Let It Bleed

[bandwraith at aol.com]

Animation. Parturition. Separation. Individuation- all wonderfully 
bloody processes. Women bleed best of course. They're more practiced- 
blood sisters. Men spend much of their energy trying to stop the 
periodic and nuanced bleeding around which all culture is based by 
attempting to plug the holes, only to cause buckets of blood to flow 
with their chaotic wars of aggression. They become enraged- red flags 
to bulls- right to life, pro-death. It is said that Mayan priests would 
ritually slice their foreskins and bleed into ceremonial bowls kept in 
special chambers at the top of their temples. Technologists of the 
Sacred, who were they emulating?

But bleeding works both ways- a necessity for separation and 
inividuation, and as symbol for the penetration and breaking down of 
barriers necessary for meaningful re-integration. Bleeding (or the 
potential to bleed) is essential for well demarcated and maintained 
boundaries of all types- from the physical to metaphysical, including 
that between the audience and the performer, even from one era or epoch 
to another- in Paris, 1913, for example- The Rite of Spring. Temporal 
bleeding.

The boundary between virtual and real is becoming an especially 
sanguinous one these days, and is probably best represented by that 
post-postmodern phenomenon, The Drone Pilot. I would love to see the 
ensignias those guys and gals wear on their uniforms. Something 
tasteful I would hope.

For the rugged and harried Islamist- profiled and mapped, uploaded into 
any number of data bases (humming in supercooled conditions, buried 
beneath how many dunes of silicon)- scurrying around murdering aide 
workers and other feminists, in the undeveloped dirt of the third 
world, the weather outside must be frightful. For the Drone Pilots, I 
would imagine, it's probably pretty cozy.