In memory of Per Odeltorp.
Published 2000.
URN: urn:nbn:se:studiofreewheelin-2000-02
MASK MUSIC BODY
-
woman fallen
Demoiselles from Avignon. Fallen bodies; bodies fragmented in the falling into pieces of the I; bodies falling into the world. arms hips heads eyes breasts legs cunts throats hands feet mouths Woman's fall an unwritten sign between heaven and earth; a sign of promise and hesitance trembling on the ambiguous sword of discernment. - Well, then my beginning was scorned and displaced, woman murmurs, and shuffles the shattered fragments around. - My body is my castle is my haven, she recites, as if conjuring the fallen sign. - My body is a rock of grizzled granite; my body is a rock of granite with colours interspersed; with purple and magenta, with orange yellow and avocado green, and longing, scarlet red I believe it to be... - ...or blue...like the great blue... She tries a piece of blue in her hand, weighs it to test its reality. It is amazingly easy, like the eternal flight of thought borne on the wings of Mercury, but, at the same time just as heavy as wet clothes on those in distress. ...and longing grows the stronger in her hand... A memory of tones from a blue blues exudes from a recess almost forgotten. A song of mourning, sung by a slave dreaming of the return the homecoming. The soft tones vibrate in the hollow of her hand, and diffuse among forms of woman's abstraction, among forms falling to pieces, unveiling the body's inner music. -
woman haunted
On the threshold to the black hole that holds woman's secret in store, stands woman in time lost. An hour, maybe, that's gone its way; an hour flooded in profusion, where it lost itself; an hour, when the mirrors of time cracked, and were smashed to pieces. In a room without mirrors of recognition, the familiar homely is uncanny foreign. A room without mirrors of recognition, is a room haunted by a foreign body forcing its way into woman's house that is her home that is her body. A stranger in woman's house makes a woman a stranger in everyone's house. A foreign body haunts woman, lives under her skin, moves like a rhythm under her skin, spreads now murmuring now roaring a lion through woman's body. A germinating seed, a soul in becoming. A possibility beyond the vision of the eye. A foreign rhythm in a foreign soul; a rhythm transparent in its movement, yet always evasive, never brought to light, but sensed by the skin, under the skin, as the rhythm waxes and wanes, in the body's infinite metamorphosis.
-
the labyrinth
She found herself in a maze deserted, among funky archaic roots.Throbbing waves of heat took her to its heart, and as she penetrated this body of stone, the image of the monstruous the site was thought to be gave away. The stones breathed of peace, and the walls told a story of a proud and freedom- loving people. Slender and with heads high borne, they moved along the walls with graceful evidence. The labyrinth was shrouded in mystery, there was so little known about it, details were missing,denunciations of exactitude lacking, and she probed her way viscerally through this lost garden of Eden, through a centre now empty and deserted. Only clouds of sand stirred in the heat, as she moved along the wall where the king once had his seat. But then, once long ago, the square had been filled with men and women from far away. Maybe, this had been a place of wheeling and dealing, of mixing and socializing, of dancing and drinking. This empty site would have echoed of all the tongues meeting here in a babylonic jumble of voices: unlimited billowing uncontrollable, and, hence, horrifying monstruous. A buzz of voices gone traversed the air in a sudden puff of air; a buzz that once was silenced by history. She had come to a rest, drowsy, with eyes slightly closed, as she felt a thrill along her spine. She opened her eyes and found herself facing the abominable. Across the empty courtyard oxen horns outlined, one resting in the west, next to the king's seat, and the other in the east, in the house belonging to the priestess of the snake. In its bosom, in the joint between, in midst of the two compasses, a double axe lay across. And she remembered, she remembered that the labyrinth was not a place of a maze; she remembered that the labyrinth was the house of the double-edged axe, the house of the equivocal and ambiguous, the house that splits and discriminates. She saw a center that was not; she saw a double axe splitting it in two, and she followed the horns of the oxen with her eyes from the seat of the king, through that which is not, to the throne of the priestess of the snake and back - back and forth -back and forth - back and forth. The movement of the eyes aroused the lost dialectics between man and woman that once had been harboured in the house of the double axe. She remembered how the centre that was not,was the space, where gracile men and women entered the trance of dance, where you are neither man nor woman. She saw these men and women lose all proportions, as the movement intensified and brought them into the heart of themselves, into the pulse of the heart, where the day blossoms forth in a lily of blood. It was the blue hour, she stood in the nakedness of unconcealment, as the rut of a taurus filled the centre that is not her. She felt the rut wax in that which is not; she felt it grow in her absence, inside of her, moving inside of her, under her skin, and the body twisted itself in an emotion grotesque. Legs thighs hips swelled into proportions unforeseen, shoulders budded wings. The bull was inside her. Ravaged her, raptured her. She wasn't herself, but, more like herself, raptured. Spirited away, she stood in her absence with the atrocious the abominable playing under her skin. The air changed, a warm moisty wind blew through the labyrinth, and out of its ganglions soft tones are heard seeking their way out from the dark continent, from up down out of the broken perspective and bursting forth in an erotic play in the centre that is not. She danced the music of the labyrinth, where man meets woman, where I meet myself, where the dance happens just in the split between you and me, between me and myself, where neither you nor I is man or woman. The feeling of the body's grotesque deformation is traversed by a sudden metamorphosis, as a star dances over the mountain peaks and throws its light over forms clear sprung out of the music of the body and the soul.
-
baila, muchacha!
