Little corpses made to dance – imposters and necromancers.

Yesterday while walking through the city I saw a busker whose work made me reflect on what I find unsatisfying about puppetry. The busker made junk puppets out of driftwood tied together with a crazy tangle of fishing line and suspended from very crude hand controls. Sculpturally they were quite beautiful objects but the man seemed to be abusing them by performing them. He was dragging two of these objects along the street in a mock chase scene –yelling in a strange voice that belonged to neither object but served to indicate that they were ‘alive’. Somehow the brutal style of his ‘puppeteering’ had the opposite effect to convincing me of the ‘life’ of his objects, instead it highlighted the ‘uncooperative’ deadness of his tethered sticks. The sticks rolled and bounced about the pavement, dragged by webs of chaotic, dirty cords like a disarticulated skeleton caught in fishing net.

The whole effect of his performance was oddly mystifying. He appeared a crazy man, dragging a collection of sticks mistaken for bones and trying to awaken them by shouting   and rattling them. I kind of admired the incongruity of his behaviour in the midst of the  lunch-time city rush, but as an act of puppetry his creation was unconvincing. The sticks were not becoming puppets – they remained lifeless, tired assemblages.

When puppetry doesn’t succeed it is absurd and its improbability shines forth like a kind of madness. That derogatory term used for puppeteers, ‘dolly-waggler’ can be a sadly accurate description.

To be honest I have been left with this impression often when I have watched puppet theatre – as if I have participated in a failed séance where we have collectively failed to wake the dead. Sometimes I am more aware of the latent life or vitality of a puppet if it is not manipulated. In quietude and uninterrupted, the puppet’s suspended animation can sing.

It takes a rare artist to really master puppetry – to elevate the craft beyond the visibility of struggle and artifice. (I’m referring to puppetry where the puppeteer is visible here.) If I am to analyse what makes a puppeteer successful I would say it is the ability to appear in two places at once  – that is, within their own body and that of the puppet’s. And further, from this divided place to disappear and re-appear within that charged sphere of the puppet/performer relationship. When the puppeteer masters the art of distanciation between their own body and the puppet’s and is able to shift focus to the puppet, then to back to their own character seamlessly – it is magic. Neville Tranter is outstanding in this regard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ0wkSErIUg

See also Duda Paiva (who studied under Tranter)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl1kWP9OnhY

~

When this alchemy is tapped by a skilled performer, then puppetry is sublime – when it falls short, it can be ridiculous. More often than not I am too aware of the ‘effort’ involved in puppeteering – the constant tightrope that is the unpredictability of manipulating dead matter. With their uncooperative joints; limbs that fall back-to-front, strings that tangle, eye-lids that freeze mid-blink and jaws that gape in a rictus smile – puppets are deeply unreliable colleagues.  It can be excruciating to observe a puppeteer’s harried efforts to conceal their technical difficulties on stage. Watching the performer split their attention between the struggle of puppeteering and the illusion of effortlessness can feel disheartening and intrusive. It can appear like a futile excercise in grappling with something dead whilst pretending it’s alive.

I am so familiar with this struggle myself – focus is splintered in multiple directions. First there is the presence and intention within your own body on stage, subtle enough to enable the puppet to live, but vital enough to conjure a relationship between performer and puppet. Simultaneously intention and breath are being directed to, and through the puppet while the technical demands of operating the puppet are also in motion. (Where are the limbs located in space? Where is the gaze directed, is breath present? Is the movement imposed or ‘coming from the puppet’?) While all of this is happening some of your attention is also reading the audience to understand if they are engaged – are they immersed in the world you are creating on stage or are they unconvinced?  All these streams of awareness must flow in a subtle, subterranean way – if one current of thought overwhelms, the balance is lost. You are at once intensely ‘in the moment’ but also inhabiting future moments as you navigate the complex multi-tasking of theatre making. If in one moment the puppet does not co-operate, the next moment must happen regardless – and it must happen in a way that appears fluid and unbroken. It is a path blighted by little ruptures that must be integrated into the whole – and somehow the audience must be protected from these blights to remain there with you in the moment.

