Clare Byrne's Weekly Rites

Brother Fire

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:39:00 +0000

St. Francis' Order was founded eight hundred years ago this year - in 1209 AD, in Assisi.

St. Francis was so crazy in love with God! So was Clare. Both renounced medieval middle-class. She was a young girl who followed him - escaped the marriage her parents set up. She eloped to Francis' chapel, San Damiano, outside of Assisi, cut off her hair and married God. Both undertook a life of keeping their hands empty - burning themselves up for God.

They created twin orders, the Friars Minor and the Poor Clares. Francis turned over San Damiano to Clare, where she gathered followers, and became its abbess. He died in a hut, on a mat on the floor. She lived more and more in seclusion. By the end, she didn't need to leave her cell to attend Mass - it appeared as a vision on her stone wall. Today she is the Roman Catholic Church's patron saint of television.

I think they were lovers. They shared one meal. I love their foolish love affair with the world and the sun and moon and birds and mountains and olive groves. Their unequivocal sense of place in those God-lit hills of Umbria.

Here is a verse of Francis' Canticle of the Sun, as we descend into the darkest part of the year:

"Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom you brighten the night.
He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong."

all saints

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:44:00 +0000

Turn the tables to November: cool not cold, damp. Trees' hilarious outburst is over. Now, sober rusts and coppers, with a few deep-yellow maples and birches, like the most luminescent Easter egg I could dye, or its yolk. The prayer begins: "Winter, hold me safe till then!" The spice of the leaves - dying both wet and drying - answers, overpowers.

All saints, all souls - I was called back to haunt this spot again! I've found a chair. Life is good for the departed here, nestled in bowl in hillside.

I look up, in The American Heritage Dictionary:

Evocation: "summoning or calling forth; creation anew through the power of memory or imagination - ' calling out'"

Invocation: "calling upon for assistance, support, or inspiration - 'calling in'"

Don't trust something that doesn't smell. City art-making-and-selling - sanitary poison. Thought-tinkered process, packaging, selling, structure for structure's sake, commentary and comparison - death-dealing. Undercuts evocation, invocation, purpose, feeling, how they are the same as the material, the stuff, the movement, the leaves.

the feeling

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:57:00 +0000

Don't dance prose.
Don't talk about something else with dance.
The dance is itself. Let it live.
Dance these days - a horror house of mirrors - overefractingly self-and-history-referential. Just make it. All that other stuff about you and your process and your investigations will be there, don't worry.

by the seams

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:20:00 +0000

I performed Martha Graham's "Lamentation" in Paul Besaw's Dance History & Legends class this morning. I hadn't spent time with it in since last February, and coming back to it I realize: must understand better what I am doing. I can't just be doing Martha Graham - not to imply, Martha, that you are just anything. When doing a work as famous as this, there is a complex layering of identity and purpose. And then there are the images and movement contained, suspended in the fabric of the work itself. This is fundamentally what to get at - this is what Martha was getting at. The first time around I was just trying to get at her.

So here I am, trying to get into the seams - in the backdoor - down to the bedrock - of Lamentation. I am just beginning, but think Lamentation might be good done on a rock. Or it is the rock. The shapes are like caves, the core is powerful, solid. Skin and rock, seams and fissures, wounds gaping, wounds hidden. Wombs hidden. The first shape, a mound of the dancer, folded on herself by the seams - is a deep purple mountain.

Here is Lamentation in whole, performed by Peggy Lyman.

calves and toes: more than we know

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:11:00 +0000

Went to my twenty-year high school reunion on Saturday. We are all still ourselves! Each person's gesture, movement - so familiar. We really knew each other: chemicals, nerves, muscles, skin, and heart. Some more deeply than others, but all more than we know.

But since the last time I saw you - the people I spent twelve physical years of Catholic school with - every cell on us, except nerve cells (the ones that feel and remember) have been replaced. We've died by pieces and replaced ourselves. You can see it: a canniness and a grace achieved - knowing death and birth - along with stray grey hairs and beginnings of wrinkles. It makes everyone look better.

There was so much to hear, report, laugh about, include, omit- it was too much. Wished I could cut out the talk, or turn down the volume, and just watch everyone. Really look - or smell - or touch. And before and after, on my seven-hour drives to Pennsylvania and back, I missed everyone. What comes up is sensory reassessment, revisiting, remembering. All the wantings, not-wantings, gettings, not-gettings - they percolate into the stories I live, now.

