"wisps of thought"

This first post is in fact a little meander backwards, to the email that got us started on this line of inquiry. I wrote it on April 25...

hi catherine,

been thinking about you lately, about our project. i'm just back in brooklyn now - i got back from israel about a week and a half ago, where i ended up somewhat unexpectedly just two weeks after coming back from toronto. i guess i needed to see my family and visit familiar places to help ground me after a very intense year.

i gave myself some time to ease into work and the nyc rhythm, as much ease as the city will allow, anyway, which means that i've had a little time to do some dreaming. i started thinking about our project while i was in israel, really just realizing that what we should do is choose some line of inquiry, even if it changes a few times at first, and start researching and working on ideas on our respective ends of the atlantic. i could set up a blog for us, where we could post updates, ideas, photos, whatever, and as far as i'm concerned, the blog would already be a part of the creature we are creating.

as for lines of inquiry, i'm throwing this out just as a suggestion, a starting point which i think is open enough to lead to all kinds of things...

i found myself thinking about the seven deadly sins - Luxuria (extravagance, later lust), Gula (gluttony), Avaritia (greed), Acedia (sloth), Ira (wrath), Invidia (envy), and Superbia (pride) (that's a little cut and paste from wikipedia, excuse the laziness). Living in New York they are very much in my face, but being around my mother and her six sisters in Israel is really what brought them to the front of my mind - seven sisters, seven crazy personalities...

I've been reading a book called "The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep", really just started to get into it, and the author mentions the Eastern equivalent of these deadly sins, which manifest as six negative emotions relating to what he calls "The Six Realms of Cyclic Experience" : anger, greed, ignorance, jealousy, pride and pleasurable distraction. The six realms to which they relate, in the same order, are the realms of hell-beings, hungry ghosts, animals, humans, demi-gods, and gods. The language is so colorful, and its really amazing to think of people I know as being stuck in the realm of hungry ghosts or of behaving as if they were demi-gods.

I'm not trying to pitch this theme too hard - i'm very open to other things right now - but on the level of practicality, it also occurred to me that it's a theme that is easier than others to write grants for, get institutional support and generate some kind of interest just because it is a classical theme which artists are expected to deal with.

I'm not at all interested in a classical, formal treatment of this or any other issue. It's really just a starting point, something to focus us in and lead us towards the interesting things. the other advantage to the theme is that we could work with it in "chapters" - deal with one or a few sins at a time, and not all at once.

when i dream about it, i see both an installation and a performance aspect to it. and i'd like to have at least some elements that are "site specific" - something that would be shaped by the place and context in which the performance was taking place. i guess i'd really like for it to be something that ends up taking us to all kinds of interesting places.

so, maybe that's more than a wisp, perhaps a small smoke stack, but i've been talking to you about it in my head for a few days now, and I wanted to get it out to you. let me know what you think when you get a chance, and i'll start looking into setting a blog up - it would be good for me to figure that out.

love, o