Mercuries #4: The book reincarnate
The material of literature is language and the material of performance is liveness. These improvised, talking performances explore the various tropes of public speaking, such as recitation, reading and introductions. They tend to grow from small gestures into weirder things.
The miracles of world-creating discord
Desire, the indefatigable disrupter, the sweet enemy of civilizations, the creator of worlds, the destroyer of philosophies, the pulse behind variety, the naked, animal essence, intensely alive, unwilling to negotiate with reason; desire, the pure current of the ego, the usurper of the heart, the piercing and poisonous arrow. How many names are there to bless desire with?
The sun: To build or not to build?
The history of philosophy can be reduced to a hypothetical conversation between the structure builder, Plato, and the artifice destroyer, Diogenes.
I must keep from breaking into the story by force
When I met Joy Harjo, I fell under the spell of her sylvan gaze. I felt I was before a kind of astrolabe that ponders the silences of heaven and earth. She read us her verses and sang, and her song caught up and drew together the invisible threads that tie us to those who came before us.
Who is Mercurius?
There are deep currents to the alchemical personality of Mercurius. Mercurius stands not only for political transformation, but also spiritual, philosophical and psychological perfection.
Mercuries #2: One hour in Vilnius
The material of literature is language and the material of performance is liveness. These improvised, talking performances explore the various tropes of public speaking, such as recitation, reading and introductions. They tend to grow from small gestures into weirder things.
The fifth element(s): Time, space and consciousness
The fifth element is the most mysterious of all the elements. It is the missing link that crowns and completes our earthly knowledge.
Air: the double magic of words
Words themselves are empty: hollow draughts of spit encasing air. In Tarot cards, the element of air is defined by swords that cut both ways. Words foster clarity or wreak havoc and self-harm. We should be careful how we use them.
Fire
As the yearly heat begins again, the city comes to life. With lockdown eased, the roads pulsate with cars, and the terraces of bars are brimming with drinkers and diners. Those eerie days of March, of emptiness and birdsong-haunted avenues, have started to recede. Perhaps all this will be a memory soon. How much normality will be restored, if any?
What the living do
I discovered Marie Howe through her book "What the Living Do" published in Caracas. A book that follows the threads of the illness and death of a loved one (her brother) and subtly connects us to the birth and transparency of all shadows.
Mercuries #1: Sculptural poetry
I'm interested in three dimensions and poetry, and what we might term sculptural poetry. Why is language two-dimensional when it is objective material? Why does this bleed into what we take the social engagement of reading, and speaking, to be? The head, the mouth, the tongue, the ears: objects in the world.
Earth
The month of May belongs to Aphrodite, the mother goddess, famed for love and beauty. This year the city seems to bless her more than other years. The shops, silent behind their steel shutters, announce a different kind of place: all sense of being in a hurry gone; nothing to buy, just days to live, without the noise and fuss of all those small invented worlds, the markets, schools, and mausoleums, competing for space with Mother Earth.
Water
In Barcelona, they say the spring begins when orange blossom fills the cloisters of the old monastery, just off Calle Hospital, in the old town neighbourhood of El Raval. This year, no such initiation. The gates are locked, the library closed. Only birds frequent that fragrant desolation.
The never-ending quest…
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