Friday, February 19, 2016

The ceremony of innocence (excerpt from The Invisible Hope)


We were innocent yet, us dreamers in the night.

Despite our claws dug into the machinery of reality, we were still outside. We clung but we did not breathe in resonance with the machine.

Our own hearts still carry our breath to this day. For we are free.

For our resonant thoughts that came together like we were some long lost souls meeting in new life, we decided to hold a ceremony.

It would be a fine portrayal of our own innocence and the innocence we still yearned for to clothe the world, to make our dreams come true and to save the rest, a Second Coming.

This was our vision and we pulled verses from Yeats to support our thesis like academians, and we sat and discussed the logistics over rosé like fine capitalists and we parted into the night to create our formal works that would compose the elements of the display, like true artists.

And that we were.

It would be a one night affair, put-up and take-down, guerilla style. Romanticizing the moment to match the ephemerality of the current fashion.

I wrote verses upon verses and pulled from verses of old and the verses of the model in August, Los Angeles.

I merged our writings into one that could not be distinguished, so as to express the resonance I truly felt with these people. We recorded our reading of it.

The husband created more dark works of poor children’s faces that depicted the reality of the peripheral effects of the capitalism we so sought to escape.

Another painter created the haunted semblances of children, as well, perhaps these reflected the inner child in each of our souls.

I selected a musical piece that reflected the haunted repetition of true meaning distorted and twisted and looping over and over again in partial fragments of varying fashion that left you groping for the truth.

This reflected my capitalist self reaching back for the moment of truth experienced in Bach's Violin Concerto No. 1 upon my last true descent into my own intellect.

This was my innocence churning in the sea of new life, that was always moving forward.

Finally, after much rumination and preparation and celebration, the day of the ceremony came. We set up in rapid pace.

The space was lent to us by a group of artists and underground dreamers whose innocence ran much deeper than ours. Their motive was exposure, much more so than expression. They left their works scattered throughout the space so that we held our ceremony in their presence. This, and their attendance, was their only request.

We hung our works, prepared makeshift stands and digital boards to display our poetry, played the looping madness of our thoughts in the back room, while hip dance music resounded in the front.

And we waited the night to come around.

And so it did. Around and around again.

After the opening conversation and some drink, I began to dance.

It was an asexual dance, guided by my own concept. My partner was along for the ride, though she tumbled again and again. It was a Viennese Waltz and we were mostly the only ones.

It was ferocious in its exactitude to the every whim of my racing mind. It communicated in detailed logic and pure chaos the rise and fall of my own intellect, day in and day out, the awkward steps of my thoughts as they struggled to keep pace with the capitalist, or the gallant strokes of my words as I wrote the definition of my freedom persistently and incessantly, late into the throes of night.

As we all did. For this was our innocence and I was expressing it totally and fully.

Finally her charms scattered onto the floor the night was late and I settled in to my own exhaustion.


The next day we took down the show, closed our books and that was all.


- Excerpt from The Invisible Hope, Jason Greendyk