The other story you write

I want to return to The World In Pictures, the Forced Entertainment show I saw in Dublin and wrote about several posts back (‘the story you write…’. I think I was being grumpy and more fixed on what it wasn’t than what it was when I wrote about it in Dublin. (more on that soon). Why do I think this? Because images and moments from the show keep coming back to me. For some reason I’m seeing astroturf, the hysterical green of fake grass, and Terry’s deadpan slide show of images of banal, everyday things like meat in plastic wrap. I don’t actually remember whether there WAS this lurid fake grass in the show, or if I’ve furnished it to fit some mental mise en scene. But this is the thing with shows, if they are alive they mutate and keep dividing in memory long after the event.

For many years the only way I’ve been able to explain what I hope for, why I keep going to theatre, as that feeling of a space opening up inside my body, like a forgotten landscape, that was always there but not known. This extraordinary feeling of a folded world unfurling. And that feeling stays with you afterwards, it becomes a point on the map, a place.

I wonder if getting old and dying is a process of all experience incrementally converting, moving into, this interior, folded/unfolded map which both co-ordinates to, and is separate from, the outside world.