“Shedding Skins”: Keynote Performance/Address at the 2015 ATHE Conference in Montreal
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Excerpt from Me Talking to Myself in the Future
After a sleepless night,
I walk through my hometown, the city streets
In the morning before the sun rises,
My mind sharpened by my last excess.
One has to reach a certain pace, a high velocity,
To shift faster than normal human beings
As they move through their everyday life,
And then the brain gets efficient.
It’s a matter of speed.
Not that the mind is running,
But it exposes its innermost thoughts and feelings in layers.
Spectral voices make themselves heard
And their language becomes familiar.
And in that shapeless territory called the mind,
Another observes the one who talks,
Who is observed by another one, observed by another, observed by another one.
Who’s at the end of the observer’s line? …
Sun rises
In the schoolyard
Where I used to play
I see myself: a child.
On a paper I draw a ballerina wearing a red dress.
She is blindfolded.
Her arms stretched in front of her
She is holding something in one of her hands
Morpheus asks me:
What does she hold in her hand? [End Page 11]
I invent an answer.
An earthworm or it could as well be a tiny snake.
What is she doing?
She is taking the snake back into the forest, where it belongs. Then, she’ll lose herself into the woods.
She is blindfolded. She can’t see.
Someone guides her.
She might get lost
She will get lost.
This is not possible. This doesn’t exist.
If I invent it, does it exist?
If you invent it, it does exist. [End Page 12]
It exists.
(End of excerpt)
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Marie brassard performing her play The Invisible.
In my reality, the farthest memory I have is when I was a year and a half. I was standing in my crib, hearing my older brother telling my mother that he was thirsty. I remember wondering what the feel of thirst might be. I knew it meant someone wants to drink, but I didn’t know what was the physical feeling, how it felt. I remember shouting to get my mother’s attention. I thought: she will come and give me something to drink and maybe it will help me to understand how it feels. I didn’t have the words to express these thoughts. I forgot how the story ended. I did probably shout and my mother didn’t understand what my request was … or maybe she did and did give me water. Maybe I drank and still, didn’t get my answer. What I remember clearly is that I wanted so much to feel the need.
What fascinates me about that story is although I was a small child with a limited range of words and experience, I could elaborate complex questions in my mind. What is the feeling of thirst? It was a wise question.
What Is Desire without the Need?
Children are often strangely clever. As if they arrive in this world already filled with some sort of knowledge. They are in a constant state of observing and listening, as if they were aliens coming from another planet.
My goddaughter Léone is two and a half years old. A few months ago I came back from a trip to Tokyo and brought her a gift. It was a book filled with beautiful illustrations. As we were going through the pages, commenting on the drawings, she pointed to a very small bright dot in the sky of a landscape and told me: “Look there! It looks like a Japanese flower that hasn’t been born yet.” [End Page 13]
A whole world could be imagined from that short sentence. It is so rich of underlying possible meanings. It talks about death, about existence. It suggests that there could be a world, a sort of antechamber where a soul awaits the...