In my last post I touched briefly upon Roman Paska’s description of puppetry as a kind of ‘necromancy’, an enlivening of the ‘awful otherness’ of puppets. Puppets, Paska suggests, are little corpses made to dance. I am citing the moments when puppetry fails as the moments when this deadness becomes apparent in its most unpoetic form. When puppetry succeeds and the little corpses do dance, this deadness becomes one of puppetry’s most disconcerting and beguiling qualities. As much as they may be corpses of a kind, puppets are also little prostheses through which we dance our own dance in the face of our own mortality.

I am aware of aspects of  ‘awful otherness’ as I make and perform puppets – but it is also this quality that I am compelled by, even affectionate towards.  Each puppet is a little memorial; memorial to an idea, a moment, an encounter, a likeness. Each puppet I make is an artefact which simultaneously affirms my being but also reminds me that I must die. Watching the documentary about artist William Kentridge recently, I noted his comment on art making as a way of reflecting back evidence of his existence.

There was some part of me that only knew I existed if I made some kind of external representation of it on a sheet of paper.

During the course of an artist’s life we leave behind us a ‘body’ of work. How interesting that we say ‘body’? ‘Body’ suggests a mirror of a kind, at once an aliveness and a dead thing – perhaps a reflection for the living, then stand-in for the deceased artist.

When asked how he views his puppets in relation to himself, Paska says that puppeteers view their puppets as extensions of themselves, almost as an amputee might feel about a prosthetic limb. Puppets function not only as an extension of the performers own body but as an artificially embodied desires that transcend the limits of the human form. Each puppet is a metaphor for the human condition.

Author Robyn Ferrell describes the psychological function of created objects this way:

Objects and graphics function as narcissistic ‘doubles’ as a protection against death: but doubling is uncanny because of a kind of primitive thinking, now surmounted but not eradicated [Freud] says. The splitting into two (e.g, the invention of the soul) was a narcissistic protection against death.

My puppets are my imperfect children, my impressions and ideas made concrete – they are ambivalence embodied, and perhaps, funereal objects of a kind. That is, objects that will endure in my absence and attest to some aspect of who I ‘was’.

~

Empty cradles and phantoms in the awnings.

“When one creates phantoms for oneself, one puts vampires into the world, and one must nourish these children of a voluntary nightmare with one’s blood, one’s life, one’s intelligence, and one’s reason, without ever satisfying them”

Eliphas Lévi, 1810 -  1875,  French occult author and ceremonial magician.

~

(adj) Phantom – something apparently sensed but having no physical reality.

I’ve been thinking about the notion of Phantoms; phantoms as phenomena that describe a quality and depth of immersion in an idea.  Phantoms as the acute manifestation of the imaginative function that allows us to engage with life. Our minds generate phantoms that facilitate our belief in a cohesive self.  They allow us to construct and maintain a sense of reality, to animate the inanimate and to materialise the immaterial. Our phantom selves are projected out into the world to commune with others. This incessant dialogue of speculation and invention is a reflex. The body and all it encounters becomes a constantly evolving narrative of sensations and confabulations.

This depth of immersion can also go into strange and uncomfortable places; think of phantom limbs, psychosomatic illnesses, phobias.

The mind is an incessant storyteller and the body is both a map and a stage. As in life and puppet theatre, without imaginative complicity there is no show.

Rodolfo Llinas, the chair of physiology and neuroscience at New York University Medical Centre, states;

“Thinking is internalised movement. …We are emulating reality inside our head. We have managed to generate a dreamlike condition where we actually have sounds and objects that move with respect to backgrounds and all of these things without effort. So that is basically what the nervous system is for. It’s a huge, beautiful device to emulate reality.”

