dance #253, imagination as flowering

Sunday August 30, 2009

Imagination as flowering

“In the heart of matter there grows an obscure vegetation; in the night of matter black flowers blossom. They already have their velvet and the formula of their scent.” (Gaston Bachelard, On Poetics and Reverie, p. 11)

Late evening. I read segments from On Poetics and Reverie to Dorion over the phone. Returning to this quote again after many months (see dance #11). Later I do a 5 minute sitting meditation followed by an unfocused warmup stretching taught muscles. Creaking bones. Then I centre myself. Looking for insight through movement. Moving to think. Finding tendrils of thought. The dance moves with ideas that, like little starbursting flowers, bloom fast and fade even quicker. The dance dreams these thoughts: Reverie, imagination as kinds of blooming that propagate rhizomatically. Materiality itself as a flowering, like a Leibnizian universe that is constantly unfolding. Matter and thought are both vegetal. Primed for growth and propagation. There’s a particular quality to thought movements that grow like leaves, or flowers, or fruits.

Alice purrs as she rubs her cheeks up against things. It was a cold, at times sunny, at times ominously grey day.

~ by nmyers on August 31, 2009.