Anachronistic Anarchist by Herb Eaton

It’s cold around here, the wind, the wind, the wind.  Ah the wind, it swirls and penetrates, adding a toothy bite to whatever cold keeps in northern ice.   The wind turbines spinning above corn stubble are gathering energy for comfortable utility of modern types, living past the wind;  however in the tent the heating is last-century archaic.      We found pot-belly stoves in the junk delivered by the locals.  Outside its’ the cold, inside it’s drafty warm, pot-belly coal stoves are roaring rusty orange hot.

Everybody’s amiable around a pot-belly stove, warming hands.  It is very communal, especially for those with storied pasts who have come to exhibit and perform.  Mystic memories, darkened poetry of personal and ancestral memories,  cultural agrarian memories, the darkened reminder of industrial memories,  times we understand by virtue of “back-in-the-day…”memories.  Unquestioned veracity memories, the warmth of old thoughts in a cold world memories, the warm antique junk rag-and-bone shop memories; the, oh so cool, film noire memories.

Memories (and conversations) come out with the smell of hot boiling coffee the color of soot (and  about as dense ), snapping spattering crisp burnt bacon with hot-cakes and syrup, and the nostalgic dusty envelopment of burning coal.

Anachronistically speaking winter in a dusky cave probably started the whole “art” thing; constant babbling and bother, blackened marks on walls.

Stop by next Saturday let’s see where stories and scribbles might lead.

Should we writhe (with a mad-man’s certitude) ensnarled in a world that is only arbitrarily our own; preserving exaggerated grievances?

Often an effort is given to displaying grievances that can be disconcerting to those who know: at the center of it all, this world is suffering.  The grand indelicacy of  money protects (even projects) some with painless exposure, while others are obvious in their displayed pain.  Do they really hope that someone will give it permanence; protect it preserve it?

This is a problem here at the reunion of the anarchists and enfant terribles. Many  believe that the length they took to master the handiwork, the art construed and balanced by bodily actions, is freer (thereby greater) than that which is made static by the deeply indelicate demands of money or the shallow extravagance of the rational mind.  And yet their works are unattended, frozen into fragility, still slightly out of balance.

A cave or darkness, a frozen prairie, a singular forgotten place, can hold the mystery of a tragic personal memory, but more commonly, it is the psuedo-tragic constraints of the mundane. Some special reserved inaction that is to frozen to disrupt that little bit of the world tensed by the efforts.  This isn’t available to the explosive possibilities of more public problems, and yet remains an explosive contrivance in its’ own coiled fury and fragile, singular – oh so singular – character.

The anarchists are escape-delirious, the internal seething exploding desire to blow-up the mundane, going into the wild; and yet begging the peace of stasis.

Balance, balance would be nice if it did not contain with in it the potential of failure, the falling, the destruction; without that, it is not “in balance”.  Stasis, believed impervious to the forces ( also mysterious) that, with a sweep, would, for a moment, replace the static with balance before destruction (or even oblivion): or burst beyond the borderlands.

Such is that absurd world our enfant terribles, our emotive artistics, celebrate.

Next Saturday we consider moments: how long should thinking take place.

I wish I could have bought you a pony, wild and lovely, exotic and true; but, alas I brought what you know I can.  It is all I have.Maybe you could just save it, seal it, protect it…remembering why a small gift was borne to you.

We should consider balance…join us next Saturday

Deception, as in chicanery, there is some of that in the arts, when there is money or power to be gained by various underhanded means.  But, usually chicanery is left to the bigger deities – corporate entities or political celebrities.  Deception in romance is more common, He and She seem to be dealing with (written?) issues, or, are they possibly practicing lines from a script…rehearsing yet again?  Things appear a bit chilled out here, best we go in.

Take a seat, what you see is a drawing, a mural to help the actors; an audience is important.  We also have an applause and laugh track if needed.  Peruse the following as if a playbill, we are preparing for the show.

Here at the tent of the incomprehensible we are interested in simply concocting an artifice, a deception if you will, but more a metaphor for an audience (if we get one) to ponder, hopefully helping to fill in the images or words that thoughtful people may use to “help them understand”…something: romance, some absurd words and deeds, some political drama ( a slow-moving coup d’tat?), hopefully some humor.

Enfant terribles are intensely writing plays, comic, tragedy, reality dramas, spoofy horror, whatever their momentary desires.  Anarchists have partial sets  that should evoke the poetry necessary to investigate ideas, or practice an actor’s media personality, or at least consume the time allotted on the stage.

Absurdist costume designs are favored, basically clothing not convenient for protecting one from weather, or useful as a suit of workclothes, and not likely to enamor future in-laws if worn for a introductory home-cooked meal.  For others, cliche’s on tee-shirts are costume enough.

Making reality, as a theatrical artifice, is a bit tricky and expensive; and so artists resort to simplification of conditions (through a thicket of complicatedness), if not always wearing flattering costumes. And props, of course here the props of choice are the bombs; the pre-exploded personal emotions, attributes of creative outpourings.

Perhaps the playbill notes can unravel the deceptions in the play, is that helpful, (in the metaphorical sense), for your understanding?

Join our first performance next Saturday.