Extracts from Mangkhut: stories in the air

As I haul my bags to the hotel elevator, I pass the statue of Guan Yin which stands in the foyer. She holds her jar of pure water. Guan Yin is the goddess of compassion, mercy and kindness, a fiercely loving protector of ships and sailors, kite surfers, swimmers, divers, fishermen and anything that risks danger at sea. Her name is short for Kuan-shi Yin, meaning “observing all the sounds and cries of suffering of the human world.”

Swimming

This time I’ve been given an artist’s studio in the woods for two weeks. It is round, with a pointed roof, and being in it evokes – to my surprise – feelings of a forgotten childhood longing for the perfect secret house in the woods. In this sense, the studio has all one could wish for: it’s fully furnished, has a little kitchen and a bathroom. At the back a second door opens onto a deck, circular like the house, the entire thing built out of pine wood. There are some reminders of previous residents – pinholes in the walls, some half-burnt candles, even a visitors’ book. One entry reads: “passerby enjoyed Mexican hospitality.” Presumably there was a Mexican, or at least Mexican food ... I turn the page: yes, from Mexico City, a certain José, “writer, artist, curator” it says ... I feel the presence-in-absence of these persons, like the Three Bears with Goldilocks. On this, my third day of playing house out here in the forest, there are even passing deer to further summon up the distant corporeal memory of that secret house – of how important it was.

My secret house took on various forms. Sometimes it would be thatched, rose-strewn, at the end of a path in the heart of a forest, always with a chimney spiraling smoke. Or it would be under the roots of a tree, just a door, maybe a lighted window built into the bark. Or a toadstool house reached only by a ladder. I must have seen them in books, and I certainly remember drawing them incessantly.

I’m curious about the “passerby.” At the entrance to the colony there is a notice stating that access is strictly by appointment and in any case, since the path leads only to the studios, no one theoretically “passes by.” It occurs to me that, in keeping with the fairytale-like nature of the place, the same passerby might visit me. I would offer hospitality just like José.

I take the path to my secret studio. I am thinking about what I want to write: about “water” and “gravity.”

Water. Early this morning I was swimming in it. In the pool. Imagining, as I did so, that if the lengths were laid out in one direction, they would make one kilometer, and that I was swimming that distance across a bay in Greece or Corsica ... As I settled into the swim, the line between reality and imagination blurred. I remembered the classes of Denis Brousse in the pool at Malérargues years ago. How this robust and bull-chested Frenchman from Lyon would introduce the class participants to the idea that, more often than not, we aggress the water when we swim in it, beating it aside with our arms and feet, hitting it, pushing it away from us – that this aggression towards water was born out of our fear of our essential liquidity. We are, after all, up to sixty percent water ourselves. The water is found in the extra cellular fluids of the body, but above all in the cells themselves. With Denis we would sing underwater, sink to the bottom of the pool listening to each other’s songs, learning to let go of the fear, to be once more literally “in our own element,” identified with the water and as relaxed within its embrace as in the womb itself. 

From our earliest age we are taught to fear water as an alien and dangerous substance – one that, unless we learn to dominate it, to make it submit to our will, will invade our bodies and end our lives by that most terrible of all deaths: death by drowning. Not only are we taught to fear water: the fear is inherited, since the cell itself, the very water of our bodies, remembers. Not only actual events: it remembers also via myth. Death and drowning, suffering and survival, the great flood sent to punish the transgressor.

My swim brought this back. We inherit the fear that leads us to aggress the very substance of our own being. And this fear can be heard in our voices.

Gravity. Often in classes, the first thing I’ll ask a group to do is to get down on the floor and simply roll from one end of the room to the other. This rolling reveals a mass of information about those doing it. “Be detectives,” I say to them, “look for clues.”

For some participants, just dealing with the idea of putting themselves horizontal can be a major step. In Caracas, The International Theater Institute had arranged for some twelve opera singers to do a workshop with me, a radical move designed to break down barriers between the thriving experimental scene in the city and the more traditional arts world. The singers arrived, all women. Perhaps they had been advised to wear loose clothing, suitable for movement, perhaps not. In any case, they enthusiastically took up positions around the piano, all immaculately turned out, looking expectantly and not a little curiously at me with my sweatpants and bare feet. I looked back at them. They would not have been out of place at an English society wedding or at church on Sunday: all beautifully and expensively outfitted in little suits and dresses, impeccably made up and highly perfumed, with lots of gold jewelry, and all, without exception, wearing mean sets of high-heeled shoes, now neatly placed, one before the other, in severe anticipation. Court shoes, my mother would have called them, presumably because one would wear them to court. And certainly these ladies’ careful sartorial and cosmetic preparation indicated that they did indeed view a trip to an English voice teacher as akin to being received by royalty. One snappy little two-piece outfit even had fur trimmings on the sleeves, despite the Caracas heat.

Rolling on the floor was clearly out of the question on that first day, but I did make the suggestion that they might like to remove their shoes. This was greeted with total consternation and not a little amazement. I might as well have asked them to disrobe completely, such was their initial shock. Removal of shoes meant removal of support, of structure, of identity no less. 

By the end of the day, being an enthusiastic and generous crowd (only truly generous and enthusiastic souls could have dressed like that in the first place, in fact), most had taken off their shoes and were moving around with the glee of royalty slumming it on a night off ... 

On the second day many of them appeared for class more practically dressed, in an array of designer leisure suits, mostly white or fuchsia, some with gold or silver beading. At some point in our few days together we even made it to the floor for rolling and breathing exercises. They ended the workshop thrilled with the growth and flexibility in their voices.

