Seven Bodies and the Talking Sea

[Tiger Mountain, Taipei] During our last iteration of meeting online, I am traveling up a mountain, the cellphone in my hand reflects the sunlight that peaks through the tree leaves, between the screen and the actual world, the bright surface of phantom faces discussing ideas about void, I lose track of my direction and where my feet is taking me. I am trying out another form of mobility amidst the many limitations to move, to move in parallel between surfaces allowing reflections to mangle, and perhaps, in certain moments, mirrors are able to bend their silvery torsos. This has been a year of creating spaces within crevices, curling inwards, inner climate change, she said, “sense your underskin, it’s like mist.” The unconscious emotional weight that water carries, rippling with the stylized flames in a Buddhist mural, depicting the fiery roar of the dragon serpent frozen in time. There is emptiness between the ripples, a null space between every glare, to situate freedom within this blank, is a choice to say no, and a refusal of calculation, a naturalized rhythm, A’s affirming metronome replaces my heartbeat, tik, tik, tik, tik.

Our ventilation is clogged by a squirrel making its winter nest, in a bundle of twigs and industrial scraps, the squirrel digs into the hollow frame instinctively trying to make more room itself. The idea of re-embodying in a time when our bodies are so disjointed, to shapeshift by leaving every hindrance of doubt behind.

In the Open Sea, I arrive at a talking boulder and a talking tree, and a man brushing off fallen leaves. To acquire the ability to listen, he says, one must cultivate a deep connection with the cosmic, aerial energy, and tune in to its way of moving. To breathe with, to project one’s spirit with the marrow of sun and moon, to warm with low fire the golden egg of the moon and cook with herbal dynamics of anti-covid tea. Heaven does not speak, it does not herd, but you can tune in for a different kind of inner listening for an immersion with the naturalized divine.



Scoring of Anti Covid Tea

During this pandemic, the relevance of alternative covid remedies have been well pronounced in the form of herbal medicine, grandma’s recipes and conspiracy theories. These propositions, altogether disregarded as covid myths, are dismissed as unscientific and dangerous. In tiny circles, I begin to question the the merit of what we call myths today, and how a reconsideration of myth and medicine can encourage a renegotiating of our relationship with our surroundings and a reopening of the possibilities to reimagine a shift in the way we live and relate to the world when we come out of this pandemic.

Scoring to me is a process of exploring the performative potential in materiality. I look for states of trembling, as the forming of clusters rely on chance. I move elements around until they make noise in my head, noise that makes time bend, diffract.