This rite is for Kerry - it was so fun to see you at the reunion - responding to your response, from way back!

Here in Vermont it is a speechless time of year. The colors, in perfect disorderly jumble, are clownish, are ridiculous, are laugh-out-loud. There is nothing to do but stand mouth agape - and applaud. The trees are going out, flaming - the trees are dying for the year, burning up. Things die to perform, they die to come into their own. This is a performance to match any performance anywhere in the world. It calls to mind Annie Dillard's quote "any life without sacrifice is a sacrilege." The dying must happen, for the life to be lived.

Breakfast 1977

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:13:00 +0000

This week is my brother Donald's birthday! He is only two years and two months older than me, my closest sibling in age. And this year, a particularly auspicious birthday, Donald requested homemade art. So Happy Birthday, my music man! I call to mind that Donald gave some of the first home performances I witnessed - a master of subtlety, rhythm, focus, and consistency at the Byrne breakfast table, back in the day - so this performing-at-home thing is nothing new. All you see here is true.

doors for opening

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:07:00 +0000

Some of living the monk life is about clearing away things you don't want so you can fully enjoy the things you do want - if this is called asceticism or mistaken for deprivation, so be it. Like everything, there's a lot in the degrees to which you take away, reduce, that end up rendering sensual experience more abundant.

Seems to me ascetics and pleasure-mongers are actually going for the same experience: intensification of the senses - through distillation or submersion, you choose your method. An ascetic is a glut in some regards, a pleasure-seeker is, by the nature of the crush, squeezing out a lot of potential though subtler sensation.

In my Introduction to World Dance class we are looking at the Indian classical dance form Bharata Natya - I think some of this is coming out of me (along with my underwear) in this rite. I long to be a dancing devadasi, propitiating the god, centuries ago, in a temple.

the music

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:44:00 +0000

Came back from town with just enough light to take a power walk up the mountain before it got dark. I put on my hiking shoes and charged on up. My goal was to exercise my ass, which had been sitting too much. Hadn't been up there for a long time, since all the leaves were fully out, I guess, because it looked unrecognizable - or maybe, unseeable. I couldn't see into the woods what was there. Under my feet moose tracks were all over. I feared looking out into the trees, what I might see, but couldn't even see because of all those damn leaves and the gathering gloam. Breathing hard, heart beating, teeth numbing, I still charged on up - up - up - the slope. I reached the first level place, crossed the ridge where there were more and more moose tracks. A real stomping ground for moose, in big mud splotches - how lately had they been there? On up - vaguely ominous downed tree across my path - to big rock face where I can usually look out at the view across the whole valley - but now, nothing. Not even a hint beyond. Leaves, leaves, leaves, millions of saplings and teenage trees and middle aged trees and ancient trees, taking up all the seeing.

I started down, and starting saying things - little nonsense words and syllables, silly sentences - so that the moose about to jump out at me would know I was a human, a crazy human, and just let me go. Then I started singing Stevie Nick's Leather and Lace.

That was it - that was the key. I began to feel more calm. I slowed down. I enjoyed being in the woods, seeing what I could see, and being looked at, and heard. And appreciated - this is really it. It seemed an appropriate gesture to give the woods, as if the woods would recognize - as if the woods has known for centuries untold - that THIS is what humans are good for. This is, in fact, why we put up with them, the trees and the ferns and the moose say - they SING to us! As if I suddenly made sense and had a function in this world. Ah, I get it, I understand! My job is to sing - and dance -and do all the joymaking capacities which I have been granted as part of my species. Leather and Lace dropped me into my rightful place, my proper notch, in this woods. And when I finished ("take from me my lace, take from me my lace, take from me my lace"), the silence followed - and I felt received, at peace.

technically snuggling

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:37:00 +0000

Technique is unavoidable - whether you are learning to build a house, cook a soup, make a dance piece - it's no good running from technique - cultivation of the thing you are doing, enhancing of, making more or less of - distilling or spicing or weaving or melting or tearing or sewing or combining (in the "domestic arts," that's where the real names for actions are kept). But how we regard technique is the key: in terms of emphasis, keep it firmly shoved to the side. It is not "it." Technique houses it - but "it" is intent, purpose, heart, the transformer and transformation and the transformed thing, all together - the subject and the verb and the object. Technique is how I lay my sentence out.

