A SORT OF THOUGHT THINKING A THOUGHT OF FEELING:

Thought, thinking and feeling are inextricably entwined, creating and created by the

languages and mediums expressing them. Endlessly moving between many overlapping, intertwining-colliding modes of feeling and thinking to sidestep language and create strange, bizarre polymorphic singing tongues that reinvent the familiar

start frantically ripping out the set, racing to save

the floorboards, the etched boxes. I lose most

of the paper and the set gets soaked, so I bring the boxes home and spread them out across the lawn like garden mulch, trying to hold the moisture of this unseasonable rain, and protect the earth from the harsh summer sun.

There’s three performances left but no set to perform them in.

Devastated I stare at a dry bit of box - a thin fold with a line.

That night I borrow a big umbrella from the next door neighbour and go to the park that was the meeting point for the performance. I tell the audience history has been replaced with contingency - ‘because of the weather.’

It’s a stupid performance, that like this writing,

I explain as I go, telling the audience to imagine what was, but no longer is. Part story telling

lament, part fiction, it falls into this story as I

tell you about telling them about the walk past the cemetery to the laneway, the kingdom of cardboard, the wackiness of the mad worlds text and the opening stillness. I half-talk, half show

them the first tiny section of work, ending by

surprise with a solitary note of song.

I tell them about running a strip of gaffer tape, like some primary school kid’s attempt at a costume down each arm, and leap into the rain to perform a ridiculously dysfunctional melodramatic opera of burbles and snorts, high-pitched whining and maniacal laughter cut through with spasms, cries, hiccups and other

leads “us into a ritual of the possible occurrence of learning” (Goulish and Bottoms 2007 p.54). And “the frightening possibility that learning only takes place in the presence of the unlearnable” (Goulish 2000 p52); that ‘the unthinkable’ is the only thing worth thinking (Cixous), and the ‘unthought’ where thinking and learning begins.

But thinking the unthought depends on unthinking the already thought; thought is unthinking, unthinking thought: unlearn, unknow, undo - unfeel the already felt to find the not-yet, where ‘true thought thinks itself’ (Cixous 2005 p.71).

An unfunded, unsupported independent artist, I’ve always worked with what I could, which is what I had. Movement. It’s free. So take your time, trip over yourself and go into it. Inside. It’s micro moments. It’s de-tail-s. and late. er. it’s ron-gurr (grrrrr) geeky- gawky-awkwardness.

Do it in, as, through and with the movement, which is always plural, even when it’s singular. Follow the writing-trying to do it in-through-as-and-with-itself, only don’t expect it to stop or not try to get to where it’s not and do what it can’t; that’s what doing it in-through-as-and-with-itself’s about: becoming itself by getting beneath, going

sounds, finishing with a sad song in a faltering

falsetto - gaffer taped wings hanging uselessly by my sides. I tell them about stripping the gaffer tape away and replacing it with a plain black top as darkness falls, about sliding the wall side on to lengthen and narrow the space - shadows against paper.

Head tilts back towards the sky Time falls

Down

Into the earth, and a stillness that runs in search of dreams (I’ll never know)

(dying) … a memory of forever yet to arrive

My body transforms – afterwards everyone will say this section of work looks nothing like me, but the truth is this section is the most me, stripped bare, old, gnarled and shaken.

a non-thing-thing, like play, discovery, change and transformation, everywhere, part of everything, yet nothing in particular, it exists without really being anything, but its very real, almost invisible activity tinkers away endlessly at the most microscopic level, rebuilding logic, language, code and sense, changing and reinventing the inextricably entwined processes of language and thought, changing the way we think, and the ways we think through with and in languages.

And an undone, mixed up mismatched language doesn’t exist outside but because of the confusion of a deliriously intoxicating muddled broken tongue. This kind of thought might be called a materially constructed ‘operative reason’ that ‘wrecks,’ wreaks havoc, comes into being with and is inseparable from the language creating and created by it.

Translating this sort of thinking into instrumental reason would need a further bending of the language in a different

direction that can accommodate complexity - confusion, chaos, multiplicity and becoming. Different modes of thought think in, through, with, and utilize different languages in different ways. Changing your mode of thought and thinking isn’t as simple as flicking a switch. If crossing thought modalities were that simple, the thought

THE SOMEWHAT INACCURATELY