L3: Bilbo’s Birthday Party
Tonight I watched Anat Oz, a dancer from Israel, execute an early version of a dance she’s going to record tomorrow and send to some dancers’ prize for people under thirty. She danced to a recording of her mother, who has Alzheimers, playing the piano falteringly, forgetfully. She started by standing still in the middle of the studio and twisting her face into joy, then snapping to neutral face, then heaving with sobs, then neutral, and so on. And then she danced. A few nights ago, in the smoking room, she told us she’d been a dancer for the Israeli army, and had been the best sniper in the company, but when they put her name up on the board to advertise this title, she asked them to take it down.
After the dance I left PAF, crossed the road, and walked into the forest. I followed a trail I’d just figured out a few days ago that leads to a river banked with “sculptures” made out of wood, sticks, vines, stones. I thought about how I’ve been playing piano here and how once you learn something, it’s sometimes surprising how easy it is to do the next time. A few nights ago Anat said her piano teacher when she was a kid told her that once she learned something, she should immediately do it three times, to put it into her brain. Then I thought about the hazardous version of this phenomenon: if it becomes so easy for you to walk through a dark forest and down a long unmarked country road on a night with no moon to the entrance to the river, there is a danger you will begin to do it automatically, habitually, over-habitually.
Early this morning, “with the cock,” Margarita Jimeno left PAF. She is a filmmaker from Colombia who lives in New York and last night we watched her new feature “Grind Reset Shine” on the projector in the media room. It was about a Danish mixed media artist who lives in New York who moves to Berlin. He gets a bad review and flees to the Polish countryside, where he meets a nun who is not great at being a nun and is also, secretly, a painter. The nun, secretly, has a hut where she paints, and the Danish artist shows up there at some point and asks her “Is this your studio?” and she says, sharply, “No. This is where I meet with God.”
Margarita’s film contrasts urban artists with simple country people, and after “Grind Reset Shine” she showed us some rough footage of her new film, where a Colombian mother in the dirt teaches her son how to hunt giant ants. Later, there’s a slow motion low angle shot set to beautiful music where the mother is carrying her son in the sunlight. Watching Margarita’s art, combined with eating almost all my meals at a long wooden table in the countryside surrounded by people I know and have grown close to, plus a Dutch person and a Danish person and a Norwegian person comparing their national Christmas celebrations, got me thinking about ‘peasants’, ‘the simple life’, ‘old style cultural traditions’. At about 4 p.m. Central European Time I was talking with my friend Oliver, who is a doctor in Newfoundland. He had just come back from a week of hunting with his dad and cousins, and he said last night he watched “The Fellowship of the Ring” with his mom, and, watching the hobbits getting ready for Bilbo’s birthday party, he felt like friendships and family and community were all that really mattered, and that “the world is actually pretty full of love I think.”
A couple weeks ago I said I’d never seen Lord of the Rings to Rhiannon and T and Jahandar and Cole—the day before Jahandar left, I believe. They all got excited and told me how good it is. We were, just then, lowering ourselves with a rope down a slippery hill that led to the art river, which at that time was gorgeous and green and reminded them of some part of Lord of the Rings. When we got back, they actually put the first movie of the trilogy on, but I was on a deadline for my interviewing job that day and didn’t watch it. So I still haven’t seen Lord of the Rings.
Anyway, at the end of my walk tonight, or I should say halfway through, before I turned back, I arrived at the mouth of bushes that led to the art river. I didn’t have a plan for what I would do when I got there. To my surprise, I got down on my knees in the mud. I thought about praying, but I didn’t. I looked into the mouth. I saw something gauzy and white. It was in a long flowing shape, like a scarf, but curving all around itself. It was very dark and I had no idea what it was. Over the past few days Margarita has arranged two cacao ceremonies, where you drink the cacao and look into the bottom of your cup to see what you can see in the remaining streaks of cacao, like a Rorschach test. It occurred to me to do this with the white gauzy flowing scarf in the mouth. I saw a heart—like the simple, basic, two-heads-kissing symbol. I liked that, and I looked away before I saw anything else.