Too many options make you stop blogging even before you begin. This is a whole other technology of writing that dictates its own shape and logic before you are able to master and circumvent for your own purposes and goals.
Anyways, just begin. Where? Right in the middle. This is not the language I feel at ease in, and yet something tells me that this is the only way I can reach the audience I want to reach. My world has expanded so far beyond the limits of my native tongue, physically and conceptually, in terms of other actors and in terms of emotions in between.
But now I am just passing time to get over my anxiety. Why does it feel so high stakes and who do I feel the need to give all these disclaimers?
This is a blog I should have started a year ago, when my travels began, and when I had the first urge to make a record of what I am doing, thinking, feeling at each place I visit. I talked myself out of it, I chose to take it less seriously. Yet here I am, again about to fly in somewhere with the hopes of finding answers, and again the desire to both record and communicate this adventure.
Last year, this time, I must have been in Amsterdam. A few days prior I had seen Giselle Vienne’s Crowd in Utrecht. It put a spell on me, I was moonstruck by its ritual fetish (and afterwards I did regrettable things that I do not regret). The earth felt familiar, I was making mental comparisons with Bausch’s Rite. Little that I knew, it was already Vienne’s homage to that particular Rite. Further: Exactly a week after that, the fate would take me to Wuppertal, to watch Rite with live orchestra, by complete luck. My dear friend Deniz was keeping me company, Wuppertal was too much barrenness and blues, and I was so relieved to find out that the company was performing at the night we arrived there. We bought tickets from people at the door. I don’t remember paying more than 20€, that was all I got. In my “fieldbook,” the hasty and incomprehensible jots of these two shows lie side by side. Mother’s earth and daughter’s earth are conspiring.
And then the Hellas Restaurant, sweet uzo, more Bausch blues by the suggestion of the décor, our oily hands over the heavy stage design book.
Now I am preparing to go back to Wuppertal. I am already anticipating the Taurus full moon. I will be watching Vollmond on record. I will be staying near a park, and running there wishing to be turned into a wolf.
And then Paris, to see two loves of mine, Erika and Maria. Two nights of Another Distinguée. This trip will help me fill in the “gaps,” anything that I missed the first time I moved there will greet my obsessive eyes.
Paris evokes other things that must not be remembered and spoken of any longer (which is connected to a postcard mentally composed in Utrecht after Crowd‘s madness, written and sent from Amsterdam few days later). I have already created another story line in which I am in Pantin, it is June. I am talking to (and shadowing) Maria an entire day, g(r)azing and thinking over her notebooks hungrily, and having a nice walk by the river. A huge salad and beer by the Gare Lyon as I was about to leave for Grenoble. I was already anticipating the arrival of something fateful on that train ride, I was exhausted yet my soul energy was so high. My beautiful friend Özgül and our trip to the Alps carried it higher. Then, Madrid, Mara, more magic, more madness. The descend of the mighty ass in shit–but in a good way, in an it-was-a-learning-experience way!
Writing about these trips evokes the image of someone trying to unravel a knotty ball of thread, but using her toes and limbs to do so and eventually getting cocooned by it. I don’t know where I want to go with these, but I suppose it is just the movement of remembering that I indulge in.
Ironically, today I am struck by a beautiful song called “Stasis”
Eylül Fidan Akıncı 