“And the great flood receded”

yesterday I was in line to return my WiFi router and a man was ahead of me talking to anyone who would listen about how “the Lord said that at the end of days there would be more and more plagues” 

I’d just had a dream that morning that I had made a little booklet of sketches, as a gift to a writer friend, and on the cover it said “translation of light”

one of the meanings of “translation” is a kind of conversion. Language of darkness to language of light, language of trash to language of treasure, language of plague/death to language of collective rebirth. Almost like a digestion

not throwing the baby out with the flood water, letting the bad stuff nourish you - can’t translate it without really knowing it, 

feeding on it, first. 

And then there is the middle place, where you’ve let go, digested, but you don’t know yet what’s next. And you’re also still letting go, converting, over and over again; translation is an ongoing process, it’s in motion. 

I left the ladder in the installation, it’s an ongoing process; 

Noah replays the moment over and over in his mind, 

the moment of choosing what to take with him and what to leave behind. 

When an arc reflects in the water, it’s a circle

his mind travels the arc underwater to what he’s left 

then returns along the arc above it, and back - letting go is ongoing. 

This installation is a processing of something I one day hope to be able to forget

but that I must return to, over and over again, 

letting go is ongoing. 

This installation is in a window that opened on December 16 2021 and closed on January 8 2022. 

When Noah was on the arc he looked through a window of time, seeing only water, after letting go of everything except what mattered, over and over again. 

The arc was a bridge from the past to what was not known, the arc above the water sloped like the pure present, a curve ascending and then descending “No, no, no,” into the bend of the past beneath, 

then emerging above water like a dolphin gasp breaking through the surface— “Ah!” Noah couldn’t see for himself whether the flood was over;

he sent out a dove like a prayer that came back. 

By that time it was like Noah went from Noah to know-ah. He knew “ah!” over and over, his name was just One, now, it was “no” inseparable from “ah,” 

it was a knowing of “no”—

so well that it was translated into revelation; in and out in and out, his breath was the translation, breathing in the middle of the circle - 

he was the bridge he’d walked; he was the arc he’d ridden.  

In between dark and light is something clear, like breathing underwater. 

Prayer is a perpetual process, it is in motion—eventually the moment you send out the dove is the moment it returns to you, eventually the waves going out are the waves coming in. This is a prayer for breathing underwater in a window of time in a window in Brooklyn, it is a prayer in the transition from year to year over and over again

Installation 2/further reflections on what I am even doing

After writing and speaking this prayer (following the first iteration, preceding the second one), I felt clear on the next phase. Now I am focusing on the subtler adjustments that come with each return to the process of letting go (of old patterns that no longer serve us, of memories, wounds, or other experiences that we are ready to fully integrate and move on from). I am thinking about the spiral nature of this kind of growth.

I think a lot in my work about the role of neuroplasticity in human beings’ ability to grow, change, and re-create ourselves, and I am curious about the role that new-myth-making and physical participation in myth (i.e. theatre) can play in the process of forming and riding new neural pathways. 

In the case of the Noah’s Ark story, I am also interested in the ways in which humans utilize our experience of the animal world as a vector for our own transformation. Actors often use animal work to shift into character, and legends of the earliest forms of theatre involve humans ritualistically transforming themselves into the beasts they hunted.

As I mention with my Shadow and Eurydice pieces, my works are often experiments in the creation of new archetypes out of the debris of old ones, collaging my personal life together with fragmented, dream-like possessions by half-remembered myths. I will return periodically over the course of the Heroes Gallery show to make small adjustments to this work, physically acting out the process of repeatedly returning to and rebuilding my own ark.

I am continuously creating performances as part of my works-in-evolution, and my non-prosey writing incorporates a sense of assemblage too: different references and dimensions layer and intersect in a way that proposes or stems from an alternate/non-linear orientation reality. I feel like I am not a thing but a process, and my work is a container catching the rain at the intersection of my process and that of the world. Or my work is a room in which future me’s and past me’s can talk to each other through present me’s mouth/body/hands.