Messy Words on Time-Stamping and Permanence

I am sitting in a coffee shop, listening to my playlist entitled ‘Thesis’, thinking about the shatteringly frustrating and invigorating mess of time known as ‘transition’. It feels like floating, like scribbling, like passing time and marking time and wasting time and figuring out what place time really holds in this transitory space. A space I was destined to find myself trapped in, a space I have found myself creating.

I am missing: missing my people and my community, missing the movement and the togetherness. I am longing: longing for these things to live, tangibly, in my current time, in my current space. I am longing to know what is next. I am reflecting. I am sense-making. I am regrounding. I am home-ing.

In this transitory time, I have been looking for something to carry with, on, me. A time-stamp, a tattoo, a string of memories made visible- void of easily commodified meaning but imbued with a deeper sense of significance for me and for this time. A desire for tangible permanence, in the form of a tattoo.

The result was a scribble: curvy and windy, an original creation by @behsticks, planted on my right forearm. Through art, a memory with permanence has been made tangible while remaining somewhat cryptic, somewhat intangible, in easily accessible understanding.

And, with this, I am thinking about the tangibility of permanency. I am thinking about the persistence of this theme in my life. If you can’t see something, if you can’t touch it, how can you expect it to continue to exist? How do you prevent it from being permeable or porous, prevent it from fading or washing away? Without tangibility, how can we trust it, whatever it may be, continues to endure? I feel this now as the currents to which I have become so accustomed begin to change, as I begin to fill in the lines differently, perhaps more fully, on my own.

I am also realizing the fleeting nature of the things that make up this life and realizing just how profound that fleetingness seems to be. Dancing, and dance-making, remain as the center. A practice of process, a performance of impulse, a physical residue which exists fully only in the moment it is enacted. Dancing. Movement. Perfecting imperfection. Reimagining and questioning sensical accepted ways of existing. Redefining the bounds, the edges, the notions, the intentions of the body and the space it inhabits. The hold this form has on me is inescapable. And yet, it is fleeting. It is fleeting; ephemeral, constantly within reach and just out of reach. It escapes. You chase it. You ride it, hold it, become it. It becomes slippery, it transforms in front of and with you. Once it does, you are sent on the chase again. Alluring, and fulfilling. Rewarding. An inexplicable reward. There is nothing tangible to show. Nothing tangible to understand. It is not something you give, it is something you share. A permanent intangibility. How can this be sustained; a sustained possibility for a reimagined but entirely real world?

I have received a bounty of traditionally tangible things from this practice of movement, this process for embodied existence. At the center of this are the people I have found through this practice, the people who have somehow become the tangible entity in which the movement lives, the people who take all this fleetingness and turn it into a meaningful reality. Their presence has always manifested in shared space and shared time. We settle into togetherness. We create an ever-shifting but always present community. We come together by dancing together. Dancing together, being together, in real space, and in real time. But, following the nature of the physical practice itself, that tangible togetherness has become fleeting. We are separate. Distance has become a factor. But that does not diminish the permanence. The bounds, the edges, have just shifted. They have shifted in the same way the movement which has spurred the creation of ‘us’ and ‘together’ does instinctually and does constantly. The togetherness has sprung from movement, the movement has sprung from togetherness. How does that color what is to come?

I believe in the intangibility of permanence. I muse about it being something gloriously messy and exponentially rewarding. It is interwoven in the fabric of who I am, who I am striving to become. It is an entity of ‘we’, it is an entity of ‘-ing’. It is a verb by nature.

A scribble is inherently fleeting. The word itself has an ephemerality to it. Movement lives within the word itself, lives within the action. A scribble is inherently fleeting--- that is until it is given a place to remain. A scribble, a skitter. An ongoing and unfinished yet shareable and bountiful train of thought, a stream of consciousness. My search for something tangibly permanent has manifested in the form of a scribble, a scribble which has no sensical accepted tangible clear meaning but encompasses weight, meaning, time, and memory. A space for profound shifting with unwavering permanence. A scribble as a tattoo, a scribble as this tattoo.

Thank you, @behsticks, for this.