attention: this is a live performance

"Why are you stingy with yourselves? Why are you holding back? What are you saving for — for another time?
There are no other times.
There is only now.
Right now."
— George Balanchine

Lives are changed because of silences. Because of words unspoken. Requests, desires, feelings, never articulated. We think that our actions are what shapes our future, but it is the void, the things not done, the scope of the unspeakable, unknowable ether is what weighs down upon us more than we know.

I have left many many places in my past, but as I explained to a friend the other day, the likelihood that I would have stayed put in any one of those locales had someone, the right someone, sat me down, taken me by the hand, looked me in the eye and said, "I wish you wouldn't go. Please don't. Please stay right here for a little while," is frighteningly grand.

Granted, I come across as pig-headed, as unswayable, as confident and unwavering and devil-may-care - to the point that perhaps it is my own fault that nobody ever had the guts or the grist to get in the way of one my decisions and request a serious reconsideration and reversal. Nonetheless, my life's trajectory has largely been shaped by drastic exits simply because nobody ever put up a good case, often any case, for otherwise.

Which brings me to an recent experience of a friend of mine (no, this is not a veiled tale about me). There is a person in this friend's life who was planning a move - a major one - across an ocean. My friend did not want this person to go.

Me: "Have you asked them to stay?"

Friend: "No. But isn't that a huge request? An unaskable request? Something that signifies neediness on my end. Insults them by implying I think they'd consider such a sacrifice, a redirection of their life, on my behalf?"

Me: "Maybe, but sometimes, the only reason I've left, is because nobody told me not to go."

So my friend asked. Imagine it. A life was asked to be changed. And guess what? The person in question is staying put - for a bit longer anyway.

I am not surprised.

We are so afraid of showing our need; showing our affection; our depth of care for fear of frightening away those whom we feel those things toward. But that is the true irony. For really, isn't that the grand quest we're all on anyway? Finding a person, place and thing who can furnish us with exactly that sort of unrestricted devotion.

This prevalent hesitancy and the potentially life-altering wrongness of this hesitancy reminds me of another of my favourite quotes:

"Say "I love you" to those you love. The eternal silence is long enough to be silent in, and that awaits us all."
- George Eliot

Ahh... the eternal silence. Which brings me back to my airplane theme that you've seen recently, together with the girls in dresses and the quotes from choreographers (above).

I've been taking a lot of risks lately (those of you who know me may say, 'but you always take risks' - true, but these are perhaps more directed, more *calculated* risks than usual). Risks of the heart and the deep deep soul. Taking plane rides and grand leaps of faith. Some have worked. Some not so well.

But a novel is being written (there are dancers in it - I feel eerily in sync with the zeitgeist and all the Black Swan buzz) and a venture is being formed. And if I don't hold back - well, actually, the *if* of that is almost irrelevant as I've reached a point where I don't feel I *can* hold back anymore... a sensation that makes me feel as if I've backed myself onto the right gang plank (diving board?)... a place of such overwhelming surrender because there simply is no choice.

In effect, to appropriately end with another Balanchine quote:

"I don't want people who want to dance, I want people who have to dance."
— George Balanchine

And if you have to dance, dancing then, is what you must do; the very abandon of your existence is fulfilled through the act of dance itself.



Photo is by the similarly-minded Rodney Smith, who (if you read his blog) rarely loves exactly how his photos turn out, but the process, the elements that make up the vocation of photography, is his reward.

another chorus, or was that the last verse?

"Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return."
— Milan Kundera


I'm reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being right now, and Kundera writes about Beethoven's last major completed work: String Quartet No. 16. Beethoven titled the quartet's final movement The Difficult Resolution wherein he supplemented the notes with a question:

"Muss es sein?" "Must it be?"

followed by (twice!):

"Es muss sein! Es muss sein!" "It must be! It must be!"

As we live along, it is sometimes curious to me how we make decisions predicated on the number of fresh chances we anticipate will be in our future that may never come to pass, but I'm also continously amazed by how many tries, how many try-agains, we get - to the extent that sometimes it's as if, indeed, what must be, must be.

So now, as I push off a present experience, I find myself musing: Must it be? Was that just the third movement? Or is it sonata-over?


Photo: We haven't seen Mr. Smith in a while.

winter vacation

"I must try to find something new, not necessarily in a place that is unfamiliar, rather in a person or a place that is right beside me."

- Rodney Smith


Ah, perhaps should have gone with a Rodney Smith photo to go with his words.... but how cool are those lamps??? I was torn, but in the end went with Rune Guneriussen.

my heart pounded for a full three hours

"Sometimes it is necessary to make a confrontation – and I like that." - Louise Bourgeois


Photo: Rodney Smith


oh... if you only *knew* what I did yesterday.....

the beginning of the end

Okay, it's not like the 'net needs another blog. But hurray! Photographer extraordinaire Rodney Smith just launched a blog called The End Starts Here. He writes about the stories behind his lyrically whimsical photographs and throws in bits about his life and psyche along the way. In his most recent post, Twins in Tree, he writes:

"When I was younger, I just assumed I would be a novelist. I had the sentiment but not the skill."

Ahhh... I love getting such insight into the minds and motives of my favourite artists... shows that you never know where a deep-seated inkling will lead...

gather ye rosebuds

"Art is the proper task of life." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Photography is by Rodney Smith, who has a delightful new photography coffee table book out called The End. It's absolutely loaded with hyperbole and highly recommended if you've recently been taking life - or yourself - too seriously.

what remained

I moved out today (long story... alluded to, in part, by the very memorable and well-received "cracks" video featured here a week or so ago).

After too-many consecutive hours of sorting and boxing and schlepping, I thought everything had been cleared out, but upon my last survey of the place, I realized I'd inadvertently left a collage/mural I'd created affixed to the wall - a montage of Rodney Smith photographs captioned by bits of a favourite quote of mine from Catharine MacKinnon, renowned scholar, feminist, and all-around intriguingly smart woman.

With movers breathing down my neck, I rushed to take down my makeshift composition; haphazardly peeling off the images as quickly and as delicately as possible; tossing them into an empty box. But just as I was about to tear the last lingering picture from the wall, the final possession of mine to grace the little abode I'd inhabited for nearly a year, I paused, because I hadn't meant for this particular pairing to be the finale... hadn't intended it as the savored last word. But there it was, my favourite part, the quote's true crux.... since it doesn't really matter what philosophical trappings came before or after it, without this fragment, all the surrounding philosophy is meaningless.

"But invent the capacity to act," it said.

Indeed. This is true for everyone... regardless of what you believe. And I'd sort of like to think that the message staring at me was a serendipitous metaphor; a small wink from the universe, rewarding me and egging me on with this symbolic nudge of encouragement; confirming that this move was progression, that I was going forward in a good way.

Almost as if to say, "Well done! But keep it up! Perfect or imperfect, you must continue to take action!"

So I took a picture of the picture as proof. As a reminder to myself, and to you, that thought is nothing without the physical act - just as Catherine MacKinnon insisted, it is in our actions that our power manifests itself. Want to do something? Take a leap. Don't like where you are? Move.

Surrealist Meets Logician

"To be thrown upon one's own resources, is to be cast into the very lap of fortune; for our faculties then undergo a development and display an energy of which they were previously unsusceptible."

-Benjamin Franklin

[Picture courtesy of photography genius Rodney Smith, who doesn't watch any movie made before 1947.]