Thinking both emulates and constructs reality. We live in a constantly evolving phantasmagorical narrative. We are inhabited by multiple phantoms – versions of our selves (realised or unrealised), memories, unfulfilled desires, and egos.

The creative process both harnesses and manifests phantoms on a deep level.

Within the world of phantoms the line between what is real and what is not and also what is alive and what is unalive is slippery. Puppetry is a theatre of phantoms which, like the shadows in Plato’s Cave, provokes and relies on the shifting multitude of associations and imaginative tangents that dance momentarily across the maps of our minds and bodies.

I have a personal reason for contemplating the notion of phantoms – in the wake of Hutch I have travelled through some ambiguous emotional and psychological territory.

After a month of development and rehearsal playing within the make-believe world of my ‘Hutch-ian’ nursery I arrived at a confusing place. In order to crystallise my ideas and make that rabbit puppet live I had to go through a strange process of ‘gestation’, birth  and bonding. I spent weeks caressing, feeding, nursing that rabbit puppet – coaxing its awful infancy into being. At first I was really reticent about showing playful, tender aspects of the mother character – I didn’t want to go there and felt afraid and inhibited about exploring my ‘inner mother’ in rehearsal space or on stage. It felt very contrived and excruciatingly private. Any separation that I had created between the puppet and myself felt torn down and I found myself in a naked emotional space ‘mothering’ my puppet.

As rehearsal progresses I found myself more able to venture into these ‘maternal’ spaces –  I rocked, and kissed, stroked and fed the puppet. As long as I could contrast these moments of tenderness with unpredictable changes of mood – little cruelties, moments of abrupt dissociation and absurd gestures and rituals – it was ok and felt authentic to the work. This constant vacillation between conflicting states became the signature not only of the mother, but the underlying theme of the work.

But this process took its toll. When the show was over and the props and puppets were put away I felt a big sense of loss. So much so, that I convinced myself that I was pregnant. It was as if I had so deeply internalised being ‘mother’ that I physically embodied the sensation with a phantom pregnancy. The show may have been over but the nursery remained encoded within me somehow. In the absence of the puppet I had begun puppeteering my own emotions and biology. In the aftermath of Hutch my focus had switched from an inanimate puppet to my own speculative flesh and blood.

What was astounding to me was just how suggestible we are – how pliable our physical matter is as it dances with our thoughts. Through the creative process I could convince myself and an audience of the infancy of a foam rabbit puppet and with that same energy convince myself of the presence of a developing foetus forming within my body.

In some ways Hutch could be looked upon as an extended phantom pregnancy – there was a period of creative gestation that was secret and internal, then the quickening that took place in the rehearsal room and the finally the birth and fruition on stage.

Phantoms are as much about what isn’t there as they are about what is.

Roman Paska (New York puppeteer, director and writer) describes puppetry as a kind of ‘necromancy’, an enlivening of the ‘awful otherness’ of puppets. Puppets are little corpses made to dance. Paska says:

”It’s the absence of the human that is frightening… The puppet is a dead thing and it’s up there moving. If it provokes deep anxieties, that’s why.”

And further:

[Puppets reflect to us that] “our own existence is not so different from a table,”  - in the space of a moment the inanimate can become animate and vice versa .

~

In a sense my phantom pregnancy was born of the ferocious emotional investment that I had made in my infant puppet – and more broadly speaking, the project as a whole. Both my puppet(s) and the speculative embryo were little phantoms dancing briefly in make-believe nurseries – one to an audience of many, the other to an audience of one. And just like the mercurial nature of a puppets life, in the blink of an eye my phantom child was gone.

My Puppet is dead and I’m in suspended animation.

Every time we finish a project we are facing multiple endings. You are no longer the performer who existed momentarily in the eye of the audience, the show which lived for a season no longer exists and the props and costumes lie inert in boxes, stacked in a pile in the shed.

