1001 Nights Cast

“Put your red hat on and get to work, you need to do your work today, it’s the equinox and wherever the sun goes, you go. It’s a bit overcast so you’re gloomy today. The sun’s been in Pisces and you’ve been a bit of a mess, but now it’s a month of Aries, and that’s a grace period for you. You’ll be strong. Put your emotions on the back burner. Put your red hat on and just get into it.’

‘Okay. I’m glad your back, thanks for calling. Let’s go and eat soon. Bye’.

I hang up the phone, sit, breathe and fight the nausea. Head spinning.

I check my email.
‘spinning’. I laugh.
‘I hope this is okay for you’, she writes.
I laugh again, kindly, and with appreciation for the way of things, and for life’s discrete ironies.

I look up spinning in the dictionary. I like the dictionary. Of all the big books, it’s perhaps the most comforting to me with its ability to have such definitive words on so many words. On the way I thumb through show pony, shit, simulcast, slump, smudge, solar plexus, speed cop, spiritualism, no too far, back a page, spinal tap, spill, spillage, spill motion, spillway, spilt to spin, and spinning.

I pick out the ones I notice, absent-mindedly. ‘To make a yarn by drawing out, twisting and winding fibres, to form any material into thread.
To tell a false or improbable story, or version of an event.
To be affected with a sensation of whirling, as the head, to produce a thread from the body, as a spider.
The condition of stalled flight where the aircraft is rotating on all its axes simultaneously.’

It feels ridiculous to sit at my desk, on a grey and drizzly day with a big red sun hat on, but I do it anyway. Nothing to lose at this point, protecting me from the rays of the screen perhaps? Keeping the fire in, the mentals contained.

Once I went to a beautician in Paddington and she did say that people who spent a long time in front of computer screens should certainly all wear sunblock. She said that the rays created deep lines that could never be erased. I lay there in her salon as she applied youth elixir mud mask, and tried to read, to no avail, the crevices of reflected thought etched into my face.

Recently a friend of mine who gave a paper at a conference said something about how lines on a video screen are often seen as a mark of weakness, whereas lines on a persons face are seen as marks of experience or wisdom.

I thought, ‘well, maybe for men but not necessarily for women’. But I didn’t want to bring up such an old-fashioned point, so I smiled, along with the rest of the audience, and watched who nodded approvingly.

In the paper that I gave at this conference, about presence and absence and the presence of absence, I talked about what does and doesn’t endure. About what is and isn’t captured. I drew anecdotes and processes from a recent performance, I deconstructed Auslander’s notion of ‘the live’ and put the ‘living’ in its place, and so on and so forth. I was personable, clever enough but not brilliant, clearly an asset and ally to the cause and a good voice to have in the conversation. At the end of my presentation there was appreciative applause, a few questions, opinions and some discussion. I sat, took a breath and fought the nausea. Head spinning.

What I really wanted to do was stand up and say, ‘I’m sorry. This is all I’ve come up with. I know this is a very important event but you see it’s all or nothing at the moment and I can’t find a place to put it down, somewhere safe, somewhere I know I can leave it—just for a moment. I can’t make friends with what it means anymore. It’s always moving and I can’t pin it down, it just gets right on up again, it doesn’t show me any respect, it’s this thing that’s just too far.

It’s like going to the movies and accidentally putting your popcorn under someone else’s seat. When you reach for it, it’s not there! I mean, it’s there, or at least you think it’s there, you put it somewhere and all of a sudden, somewhere is the wrong place and you don’t know if it’s yours anymore, or if it ever was and then you wonder if you can look for it?…if you’re allowed to and you’re not sure what you are going to find if you go looking for it and all through the movie the sound of other people’s popcorn rings in your ears like some sort of primeval torment’.

Of course, I didn’t say any thing of the sort. I wanted to because I’d like to pay homage to Tristran Tzara and Emmy Hennings in that way. With some good old-fashioned absurdity, and spin, when spin was good and healthy and it was a political imperative to present something that wasn’t, so as to maybe sense what is or what may be.

I’m looking for the end now, in my other favourite book, the Thesaurus. A sort of poetic, resonant open-ended end, a weaving, rotating fake end that suddenly, without warning or fanfare comes into view as the sun emerges, and I find myself on that plane, spinning hopelessly out of control, on all axes at once, lost, going nowhere fast, wondering if my heart will give out under the pressure of fight or flight, with nowhere to run and no one to fight?