Monday, May 21, 2007

Trip Mckenzie and the perfect gathering.

I have been trying to imagine the perfect social occasion.
Driving in my car, returning from a show that never happened, nostalgia for days of my youth hitting me in the face as I travel along the dark tree lined roads of those days. I recall an excitement and a spirit of adventure that accompanied every such drive, no matter what the occasion I would be filled with expectation of the grand and magnificent events that might just possibly occur that evening. Or the beautiful, intimate moments that I might experience.

Now my head is constantly overflowing with jumbled ideas of great artistic achievement, human evolution, purity of experience. I question whether there is any worthwhile reason to engage in anything which is not pure experience and so I find myself doubting that there is any worth to any art or act of creativity. But without it how does the human race progress, how does it evolve into something greater than the stagnant state of society now.

I imagine an answer to be found in a collision of these ideas. Acts of wild unbounded creativity enacted purely as experience pushing its participants with every manifestation to a new and better place. In my head this collision of ideas is only possible through the collision of people - evolution of an individual is not the same as evolution of the individual.

Yet every gathering of people around creative reasons always seems to devolve into two groups: performer and audience. The former forced into effectively shouting their ideas into space, no matter how much they simply want to share and interact. The latter demanding that they be entertained, that their laziness and cowardice, unwillingness to push themselves rather than claim to be enlightened through their appreciation of other people's efforts, all be satisfied by those who they believe they validate through their presence.

This is not what I yearn for.
I yearn for social experiences, a natural product of life lived well, in which every person engages and participates. They do this for no other reason than that it is the right way for it to be done at that time. A dancer dances for themselves, but in doing so inspires a writer to put pen to paper, whose words feedback into the music played by musicians, guiding the hand of the artist and sculptor, shapes created compelling the dancer to push themselves to new places. And so on, with the linebetween all ever blurred and erased until the group and each indivudal a part of it finds themselves in a new place, filled with new ideas, concepts, imaginations and understandings. A pure experience done for no reason but its own self-worth and the self-worth of the individuals involved.

I have no idea what I am talking about.
These thoughts just run through my head day after day, never taking concrete form or shape, never showing me anything apart from frustration and confusion.
Something is lacking, but it is only out there to be grasped and embraced.
But I have no clue what it is.

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