online: 25 february 2005

25 february 2005 play-acting as living


15:24 Outdoor cafe. I'm the only one eating outside today... (the snowfalls have stopped for the moment) ... except for some actors and a camera crew who are recording as they talk and eat at a table... They all seem relaxed as if this play-acting is just a continuation of everyday living. Perhaps it is - if you do it often. And if, that is, you treat all living as acting, or the observing and recording of it (in memory of not camera)...?

...yes, and that would account for the slightly unnatural manner of actors and media people (displaying their emotions - or letting them show more than do most of us) ... and it might also account for my own manner here as i write - revealing my thoughts about events as they happen - as i walk about and look and listen with no other purpose in mind - taking life as a performance (art) in itself?... Yes!

The film makers are now trying to induce a dachshund to take part but it does not do quite as they wish - at which they laugh ... And now they pack up and continue their conversation as if it were the same one that they were performing so relaxedly... Perhaps it was.

And now the robin returns and eats from my tray of remnants of soup and bread and margarine. I look at it closely.

On the way back the heath became quite warm and beautiful... sunlight penetrating the cold misty clouds and illuminating the trees... and no wind... and the air feeling drier.

...i walked quickly over dark muddy ground and passed a tree that someone had burnt into charcoal by setting fire to fallen branches leaning against the trunk in the shape of a wigwam. There are several such tree-houses on the heath - is this a new play-acting custom... a conscious reversion to the form, but not the substance, of tribal living?... For these conical enclosures do not keep out the rain or the wind - only other people. Are they markers of territory by the dispossessed some of us?





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