(Preface: when I was asked to review this, I initially felt like my response to the show would have to be measured. Targeted. Each carefully crafted word and paragraph would have to say something measured, careful and significant about each part of Selected Verses. I wanted to honour the issues, individuals, characters and themes explored, and I thought to do that, structure was paramount.
But after hearing about how the show was curated and its nebulous process of creation, staging, and many iterations of chaotic additions & subtractions, I realised that the essence of each piece and of the show couldn’t live in such careful and measured responses. The aspect of mental health that always resonated the most with me was how it resisted the imposition of structure; how, despite our attempts to categorise it and name it, our individual and collective experiences of it will undoubtedly be incomprehensible and unexplainable to another.
I realised that as much as I wanted to think about my response, the truth of my own personal response and how I truly wanted to respond to it did not lie in structure, in grammar, in the logic of how words and sentences flowed. It lay in emotions, in the paradoxes we grapple with, in the answers that we can never find, and in the world of the unknown that overlapped across all of our beings: in logos, pathos and ethos.
For whoever reads this, I want you to read this with the knowledge that I sat through 8 different pieces, divided into 4 in the early afternoon and 4 in the late afternoon, and know that this response/these responses were my physical and emotional responses to the work of these beautiful artists, transcribed into language, as I sat there, in that same chair, for 2 consecutive shows. It was tiring yet illuminating. I have done my best within the limits of language to attempt to articulate how I felt.)
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Prologue
Death knows no want
it knows no need.
Its brother and lover wait at the gates;
The gates of Hel, its wolves of war, snarling still.
Our affair with this demon begins with moans
and ends in screams
It beguiles the dim-witted, the ken of the wise and the foolish
Alike.
It carries us through the madness of nine realms
it releases our burdens via unknown artifice
It begs us not for our attention,
for it has us in its throes, already still
Still and cold, as all denizens of Death are.
Obsession; the brother, the whore, the demon
it has many names
But it reduces us to shreds
To boxes and cubes and ill-begotten games.
Why games, you ask
For we play and entertain our fantasy notion
That Obsession serves us
but who serves the servers?
Weak; castrated; corrupted; incessant, insufferable; incurable; insane; insatiable; improvement-less; in arrogance; imbecile; whore.
I must have
Obsession
I must have
Death.
- - -
Mesologue
I waited.
I waited at the crossing, at the intersection, at the road that forked into a thousand paths, but still he did not come.
I open at the close.
Death does not come for those who incessantly wait at the gates of Hel.
Sometimes, when asked, we say that we do not wait.
But our obsessions, our choices, our non-choices, are our least redeeming qualities.
We wrestle with demons, at our own behest, we heed the voices of screams that tell us lies, that tell us this pain is right. That it is just.
But truly, truly, who is your master?
Who is your lord?
“My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?”
- - -
Epilogue: Journeys End, Journey’s Yes (JY)
/ˈɛpɪlɒɡ/; noun
a section or speech at the end of a book or play that serves as a comment on or a conclusion to what has happened.
(an epilogue also sometimes serves to give a nicer ending to the book than how it actually ended, to wrap things up and, in my opinion, give some form of closure to the reader who has journeyed through this world.)
“Our greatest fears lie in never giving up”
with tear-stained eyes I sat
I watched
The old winds whispered
the wide waters brewed
and the wind blew– what?
Like the calmness of Change
rushing over you
like the winds of change that blow away
Blow, blow, blow away
what rankles you
stifles you
imprisons you
gives you cause to cry
to not cry
to sing
not to sing
so I watched
and I waited
I waited to hear your cry of
love
of peace
of the sound of your voice
and your violet, tear-stained eyes
As I waited for them to tell me
My sojourn was over.
But journeymen lie
They always do
for they are the First
They were always the first
to sojourn, to begin
To begin the search for tear-stained eyes
And violet and amethyst and every jewel around
They begin with lies
and end in violet
And journeymen lie
They always do
And so journeys never end
With the Journeyman’s yes
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This article was first published on the author's Medium page.
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Read our interview with Matter.Less
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by 所谓工作室 Matter.Less
Date: 27 & 28 Aug 2022
Venue: Goodman Arts Centre
More about the show →