Now, reverse everything I've just said and it's just as true.

As the first leaves fall - one at a time, lazily - I'm working on my snuggle technique.

half the house

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:33:00 +0000

My ego is taking a long long time to drown - keeps coming up for gasps of air, comparisons, sputtering rationalizations, "get back in's," "if you want to understand where I'm at" and other quotations from the ongoing Clare Byrne master interview. It's grisly. At times like these, must take comfort in:

He who hopes to grow in spirit
will have to transcend obedience and respect.
He will hold to some laws
but he will mostly violate
both law and custom, and go beyond
the established, inadequate norm.
Sensual pleasures will have much to teach him.
He will not be afraid of the destructive act:
half the house will have to come down.
This way he will grow virtuously into wisdom.

- Constantine Cavafy

Patrick's Rules

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:02:00 +0000

I'm on assignment this week - following a set of instructions from Patrick Ferreri for a project he's working on:

"spend 2 min exploring each of the following tasks...
...middle finger dance, start by focusing on the bones and how they fit into their joints
...try to get your scapula and floating ribs to touch
...try to get the opposing halves of your pelvis to touch
...combine all three ideas and see what happens"

I interpreted the timing liberally. In the end what happened was the rules exploded into something else - a reactive alchemical composite, an animus all its own.

The music is C.P.E. Bach's Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings.

thank you for

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:13:00 +0000

serious practice in distance, discipline, abstinence, not getting, not having.

nearness, fountain flow, star illumination, field of grass, gettingness, havingness, longlastingness, over and over.

thank you to the Dragon's Egg, Marya Ursin and Dan Potter for the star in the field, and to Amy Larimer for the thank you game.

Flies in the Kitchen

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 12:03:00 +0000

Click To Play

I don't know why blip.tv got confused and used the same thumbprint photo from last week for this week - maybe there is a karmic reason - but it IS a new video, just click on it and see.

Here in Vermont my tub garden on the deck is really taking off, just now around the Feast of St. Clare. The clouds have cleared, it feels likes summer, day and night. The plants are finally getting good sun, good soil, good moon. The plants appreciate that night light - or that non-light, just as much. They need the sun to soak their green cells, and they need the moon - well, I don't know exactly for what yet, but let me know if you know.

In the meantime, sitting out in the dark with them the other night, they whispered a non-mantra for me to use:

Don't right woman me.
Don't real woman me.
Don't true woman me.
Don't good woman me.
Don't nice me.
Don't best me.
Don't bad me.
Don't woman me.

On the Slab

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:52:00 +0000

Click To Play

Last night - windows open - wild windy night, with big moon and trees whispering and blowing, not as cold as expected - rather warm, seductive, available. Slept badly - though wakefulness on summer nights like these may be the best thing that could happen. It does something to you. Hearing hoot owl to the south. Hearing cicadas during the day - season beginning to round the corner. Hair is nearly black or white. Where'd the brown go? Not pretty anymore, if ever was - but "interesting" as a wise one, a college friend described herself fifteen years ago, way ahead of me. Have always looked best in hoods.

Mystic

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 23:44:00 +0000

Click To Play

Can't join clubs - okay, well maybe a club of laughing eyes, or eager fingers, or insatiable palates, or lonely hearts.

Categories of people, self-chosen or imposed, are ultimately soft, slight notches in our groove. Hair, color, shape, rhythm, flow, desire, accent - these differences are inhabitable by everyone. We are often stuck on differences or separations, when the membrane is permeable, when the skin is sheddable. My groove runs right into your groove.

(Oh, what cloaks, what skins, I must shed!)

This says nothing about the uniqueness of each place, thing, and moment - the fundamental originality of absolutely everything in carnation.

There's no way to say this right.

I re-watched Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk - "A Powerful Stroke of Insight" - still the best damn way to describe it all, in this day and age, that I've ever seen and heard - and the best description of mysticism. Here's another, a creation story:

"The lover, then, satiated with the water of life, awoke from the slumber of nonexistence, put on the cloak of being and tied around his brow the turban of contemplation; he cinched the belt of desire about his waist and set forth with the foot of sincerity upon the path of the Search...

Beloved, Love, and the lover - three-in-one.
There is no place for Union here.
So what's this talk of 'separation'?"

