In Praise of Compost

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Everybody
needs somebody
else
to love.

Shout it out.
Shout it out above from heaven.
Shout it out, shout it out above from heaven.
Needs somebody to love... needs somebody to love... needs somebody to love.


Today, at PARTS, a dance outside the box. Beginning in a trash can, moving through piano tunes of crazy love played by Julien, dancing with a Coca-Cola can and the Bush administration's darling Lay's potato chips, and my own multinational clothing... "made in Bangladesh, Egypt, Mexico, Turkey, Bangladesh,...Bangladesh..." into a naked, multicellular What If: "What if my body's cells leap into becoming empty space?" there is finally a score for becoming myself:

Luce Irigaray writes, "Keep on going, without getting out of breath. Your body is not the same today as yesterday, your body remembers. There's no need for you to remember. No need to hold fast to yesterday, to store it up as capital in your head. Your memory? Your body expresses yesterday in what it wants today. If you think: yesterday I was, tomorrow I shall be, you are thinking: I have died a little. Be what you are becoming, without clinging to what you might have been, what you might yet be. Never settle." And so I dance.

The dance begins in the studio, dancing with the garbage generated by inhabitants of the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios building. It migrates triumphantly out of doors, where a fool's jig for the crowd leads the audience over grass, and takes me up a tall tree. I am climbing to the very topmost, fragile branches. A 360-degree view of factories, car sales, train tracks, homes, dance studios, a nuclear power plant, a silent public gathered below, looking up. I climb down with my heart towards the trunk, feet placed carefully in Y-shaped nooks. I hang from the bottommost branch and jump down to a squat, looking straight at one of the many hickory seedlings sprouting up all around. I dance a hickory seedling dance, then a grass dance, then a moss dance. I step willingly into a recognizeable body and walk to where Rich has upturned a circle of earth, and a tree waits to be planted.

Benjamin Vandewalle tells me that he visited a 2,500 year-old Horse Chestnut tree in Italy. Ours is just a twig: only 18 centimeters tall, but one day this Horse Chestnut tree will ask to be climbed. It has showered on and off today I place the twig in the rain-soft ground. I sprinkle Aquilegia seeds into open palms and the people spread them over the soil, sowing ground cover for the new tree.

This is all Friday evening, 7:30pm. Saturday, Rich plants a sign next to the tree. Painted in white on a slate devon roofing tile are the words: "Someday this tree will ask to be climbed."

But first, late Friday night, another entry: Benjamin and Albert call Rich and me out into the rain for an emergency announcement: A Peace Apple tree is here, and being planted at PARTS in our honor! An ode to TWIG has brought Benjamin and Albert into the rain with shovels and a slender sapling, to root next to the herb garden, near the Horse Chestnut, in line with the Hickory tree. One day this tree will ask to be munched from.

And further reports: TWIG's first treeclimbing progeny achieved his second climb up the giant beech tree outside Rosas. Albert Quesada followed Rich up in a stunning marriage of mind and desire. Protected by the Belgian government as a national treasure and guarded fiercely by Stephen de Belder, this gorgeous tree has a crow's nest in the very top. Rich and Albert went up from a bottom branch that was arcing down toward the ground. They grabbed the slender tip and pulled themselves, arm-over-arm up toward the base of the branch, having to scoot in toward the trunk like balancing inchworms. See their glowing faces at the top in the pictures below.

For a TWIG action, it was a step toward accessing the formerly impossible. A year ago I watched as Albert RAN UP the SIDE of the beech tree (sheer willpower, and after 15 or so attempts) to grab the lowest branch and then pulled himself up in a superhuman burst of power. This year Albert's climb proved a new possible impossibility: in and up from the side, and to the very tippy top. Thanks to Albert for all the images here!

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Photos

Climbed to the top
The tall tree climbed for the short tree planted.

the first TWIG planted
One day this tree will ask to be climbed.

Rich and the "peace apple" tree
Rich and the Peace Apple Tree at PARTS

A Branch of Brussels
The view over Rosas from the top of the giant beech tree in front.

Crow's Nest
The luminous face of the Albert so high up.

Monkey Knights
Rich and Albert post de facto.