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I didn't have a religion, and I didn't do team sports, and for a long time orchestra had been the only place where I felt like part of something bigger than I was, where I was able to strive and at the same time to forget myself. The loss of that feeling was extremely painful. It would have been bad enough to be someplace where there were no orchestras, but it was even worse to know that there was one, and lots of people were in it—just not me. I dreamed about it almost every night.

~ Elif Batumam, The Idiot

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Today, I realise that my mother and I know longer share anything approximating the same experience of knowing. Even though I believe there is a way - quantum?? mystical? delusional? - that we both exist together in the timeless plain.

There is sadness here. I read certain poetry and think she would have liked it.

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"We are human and we ache for meaning, we ache for a transcendence that reminds us that we are not in isolation, that we are in communion with each other and with the world ... At this moment, I need the novel and film and poetry the most, when it reminds me - hope against hope - that there is also beauty."

Christos Tsiolkas, quoted by Anna Goldsworthy in The Monthly, Dec 24 - Jan 25 Summer Reading Edition.

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“Hatto was a founding member of the celebrated Alban Berg Quartet, and was a passionate exponent of chamber music: music on a human scale, with a single voice to a part, ideally heard in the intimate setting of a chamber or a room rather than in a cavernous concert hall. As we played the Mendelssohn trio, trying desperately to impress him, he listened patiently and then gently lifted his hand for us to stop.

"Do not just count in this entry," he said, softly but emphatically. "If you just count, it is just business in music. Instead, this entry must occur at the exact moment you all feel it must occur."

And so we tried once again - staring intently at each other as if we could will ourselves into perfect ensemble - but again he raised his hand.

"There is a difference between the Ancient Greek concept of Chronos," he observed, "which is time that can be measured, and Kairos, which means the right time. Simply play these chords at the moment they demand to be heard."

As soon as we did this - as soon as we stopped trying to second-guess each other, but instead surrendered to that collective knowledge - our ensemble worked. And in a way, all of our work since has been guided by this notion of Kairos: of seeking the right, shared moment.”

~ Anna Goldsworthy, “Notes for a better world - on the beauty and necessity of music”. From The Monthly, Dec 2024 - Jan 2025 Summer Reading Edition.

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Shibata Zeshin, White Heron and Raven Flying, circa 1880

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Sigh. I hate the way fear feels! It has been all too often a companion of late - we are too well acquainted.

But; onward.

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“You’re in the hand of the sea. You are the pleasure of breathing it in. Within an order that does not feel, we are this insignificant disorder that feels. A thing to witness the sea.”

~ Marguerite Duras, “The Easy Life”

It’s like every fucking sentence in this book is magic; the distillation of the essence of life or something something.

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The house closed back up. You will no longer see their gazes gathered around the same fires. That's it.

Only I still exist with this knowledge.

What does it mean to know or not know something?

Which lesson from that knowing can untangle what is happening to me, face-to-face with this void that rises before my eyes in ever more immense waves, in ever more devouring clarity?

Marguerite Duras, The Easy Life

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“I lived off their expectations so much that in the end I was the one who tried to tear open this dreamskin with my nails.”

~ Marguerite Duras, The Easy Life

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“An improviser can have no secrets. Secrets impede the free-wheeling journey through the colorful tapestry of exposures. If the improviser is afraid to drop her guard because who she thinks she really is will be lured into the light and slither out from under the rock that she's kept so well hidden, then she's in trouble. However, with practice, she will see that her history, whatever happened, happened. There's no changing the past. But what will become evident is that the story she has constructed around an event or events is arbitrary, a result of her conditioning at the time. Now, curiosity and skillful awareness are getting the better of her. She can approach the "secrets" of the past with open arms, and is able to create different kinds of stories around them. She knows that every occurrence in her life has initiated her into the humanity of all who came before, and all who will follow.”

Ruth Zaporah, Improvisation on the Edge

This morning, with the help of my counsellor, I worked through some fears of the past. I buried those fears, confined them to imagined earth.

This evening, I read this passage. I know the stories around these fears will be with me tomorrow as I dance. Yet curiosity grows… awareness grows. Ruth’s words give me hope. And inhibition loosens its stronghold on the possibilities of each moment.

Only I can master my dance. My dance is the thing I can master (thank you Angus, for the gift of these poetic words).

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“Were we to regularly hold in our awareness the vastness of this heaving and fluttering motion, we might then fall into the inexplicable truth of our animal body, of the flesh and blood of what and who we are the walking and talking splendid performance of us.

We prefer to think of ourselves as cognitive, spiritual beings placed on Earth to do things, think about things, change things, or make things. One of the things that we make is music, a concoction of sounds that holds itself together in a timely order most usually involving rhythmic patterns that repeat and often coexist with melodies. We like music. It moves us. We like to move to it. We sway. Dance. Sing. Pray. Pull oars. Hammer nails. Shake grain kernels. We make music while we do all kinds of things.

Music is the body presenting itself outside itself. The rhythms and tones that hold our music together are not new or foreign. We have been living inside them forever. It's a music encoded within us, in the pulses, beats, waves, ebbs, and flows of our interior.

…

Improvising is about making music. Everything that happens is part of the music—the blink of an eye, a leap through the air, a word spo-ken. Each thing occupies a beat in the great sequence of everything.”

~ Ruth Zaporah, Improvisation on the Edge

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“Ruth knew even then what the Joneses know, that you can't know what you're going to need, that the best you can do is to make it up as you go along, get good at using what you have at hand, find the local shaman, know enough to ask her what's sacred here, what's poison, what's illuminating, then drink the magic tea and dance.”

~ Rinde Eckert on Ruth Zaporah, in the Foreword to Ruth’s book, “Improvisation on the Edge”

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“Theatre is at once a public, communal act and a deeply personal experience.”

~ Alison Croggon, Stage Plight (The Monthly, June 2024)

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“There were several formative moments that showed me what theatre could be: not, as Barry Humphries' Sandy Stone would have it, "a nice night's entertainment", but a living art that calls on the deepest parts of human consciousness. Not actors putting on funny moustaches and pretending to be someone else, but an enactment that is emotionally, intellectually and formally rigorous, striking with the force of beauty to shatter what we think we know.”

~ Alison Croggon, Stage Plight (The Monthly, 2024)

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Well. This adds a whole new layer to my interpretation of Brené Brown’s ‘turtle without a shell in a briar patch’ anecdote…

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“I do not find the hunger in me. But I can see it in the crowd. What is the difference between their hunger and mine? Is hunger, is rage, the attachment to one's own form? Is grief surrender?

I feel the space in my chest. I feel the stone in my cheek. I realise I am the winter wasp.”

~ Anne de Marcken, “It Lasts Forever and Then Its Over”

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“Remember the therapist who talked about congruence? It was a good thing to be congruent with oneself. Sitting on her neutral couch, I pictured myself as two lines not touching, running indefinitely through a landscape, bumping up perfectly over rocks and tracing the outlines of trees, always equidistant from each other and from the surface of solid things. Myself running in a line beside myself.

Even then I wondered, Wouldn't it be better to be incongruent?

To have the chance of meeting myself if only for a fleeting moment?

There is a much better chance of that now.”

~ Anne De Marcken, “It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over