- Divine Flashes, Fahkruddin Iraqi

and here's one more, from Moby Dick by Herman Melville:

"Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall! Woe to him whose good name is more to him that goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor!"

(Ah, what a relief to be incited toward dishonor, to spurn any and all categories of distinction!)

my latest worship

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 23:05:00 +0000

Click To Play

She is pure and perfect now - a spindle of energy, unspooling - a young star, bursting with potential. Undauntable. Accepting her fate: this is her life, now. Leaving behind, letting go without a backward glance, her former life - so completely that you have to wonder, did it exist? She doesn't give you much evidence if it did. Miss Clean Slate, Miss Black Hole, Miss Here and Now. I look at her from my box pew, eyes all a-worship.

Table Blessing

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:06:00 +0000

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My love is a fountain, a faucet. It's just silly, all the arbitrary reasons I'm required to turn it off and on and off and on. It is supplied unceasingly and the mechanism could just stay on and pour and pour, filling cup after cup.

Push It

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:20:00 +0000

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The ongoing artist-contemplative dilemma -

Flip-flopping like a netted fish over whether Rules are the thing needed to help break boundaries or whether they are keeping one from doing so.

Frida's Birch

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:10:00 +0000

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Almost three weeks ago, our cat Frida disappeared. Maybe she ran off and joined the bunnies - or the bears- or the wild turkeys - or the trio of deer. She's vision questing, or bird calling, or pilgrimaging to her birth place. She's crossing the Tappan Zee now.

Or she stayed - like I want to, long into the night, looking - right up the hill from the house - and looked up between the birches and saw two eyes looking back, and her mercurial energy is now fueling a young brood of fishercats, her bones mulch for red maple saplings. I can't help looking for her.

Perspective

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:03:00 +0000

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"When one of us gets lost, is not here, he must be inside us.
There's no place like that anywhere in the world."

- Jelaluddin Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

if you can

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:07:00 +0000

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Friday I drove down into Mystic to look for presents for the dancers in my piece at the Dragon's Egg Solstice Event - Marya, Ara, and Martha, and Felix who helped with the music. At the Emporium I found flexible beaded sparkly rings - red, violet, orange, blue and green - for toes or fingers, or just to place on pillows. I bought them, folded them in a loose loop of tissue paper, and walked out. Later when I went to wrap them, the green one was missing - a fifth extra, to keep - I dropped it, or it slipped away from me - on the sidewalk, on the way to the car, or maybe even inside the door of the store.

Martha's Red Doors

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:28:00 +0000

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In New York City at the Henry Street Settlement, on the top floor, are two beautiful little studios I have been rehearsing in with Nick Leichter. I think - I hope - they are the same spaces that my ancestors in dance toiled in - Anna Sokolow was a student, Martha Graham was a teacher, along with many others - but these are the ones that stick in my imagination when I'm in the space. Martha liked to come through a different door than her students, so I imagine these red doors were her imperious entryway. They are only red on the stairwell-side, and are Orbis Push Doors, patented June 14, 1910.

Thresholds are important spaces - every single part of them - doors, hinges, cracks and keyholes. It is also a grace to be in the presence of a piano tuning.

Cut Grass

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:43:00 +0000

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Reflection is one of the keys - a big secret - as is the inevitable destiny to burn up. The burning heart is the ultimate reflector, but there are countless others: the moon, prisms, mirrors, cameras, and even freshly cut sunlit June grass.

Something tells me - the night sky - "You must become much more wild." How?

The longer I stay. The longer I look - at the moon, the silhouette of tree, the night sounds, the ember of fire. This indicates wildness.

Tongue Solo

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:17:00 +0000

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The ones closest to you are the ones to set at most careful distance. Travel together, but make sure to stake your tents apart. Erect elaborate, beautiful borders - flowers, trellises, arbors - but guard your border assiduously. Set a dog out. Its ferocious snap is needed when your tent is too often visited, or when their stuff is taking over its order - socks on the floor, underwear hanging from the lantern.

Lumberjack

noreply@blogger.com (Clare Byrne) — Fri, 22 May 2009 21:21:00 +0000

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Oh the children we've had! The slippery socks, the bus to school, the one-night college stands, the longing, the dresser drawers not neatly tucked in.

Dreams don't heed daytime identities - they organize and implement under a different system. They open the drawers and mine us for their own inscrutable agendas.