Thursday 4 April 2013

Reverses Heart's Reassembly by Scott Thurston (Veer Books, 2011)

As Scott Thurston explains in the acknowledgments, "The accounts of dance and movement in the pages that follow relate to my experiences of dancing the Five Rhythms--a movement practice devised by Gabrielle Roth." Here are some of my favourite passages from the collection:


From Section I, Boundaries:


Get out of your own way--to get
in the way of being guided.
Each line equivalent to the whole
book of your fear of dissolution.
Openly revealed, it conceals
a guarantee of a new body.

*

The dancer holds a space for other dancers. I bring a few neatly-parcelled luxury anxieties to sit and unwrap in a clutch of unfolded limbs. [...] To move at emotional depth I need to keep my thoughts in play.

*

Trying to outrun the ego and mourn its lost authority.

*

I'll find it just as well in the un-like.

*

If this is civilization it starts to unravel
in the corner of vision.

*

In the dance--pain, discomfort, exhaustion, injury start to expose the lineaments, the estate of one's self....


from Section II, Compassion: 


What constitutes wildness? Binding both the preserved and the destroyed, resistance can be experienced as pain--memory needs to change all the time.



from Section IV Relation:



The tension between intention to move and moving; between dancing by oneself and with others.

*

I recognised I'd brought a demon with me which I named 'Without Knowledge I Am Nothing.'

*
Approaching knowledge as an encounter.


from Section V, Turning:


...turning and returning
with intricate delay.

*

Trust me to buck the trend in coherency:
in the give and take of talk our mutual
knowledge gives way to being known
on this bleak rib of land, curving upward.
The longing of the endless hills--mynydd
hireaethog--when speech dies on the wind.

*

Moving with the shape of space
creates a wild line. Start to turn
and learn how to serve you and you
trust me.

*

The shape of a choice: lust, trash,
truth, that grace arises from grace.  



Reverses Heart's Reassembly can be bought by post directly from Veer Books or online at Amazon for a mere £5.

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