MICRO-PERFORMANCE
The following text was written and performed by myself at The Imperial Pub in Toronto, January 14th, 2018 as part of a birthday celebration for Thomas McKechnie. Please note the italicized * and ** texts are from Thomas' writing. Specifically "...and the aeroplanes fall into the sea" and short play, "13 Definitions of the word Leave". To honour Thomas, I thought it best to steal his work and present it back to him.
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“You are a tooth in the mouth of your father, and the tooth in your father’s mouth is wrapped around a pistol and that pistol is about to go off.” *
happy birthday thomas. warning: i wrote some of this and stole the rest. warning: there will be no more warnings
TO START THIS COVER I’D LIKE TO GIVE YOU 13 DEFINITIONS OF THE WORD LEAVE**
1. to go out of or away from, as a place
2. to depart from permanently; quit.
3. to let remain or have remaining behind after going,
4. to allow to remain in the same place, condition, etc.
5. to let stay or be as specified
6. to let (a person or animal) remain in a position to do something without interference
7. to let (a thing) remain for action or decision
8. to give in charge; deposit; entrust
9. to disregard; neglect
10. to stop; cease; give up
11. to give for use after one's death or departure
12. to have as a remainder after subtraction
13. to have as a remaining after death
To go out?
or away
from a city cut with streetcar tracks
that seem to have become ruts overnight
and cut into clear relief my present state as I bundle
up in my walk away to workaday.
To flee To move To depart quickly, without warning or plan of return,
To tell no one, save _________To tell no one, save_______.”
who would you tell?
i’m thinking of an airplane or road trip kind of “leaving” here, not death.
raise your hand if you would tell the same person/persons regardless if it were travel or death?
all hand raising is, of course, optional.
i’m struggling with language these days. i’m struggling with narrative. people’s ability to read narrative. i’m also struggling with anyone who thinks anti-narrative is more authentic or even possible. i’m struggling with all declarations and questions. i’m struggling with this paragraph.
i’m struggling with confession. i’m struggling with the belief we have communicated at all, that we even desire to communicate with one another --i’m struggling with certainty, with ideas of justice, right and wrong--
i’m struggling with rhetoric of struggleRAMPANT, rhetoric of changeRAMPANT, with most rhetoric actuallyRAMPANT, and i’m also not struggling at all.
“You are a tooth in the mouth of your father, and the tooth in your father’s mouth is wrapped around a pistol and that pistol is about to go off.”
raise your hand if your dad has clinical depression.
raise your hand if your dad was in a band in high school.
raise your hand if your dad loves led zepplin. beatles. stones. hendrix.
raise your hand if music feels ‘safer’ than words. (sometimes)
raise your hand if you feel this is because music is decidedly lacking in rhetoric. (sometimes)
raise your hand if you’re familiar with the rhetoric of “safety”
raise your hand if you feel safe in the presence of wild animals.
raise your hand if you are an animal.
AND NOW A NARRATIVE ABOUT LEAVING.
about 8 years ago my dad digitized all the home movie footage his father had made when he got a super 8 camera. it was mostly a lot of forest and lake shots. his father, like many first time film camera users, OR ARTISTS thought more about how pleasurable it was TO FILM, than to consider what people might want to watch later.
HE liked to film the forest and lake, and rarely remembered to capture the life of his family around him. but. three hours of just still landscapes or slows pans of woods later... here’s something….
something from their home in the city. one of the only home movies in which my father appears, features him at 3 or 4 years old. he’s wearing exceptionally adorable child shorts and a button up short sleeve shirt with styled hair because it is 1959. he’s dragging a small suitcase behind him down the front steps of his parent’s house in etobicoke. he opens the car door and gets in the back. he is, of course, running away from home------but knows he needs someone to drive him.
Is there a way out of this?***
Is there a way out?
Is there a way out of this?
Is there a way out?
3 year olds have a way of knowing whether or not they’re living somewhere their souls can stretch out in.
Is there a way out of this?
Is there a way out?
His attempts to leave were thwarted. No one got in the car to drive him. Instead they made a video.
Thank god the internet was only for the military back then (not like now where it’s ALSO THE EMOTIONAL TOILET OF OUR TIMES), otherwise his actions would have been subjected to emoticons and lol’s from his mother’s social circle--presuming unhappy catholics raising children in mid-century waspy toronto would have indulged in digitized representations of feelings they had long since banished into their bodies in order to ferment into yet-to-be-realized stress related heart disease and cancer.
Is there a way out of this?
Is there a way out?
