Perverse Curating

Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.

We begin with a table. Around this table, the family gathers, having polite conversations, where only certain things can be brought up. Someone says something you consider problematic. You are becoming tense; it is becoming tense. How hard to tell the difference between what is you and what is it! You respond, carefully, perhaps. You say why you think what they have said is problematic. You might be speaking quietly, but you are beginning to feel “wound up,” recognising with frustration that you are being wound up by someone who is winding you up. In speaking up or speaking out, you upset the situation. That you have described what was said by another as a problem means you have created a problem. You become the problem you create.

To be the object of shared disapproval, those glances that can cut you up, cut you out. An experience of alienation can shatter a world. The family gathers around the table; these are supposed to be happy occasions. How hard we work to keep the occasion happy, to keep the surface of the table polished so that it can reflect back a good image of the family. So much you are not supposed to say, to do, to be, in order to preserve that image. If you say, or do, or be anything that does not reflect the image of the happy family back to itself, the world becomes distorted. You become the cause of a distortion. You are the distortion you cause. Another dinner, ruined. To become alienated from a picture can allow you to see what that picture does not and will not reflect.

From your open attic window you can see no-man’s wood being painted red by the sinking sun, and you hear msieu colson of the ministry’s melancholy sheep bleating one last time before it disappears behind the stable door: and then you push your papers aside and go downstairs, just when the music master opens the door and together with his pretty wife lucette lets a little of that late red sunshine enter. He shakes his head in his music master’s way, and you hear him say:

I suppose you’ve been poring over your papers up there in your attic, writing about the world-of-today; well, I’ve misunderstood so many books already and I know that all there is to say has already been said; I’m not even talking now of ecclesiastes, of the faust-writers or the mad actor of hamlet… no, please don’t interrupt me, let me go on; do you really think that up in that attic of yours you’re going to gather greater wisdom than lao tse, or can you be more surrealist-erotic-simple-minded than the songs of maldoror? Will you sound human depths and heights more deeply and more highly than the demons in the brothers Karamazov, will you chase time outside time and space more ferociously than proust, or will you whip life within time and space more grimly that in the voyage au bout de la nuit? Will you be any better in depicting modern derailed man-in-a-crooked-society in his true condition as living and thinking animal than lady chatterley’s love? Can you play with words more soberly than Lenin, more naturalistically than zola, more symbolically than the bible? Can you possibly be more solemn and more infallible than the pope in rome, more fabulously immoral than the Arabian nights, more heavenly than the imitation of christ, more subtle and more cunning that the reynard of william-who-created-madoc; more tragic-rustic than nivardus’ isengrinus? And can you be more modernly, mangily unbelieving than tropic of Capricorn? or more romantically miserable than the sprawl of suburbia?

And when you hear the music master fall silent and see him press his lips together, you reply: maybe it is impossible to say anything new and better, but the dust of time falls on everything that has been written and so I think it’s right if every ten years someone else draws a line through all those old things and describes the world-of-today in different words.

Limitations, somewhat haphazardly imposed, are a great thing. You know the famous remark of Robert Frost about free-verse? That it’s like playing tennis with the net down? For me, the limitations… are playing tennis with the net up. If you erect one of these impediments to progress, you have to come up with a work- around, and the work-around often causes you to think in new ways about your subject. In a way, the impediments cause metaphor to happen, and I often suddenly think anew when I am forced into metaphor and analogy to say what I was going to say in a more direct way.

Marx was fascinated by capital, almost seduced by it. He marveled at its astonishing productivity, its vast accumulation of wealth. While denouncing its violence and inequity, Marx could still love capital’s productivity, which the revolution would deliver to the proletariat as its rightful inheritance.

It’s a feature of any kind of acclaim that it eventually leads to depression, disappointment, even to something rather like a hangover, a feeling of guilt.

At the time, the mid-’90s, the AFL-CIO was doing college recruitment, and big labor unions were going to colleges and universities talking about how they should organize. It was thrilling. It all culminated with the UPS strike in 1997 in Chicago with Ron Carey, the Teamster president. Here’s a guy who came up from the rank and file of the Teamsters, who was forced into confronting a company that refused to negotiate with the workers on a new contract. 185,000 workers walked off the job, and UPS blinked. They broke the company and got a new contract. I lived close to a UPS processing center on the South Side of Chicago, and we’d bring them donuts. It was a great moment. Then of course Carey was booted; after the strike the Teamster hierarchy voted in the son of Jimmy Hoffa as president, even though Carey had just led this insane victory, and even though everyone knew Hoffa Jr. was shady. One of the lessons you learn is that changing things often means losing your job or getting jailed, or worse.

The main action for speed in ballet was the kick, in modern dancing the swing;
Ballet was a technique of thrust, modern dance a technique of winding and unwinding;
Ballet dancers worked to the beat, modern dancers to the phrase, legato;
Ballet was composed of a disjointed series of highly articulated motions, modern dance of integrated motions of pull and release;
Ballet artists made quick changes in direction, modern dancers worked along the path of motion.