark each other … the way a spark sparks … the sound and form of energy … of wheels rolling and friction and heat …

The voice present

The word present

 

The electricity of conduction:

(wondering about other channels)

 

Conducting

Conducive: making a certain situation likely or possible

Constance: a lake in southeastern Germany

Con con con

Confluence:  the junction of two rivers especially rivers of approximately equal width

 

At the end of the day I write down two things Peter said.

 

“staying lucid”

 

“slide apart a little bit at a time”

 

I also write down something from John Berger book, Bento’s Sketchbook, he is quoting Spinoza, Ethics, Part V, Proposition XXIII.

“We sense and experience that we are eternal.  For the mind no less senses those things which it conceives in understanding than those which it has in the memory.  For the eyes of the mind by which it sees things and observes them are proofs. So although we do not remember that we existed before the body, we sense nevertheless that our mind in so far as it involves the essence of the body under a species of eternity is eternal and its existence cannot be defined by time or explained by duration. “

 

(Our practice includes Peter’s knots. He knots things well, and knows about a certain kind of tying and securing. Peter arranges the space with both speed and specificity.

 

Inside a knot, writing.

Language, letters, the way we tie, are tied, learn to tie into, our language.

Am watching Peter moving slowly tying and untying himself into physical knots;

   slowly, ever so slowly, with his body … yoga is a practice of knots … tying and untying has physical history, has physical language, has physical shape, texture,

and posture.

 

How to untie the

knots of letters and words,

How to slide them into unknown shapes,

every letter is an unknown shape

until a word comes along

and ties it into meaning,

unties it into sound.

 

Grandfathers are fisherman

Fathers are sailors

Grandfathers can be gardeners

The story of our fathers and families and how we learn to tie and untie a knot.

 

Peter laying down in the sunlight underneath the hanging bar that he secured: Guy is throwing paper  … I could look at this all day … we have been practicing for

a very long time to arrive at this place; … everything in the vortex has arrived at

a still place, a bland place, a bright place, a vibrating place, a place with potential, with a desire to keep replacing that one person, to that exact place.

 

It seems like everything is secured and unhinged all at once, transformed and breathing with the warmth of the sun streaming now into the studio … in the aftermath as I lay writing,

I can hear the clock,

The traffic,

The noise of radios and the doorbell to get into the studio.

 

Unhinging creates, can be a coincidence, can alter a path,

or

secure the knot,

and the boat will stay close to harbour.

 

We are urban hermits, moving our stuff around in the studio.

 

Peter tied a yellow string around the paper on the table.

He balanced on the bars and he hung from them.

He told us the story of his grandfather.

Lake Superior is his favorite Great Lake.

Guy tied himself to the bar much later on.

Peter was ready with a knife to cut him free.

 

Knife

Knot

Knowledge

All the k’s are silent

 

How does a knife and a knot tie your knowledge into silence?

How do I understand what is blank on a page?

How does the lazy carpenter come to save us all?

How does craft cut through bullshit?

And how are we all sailing towards another language?

 

Here now in the middle of a mighty secure structure, paper strewn, objects suspending and

knots of memory,

hold it lightly.

 

Again I write down what Peter says, as we read to each other at the end of the day.

 

“ Knots are emotional”

“ Lin has a grenade”

 

Guy appears from behind the paper

Immediately I imagine the force of something hidden/then revealed,

The white page looks right now like a pyramid,

And Guy’s one finger appears, flesh against page

The embellishment of a gaze,

The way a wild animal appears

Out of nowhere, we are talking about

  seeing a bear, a coyote, an iguana, even and yes, a raccoon.

 

The imprint of a body close to a page and pushing yourself against it,

Wrapping yourself in it,

Touching pages someone else has already passed through

 

The memory is

 

A direction:

 

 

Guy is standing up on a pole, touching another pole,

Our bodies get stretched towards different distances …

I am telling Peter’s story, not the one on the streetcar,

 … it is the one about the solitary camping trip …

 

how a story is told … with many parts hidden, a story

reveals its own time, secures itself with what is said and

not said;

parts are there and parts are missing,

I love missing …

 

Once again

We write the room into a fury of various stages …

The pages turn like a sphere

Or a sun,

burning through window light,

And campfires

And how we sense embellishment.