AND NOW, A NARRATIVE ABOUT BIRTHDAYS & AGING
Before the birth of a hero there is often a period of great stagnance. the couple can’t get preggers, the kingdom experiences a drought, a fire, a plague. the earth, and its people, yearns for spring, fertility, transformation. cobwebs cover our hearts and the corners of our minds.
and so when the baby is born in the kingdom, the king and queen rejoice! a banquet, or other such symbols of abundance, is held.
the guests bring gifts. ranging from beauty to wisdom to oils to gold to COVER SONGS and such. but there’s always the bitter guest. the witch or drunk uncle, who no one wants there--and they bring a curse because they are pissed that no one wants them there. and so the baby is cursed to prick her finger on a spinning wheel at the age of 15 and fall into death.
but some other guest, being a centrist, or just not super powerful, makes it so this death won’t be final, but a deep “death-like” sleep.
and when the king hears this curse he does what all moderate leaders do and has all spinning wheels burnt. he orders a kingdom wide purge that wreaks havoc on the textile industry and throws the land into economic turmoil.
spinning, being of course, a symbol of the weaving together of fate--the spinning together of our destinies….not something we can control, purge, or outsmart. we are bound to touch our fates, the act of which, hopefully “kills us” so we can wake up into our lives. transformed.
the king’s panic and tyranny also highly fetishizes the spinning wheel making it suddenly a rare and extremely valuable object--one of such wonder that when the now teenage baby sees one, she is instantly enthralled by the presence of that which is taboo and wants to touch it.
who doesn’t want to touch their fate?
and so she pricks her finger and falls into her ‘death like’ sleep...
now, i don’t know about you, but i’m pretty sure i pricked my finger on the spinning wheel of puberty when i was 15 and fell into a LOOOOOOOOTTTT of lying on the floor of my room with the door shut staring at the ceiling listening to “that angry sad music” (as my mother called it) over and over again before venturing deeper into the realm of SSRI’s and a lot of latent shit i didn’t yet know was coming for me throughout my 20’s. becuase at that time it was still….well...latent... my hormones surged and everything felt…...well, everything threatened to feel….to feel…?...to feel.
like the parents of any teenager, the mother and father in this kingdom had no idea what to make of their “death sleeping” child, so they tried to keep busy to hide their despair while the kingdom fell into disarray.
some of the original party guests decided the kindest thing would be to put everyone to sleep during this painful time so they created repression and when that didn’t work they created suburbia.
and centuries passed.
something happened to the boys i knew between the age 14 and 15. something died. something went to sleep.
and i wonder what it was that went to sleep, because the maiden in our dreams, the figure of so many stories, is not some terrible depiction of the helplessness of women, nor is this some cautionary analysis of kissing women without consent. fuck you literalism. you are killing us in the most boring way. the maiden within is the Soul.
this story is about the death of childhood and how adulthood begins with a wound --just like every other initiation-- and the journey we must make to wake those souls we put to sleep, buried deep somewhere inside ourselves.
somewhere long overgrown with weeds and spikey things. somewhere “safe” perhaps.
but society, having lost the thread of this story, having been asleep all this time (and taking things more and more literally), is getting fuller and fuller of folks who never make that journey.
and centuries continue to pass and we wonder why it’s hard to feel awake or alive, or that something fundamental, something we remember, isn’t missing.
"you are a tooth in the mouth of your father, and the tooth in your father’s mouth is wrapped around a pistol and that pistol is about to go off.’
when enough years have passed, it’s important to note that the son of a king must wake the maiden. the king ( a symbol of positive patriarchy--raise your hand if you’ve got a good flow of that surging through your life and then be a champ and hook us all up) a king must raise this son, a prince, a symbol of immanent creative action in the world. when the prince finds the maiden he kneels before her. the kneeling is important and is often left out of the story in order to favour the kiss. but the kneeling is important.
reverence before integration. spirit to spirit.
princes in stories often carry a sword in order to kill the negative forces that want to stifle, hijack, or hold the maiden back from doing her transformative work. we all have a prince, (just as we all have a maiden) but where is he?
who taught him?
what does he know?
how deep is he in the briar patch?
is he nearby?
is he equipped?
where are the kings, are they holding up their sons?
the world is waiting for our princes to arrive. to wake up.
he often carries a sword. but maybe he needs a gun.
You are a tooth in the mouth of your father, and the tooth in your father’s mouth is wrapped around a pistol and that pistol is about to go off.
I wonder how loyal we are to our parents journey’s, encoded as they are, in our dna.
that pistol is about to go off.
Is there a way out of this? Is there a way out?
that pistol is about to go off.
Is there a way out of this? Is there a way out?
Is there a way out of this? Is there a way out?
it begins with a wound.
there is no trigger warning.
it’s your finger anyway.
[BANG]
[BANG]
[BANG]
take the gun.
find her.
wake up.