The world is a strange place to be in, when you dance a dance of cosmic waves, among rhythms of fat sensuality, celestial clangs dissonant tones, and disconnected strands of words adrift among the fragments of a past that is shattered each time the bass hits the intoxicating backbeat of baila, muchacha! baila! dance until all mirros have fallen! dance into the rift of the backbeat! emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds dance in the midst of the polyphony! free your soul let your body take control feel the pulse of salamanders! - feelin' hot hot hot forget and find! move dem hips! es muy rico - don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge - baila muchacha! baila! And woman enters the dance, but the world is a wondrous place to live in, when you tread into the dance that is the tree of life that is the tree of knowledge that is the end beginning of all and everyone, and the woman enters the dance with light feet and swaying grinding hips, and the back burdened by thousands of years 'cause she's a rootswoman. The rhythms of the music transports her into being's polyphony. They set her hips in motion. They sway salsa and samba, swing calypso, soca and merengue, grind reagge and all the unspeakable rhythms of Africa. The rhythms grab the roots that open the rift to the infinite dance of being. In the dance she is not. In the dance she is a dancing body, among playing salamanders. She dances across the surface of the earth, from Santiago to Banjul, to Caracas, to Skanstull; from Lima to Johannesburg, to Kingstown, to the shores of Calcutta; she dances from port to port, to foreign ports, of sorts. Te kanis? Como estas? Somole? Baila muchacha! Move dem hips! Dance into Babel, dance into its tower of confusing language that the world is. She enters the dance with a scent of beer and lechery gone flat. She sips at the scents names of intoxicating bodies. She breathes the stale scent of walls drenched in sperm,and is thrown up in a bar,in a bush, down the gutter, in to her extinction,in to the silence in the midst of the polyphony. -
the ballad of the black sun
A wind blows through the body of woman. It seeks its way through her ear, diffuses, and transports her into the rift that holds the black sun in store. She comes to herself, as the wind transforms itself into the music of the night, into music that washes flushes her body, into music that unleashes the barrage to memory's billowy stormy ocean, and the body starts, with a smile of recognition. She wakes by music streaming through her, dispersing a prism of colours translucent, of shimmering avocado green and orange yellow, of deep indigo and soft purple, of shining sun and crimson red, and her body sings in the dark of the night She wakes, sweating, pushing, her skin tickling and pricking and the waters running along her legs, and she gives birth to another, another that comes to her under the wings of an eagle, a lion-bear standing on its hind legs, listening to the surging of tones with its senses free, filled with the force of the surge. She laughs. In the surge salamanders dance. The number nine comes to her at the beginning end of the rainbow, and the rift that holds the black sun in store opens further deeper into the dreamworld's ocean. She sinks into surging tones, There, there a newly awake carbuncle peeps alert over the edge of a silver-coloured lotus boat, and the placenta is ejected. Relieved she lies sprawling on her back, flinging her arms in a billowing roar of laughter, when a silver heron lifts from inside the bosom. It flies a path and lands again in the music of the night. Then, a man stands there, in front of her, and the day blossoms into a lily of iridescent colours as the music of the night flows out of his hands; music that washes through her innermost recesses, that cleanses the one who once was, flows over her body. She hears all hesitance give way; she hears how longing is set free; she hears a woman man being born out of the darkness of the night. She feels her him being born out of the hands of the man; she feels him play inside of her, under her skin, and she loses herself in the longing of the surging tones, in its joy and in its melancholy. At last! dreams dance in out of the forecourt to her being. At last, she says Yes! and reclaims land lain fallow. She says Yes! and a cosmic thrust flashes through her house. She says Yes! and enjoys land forgotten. And she is taken by irresistible desire to sing a blues of her own, of irresistible yearning to write the desire that fills her body to its shattering breaking point. She is raptured by the orgasmic pleasure that travels through the body when you come, to yourself. She is one erogenous zone that dreams of catching the evasive absent in cascades of colours; she dreams of catching the body's rhythms of fire and sulphur in images of sounds and words. And In the dream's naked footsteps friar's lanterns will-o'-the-wisps jack-o'-lanterns all alight. Iridescent colours, polyphonic images of words, rhythms of fire.
Where I am, memory
is not. Where love
is I am not. Where
I am not, there is
memory. →
In passing by, a casual touch, and the subversive force of love displaces my being. Room of red roses. The demiurge's gaze transfixes me, demands the text of bygone days, in exchange. →
I hereby give thou, unmerciful demiurge, the text of bygone days, its story, its plot. I sacrifice on the altar of creation the story about the woman with many names, about the woman with a split face, about the woman with different masks; I sacrifice the story about she who once was, but no longer is. I give her to thee to feast on; I give thee this woman of the past, who sponges on my body, who has riveted herself to my shadow; I give her to thee to feast on. Thou, unmerciful demiurge, opens the gate to the earth's interior and drinks her blood, greedily desiring. Thou folds the sacrificed body in thee arms, and devours it. The earth closes again. Once more satisified. Greed fulfilled. The hellish alchemical fire nourished, gives thou back what thee has devoured. Body mouldered charred, returns in slings of fire . →
I tremble in my desire. You
penetrate my inner room. I
gasp as your head
touches the cradle of love,
and strikes the chord that is
the end beginning of my
being in the world.
You hold
my life in your arms, tasting
my nakedness carefully
at the edge of Paradise, your body starts, and
you throw yourselves into
the heat of the rut.
We make love. Nakedly
and relentlessly, safely
anchored in our hot, moist
bodies.
You shine in the lamp's shattered light,
falling over your glowing body.
I see you. I see you
in your beauty, in your perfection. I
know you see mine, as you
reach for the light of
my eyes and catch
the flickering flame of eternity in
the palm of your hand, carrying it
with you, inside, concealed
for the eye, but unveiled in the rhythm
of your love-making.
You see me. You see me
leave myself and come
towards you, as I lose myself
in the inexorable force
where you are,
neither man nor woman; weave of
upper and lower-case letters;
body of translucent
signs
follows its own
logic, and finds its form. →