dancing and writing and dancing and writing (5 minutes)

1.

So what is it? A set of feelings? A task towards feeling. Are there parameters? Is there a style? Is anything allowed? Some of these questions I think i know the answer to and others well I should just let it form. Today it feels stupid to be engaged in the pursuit of dancing. I realised yesterday that I perceive dancing as an other and what I do is not dancing but an exertion or an unravelling of my body's relation to it. Is this how it feels for other people? Today my cheeks are hot. Too much coffee or the heating or the too much time inside in a kind of obsessing. This is not how to write. Do you notice that you sped up?

2.

I keep thinking about how I need to approach it with rigour. But maybe I don't. It felt good to write down 'a singular process' but maybe a mess of everything is alright too. Attention everywhere. If I'm paying attention to my thoughts - using dancing as a kind of collection point - then what attention is my body paying to what its doing? Is it literally just generating? Moving the blood around a bit faster so fresh stuff runs through my mind. I won't pretend to understand anatomy or biology. The reflection that my difficulty in comprehending maps and their relation to real space - real buildings and streets and thoroughfares, is perhaps similar to my lack of ability with anatomy. The body outside divided up and named versus what it feels like to be inside my own.

3.

An acknowledgement then that five minutes seems to move more quickly, faster than when I started. I think today my dancing is a conduit for thinking. Its slower to write it down and it can move through so many things at once. My hand, my pen, of course, can't keep up but I don't how to spell the sob that is bursting to get out but also shut up you wanker. Why am I thinking about truth? Would it be true to say that it felt most like how I really feel in that moment standing by the drawers, making the motions to pack, when the blood in my head sounded so loud and there was no longer any boundary between my skin and the air, between the noises coming from within me and the sounds coming from without? In fact I disappeared for a moment or everything became one - and its true that I can't believe that I went ahead and did what I did. Silently getting up, getting dressed, wheeling the suitcase out into the dark and softly closing the door behind me.

4.

And it was the desire to push it to the edge. To strip it down. To shout it out. To push, push until something else came through. Its not my place to say who is and who isn't an artist, and its funny that she says yesterday that ethically she thinks its for everyone, but also no its not. I'm tired. Thats clear, and its becoming a bodily habit. There's a kind of push, a muscular tension, that makes me feel I'm actually doing something. Now I'm just writing words on a page. I can't remember when it was that I thought 'do I ever just feel fine?' There is always some niggle, some itch, some ache, some hunger. And now it is legs that need to be stretched, a neck that wants to rest, a face that is full of heat and eyes that want to close.