SWARM #0

My Grandfather was a boxer and an undertaker.

There is no way to describe what the past does to you. You can only sense it and peel it open.

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At least, that is what we tell ourselves when we need to fall asleep. The rest of the time it taps on our shoulder and we pretend we can’t turn round.

This is called social climbing.

This is called blasphemy.

This is called denial, forced-entry, a pick, modes of conduct, gratitude, unjustified luck or cheap booze.

This is a show I made called SWARM #0 and if any of you have some kind of trouble with insects, it’s ok because this has nothing to do with insects. To explain what this is about I am going to recount a story that sort of gets where I’m going in an indirect way. Indirect and sort of Inaccurate too. But before I do that I just want to let you know that this piece lasts for 3 hours and it’s only just started.

There is a guy who calls at our house from time to time. He is a nice old guy but he has sadness in his eyes. He calls by from time to time and we have a cup of tea and we talk about this and that and then he goes. But before he leaves he always checks to see if it would be ok for him to call back again at some other time. We say ‘sure’ because he has sad eyes and the eyes look like they would get sadder if we said ‘hmmm, not really’. Besides, it’s fine. If he wants to come round once in a while for a cup of tea and chat then why not? So some of you may be wondering what the relevance of this story is. How does it relate to this ‘Art’ I am enduring or to this room I am in for that matter? And I would say that it’s a bit early to ask such things because I have not reached the point just yet. You see all of this so far has been pre-amble, setting-of-the-scene as it were, and pre-amble is very important, oh-yes, why just recently I was accused of not using pre-amble when approaching a ‘friend’ to try and get his part of the rent out of him. Apparently pre-amble would have helped him to come up with the cash but because I didn’t use it he was unable to find the money and instead he had to start threatening my family. So as you can see pre-amble is not without it’s gravity and neither is friendship especially when rent and selfish leaching bastards are involved.

But we learn from these experiences and they toughen us up, not so much that we can’t cut some old guy with sad eyes some slack and offer him a seat by the fire though. ‘I’ll make some tea’ I said and he asked for ‘caramel’ by which I knew he meant ‘chamomile’ but somehow his name for it drummed up the image of a much better drink so I went and got him some. Well, it was raining quite hard and the fire was going well and pretty soon we got round to gun-talk. He said ‘Oh my grandfather went shooting with Buffalo Bill when he went to America. He wasn’t a kind man, my grandfather, if I came in the room he wouldn’t allow me to talk, but the one nice thing he did for me was that he gave me a big leather-bound book with all photos of the Indians from America. He was gived it by Buffalo Bill himself.’

I started doing all sorts of cack-handed calculations in my head to try and sort out whether this story might be true but in the end I gave up and decided to believe because I liked the story.

‘Do you still have the book?’ I asked and he started to shift around all sheepishly and said that in his ‘bad years’ the woman he was living with had thrown him out one time and burned all his belongings. That’s where the book went.

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Now he says every time he sees that woman that’s all he can think about.

For the next three hours I will burn like a book that my Grandfather gave me.

I have it in my mind that mortality is this sneaky mafia type of person, but they have this strange beatific glow about them. The terrible truth dressed up to the nines and whistling. I don’t want to die and I don’t want you to die. But if we lived forever would the skin last? If they had to grow new skins for us then I would choose one exactly like this one. I like my skin, even when it crawls, even when something gets under it. I saw this statue in the Guggenheim, it was an Aztec figure of a priest and he was wearing somebody else’s skin. It wasn’t too evident that it wasn’t his skin until you walked round the back and there were all these give-away knots running down his spine. I thought how it should feel disgusting to look at, but it was ok, it was kind of cosy.

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