PARTS!

I enter, run down stage

The Part that rhymes with part is HEART!!!

(Oh, no is this going to be about love?)

(Did we agree to that?)

Something else that rhymes with part is START!

Do it, do it, do it (etc.)

I wave them to join me, then wave them on while I shake my head, then cut them off with my finger across my neck

Thank you. Now for once called “the parts of us” –

Demo dance: look at hand, grab crotch, look over shoulder

And now for a dance called “the parts of us”- for this I need you all to do it from you seat. It’s quite simple. Just remember, hand, crotch, shoulder. Visualize it a few times while the orchestra warms up...Ready? With me now...

Hand, crotch, shoulder, hand crotch shoulder, hand crotch shoulder

That was great, thanks....

A thing about parts: cata-gora-zations

Separations

Each contained

Brought closer together again

The card catalog

At the library,

The ones they used to have

Paper upon paper pressed to make sense

This one next to this one

Running their fingers through the cards

Run fingers

They found out how things were related

Pluck card out

Some were related for proximity

Some were related for a word they shared,

A cross-referenced

Third

Sending them into a whole new drawer

Containments

Compartments

Come

Sex noise

Parts

Noise

Mentalized

No noise

We are obsessed by parts

Our parts and your parts and

try to fit them together and

try to fit them together and

YES! they fit!

Trying to make sense of our

selves.

It’s not just the dozen or so organs and the hundred-something bones and the sexy protruding parts that I’m curious about –although, yeah, I’m curious about those too

Hands over sexy parts

The parts of us are more than our bodies. We are also parts of each other. Sometimes, it’s a startling realization. Like when you notice you are becoming yr mom, just when you thought you were going to avoid that cliché. Or the moment when you can no longer quite separate your aesthetic desirers from your lover’s, even though what attracted you in the first place were those very gaps, and the reaching.

Sometimes the realizations are beautiful – as in:

Sound of manatees

Before I met you, I never thought about manatees. Maybe I didn’t even know what they were. At any rate, I never considered them. I never noticed or knew, but you know them, and I love you, and you noticed and knew. You have a manatee-shaped pillow that cradles your head at night, and you wake up in the morning peaceful. Watching you, I pay better attention, and now I consider. You teach me how to be true.

Dark

Judith Butler

Where are we?

Judith Butler

Where are we?

Judith Butler

Who ‘am’ I without you?

If it is possible to be undone by each other, then we must first have been done by each other.

Assimilation remains crucial to love.

But it is more than just being like each other

The ‘insideness’ we feel is the effect of

The ‘withness’ of intimacy

We are ‘with others’ before we are defined as

Being ‘apart from others’

Each of us, in being shaped by others,

Carries with us ‘impressions’ of those others.

Impressions are memories,

But also ‘withness’ shapes our bodies,

Our gestures

Our turns of phrase

We pick up bits and pieces of each other

As the effect of nearness or

Proximity.

Is it never about pure resemblance

Of one to another.

The dynamic process of

Perpetual resurfacing:

The parts of me

Are ‘impressions’ of you

Can never be reduced to the ‘you-ness’ of ‘you’,

But they are ‘more than just me.

I am made through the impressions of you

But impressions are not simply your characters

You exist within me and apart of me

At the same time.

Taking you in is not so that I am

‘becoming like you’ or

‘making you like me’.

Others have also impressed upon me

Shaping my surfaces in this way and that

Others have also impressed upon you

Shaping your surfaces in this way and that

Can you spot the original me? Where are you in this mess?