Circling Gnomes

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Circling Gnomes

{ first-posted on 05-04-2018 by aa.bbbb loop-now 05-04-2018 }

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HEY!! ALL OF YOU!! This is about the “stupid” exercise video, not the other stupid junk most of you people think is way far more important, like your snotty self.

Yes, I broke in here – I broke in a locked door here at the Community Studio just two minutes ago – I used a big hammer from my house and the broken door is still hanging open – cause I can see out to the street from number three aisle where I am walking quickly down – if I don't trip – but now I have gone out to the central chair and sat down and I am about to push some buttons – yes, like this – as you know, exactly six buttons and a switch – and I have started talking. So, yes, all because of a STUPID EXERCISE VIDEO as all you assholes out there in this dear community as it has become, as you neo-neo-neo-fascist bastards call this vitally important piece of art. THIS ADVICE FOR OUR FUTURE. An exercise video. And I am entering it into the record, or at least I am entering what I'm saying about it.

So here's the best film review I've got. This thing has been working its way through my brain for some time, and it aint ready yet but the time is ready, so here it is.

Uh point of order! Did the Serverity Video get the shouting and everything in my big entry? Oh fuck me please, who the fuck am I talking to??? I'm alone here! the Joke Office is empty!!! but come to think of it, you bastards, I am calling a point of fucking order so FUK OFF!!! Neo-neo-neo-nazi scum. I PUSHED THE RECORD BUTTON!!! HAHAHAHAHA Here it is … … … FUCKING POINT OF ORDER!!! { …pointoforder.overload… } You will love this when you turn your boxes on this morning.

So later I'll tell you how I got this idea, but the time is ready now. So it's been working through my brain and it is not ready at all but here is the script.

Circling Gnomes, what are they? asks the happy non-confrontational voice of someone who seems to be acting. This is a pleasant person of my favorite gender who had smiled just a moment before the recording box started turning and is now nodding reassuringly at you while trying to hold their smile. Their hands are clasped on their bosom. That's how it starts. Right off you know, it's a no-budget pro-amateur advertisement public service video by the staff, all or mostly amateur staff, at some roadside temple like a million others.

You cannot, in this opening shot, see the vast refugee camp that stretches around the recording box and its human subject in a neat open space before a wall, the vast refugee camp that stretches around this slightly elevated minuscule of land where the person is actually standing, stretching on wide rough paths that radiate out from this temple's front dooryard, wide rough paths on this slightly bumpy low hill land now filled with an ocean of debris crawling with human beings, and yet the wide radiating paths – and the open public watchtowers, watchtowers standing open, built of concreve and each uniquely brightly painted, towers set at intervals across the scene – those things prove it is a living cityscape.

As you will see in a later panoramic shot, these wide rough radiating paths (which you have not seen yet) radiating out from the large round temple's front dooryard, two of the open paths caressing tangent edges of the temple's large round low dome built of solid concate blocks, painted by the successions of residents with layers of colored shapes, with its open front and back yards, open to the people who walk by from anywhere, thus connected by walking feet with distant places, those wide radiating paths are actually expert city planning for a city of utmost squaller, for a city where there are no possessions at all, where everything that was standing up, except the round concate temple and the public watchtowers, has been broken over by a storm.

And the temple's all volunteer staff – which is to say, the temple congregation – they have made something. With a variety of miscellaneous tech equipment on hand from their government, with skills and thinking of people there, these astonishing people made this video about a good idea somebody had around there. This camp is in Wales. It's Druidic. It's one of those.

And, as you surely know if you're paying any attention to Community affairs, this is where our Community Governing Board proved themselves nazis every one. Or maybe, damn them, this opening shot, of the poor spokesperson in the poor setting, maybe this is the instant in time and space where our reverend respected your-majesty holy fuck you bastards Community Governing Board, every one of them, chose to become each one a nazi. They laughed.

Are you with me? If not, fuck off and go build your own town somewhere and drink your piss for holy water. These people in this ancient video are trying to tell you, across all the years, a certain truth they have chosen, and I (skeptical me!) – I was stirred by their call the first time I saw this exercise video, this art they made. It is not a cry for help, it is an offering of help. It is an offering those poor people sent across the sea of years to us.

Walk around in a circle. You're in some small place, but really any place you like. Walk around in a circle. Half an hour or so. Change directions in-out now and then. Do this maybe two or three times a week perhaps. Presto, the box opens to reveal your prize … better health and better happiness and, we hope, at least some hint of spiritual liberation. The Circling Gnomes idea. Who laughed at that?

Where were you after the Last War, asshole, you weren't even a semen's future semen's future semen yet. So seriously fuck off. And you have the stupidity to laugh at this extraordinarily beautiful treasure sent to us – and now received by us at last – and why to us? – from a small group of extraordinary people who were standing and alive, and conscious and breathing on the real and actual last day of the Last War, and the day after and the day before. And you spurn this?

