dance #44, the puppeteer IV x 2

The Puppeteer IV x 2

On Assignment: Day 2. Craft one dance in the morning when you wake, and another before you sleep.

Text:

“Now then, my good friend, you are in possession of all you require to understand my point. We see how, in the organic world, as reflection grows darker and weaker, grace emerges ever more radiant and supreme. – But just as two intersecting lines, converging on one side of a point, reappear on the other after their passage through infinity, and just as our image, as we approach a concave mirror, vanishes to infinity only to reappear before our very eyes, so will grace, having likewise traversed the infinite, return to us once more, and so appear most purely in that bodily form that has either no consciousness at all or an infinite one, which is to say, either in the puppet or a god.”

Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1814) “On the Puppet Theater” (1811). From An Abyss Deep Enough: Letters of Heinrich von Kleist with a Selection of Essays and Anecdotes. Edited, Translated, and Introduced by Philip B. Miller. EP Dutton.

6:05 a.m. A 4 minute dance in the living room to Kleist. On the two intersecting lines that reappear on the other side of infinity. Becoming the figure eight. At first my arms create a figure eight that pulls me forward and back. Then my body comes in with a wave that ripples from my hips upward. Then my body is in the figure eight, with my hips tracing the curve forward and back, side to side. Constant return. The figure eight returns. It has elasticity and pull. And spring. Where is Alice? I’m not sure. It’s still dark. I’m bleary. Half sleeping.

10:25 p.m. A one minute moving meditation in the living room. Transducing Kleist on “grace”. Grace circling back at us. Nothing is inanimate with us around. The looping figure eight, returning from infinity as our own vibrations exciting the world exciting us exciting the world. Recursive. From standing, a stillness, my arms are bouyant. Grace as expansiveness. Sensations moving through my tissues. I pull grace as a feeling through my tissues. Surging joy. Alice is asleep on the footstool. It is a cool night. -5 degrees Celsius. I’m exhausted from the intensity of the day.

~ by nmyers on February 3, 2009.