imbolc

Welcome to ’23, here when the road reaches its antenna out to see how to get along – how to be by going. Friend and comrade Rae Diamond, who has offered such apt guidance in the past, now suggest we look at:

the “cross quarter” holiday of Imbolc/Candlemas/Groundhog Day – to celebrate the northeast & pre-rising, just-stirring energy. Tight buds. Possibilities. Midpoint between winter solstice & vernal equinox.

A proposal:

That we all write (or draw, or choreograph, or face out onto a view, or lose a shoe in a peat bog like Kimmerer does, or…) somewhere in the span between the evening of Wednesday, February 1st (starting after sunset, wherever you are), sharing projects/traces sometime before dawn Thursday, February 2. We then share these among each other, there’s no public move in mind beyond that.

Invitations:

Have a look at traditions around Imbolc, Candlemas, and Groundhog Day [(also St. Brigid’s Day, Feast of Nut, Risshun Setsubun…)]. The sense of in-betweenness, readiness for change, and for incarnate wisdom may have a bearing on what you make. It may be that busy-ness and regret are replaced by dancing and mourning (this latter pair are in the present, generating out in all directions; busy-ness is obsession with the future according to habits and luggage from the past; regret is anxiety about one’s acceptability to the future inhibited by the notion that one’s past errors are of actual interest to the immanent, responsible, hospitable conversation going on all around us, now).

We make what we make in any medium. If you’re looking for recommended forms, some suggestions:

Go to the virgule, actual or in line with its nature –

“This symbol (/), the virgule, was often the only mark of punctuation used by medieval scribes copying English poetry. The virgule is the ancestor of the comma. Rather than indicating mutually exclusive alternatives, as in some cases in modern usage, the scribes’ virgule connected things… Elizabeth Willis, in her extraordinary book-closing poem ‘In Strength Sweetness,’ from Address, explores the possibilities of constructing each line out of two halves, separated by a virgule… In the verse sequence titled “what if,” embedded within Just Us, a book largely written as prose, Claudia Rankine investigates contrafactual hypotheticals, or ‘what-ifs.’” (For more, see: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/158248/alliterative-verse

If devising a performance, consider the ambition of Arseny Avraamov:

“One hundred years ago, a 36-year-old Russian composer named Arseny Avraamov climbed on to a specially built tower in Baku, Azerbaijan, then part of the USSR. Surveying the urban landscape before him, he lifted two red flags and began to wave them from side to side. What happened next was one of the most extraordinary musical events of the 20th Century. One which, until recently, remained almost completely forgotten.

     “The event was the Symphony of Sirens, a musical work incorporating the city of Baku as its orchestra. It was staged on 7 November 1922, to celebrate the five-year anniversary of the October Revolution, and included the entire Caspian flotilla, cannons, locomotives, artillery regiments, hydroplanes, factory sirens, bells, foghorns, brass bands and a massive choir. Avraamov wasn't just conducting an orchestra, he was conducting a city.” (For more, see: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20221103-arseny-avraamov-the-man-who-conducted-a-city)

If hungry for a subject and approach:

Rescue (see Wright’s poem; Johnny Lee Hooker/Van Morrison, “The Healing Game” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ5Hz7-OjfA; Theodicy Jazz Collective, “Nunc Dimittis” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBqJABMaQO0)

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However it sorts, here’s an opportunity to lift up the spirit of solidarity as we take up art’s maneuvers into the onward.