Some of their movie making gear was decent quality and some of that was unusable from mismatching plugs. They had no instruction sheets except a page of carefully lettered advice left by an unknown departed person. They had a big box of unsorted tech boxes, a fact which served their community as a common bit of humor and served the short film, that they and their temple congregation made, as a polite running joke. The movie has a brief scene featuring the ridiculous big unsorted box of tech equipment, with several of the characters sitting on it. But why detain ourselves in petty curiosities? They made their case.

Walk around in a circle. You're in some small place, but any place you like is good. Walk around in a circle, for an hour. With step and gesture, weave a careful psychoactive pattern that you make up by groping inside yourself for truth. Do this maybe six days a week for three weeks sometime in each decade of your life perhaps. Meanwhile, pay attention to yourself and life. Presto, the box opens to reveal your prize … a calmer and more thoughtful and more independent mind. You have learned to better know what and how you think. The Circling Gnomes idea. Do you laugh because you fear it?

The cute couple were really cute. An older couple, older than the average in those camps at least, and aged with care. I fell in love with them. So now I mourn them. They found matching long shirts to wear for the filming, or you learn in one beautiful shot that their friends made their extravagantly painted shirts that were painted full of stars. Soon gone of course, gone in an uncountable disease outbreak probably of course, but now not forgotten. How you laughed at their shirts full of painted stars!

They walked the little circle hand in hand for the film's first demonstration, in the temple's back yard with the tall block wall behind them painted daylight blue, hand in hand around a little tree the temple staff were nurturing. Round and round, change direction, smiling pleasure, softly singing.

So, as you've seen, this woman spoke first, when the movie came on. This face at the movie's start, her face, is the face of an old woman probably thirty-five or so – me here just judging age from our memories of how things were in the Last War camps – this woman who stood for the recording box with her broken hands folded photogenically on her breast, and trying to hold a certain kind of smile that she had plastered on her face for a moment because the smile was necessary for a moment. It was the kind of smile you plaster on to tell strangers the lie that they are always welcome.

It was a famous kind of face too, a Face of Caceras. This face was not hungry at this moment when we see this face but yesterday's ruinous storm has told her definitely no food will arrive here for several days or a month or more or years perhaps. She speaks to us very calm and severe, we her audience, about how to keep a sane house.

She says she's spiritual herself and she recommends spirituality to us in general. She displays a few of her Bardic religious household utensils, revealing them on a small table where she is sitting in a small chair – all of this old woman's sacred household utensils are small and made from junk – helped by a young girl who helps her handle things. She gestures with her sacred objects to show an imaginary structured 4-D pattern in which she claims you can conduct all of a household's activities – and thus recommending that you, the audience member, should dream up some structured spiritual universe where you, yourself perhaps a homemaker, place the existence of your home. She advises that when you must remove a dead body from the house it's spiritually best to hand it out through a window.

She says her name is Grandmother Witch.

Why is writing so hard? This is me asking this. I'm not typing now, I'm speaking. Why is writing so hard? Is it very hard to tell the truth? Or is finding words for truth or lies or anything harder than it needs to be? Or is it the fucking muses, fucking idiots half of them. Sure, any writer with a stupid muse can type in lots of stupid shit but that's fucking easy. Why is true writing so hard?

Making pictures is easy, or it's not too hard. You know what? In the end, if you're painting you're just finally standing there with the stick in hand – with the ink or paint just perfect on the stick by now, just not quite but almost dripping off of it onto your hair or shirt or cuff – you staring at the bastard thing, and you say, fuck that's good enough. Here's what you say… 'Each viewer will see what that viewer will see.' Bullshit copout from artistic responsibility but fuck, when you paint a picture that copout is all you've got. You look around, where you are, and you're alone. You and that picture are somewhere very deep in some sub-sub-sector of existence, trying to look like here from there.

But with writing you can be accurately understood by maybe many people and you know that you can if you just don't wreck it all too much. The viewer doesn't see so much of what you'd like to show, of course – you have narrowed the bandwidth a lot by switching from painting to writing – but you seem to stay here, where you are. Language slows your thinking down and forces you into coding mode enough to immediately fix the grossest gibberish mishaps of fingertip and recording surface. Not so with paint, I promise. With language there are far more rules you think you can trust. And only certain viewers are qualified to read, only those who learn the rules by heart. With your painted picture, any human being is qualified to look and see whatever they grope around inside themselves to see.

The old man – she introduced him as 'my true heart love' and he called himself 'Grampa Druid' – sometimes even speaking of himself in third-person, sometimes clearly so you might decide the 'Grampa Druid' name is supposed to be some kind of ruse – the old man was a teaching storyteller who had helped her invent this walking exercise for thought and health. And I believe he tells the truth.

Why is it so hard for me to describe him for you? He had another famous type of face, a Face of Dasilva, but in a mood of happy triumph.

Someone's coming. Goodbye