︎ To Be Big and Be Seen: The Mirror, The Self, a Host for Dreams
Many times, while half asleep, I can feel my soul camped out in my body. I feel an essential part of my being, different than “Lex” – the person who loves to roller skate and is obsessed with MasterChef; the person who is educating herself about T-Bonds and long term investments; the artist who doesn’t know how to outrun the maze of the techno-political state but is going to keep shopping at Amazon; a woman who is black and will mention it here because that’s what everyone wants to talk about these days – Somehow that person, and all of her that is earthbound, sleeps, while another part inside me lies awake. It is the sound of a train cutting through the clear night. It is the water that keeps on flowing. I lie there, more than merely a body alive, but alert as the pure nerve of life itself. Like a fragment of a star, I can feel a force within my body piercing through the aether of sleep thunderously alive and wildly un-dead.
I have always loved and feared the cloak of night. It is when we are perhaps most ourselves, most vulnerable and malleable, temporarily unconfigured before and after the day. It was in this same space of potentiality that I first began to love theater as a kid. Of all of society’s arenas, the black box, the lights, the costumes – the theatuh – seemed to be the most truthful. It offered a space to play with, but more importantly, acknowledge the construction of values, identities characters, and entire places and times: our first virtual reality, my first love, a place to be absolutely alive.