consider themselves audience, while they perform for each other, and the gas
acts out poems of its own through the medium of the human body. This
approaches the psychology of the orgy while remaining in the realm of the
Game and its infinite permutations.
The aim of the happening is to cure boredom, wash the eyes, make childlike
reconnections with the stream of life. Its lowest, widest aim is for purgation of
perception. The happening attempts to engage all the senses, the total
organism, and achieve total response in the face of traditional arts which
focus on narrower inlets of sensation.
Multimedias are invariably sad comedies. They work as a kind of colorful
group therapy, a woeful mating of actors and viewers, a mutual semimastur-
bation. The performers seem to need their audience and the spectators — the
spectators would find these same mild titillations in a freak show or Fun Fair
and fancier, more complete amusements in a Mexican cathouse.
Novices, we watch the moves of silkworms who
excite their bodies in moist leaves and weave wet
nests of hair and skin.
This is a model of our liquid resting world
dissolving bone and melting marrow
opening pores as wide as windows.
The «stranger» was sensed as greatest menace in ancient communities.
Metamorphose. An object is cut off from its name, habits, associations.
Detached, it becomes only the thing, in and of itself. When this disintegration
into pure existence is at last achieved, the object is free to become endlessly
anything.
The subject says «I see first lots of things which dance… then everything
becomes gradually connected».
Objects as they exist in time the clean eye and camera give us. Not falsified
by «seeing».
When there are as yet no objects.
Early film-makers, who — like the alchemists — delighted in a willful obscuri-
ty about their craft, in order to withhold their skills from profane onlookers.
Separate, purify, reunite. The formula of Ars Magna, and its heir, the
cinema.
The camera is androgynous machine, a kind of mechanical hermaphrodite.
In his retort the alchemist repeats the work of Nature.
Few would defend a small view of Alchemy as «Mother of Chemistry», and
confuse its true goal with those external metal arts. Alchemy is an erotic
science, involved in buried aspects of reality, aimed at purifying and
transforming all being and matter. Not to suggest that material operations are
ever abandoned. The adept holds to both the mystical and physical work.
