The Bodies of the Dummies have been returned to their store house, Singer sewing machine locked in her box, photographs released from frames and wedding lace packed back into the jumble of other laces shelved in prop departments and wardrobes from all around Sydney.
The Occasional programs and badges we have left over are tightly contained in a suitcase and I will unpack them once the sadness of this project ending lifts and Red Room can move into the next one.
The end
Ing of projects are wierd little deaths best cured by intense discussions reflecting on the strange encounters, opportunities seized and tossed away, ideas faced and words met that are always part of producing and publishing poetry into the world on the faces of the world.
All those faces .. all those words unleashed into the world for a week of the Sydney Writers’ festival now gone. The disappearance of the guests and the audience fortunately can’t be totally forgotten as one has a tightly wired factory of memories onto which we print the experiences not able to be printed in or on real world materials.
But there is a joy in keeping relics from the projects, locketing objects like books, badges, photographs, someones sock that ended up in my bag. And, a very large, deep, long red scratch mark. A bloody line from my hip to my knee that appeared the morning after the Occasional event as if I’d penned a line into my flesh, scarring the body to be at one with the dummies who we’d pinned and pricked and cut and tapped all week long.