My Masters supervisor Peter asked: “And what happens to the puppets between shows?” Well, some puppets die while others continue to live.

Upon reflection I build two types of puppet – there are those that are purpose-built specifically to express a particular idea within a show and those that I consider to be ‘alive’ in their own right. I have very little attachment to the purpose-built puppets once the show is over. With the other kind of puppet the relationship is more complex – I perceive them as a sculptural beings that emanate a vitality that is not reliant solely on my manipulation and continues beyond their ‘life’ on stage. These puppets live in my space and I regard them as entities that grace my life with their uncanny presence.

Am I conscious of which category these objects will belong to at the outset of creation?  – it depends on the role that they have within the work. Sometimes I am building a puppet with the intention to fulfil a specific role – that is, I am not creating an object that aesthetically or philosophically engages me beyond the performance, I am simply making a prosthetic performer.  Other times I am creating a sculptural entity that demands to be made and continues to resonate beyond its life on stage. As I make it, I come to meet it; it engages me deeply as an object and begs to be performed. With this class of puppets the performance gives voice to the subtle inner life I believe to be latent there, whereas the prosthetic actor exists only for the sake of lending form to an idea specifically within performance. One is a colleague, the other is akin to a prop.

The puppets in Hutch fell into these two categories. The miniature puppet of me is a sculpture, a solemn little effigy. The rabbit puppet is a cartoon – a giant sponge rabbit that encapsulates cuteness with all its accompanying layers of repulsiveness and vulnerability; sweetness and cruelty. It is literally and metaphorically a ‘sponge’, soaking up the audiences’ expectations and turning them upside down. At once, full of bouncy promise and yet utterly vacated – a grubby foam head lolling on an empty infant jumpsuit.

I have no desire to share my space with this creature! After Hutch I deconstructed the rabbit puppet; his eyes were removed for mending, his head and buttocks (both made of carved foam), were put through the washing machine. Imagine the eyeless face pressed against the glass during the spin cycle, its ears painting brisk arcs with the spin…His body was then un-stuffed and his flensed skin also washed. So in my backyard the rabbit’s head hung from the washing line, pegged at the ears while his buttocks dried amongst the parsley and his pink, newly washed skin shivered in a light breeze. Once dry, the rabbit was packed in pieces and consigned to the shed.

The little effigy (or mini-me as she was dubbed) lives in an alcove in my studio. I look at her daily  – she is me, but not me. She is an enigmatic ‘other’ – her stillness and composure fascinate me – her qualities are distinctly her own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the shelves of my studio some puppets ‘live’ quietly in a kind of suspended animation, while in the shadows of my shed others lie ‘dead’ and forgotten.

Of late, I too have been in a state of suspended animation, a post-performance fog.

After months of focused and intense work with the show’s development, the build up to opening night and the tightrope walk of each performance with it’s new audience and unforeseen contingencies, I am disoriented and empty.

Theatre making is hard; you strive, sweat – you work. Sometimes you marvel, sometimes you cry – you definitely don’t sleep much and there is a certain delirium that begins to envelope your life. Then it’s all over and you wonder what all that intensity was about.

For me, these past two months saw every waking hour (consciously or un-consciously) infested with Hutch. I was profoundly disengaged from ‘real life’ and simultaneously engaged with a kind of ‘hyper-real life’. I both resented this period of creative ‘infestation’ and was relieved when it was over – but at the same time, I never wanted it to end.

Now it’s over, the production feels like a mirage – the fatigue, excitement, successes and failures have come and gone. Such is the transitory nature of this art form – the very thing that I love about theatre, is the very thing that leaves me in a void every time. The future looms like an empty storyboard waiting to be filled and I wonder if I can possibly summon the energy to do it all again.

But I also know that like the puppets in my studio, I am only hibernating for the time being.

