"Western culture has confused mystery with "something to be solved", rather than something "to be serenaded."

- Helen Avery

We wanted to see, but were made blind. 

So electrified by the infinite possibilities, we rendered ourselves useless, unable to motion a single step towards greatness. 

Our flesh fatigued and our heads weary but wired, we gave in to the exhaustion of our own expectations.

All images by Blair McTaggart.

Everything Anyone Ever Wanted | Black Sheep Productions 

21 - 25 June 2016 @ Q Theatre

everything

The base things that anyone ever wanted can be reduced into a few simple words: Love. Happiness. Fulfilment. Simplicity. But these are not simple concepts. "What makes me happy?" is not a simple question, nor is it one that many people can even answer for themselves. Love often doesn't arrive - not from ourselves least of all - and doing that which fulfils you isn't always sustainable enough to fulfil you totally.

If you could have any one thing in your life right now, what would it be? How would you reduce the thing that brings you happiness into a single word ?

"We live together we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes."

- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception. 

in-Orchid (II)

we begin in an empty space
we birth it a life
we root umbilical chords out through our feet and into the ground
when they emerge,
   we hold our children upside down

we run into walls
we navigate one aother
we speak an unspoken language
we pick apart the symbols woven into our bodies

we place our hands on ourselves,
   each other, our foreheads,
   between our own legs
we comfort ourselves by stroking our own hair

we incite mythical deities
   and ingest orchids
we curl our toes towards our faces
we conjure the devil herself
   up through the floor
we drive knives through our ribs
we smash our knees into our cheeks
  not to punish, but to feel
  the empowerment of purging

we study the alchemy of life
we gargle spells to ourselves
  laden with eights, memoirs, directions
we are kings, magicians,
  maidens, witches
we are women, dancers, orchids:
  we cling to dust
  and flourish in dark spaces.

wading

This is the second time I've waded naked into these waters. The first in broad daylight, a baptismal ritual. The first cleansing from love, the second falling into. With, and alone - in oppositions of literal and figurative.

The first; dragging him in with me to escape the shift of the years, but very much in my own orchestrated realm. I am so good at that. I instigated, I decided, I enacted, I fulfilled, I regurgitated it back out. I watched him squirm in the hours that followed, coy around the campfire, gauche as his parents anchored ashore the next day. Messages unanswered, him being too young to understand the notion of play - especially from my female end.

And this time, by my own proximity and with joined heads. I have confessed my secret to those with me but in terms that bear no weight for them. They only know forevers, ongoings. The water holds my gushing heart; my body feels lithe with love. It speaks to me throughout the night, crashing: "I know, I know."

I'm glad it knows.

A pod of dolphins swim past us, mum is squealing with feigned delight - this is the perfect story to impart in weeks to come. I'm quiet with love, much in the way that I was when I became awash with bloodflood in the carpark of 2013. Where I sewed myself together and picked him and I apart. A mistake to be repeated.

You've the same triangles as those three, but you know the geometry of yours. And for that, I already love you.