October 23, 2007
The Inglis Proclamation II: The Blessing Room
Ring them bells, St. Catherine, from the top of the room;
Ring them from the fortress for the lilies that bloom.
Oh, the lines are long, and the fighting is strong,
And they're breaking down the distance between right and wrong.
--Bob Dylan, 1989
by The Tears Of Things
We have noted with both amusement and disappointment that repeat visitors from the Heard Museum, The Smithsonian Institution and the local university --which have driven our sitemeter reading average up by minutes from where it was before-- these visitors make no comments about their reason for visiting-- the Loser Tribe piece and the Partnership for Innovation postings, respectively. And who are those happyheads from Happy Jack? Word's getting around, but not back to us. Cell phones chirp throughout the town in a circling chorus like trees full of gossiping starlings, but not for us.
Too bad for all. We would welcome a constructive conversation about, oh, to begin with, authenticity in making art, followed by a serious exploration of the importance of spirituality in art practice, the reality of evil, reverse racism, and building up the distance between right and wrong. And how about developing a consensus against misogyny? For starters. But in our dreams, for now.
For now, we bear witness to what we see, and testify to what we'd like to see. And everybody's got a problem with that. But it's their problem, idnit? Still, to soothe the nerves, to heal the soul, and to keep the local low-level sniggering evil away, we often burn sage, and savor its singular smoke --pungent and greasy, but not heavy at all, and seeming to change its tang, in turn, into earth, air, fire and water, again and again, smelling like what you'd smell at the throat of an eagle's neck if he'd let you get that close, the world condensed and fused into furry pale green leaves.
Sage . . . . On October 17, 2004 --over three years ago; has it really been that long?-- we published a sardonic piece about an imaginary art action inspired by a real anti-Satanic proclamation established by the Mayor and City Council of Inglis, Florida in 2002. One of our ideas was to combine the Proclamation with a burning Sage Censer bolted to the top of a van, which we would drive around the downtown Phoenix arts district, tossing rolled-up versions of the Proclamation at various venues, while the healing sage smoke would spread over all and bring them back to their senses.
It was a joke, obviously --we laughed, anyway-- but it had a painfully sincere heart. We really will stand up to evil, to rise above the miasma of the current culture, to reach for and celebrate the best within ourselves, and we don't think it's a sin to expect the same of others, especially in such testing times. So recently we got to (re)thinking about the whole concept again. It was also interesting technically: finding a way to combine the sage smoke with copies of the Proclamation, to soak the Proclamation in sage smoke. And we needed a more efficient way to distribute the good news. We thought. We brooded. We thought, What if we turned the notion inside out? What if, instead of taking the sage/Proclamation to the people, you bring the people to the blessing? What if . . . ?
The Blessing Room is a freestanding rectangular enclosed structure twenty feet on a side and ten feet high, with four seven-foot by five-foot open doorways centered on each side. It is designed to be used outside. Each doorway has a directional letter --N,E,W,S-- mounted above it, inside and out, and the Room is sited according to those cardinal points. The Room has a slightly peaked, four-sloped roof topped with a large black iron functional weathervane in the shape of a wingspread bald eagle which seems to hover above the scene. The Room is completely modular, made of fireproof thermoplastic, and rests on a hydraulic platform which can be raised, bisected, wheeled, and towed away after the Room performs its function.
The color scheme reproduced above is painted on the floor, ceiling, and roof of the Room, connected by the corresponding vertical bands painted on the walls, inside and out. The effect should be bright, sharp, hopeful, balanced, and life-affirming. In the center of the ceiling, below four circles cut in the cardinal points, hangs a ceiling fan with five large wooden blades carved into the shapes of eagle feathers. In the center of the floor, standing thirty inches high, is a shallow steel censer five feet in diameter, which can be equipped with either propane and pumice or real coals; a grill lays above this layout, and sage bundles are piled liberally all over the censer, sending up thick clouds of its smoke. Seven black electric fans are mounted on the edge of the censer, evenly spaced beginning at True North, randomly rotating about their bases, distributing sage smoke all around. Combined with the fan above, the effect sends smoke to the walls and out the doors. On the floor ringing the censer stand eight black aluminium buckets filled with colored sand corresponding to the colors on the floor. Nature sounds --birds, animals, the sounds of the four elements-- are continually piped in and looped from hidden speakers.
On each wall, at even intervals flanking the doorways, are mounted clear molded plastic paper holders, ten to a wall, each of which holds a bundle of Proclamations.
And here is the key point:
Visitors are invited to spend as much time as they want in the Room --they can even meditate up against the wall under chosen colors-- then take a sage-soaked Proclamation back as a blessing to their neighborhood. In this way, from whatever venue --outside The Heard or the Phoenix Art Museum, vacant ground downtown, SMoCA, dozens of possibilities-- visitors can seed goodness in an unpredictable but beautiful spreading of blessings from the central spawn of the Blessing Room.
The Room is supervised by the Sage Tender, who usually sits on a wooden chest at the South position, halfway between the doorway and the censer. The chest holds more sage bundles, more copies of the Proclamation, and small fire extinguishers. The Sage Tender holds a long oak rod with a grip device at the end to place and shift sage bundles. He or she regularly tends the censer, and replenishes the paper holders, and keeps the peace.
The Blessing Room should ideally be used four times a year, on the equinoxes and solstices. (A reasonable length of time for the blessed burning would be six to eight hours, either beginning at sunset or bracketing midnight, depending on the venue.) In these times, though, we could use blessings as often as we come across them, shouldn't we?
And this one is not a joke, it is a serious proposal.
Posted by Jerome at October 23, 2007 03:33 PM | TrackBack“Don’t let my sorrow make evil of me.”
-- Caroline, in Tony Kushner's Caroline, or Change