The Vanity of Star-dust

Figuratively and literally I have been down a mine. In March 2012, three performances of Hutch took place in a disused goldmine in the Central Victorian town of Maldon. The making of Hutch has been a slow burning process with many unexpected micro destinations along the way.

Did I stay true to my original vision? – Yes and no. Through the process of redeveloping Hutch (and considering the work in relation to my research question centering around anthropomorphism and transgression) the piece enlarged in the scope of its themes. In the original work in progress 2008, Hutch was a deeply personal, simple and straightforward expression of the associations I have with an episode of my mother’s life and the reverberations it had with my own upbringing.

My program notes read:

As an empty nester my mother bought herself a rabbit. Within weeks, her care had become so obsessive that her house had been transformed into a rabbit hutch. Watching this relationship unfold prompted me to think about how in the absence of human company we create substitutes. As human beings we ‘anthropomorphise’ companions into being whether they be inanimate objects, utensils, a doll – a rabbit.

As imagination and anthropomorphism are the animating forces within puppetry, puppetry seems an ideal place from which to explore this territory, to watch this story unfold.

And so it began -  a woman, a giant infant rabbit, a disused mine and the desire to tell. In this most recent re-iteration the initial compulsion to tell (which teetered on the verge of catharsis) cooled and the work opened up to delve into more layered psychological territory. The show investigated slippages and thresholds – the slippage between innocent/malevolent, alive/dead, and intention/distraction, humor and dark. And the thresholds of tenderness/ brutality, animated/inert, hilarious and tragic. The work also played with the alive/dead paradox – the way in which something can be suffused with vitality one moment and in the blink of an eye, utterly vacated – it’s meaning or identity turned upside down.

In the rehearsal room we spent quite a bit of time playing with the qualities of different objects – the material properties of the props; the squeaking wheels of the dilapidated pram, the prone and upright positions of the antique toileting chair, the diaphanous billowing of a yellowed nightie and the inert greasiness of an old chopping block.

I spent time responding to these objects gesturally, emotionally and theatrically – playing with shapes, moods, the details of little interventions i.e. passing my arms through the bars of a cradle, imitating the scoop of its architecture with my body, perching, rocking, wheeling, circling. At the end of each day I would write-up a map of gestures or discoveries.

The alive/dead paradox came into play as I really pushed the boundaries of the puppet’s use. Both the rabbit and the little ‘mini-me’ puppet went from being animated and then abruptly de-activated, abused, tossed lifeless to the ground or dangled by one arm. The puppets also transformed from being infantile characters that the audience sympathised with to more ambiguous figures – the rabbit with aggressive and sexual overtones, the mini-me moving from a doll-like quality to the deathly impermeability of an effigy.

In playing with my own body too, I investigated ways of being fiercely engaged (animated) and then illogically disengaged (inanimate). I used my body like a puppet and developed a gestural language with the encouragement and guidance of director Nancy Black. Through improvisation we teased open the possibility of lyrical movements, irrational gestures and inexplicable ‘collapses’.  We also investigated the notion of a life or will being focused in one part of the body but not the whole i.e the right hand investigating or seeing the space around it while the rest of the body lay collapsed and unresponsive.

The activated/ de-activated and nurtured/abused cycle with the puppet and with the body was certainly a vocabulary for describing  the way we move in and out of states of awareness and empathy for others, and also a way of exploring the nature of anthropomorphism and its fluidity as we move between states of belief and disbelief in relation to the inanimate.

Working with the puppet in the studio Nancy and I spent a lot of time examining the shifts of tone within the relationship between myself and the puppet – I imagined the whole play to be an extended examination of the fluidity and changeability of the “mother’s” engagement, imagined/or real with the object of her obsession. This constant slippage was played out not only through the alive/dead ambiguity but through the guises that the relationship seemed to move through i.e. rabbit as infant, lover, dead thing, live thing and the mother’s sense of compulsion to re-engage with and re-animate this creature to whom she is mother/lover/,abuser/abused. The flip-side of this compulsion to animate is the unacceptability of, or revulsion we feel towards an insentient thing, something dead.

