dance #250, imaginary flower I

Thursday August 27, 2009

Imaginary flowers I

“…a flexible or an elastic body still has cohering parts that form a fold, such that they are not separated into parts of parts but are rather divided to infinity in smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion. Thus a continuous labyrinth is not a line dissolving into independent points, as flowing sand might dissolve into grains, but resembles a sheet of paper divided into infinite folds or separated into bending movements, each one determined by the consistent or conspiring surroundings….A fold is always folding within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern…That is why parts of matter are masses or aggregates, as a correlative to elastic compressive force. Unfolding is thus not the contrary of folding, but follows the fold up to the following fold…” (Deleuze, The Fold, p. 6)

10:05 p.m. After conversations with Dorion on his insight into the potency of imaginary flowers, I pick up Deleuze’s The Fold and sink into a universe composed of Leibnizian materiality. Flowering plants as masters of the art of unfolding. A whole tree alive already inside a seed. Flowers are potent lures that pull us into dream-time where they can unfold in a realm of expansive possibility. They can dance themselves into being in our imagination, becoming pleated surfaces on which we write our own fantasies. Dreaming flowers we dream new possibilities for being. Imaginary flowers can bloom anywhere, including inside another dancing body. I dance an imaginary flower moving in front of the mirror to watch it grow, and then draw it. Materializing an unfolding? Alice greets me with a little nuzzle as I write. The day cooled rapidly. Heat falling fast.

~ by nmyers on August 30, 2009.