Not all students who come to class refuse gravity to that degree; but most of us resist it, even when we are lying on the floor. In class, when we observe the various ways we do this, our amusement at seeing ourselves described or our idiosyncrasies illustrated helps to release the tension further. For example, there is the two-sided person – front and back, no sides – who falls flat after the enormous effort of pushing the body over, so that rolling is more like moving a heavy slab of marble. Or the four-sided, four-cornered body – the one whose hands and feet never touch the floor but spiral up leaving the center body to make all the effort. Or the one who rolls off to the side of the room, then realizes, aghast ... The one who rolls really fast to get it over with quickly (who you later discover was nicknamed Snap-Along as a child), or the one who rolls so slowly as to always cause a traffic jam.

Most of those in a new group will initially roll with their mouths tightly shut – air is like water, you could drown if you let too much in – yet they must be breathing. But how? The skin of the body, the skin of the floor. Skin meeting skin. More of the skin meeting more of the skin more of the time. Letting go of the fear of drowning, of gravity, of water. Pour yourselves across the floor. The floor is getting softer. No bones, no muscles. Liquid ...

The water within us is the solvent; without it the chemistry of life cannot function. We remember that in our embryonic form we had gill-slits in the region of the pharynx. We remember from where we came. Liquid memory ...

As muscles relax and articulations release, the skin begins to breathe, the floor-skin no longer feels hard and a kind of natural cushioning or suspension develops: the body is heavy, and yet it floats. A reminder of our earliest origins. We expand out and across the floor as we breathe out; we contract and gather together as we take in the air – this is the action of the very cell itself.

We seek a balance between our sensitivity to gravity (which at sea level, because of the sixty-mile column of atmosphere between us and outer space, pushes down on every part of our bodies with about fifteen pounds of air pressure) and that sense of action which is our living identity. If there were no limits to this melting release, we would leak out or explode, so we recognize the pressure and adapt to it. Our liquid nature finds harmony with the air itself; we are literally swimming in it, participants in a peristaltic pulsating progression of movement through space, evoking patterns and searchings that began for each of us in our mother’s womb. As it did then, the fetus floats and actively assists in its own birth. It stretches and contracts, generating motion, liquids pumping, and emerges to assert authentic action.

Swimming in sound.

Surachet tells me he has two saffron robes; one is being washed and the other one he is wearing. He sleeps in the temple and eats only twice a day, once at 7 a.m. then again at 11 a.m. Nothing after that. Half an hour of prayers just after waking at 5 a.m., then another half-hour later in the day. The rest of the day is spent either studying, collecting gifts of food and money, or talking to people like us. Victor asks him if it is okay to eat ice cream. Surachet says that it is.

Unidentified Flying Objects

We are eating oysters and smoked salmon, drinking white wine, in Paris. The television is on and the Arte channel has a program about unidentified flying objects. In the program, a panel of experts sits around a table discussing the phenomenon with great intensity, while we in turn sit around our table and eat. I notice that Gerard, who has prepared the plates of oysters, has given me one more than he and Yveline. It is our last evening; I am leaving for Corsica in the morning.

Our attention is drawn to the five or six men on the screen; amidst much laughter and eating of oysters, we joke that they look like extraterrestrials themselves. It is the ultimate extra-terrestrial joke: the “little green men from Mars” have manifested themselves on earth to speculate – on television – as to whether or not they do in fact exist. The men are decidedly odd, peculiar even, sitting stiffly. One of them is completely immobile with staring eyes – clearly a sign of being from outer space we decide amid giggles. The man next to him seems to be wearing a wig or perhaps he just has a very low hairline. Suddenly he spits while speaking and a dollop of it, clearly lit by the studio lights, flies across and hits the staring-eyed man on the cheek. He jolts back in his chair and out of the line of fire but doesn’t wipe his face.

We move on to the smoked salmon. An elderly man on the extreme right of the screen is speaking. The sound of his voice as he hypothesizes as to the existence of life in other universes arrests us and we listen with rapt attention, our meal momentarily forgotten. The voice is itself extraterrestrial. It is not just in his head but comes from somewhere above it, supported tenuously by a flattened resonance somewhere between his nose and his ears. His face is classic Star Trek, plasticized, eyes protruding, a cap of white hair, lips barely moving, the rest in squashed retreat.

We resume eating but the joke of minutes before has mutated into wonder. I imagine this little white-capped man as a boy growing up, top in science at school, curious about but not practicing masturbation, retreating to his room at night to do experiments and watch the stars from the window with the telescope he has been given at Christmas.

At what point, I wonder, did the sounds he made as a child begin to retreat

up and out of his body to join hands with the stars of his imagination

with his extra-terrestrial voices,

to become this fascinating

but scarily

unidentified

flying

object

of our

weary

wise-eyed

wonder.

I wonder how the attempts to distance myself from the so-called teaching will work with the more intimate material. I certainly want to leave a trace of this life, something that might lead to an “Aha” moment for readers, for teachers, for friends, since many of them do not really know me at all.

If I were to dream you

If I were to dream you, it would be in a room with my lover and I after class is over.

If I were to dream you, I would talk to you about my first day, how so very nervous I felt and how I felt I didn’t fit in. How I even doubted if I should be in the class at all.

If I were to dream you, you would tell me calmly, paternally even, not to worry.

If I were to dream you, you would say, “It’s OK, you are doing fine.” I would feel calm as you say this, relaxed and safe. It would be all I would need to hear.

If I were to dream you, either my lover or I would ask you a question about the structure of the class.

If I were to dream you, I would ask you your title. “Do you run the workshop?” I would say.

If I were to dream you, you would answer very simply: “Really, I’m an author.”