Throughout the rehearsal period Nancy kept emphasizing the idea of polarities – the polarity between light and dark, between ambivalence and certainty, tenderness and brutality.

Humour became a potent ingredient within this mix – though I am witty and playful by nature, I am also grimly analytical and serious. Initially I had reservations about allowing playfulness to surface in this piece – I felt it would play down or trivialize the darkly ambivalent tone that I wanted to convey, but as the work-shopping progressed the humour of the piece found its way irrepressibly to the surface. This was a huge learning curve for me – a liberation. In hindsight Nancy was right – the humour and playfulness served to heighten the transgressive elements of Hutch.

Audience members reported enjoying the wit within Hutch and the exquisite discomfort of wondering if their laughter was illicit or permitted.

˜

During the rehearsal period Nancy and myself frequently forgot that the rabbit puppet was not ‘actually’ alive  -  Nancy would ask impossible things of the rabbit forgetting that it was attached to my body and in the improvisatory process I often felt like the rabbit was leading the actions. In order to get to this state I had to be deeply immersed – in a subtle state of mind. Was it the  transference of my own energy into the puppet that I was sensing in this state of mind, or was I simply more awake to resonances inherent in the object itself?

˜

Over the next few posts I will continue to examine this process and will have some film and photos of the actual performance to share.

But right now in the wake of it all, I am tired! I have been struck by that strange emptiness that is the post-project come-down – it all feels strangely illusionary. Just like life with all its creative fury, inconvenience, joy and bother, theatre too is a passing phenomena. Just part of the exquisite ambivalence of being momentarily in this place as animated star-dust. What are the chances? Sometimes I wonder what it is that compels me to make theatre, to make a spectacle of myself – is it a desire to commune with others or is it just my vanity ?- the vanity of star-dust.

Hutch is coming.

Hutch is currently being hatched in the rehearsal room under the wonderful guidance of director Nancy Black and with the superb music of Kristin Rule. I am most grateful to these two talented women for their contributions so far.

Hutch can been seen as part of the Tarrengower Puppetfest in March 2012. For more info follow this link:  http://tarrengowerpuppetfest.org.au/index.php

More to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Broken pram and a musk-pink nightgown.

I’ve been perusing junk shops for objects and clothing that belong in the underground world of Hutch. I’ve been searching for a costume for the Mother character – which begs the question – who is she and what aspects of her nature do I wish to accentuate?

As I’ve searched I’ve been struck by the silence and cacophony of old objects. In a giant collectables warehouse, with objects piled and assembled into stalls, I saw all manner of conversations going on between generations of artefacts.

Each object has a resonance, and encapsulates the aesthetics, function and culture of its time. So too, the clothes that hang like empty skins, jostling for recognition as the remnants of previous habitation. It is interesting to consider what message a garment carries. Garments can be very assertive in their expression of gender, age, occupation, status and aesthetic. They are the uniforms of our culture – they cry homemaker, mother, boy, girl, father, soldier, breadwinner! They state old, young, rich, poor.

˜

A musk-pink nightgown.

As I’ve tried a range of clothes on, searching for the mother character, I’ve been particularly intrigued by intimate apparel and sleepwear dating for the 60’s, 70’s. Each garment suggests a particular body, desirable to its era – and also the delineations between different facets that are called into play during a woman’s day – i.e. diaphanous, pastel nighties that suggest the intimacy of sleep or sexual relations, the stylish sundress that suggests feminine allure combined with the practicality of a busy mother, the apron that protects a mothers clothes from chores and says; provider, nurturer. The corsets and pointed bras that restrain the body, that sublimate the unruly feminine and impose a neater shape. The maternity garments that preserve modesty, conceal a mother’s shame.

