Here it is, mid-fucking-day in Avignon and the sun’s a blowtorch turned on this stone plaza, 100-plus degrees of Mediterranean fury, and there’s this ghost, this white-painted wraith doing Butoh like he’s negotiating with death itself, and I’m the only sonofabitch here to see it. But here’s the thing that breaks your heart wide open: if I wasn’t here, nothing would change. Not one goddamn thing.
He’d still be out here. Still moving like erosion, like continents drifting, like pain has a physical language and he’s fluent. This isn’t for me. It isn’t even about me. I’m just the accidental witness to something that was always going to happen, audience or not.
Everyone else fled hours ago to their air-conditioned fantasies, and this beautiful lunatic is doing this because the doing itself is everything, because Butoh demands the body become a transmission from somewhere we’re all too chickenshit to look. His white paint running in the heat like evidence. Like proof.
And maybe that’s the realest thing I’ve ever seen: art that doesn’t need you, doesn’t want your validation, doesn’t give a fuck if you’re there or not. Just pure expression happening because it has to, like breathing, like dying, like Serge Gainsbourg humming in an empty room.
I could leave right now and he wouldn’t notice. Wouldn’t care.
And that’s exactly why I can not move.
This is what devotion looks like when nobody’s watching, which is to say, this is what it always looks like.
Tread lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow. All her bright golden hair Tarnished with rust, She that was young and fair Fallen to dust. Lily-like, white as snow, She hardly knew She was a woman, so Sweetly she grew. Coffin-board, heavy stone, Lie on her breast, I vex my heart alone, She is at rest. Peace, Peace, she cannot hear Lyre or sonnet, All my life’s buried here, Heap earth upon it. AVIGNON Poem:
Oscar Wilde, Ballad of Reading Gaol