THINKING OR FEELING FOR A NEW (UNCODED) CODE

Language is code. Playing in language is talking worded code. And code can move. Thinking through feeling, playing to find and feel the movement of language and languages of movement moves moving codes making them move. Rhyme or reason aren’t needed. Rambling-scrambling-

spittering-spattering confusing the codes of ‘normopathy’ (Oury) to make mutating escaping disepileptixially lurching stumbling codes kills killing codification; stops the spread of codified code that codifies the imagination, defining dreams and desire, deciding and confining everything to/by the code - codified code: slowly kills.

More code, less freedom: less code, more freedom. Break the code, mismatch, confuse, de-code-uncode don’t accept the code and pedal a small boat across wide open skies, following the moving, tactile, changing nature of feeling-thinking-traveling-through-every- cell; noticing, following and playing with it’s movement – the moving imagination of thought feeling itself thinking, its felt

sensations seeping through silent spaces between words and worlds.

onto the performance space. Preceding this there has been a 30-minute warm up and stretching. Preceding that there has been an hour or two of setting props. Preceding that was two years of making and

rehearsing a performance work. Preceding that was a lifetime of maybe 30 years of dreaming and studying and thought and experimentation. Preceding that was the centuries of developing the performing arts as we know them. Preceding that are the millennia of human evolution. Sometimes I can see the whole scheme of events during this 5-second pause. I am stretched

out and flattened and dematerialized

and sent back and sent forward and rematerialized and comprehend some great and simple truth … and step onto the stage and begin the performance (Saner in Goulish and Bottoms 2007 p.167).

Stepping into the doorway, facing out into the night, my back to the audience, the side surface of an arm falling beside a box, its back surface into the space. My surfaces, the pores of my skin, a full body attention become acutely aware of travelling in two directions, of being in two worlds as my eyes gently, slowly roam the sky-scape, reaching past changing atmospheres and return, falling down the side of the building opposite the performance space, along the ground, and down through layers of sediment, into the earth. I turn, entering the space and begin

I heard the story of Ernesto from Matthew Goulish, who also wrote that late in his life, Marconi, the inventor of the telegraph believed that sound never disappeared, but continued, getting quieter and quieter (Goulish 2000 p.33). Movement, thought like, thought as movement, releases waves of slowly dissipating energy that travel, intersecting and connecting with other dissipating waves that are slowly changing, transforming in movement. Matthew heard the author of the story, Marguerite Duras, hear Ernesto; Ernesto, unable to read, read the book without knowing how: listened to and heard it.

I did too.

There are indecipherable codes that make perfect sense, languages that bend our ears in different directions at once, and sometimes the strangest foreign tongue makes more sense than our own. The languages I love the most aren’t the ones I readily understand, but the ones that force me to work, listen for their logics, that somehow allow a certain energy beneath the form to be glimpsed; ones that muddle and break rules and codes, not replacing one code with another to make a new code, but finding and working a muddled uncoded- code til it cracks, opens up, spits itself out in

new directions, loses its voice, finds others

- discovering myself, discovering the world. ... ... ... The soft tissues inside my skull move, one hemisphere of my brain drops as far as it can and the surfaces of my face slide and distort then press out until my face shakes and my eyes travel in different directions. It keeps going until it plays itself out, and I begin the journey back; it takes a few moments of just stopping, waiting, kind of resting my way out of this strange dementia. I give it a moment or two before reminding myself this is a ‘choreography,’ rushing, accelerating in a controlled way,

returning to the breathings, dancing through the

residue and finding an ending, a way to leave

you in the space.

I walk out of this tiny room, enclosed with its etched cardboard walls and wait at the edge of the greater space.

A few minutes later a wall slides away to reveal me standing at the edge of the performance space, facing the night. After a couple of deep breaths I walk through the sand, leaving a trail of footprints disappearing through the laneway and into the night.

Where does it begin and where does it end? That night after the performance I stay in the laneway, my mattress having been atop a bed of boxes so long it’s hard to separate – at home dreaming inside a cardboard castle of delusions

code starts generating more of itself, keeps mutating and making and mutating and making; then starts trying to lose-confuse, undo-escape and throw itself away - new code-old code, mutating-back-to-front- inside-out-up-down-uncoded-code trying not to be code but not just non-code either; flitting between and layering fragments of fragmented half thoughts revealed by flitting between its many building, accumulating,

stolen logics and senses to caress the kiss of a touch creating a disastrous way of speaking in circles, and circles and circles circling within the circles, all saying the same thing, differently - my many ears searching, listening, listening to their listenings too and their failure to hear, to say what I hoped and intended, only to return and say it anew,

failing again as other ears hear and seek the paradoxes, absurdities, ambiguities and impossible possibilities of multiple tongues speaking the speechless forms of speech.

A SORT OF THOUGHT - THINKING A