going there

ill give away one of my secrets
artodyssey1.blogspot.com

 

chaos is survival

i was at a djembe show last weekend after getting some free tickets (industry), and the craziest thing happened.
everyone in the audience was given a djembe drum so they could learn to play along with the performers, and everyone more or less played at the right times. except these couple of dudes in front. they played whenever they wanted,  swatting at the djemebes with their clumsy american paws in direct competition with the performers' cheery island songs. there we sat, our eyes beaming in delight with that familiar childhood feeling you get as you watch decent performers in costumes sway and clap and mime the gestures for you to do "after them, one more time now!", and then there were these dudes.
the house manager, poor soul, gave the lead member of the Bad Boys in Front a couple of chances until his tantrum shaped the perfomance before our sore djembe hands. what im about to explain is, as my friends have since pointed out, pretty vulgar for an exit from a drum circle. Bad Boy goes from whisper to yell in one drunken swoop while telling the manager to get her face the fuck out of his face!!! the performers one by one stop playing until the soundtrack of the room is just filled with this guy swearing at us all, enjoying it a little bit with his arms raised and his middle fingers shooting toward the nosebleeds of the 100 seat theater. the rest of us are wildly banging our djembes in protest. he drunkenly lurches his heavy body out of his seat forward at the amiable MC and unshirted men in island garb that are populating the set, but before he reaches the steel drums, the performers rush out to back stage. multiple employees find a way to hold him back - holding him by every limb, separately - as an elderly lady volunteer usher tries to talk him down from his little toddler fit. screw you all, he says, you all should go to hell! :)
they remove the man, and we all start clapping, our adrenaline pumping like a thousand djembes.
what a bit of chaos, right? when's the last time anything like that happened in a theater, such a prescribed ritual experience? this was absurd - thrilling! - and we all got to riot on our djembes for the next hour and a half, so excited that we got the chance to see it. what a show, what a night!
we felt like the luckiest people alive, in that audience - and that's just it. we were alive. "oh, wow, something could have happened in there!" the uber driver says on the way home.
you're insanely right. we live in an insane world. 
luckily all of the instruments and humans were spared, but i guess what i tasted, what we as an audience experienced together, was a burst of survival. that animalistic rush we feel when something is on the verge of going terribly wrong but then nothing really happens, or we narrowly escape, and all of a sudden you can feel where your heart is in your chest and you think: great odins raven, im safe! whether that's straight downhill on a mountain bike or sailing a giant gust, or in a djembe concert,
the body all of a sudden feels itself alive. it does a gut check, a role call for all its parts working in order. there's a rushing current of energy as your senses awaken and assure you this is real, you're real, this world is unfathomable but you've gotten yourself this far, at least.
just as we enjoyed watching them, these Bad Boys enjoyed being naughty on purpose. we're so drawn to chaos, and to other people's chaos, that we couldn't look away. there's an inherent satisfaction in leaning into what we think is madness, an unleashed moment, and harnessing it by putting it into words. and even by *giggle* gossiping about it later.
chaos is the taste of survival and the constant state of it.

~~~

on writer's block

did you know that humor only works
when you sacrifice yourself first?
fact.

as an existential person i cant help but apply the questions of my life to this blog. what is its purpose? what does it contribute to creative fulfillment? what does it contribute to other life?

i think a lot of these questions - and perhaps a fear of audience - have held me back from sharing as much as i would like to. it's not really growth, just to age. you have to actively work at keeping your sense of youthful abandon, especially as a creative.

it dawned on me that without this output, im the only one in conversation with myself. people don't know what's going on in here, in this brain. the sunflowers. the music playing with the art. the smiles with strangers. the tears welling up with a song, surging. the meaning i see in just about anything.

for a while, too, i was thinking: what value are my words and posts when there are millions and billions of words, images and articles posted to the internet everyday? perhaps you, reader, can relate. i'm just contributing to the noise, i thought.

but there is a place for what i do, i must remind myself. from the start, my goal has been not on gaining readers, but on curating meaningful internet experiences - for myself, definitely, but also others. it's meant to be a respite from the noise, something you read late at night it's dark and you're in your room doing whatever and no one else is awake. possibly my favorite thing in the world is to experience - and express - the ways music and art and text engage with one another in my head, forming a sort of intersectional poetry. it's something you and i can get our thoughts lost in, and we don't even have to talk.

i cant go back and fill you in on it all, and i realize i dont need to - after all, wouldn't that just be noise? what's more important than recording everything is accepting that your life story is never all going to be in one place. digital tools certainly exacerbate feelings of disconnected storylines - you've got different ones on every fuckin social media platform you're on - but it's always been this way. our life stories have always been told by everyone around us, with us, hopefully.

once im gone, maybe you'll find my various journals and scribbles and iphone notes, my slew of unsorted images of artworks and personal photos, and make a story out of it. if you're reading this: oh, it's worth it. i rarely am what you may think!

in the meantime, i should probably wrap up writing about writing and just start writing!

julia ciccarone

~~~