On Fishes: a video setting of a poem by RIlke and another guy

you did not expect me to live 
I have said it
I will live

Some years back my old high school friend Hilary McDaniels Douglas invited me to write some music for her aerial dance company Project in Motion, based in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She requested that I set a poem by Rilke and of course I couldn't resist. I also included a poem whih appeared in my book Moon Baboon Canoe that I'd written and that felt appropriate. The overall theme of the piece was to be about water. 

Last night I began exploring a video clip of moving letters. (Full disclosure: I stole it off the Internet.) I transformed it: I layered it, expanded and contracted it, changed the colours and the movement and generally played around with it. It was riverine. It reminded me of the flowing letters in Justin Stephenson's spectucular film about bpNichol, The Complete Works. 

I loved how the letters moved and replaced a poem that I'd stuck over top with an audiotrack of a funky distorted saxophone-based track that I'd made with a video of my hands moving. I realized that I'd need a much more flowing audio track and remembered the Rilke track that I'd made for Hilary. It was all about flowing, movement, and in my poem, it mentions hands. The whole thing worked so well together. I began transforming the video to be all about the Rilke track. I'm really thrilled with how it turned out. From a series of associations and accidents, this lovely thing that I stumbled on.

song

old mother
do you know me?
I have not swum with you for years

I have been silent
these words I have learned 
they are not words to trust

we were together when the moon rose 
when my fists were soft as my tongue

old mother
here there are stars on the sky’s wall

you did not expect me to live 
I have said it
I will live

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward,

as if the river shores were opening out.

It seems that things are more like me now,

that I can see farther into paintings.

I feel closer to what language can't reach.

With my sense, as with birds, I climb

into the windy heaven, out of the oak,

and in the ponds broken off from the sky

my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated by Robert Bly)