Bringing together the 10,000 Things to a moment of poise.
How do we as artists recognize each other in community? What does this community do, in its union, and how? How may we rehearse our strengths so that we are ready to serve emergencies of grieving and celebration?
To play out answers, let’s draw together through work.
The challenge at hand is for individual artists or teams of artists to generate ten thousand things each, and, as possible, to bring them together in a live encounter on the occasion of the Spring Equinox, gathering, balancing, and releasing them, at a focus on joy, recognizing an urgent need, born of compassion, for creative elation and expectancy during heavy and tangled times.
MAKE TEN THOUSAND THINGS
LET THEM GO
MARCH 20th, 2:58pm
“Ten thousand” is rooted in the Buddhist concept of the ten thousand dharmas – an image for all observable reality. We are meant to recognize, and ultimately move through this reality, to a state of levity – a surpassing of fact, a merciful gaze on it, a move into light.
We bring everyone together, with everything we have, and set our tens of ten thousands free at a given moment. The character of that moment is joy. Any moment realized by art is compound, we match vulnerability of change with precision of purpose (vibratory, sonic).
Joy includes expectancy, and joyful expectancy is hope;
hope is a kind of woundedness – admission not only of uncertainty, but also of a willingness to anticipate the good despite uncertainty.
We gather to affirm a manifesto of joy in all its precarity.
In practical terms:
We each write ten thousand words or characters, ten thousand epigrams or names. We dedicate ten thousand thoughts, ten thousand brush strokes or ten thousand cuts in a silhouette. Where our set of things cannot be brought to shared presence, materially, in the space we chose for convening, our work is accounted for (documented, described, or noted somehow), and lent to the communal environment.
A special moment of silence is observed, live and remote, at the chronological center-point of equinox.
EXAMPLES/GUIDELINES
Approach the number ten thousand, variously. What are you already doing ten-thousand of, daily? How can you gather them in gratitude and offer them over?
More formally:
Generate ten thousand synonyms for precarious joy.
Write ten thousand haiku; write something using the math of 5-7-5 in various ways to create a poetic equation amounting to ten thousand
Write play or story of ten thousand words.
Devise an aleatory system that yields ten thousand variations.
Play tune of a ten thousand notes, a round with ten thousand verses, a dance of ten thousand steps…
Consider flocking:
Build a team and divide the labor – ten people do a thousand things each, etc.
MORE ABOUT JOY
The vivid peril of vulnerability; exposure in a moment that anticipates that there will be subsequent moments, with fatality at most insecure (one may live; approaches hope).