While rifling through a second-hand shop I found two 1970’s nylon nighties and a musk pink bed jacket. They are at once, chaste but erotic, endowed with pink ruffles that remind me of female genitalia. This shall be the attire for my character in Act One – why? because they remind me of the sleepless and unkempt vigil of the nursing mother.

My own mother’s bedclothes always held an allure for me as a child – they felt like secret garments, close to the skin. They carried the scent of her breasts and of her femininity. During her pregnancy in 1975 with my brother, I remember her wearing a large tent-like dress patterned with blue flowers. As her pregnancy advanced the garments became more fiercely modest, which filled me with the sense that I should be embarrassed by my mother’s body, and therefore my own impending female state.

In trying on these vintage nightdresses I was reminded of this time in my mother’s life and the mystery that it held for my six-year-old mind. Wearing one such a nightie, I was also confronted by the similarity of my own body to my mother’s – I felt as if I was displaying the memory of my mother’s fecundity as well as my own ‘unused’ motherly body.

To me these garments speak of lonely nights and leaking breast milk -  they also allude to the dissolution of a new mothers autonomy and perhaps to my own childlessness.

No matter how many times I’ve washed and aired these garments they still smell of must and neglect.

A Broken Pram.

I found this extraordinary object in an antiques bazaar – I love its tattered canvas and strident, rusty frame. It truly belongs in the underground world of Hutch. It sits in the corner like a reminder of some neglected duty of care, a worn out love affair, something inappropriate and insistent.

This object reminds me of some of the qualities of the Odradek in story ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters‘ (The cares of a Family Man). Walter Benjamin describes Kafaka’s imagined object:

Odradek has “the form things assume in oblivion. They are distorted.”

Kafka’s short story is based on the possibility of an object that keeps resurfacing in a house and provoking the attention of the family man. It is an object of no definable purpose, a useless thing that lurks in the dark corners of a house, a thing that becomes an irritant to the story’s protagonist, as it is a thing that cannot die. It plagues him with the “almost painful idea” that Odradek will still be “rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing behind him, right before the feet” of his “children, and children’s children…”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cares_of_a_Family_Man (More about Kafka’s story)

While the pram in no way resembles the physical description of Kafka’s Odradek, nor is it an object without a discernible purpose – it is an object which is “practicing its insurrection” (to quote Vivian Liska in her wonderful essay, The Uprising of Things). Liska proposes that we ‘insist on the lifelessness of things” as consolation for our mortality:

“We take revenge on their permanence and make them subservient to us… Henceforth their function binds them to us and subordinates their duration to our temporality.”

However, there are objects that resist appropriation and ‘practice their insurrection’, causing unrest.

This shambolic pram’s insurrection is to persist, to be found again in another era, having outlived the people to whom it served a purpose. This pram has returned from oblivion – the shadow of an infant, long gone and forgotten, hangs about it. Its stained canvas and absent canopy remind me of the inevitability of decay – of distortion.

A woman who watched me buy it commented: “that would have been top of the range once.”

A small digression

This week my beloved canine companion died. She was 18 years old – but what has this got to do with the subject of this blog?

 As I watched her die the mystery of the animating force struck me again with poignant force. In a matter of minutes, the old dog passed seamlessly from an animated being to a lifeless body. Once again, just like witnessing my grandfather’s body, I imagined the rise and fall of her chest even after it had ceased; my mind kept stubbornly imposing signs of life where there were none.

I truly believe that the human mind is hard-wired to perceive life – life loves life, life wants to commune with other life. It’s part of the trick of walking this tightrope of living. Perhaps this is why the line between objects and subjects is so permeable, why we are so willing to invest life in the objects that surround us, for at the heart of it we are all biological puppets, briefly dancing.

 ˜

For three nights after my dog’s passing my own heartbeat kept me awake – this little beat disconcerted me as it seemed such a precarious confirmation of my own status as currently, but not indefinitely, living.

Vale Zebadee 1994-2012.