 

Guy finds something I wrote in a corner of light on a page,

He reads it out loud …

…….

 

Sutra in yoga means thread …

threads of light

of voice

of water

of pencils

of pens,

the thread of your distance is what secures me.

 

(At the end of the practice looking into the room … a paper sculpture formed from Guy’s body looks like Josef Boyce from his days with a coyote.)

 

 

 

 

Guy and I meet first at Laika Café and Peter picks us up and takes us to the space he is presently working in. It is a remarkable site in Griffin Town and was used to burn coal to create steam for downtown Montreal, and was also used at one time as a stable for horses.

It has a very old concrete floor, and brick walls, a high ceiling, with thick wooden beams supporting it all. The space is triangular.  There is a  huge wooden barn door at one end and inside this huge door, is a smaller door for going through, smaller.

 

Peter likes to move.

He likes to move himself in space.

He also likes to move things around in space.

He has good placement, and

stillness with an edge, like a shoreline.

 

I put on overalls with suspenders, Guy puts on a garage mechanic suit, Peter puts on something similar … and we are ready in our work clothes.  The space is old and dark and filled with parts of things … Peter has been emptying out the space, some objects, some have been transformed into sculptures and occupy the floor, or are suspended from the ceiling … it looks like a medieval art gallery.  The space is raw.

 

We begin.  I am in the witness chair… Guy is very space sensitive. He begins in the space rocking, gently back and forth, as if on a boat?

 

Guy’s hands go to his head, just away from and slightly in front of his ears …

His hands vibrate and wave and signal a state: the room sets sail…

The room launches from the shore

We are out at sea

Peter’s grandfather/father is a fisherman

I sense Peter can weather a storm

I sense he likes to go far out

 

We are all adventuring into the waters of many past waves in time …

The texture of horses,

  and winged creatures …

The walls have measured us … in spider’s webs and crumbling bricks …

They compress us back, with an undertow of memory and electricity and steam and manufacturing …

Work

We are working with the space and the space is working us

The most invisible threads of conversation seep through these walls

 

We are approaching their wavelength

We are saying hello

“Hello”

I actually say hello.

I am standing at the top of a staircase, directly in front of one of the brick walls,

My ear is pressed into its crumbling …

You answer

“Yes”

“Hello” I say, and

“How far away are you?”

“Just down and to the right”

“About 8 meters”

“Not far”

 and I say,

“How to get there from here?”

 

Evening is falling

We are going towards

Night; my hand goes towards a light

 

(this reminds me of the Tom Waits song with the line “ what’s he building in there?”)

 

A long steel rod has a light bulb,

A metal chandelier with iron and rust hangs at one end of the room, a beacon, and

A winged creature is flying and has captured something closer to the middle, and

A teeter/totter,

Balances and measures the edges of danger with a body …

 

You help Guy and I to fly …

You show us ways to be higher up …

You say once, from higher up, “ I wish you could see it from here”

 

My my my

 

The wheel with the mast

All three of us:

Walking counter clockwise on this wheel/ship

Conducting waves,

Following motions of space

The energies between the objects; creating electricity

The damp cool air grounding

The charges between us …

I feel profoundly alone and singular,

Like when in nature,

The enormity of the objects around me … the history of their placement

Stills me and I listen …

When I listen,

My skin

Picks up the frequencies of where you both are in the space …

And I feel less alone.

 

The informal showing

 

It was the shortest most succinct practice we have done together.

We introduced ourselves and the practice of Rewriting Distance.

We all spoke briefly, and Peter spoke about inviting us into his space.

We offered Peter the choice of where to start.

Peter brought the paper from the work we did in his space in Griffin Town.

He wrapped it up in a string, and tied it with knots.

Guy arranged the space.

I brought the letter Catherine Lalonde had written to Guy and I that morning and

Slipped it into the pile of papers.

 

Peter chose to begin at the writing table, writing.

He wrote on single 8 by 10 sheets of paper,

Dropping them to the floor when he was done.

 

I was in the witness chair, and eventually

I entered and began to read out loud

From the papers he was dropping to the ground …

 

It was the story of a school bus trip to Montreal, he was late, and missed the bus.

But/and he was determined to find his way there, so we all took up

 … our way to there, with a story of a trip, a travel,  a childhood, an open door, a

weathering, thunderstorm, a cradling, and a securing.