Over the decades I've been privileged to be an up-close witness to all manner of transformational rituals: shamanism, vodou and candomble ceremonies, the Catholic Mass, powerful S/M exchanges, trances, more. Each at its core is a means to gather and distribute energy, to summon it from its source, manipulate it or be manipulated by it. To shape it in ways that can breach constraints of consciousness and transcend physical bounds.The priest, the two-spirit, the witch, the submissive, offer themselves as the conduit for the raw power of the cosmos, thereby making it available for the members of their tribe to touch and partake of it, for healing, guidance, celebration, renewal, catharsis. Their body becomes the portal that allows us ingress to the secret places.
Diamanda Galas last night was such an instrument. Embracing her ancestral links to the ancient mystery cults, and her quite possibly literal descent from the Erinyes, she glided onstage, opened her mouth and with it her soul and wrought transformation.
It sometimes happens when watching a performance that I experience a type of tunnel vision. Everything but the artist and the small space immediately around them fades into an indistinct murk, my peripheral vision stops working. It's like watching through a cardboard tube. Then a shimmering corona or halo appears around them. Often I will also experience a vaquely weightless sensation, as though every neural impulse is so tightly trained on the artist that things like feeling myself in physical space become superfluous.
Experiencing Galas was something altogether different. The hyperfocus was heightened, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, and the aura effect was almost kaleidoscopic. That much was at least familiar. But elsewise it was completely wracking. Despite the volume, my ears were doing very little of the work. Rather, it was my sternum and my tailbone, my every last humming, jangling nerve, taut muscles, aching skin, and burning tears. For two hours I had not one instance of intellectual reaction; it was pure emotion, relentless disorientation, exhausting, and something akin to how I'd imagine open-heart surgery without anaesthesia would be.
Well into this morning I felt buzzy and boneless and like I'd been Rolfed by a walrus. And I remembered the brilliant Evelyn Glennie's TED talk, "How to listen to music with your whole body," and suddenly I got exactly what she means. By absorbing the music on that tactile, climatic, pure sensation plane, we go from being passive recipients of a handed-down experience to fully participating in creating the transformation, our transformations. Last night I was another instrument -- undoubtedly a drum, given the way I was beaten -- played from half a small room away to complete the performance.
Diamanda Galas is a shaman, a shapeshifter and trickster. Not the type who works by firelight or under a cat's-eye moon, though. She leads you into the hallucinatory meta-darkness of the sweatlodge or the deep labyrinthine caverns, and leaves you to find your way out. All you have to do is learn to hear with your body, listen with your soul.
Ralph Stanley - O Death
And now I'm off to daydream about what a Diamanda Galas - Evelyn Glennie collaboration would sound -- and feel -- like.
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