The Residency Day 3 - Footnotes

Welcome to The Residency. You are invited to be a resident artist; resident in your body, your home, your streets and parks, seas and dreams. Gather your tools, instruments and materials and begin.

Dye, the transformative power of plants.

Footnotes: voice notes made while walking, then transcribed, unedited.

I definitely don’t have an answer. All I know is that the new river’s flooded. Puddles lying. its concrete and muddy paths There’s something. There’s something beneath the wind. The pebble shrine is trodden in and kicked away. The wooden bench is broken, snapped as though struck by lightning. The rhythm is out of sync and in the spaces invisible words fall into my mouth. The trees remind me to stand up straight I filled my bag with everything I thought I might need. Can you hear the leaves beneath my feet between these words Maybe every street is a spell. Listening back, I realise That I poured gravy over everything. until there was no flavour left, except for the salty Confusion. Caused by a lack of trust. in my own hands. My feet are pens. Underlining my thoughts. Is that why they’re called footnotes? At the end of the New River path there was a roundabout. Is that where the water circle back on themselves? How does the water decide which exit? It’s going to take. Does it push or is it pushed? The leaves have turned red. And I’m wondering if I really was a witch in a past life captured and tortured, just as I feel captured and tortured. in my dreams. There really are no fences. And the wolves really are roaming. Even in the square curated gardens What if you don’t explain?

Rehearsals with Aki; finding our way in and out of a song.

The taiko shook my lips as I played the shinobue.

James Hillman on the invisible:

The great task of a life-sustaining culture, then, is to keep the invisibles attached, the gods smiling and pleased: to invite them to remain by propitiations and rituals; by singing and dancing, smudging and chanting; by anniversaries and re-membrances; by great doctrines such as the Incarnation and by little intuitive gestures— such as touching wood or by fingering beads, a rabbit’s foot, a shark’s tooth; or by putting a mezuzah on the doorpost, dice on the dashboard; or by quietly laying a flower on a polished stone.

All this has nothing to do with belief, and so it also has nothing to do with superstition. It’s merely a matter of not forgetting that the invisibles can go away, leaving you with nothing but human relationships to cover your back. As the old Greeks said of their gods: They ask for little, just that they not be forgotten. Myths keep their daimonic realm invisibly present. So do folktales, like that of the woodsman who dropped his ax and its cutting edge, going deeper and deeper to keep close to that smiling.