Standing on a Different Plane

Last week, my day started out with cursing the gods, and ended talking philosophy with a drunk midget. A drunk midget who specializes in human suspension.

May I just say, every week, I find another reason to be grateful that I live in New York City.

Human suspension, in case anyone doesn't know, is the art of putting hooks through your skin in multiple places and hanging for minutes or hours at a time. I don't know what the exact process is, but at the Manor, in the room next door to Barbara Blue's House of Hair, is Disgraceland, where the year-round carnival freaks come to be chained, pierced, and snagged and scare the living crap out of anyone within 20 feet of them.

Whilst talking to Steve (the aforementioned little person) he explained that suspension has been practiced for thousands of years as a form of meditation. Yet another way humans have found to access another plane of existence, to reach mental clarity. Throwing aside the factor of self-destruction, ways to the alternate plane include yoga, suspension, drugs, severe diet restriction, intense excercise, so many trials people put themselves through for a few moments of enlightenment.

All this falls under the heading of meditation; everyone has their own personal form of bypassing the everyday world, including me. My personal choice happens to be art. Theatre, in particular, but I believe all forms of true art come from the desire of the artist to achieve something beyond what the immediate world has to offer. I know that when I personally am involved in a scene, I forget the real world around me and get caught up in 'the moment', and the same happens with dancers, musicians, even visual artists let the world around them fade as they mold and sculpt.

Almost any artist will tell you that a certain amount of pain is necessary to create great art. So are these suspension artists merely a bunch of people who are in desparate need of some therapy, or do we all somehow specialize in pain, if only to reach that other plane for one shining moment?

In my play, our director makes sure onstage we are never on the same spacial plane, because if we are all even, not only is it not as interesting to look at, it is not as lifelike.
However you get there, alternate planes are just a part of human existence. Because no matter how mundane to colorful this beautiful life on earth is, being human is knowing there is something more. SomeWHERE more.

I'll see you there.