EUROPEAN POETRY FESTIVAL
A written collaboration with artist Bob Dela for THE EUROPEAN POETRY FESTIVAL - October 13th 2018 at Rich Mix, London
In this performance I was paired up with Polish Artist BOB DELA for The European Poetry Festival at Rich Mix in London. We started a communication via email where we would respond to each other literal cut ups. The “conversation” developed from there and carried on for a few days. On the day of the performance both BOB and I decided not appear on stage but instead leaving it empty with only a recording of Bob reading of the conversation and a few notes played by me on the piano. See HERE
On the recording - the entire writing was read by Bob Dela whilst I played a few notes on the piano to accompany the words.
Drawing correspondence between me and Bob Dela (September 2018)
UNTITLED
CP - Ironic is the gap between what everyone wants and believes to be and what one really is in the global context of reality, which cannot be seen; ironic is the difference between the part that everyone think of acting in life and the part that one actually plays.
BD – Thank you for your reflection which I am reading in the cinema while the credits of Mamma Mia 2 are filling the black screen. In the final explosion of dance the three fathers are dancing with their own selves from the past. Playing for their past self.
CP - No one has the truth on his side: neither the reason which despises visceral immediacy, nor the viscera that refuses to be furious to reason; neither the sticky closeness that does not know how to distance itself from what is happening, nor the intelligent distance that does not know how to remake itself continually close to the throbbing of life and its wounds.
BD – What a great lines ! Truth seems to be a temporary rescue line for our mind and its reasoning. It is not on our side but we still have this clean humble space on paper, this true physical silence which will take our punches and screams. There is an American wrestler called Viscera. Will we take a fight knowing we already are the winners or would we enjoy more the taste of our own blood and respect our bruises without reasoning?
CP - We have learned from him, that time is a river that drags us, but we also are that river. Though not even of this truth, perhaps, will we be able to use it to help us. Life, he said, gives everyone everything, but almost everyone ignores it.
BD - Lets do not be fooled by the motion. The very first motion picture Sallie Gardner at a Gallop was produced with a set of photographs. There is many still drops in this dragging river. I shaved the same face this morning and twenty years ago. So many blades went dull. Tricky time, changing its power by changing its scale. If there is timeline floating forward there must be a timeline going backwards. Yin and Yang, day and night.
CP - Renunciation becomes ever more coherent and radical and results in the renunciation of oneself. Focault imagines this as a face drawn on the sand and close to being erased.
BD - My phone is broken. Half of the face is not responding and keep freezing. I am not sure which part I should try to fix, and which one should keep freezing. Who draw my face and why I should carry all my life something I cannot see. Are you the voice in my head?
BD – We call him weekend. Murmuration of the second black coffee this morning. The computers fan is accompanied by birds singing and my wife’s morning habits. Have we been here before? What else are we constantly missing in this overloaded reality?
BD – Certain of uncertainty I am setting off to restaurant where the images, which I remember from yesterday’s dream will be repeated as part of the lost memory from seven hundred years ago, dreamed by a fly gazing through the snake’s terrarium.
CP - That return and that rescue are not possible, just as that interval is not narrable.
BD – Yes, yes, yes! The rescue of my image failed the play for the bigger part is still on. Wish I knew it before the attempts to framed the circular image into rectangular frame. Both, frame and image is passing my fingers like a sand which I am holding in imagination. Bigger picture eats the small one without noticing. Is my sentimental part the cell of cancer?
CP - The grammatical time less inadequate to nostalgia and irony is perhaps the anterior future, which lives the events looking at them as if they had already passed and turning them into thought before they even came.
BD – Two stars collided deep in the universe spreading debris in illusionary four times light speed. Am I using the same mind to comprehend this event and my yesterdays dinner? Can I use the same emotional frame for both events? Maybe that’s why there is no rescue as the appropriate mind methodology is missing? Maybe there is rescue waiting for us to adopt the corelate mind like Mr Hertz discovered/predicted a radio waves.
CP - Wondering what will become of them in the coming years means which moments, shapes and figures of their past they will rediscover and reinvent proposing them as roads to follow.
BD – It seems like the death of the future lifeforms appeared at the beginning not the end of their road to existence. Do you remember your millions of years of nothingness before you have been born? Are we alive or are we still in the process of shaping and waiting for its birth? Stars colliding.
CP - The comic is the everyday that makes the trip to the sublime, and the immediacy that corrects the pathos of the spirit and the stiffness of the behaviour.
BD - The miraculous is that by dissolving even most fundamental believes, the world seems to spin even more gracefully. The drama was real, no one is paying attention. Holding in hand few pages of mediocre script. So eager to see what is written beyond the margins.
CP - He feels that every man - like Dante in the hellish apologue, I, 32 - has received an infinite and irrecoverable thing. It is the intuition of one's own identity, of that indefinable and impersonal emptiness of which we are made.
BD – Standing on the edge of inferno, looking inside the empty void, he is planning his future with a cheerful mind, like a feather against the oceans, no limits to the creative instincts and no point of a tortured soul.
CP - Although In Novalis we feel that sweet and reassuring circle of life that turns and returns to save and to repeat the immutable order of existence.
BD – for now it is only Kinhin, the soundless steps without a bell, on the deep breath, without punctuation marks. Tomorrow it will be enthusiastic explosion of self in childish and colourful words as a conscious choice of the powerful mind