Fifty ways to leave your lover

Forget documentation; forget proof, objectification and fetish. Forget security; forget classification, style or genre. Action, performance, happening, life! Prepare yourself to doubt, to refuse, to struggle but first of all prepare to bleed.

Continue trying getting up and walking out fast without taking any notice of what people might think, sneak out whilst she’s sleeping, make eye contact with someone you recognize from across the street when you see her crossing the pavement to meet you, sleep through the rendezvous, delete her name from your mobile phone, get too drunk to tell her, and suddenly it is late at night and too late to call and you find yourself at a new location, looking into the same face you’ve been looking into for the past three hours, smiling because you can't do anything else and at the same time wonder about the sweet yet easily sickening sensation in your body, or is it tickling? You sit at a cafe table with the one you’ve met in the bar. - I didn’t realize it was getting this late, your new acquaintance tells you, rolling her eyes in a way that makes your checks prickle and your tongue numb in your mouth. Remember, forget - love, love no more.

A performance, an action, a happening or a meeting, all have ephemerality as a starting point. The decision that something is going to continue is contrasting to the intimate present moment and the directness a performance tries to be in. What would happen if the performance never ended? If the artist never gave up, or the audience refused to go home? To empty a river of water, to drink an ocean dry, to continue walking, never looking back. Performance is in itself a Memento Mori. Many other art forms preserve the communication moment, whilst a performance arises in the present-and the meeting between a performer and his audience makes us all mortals. We are absorbed with ephemerality and there is no wonder as we have no choice in the matter. Movement accelerates more movement.

The problem is all inside your head, she said to me. The answer is easy if you take it logically. I’d like to help you in your struggle to be free. There must be fifty ways to leave your lover.

In the middle of a pirouette the ice skater loses his balance and falls to the ground, the rain pours down and keeps pouring down until the competition you hated as a child is finally cancelled, It is the same rain that ends dinner parties in the garden, where the guests throw themselves over the food and cutlery and hurry to seek shelter. I have always liked it when the unpredictable is given space and when it pierces through the comfort zones, making the unpolished visible. It is during these moments you can actually be safe. But this presupposes there are some common standing points. There has to be something secure and clear rooted in the foundation, there has to be some ground rules to relate to or some sort of an agreement. The threshold of how much insecurity a human being can withstand , particularly in a performance, is low Especially in a regulated society. The buildings in the city and its perfect facades may seem like they are built for us to believe that they will last forever. The shopping mall and its friction free esthetics make shopping as comfortable as possible. We might endure a little more chaos?

To reflect or to act on something ephemeral is like building something in order to make it disappear, is the same as accepting the cycle of change that is at all times present in our lives. It is part of our daily rituals, and we do not give in but hang on and try over and over again. In the book of hymns our lives are compared with the life of grass that grows and flowers in the morning dew, as if the evening has withered and is tossed in the fireplace. Life is fragile as a dream at night and as the dewe in the sunshine and the bubbles in the water. The Buddhists say that all things are connected to pain because humans attach themselves to things and possessions as if they are meant to last. The Buddhists' emptiness radically exposes conditions as a matter of no substance and as a flicker without an existence of its own. They talk of existence only within the ephemeral network of connections. And thus accepted as ephemeral, flickering and passing, things receive their meaning. They turn back and are accepted as fragile beauty. The road to Buddha is the road to yourself, to find oneself is to loose oneself. To loose oneself is to be affirmed by all things and the person who empties his desire will receive these things as a gift. - If you are too desperate no one wants you, if you let go they all come running

She said: It’s really not my habit to intrude, and furthermore I hope my meaning won’t be lost or misconstrued. I’ll repeat myself at the risk of being crude. There must be fifty ways to leave your lover.

For a short while you become aware of a person in the crowd because he is looking at you and shortly after turns and walks away. You have been seen; for a few seconds you exist with someone else. Potential, magnificent moments, happenings and spaces in time you keep turning back to experience over and again, a childhood memory, a fear or the smell of something familiar. When others have talked about similar experiences and you have been nodding your head- it was as I thought. It is these moments and this insecurity we live for, this fluent unfamiliar atmosphere arising and disappearing before you know what it was. There are days when it can be sufficient to sit still and observe a person, all the tiny motions that he believes no one sees, his characteristic walk, the peculiarities of his manners. Find a good spot, cue lights and there you have your performance. Nothing is as fascinating as a person being himself. The hunt for authenticity has never been so topical. Recognition and sincerity. If you choose me I wont let you down, I promise to be myself and so authentic that you’ll get dizzy – all for free. You don’t even have to walk out the door. I come home to you and we use your apartment as a setting. Why did we never really get to know each other? What could have been different then? What is a human without any expectations?

Just slip out the back Jack, make a new plan Stan, you don’t need to be coy Roy, you just listen to me. Hop on the bus Gus, you don’t need to discuss much, drop off a key Lee, and get yourself free.

You find an object on the street, something someone threw away or lost and you wonder where this thing came from, you try to imagine what the reason was for it ending up there. A story I once read contained the following props: A whip, a stick, a hat and a rose. The exercise is as follows: In two minutes you’ll seize to exist and vanish into thin air. You are to pick one of these things. Which one do you choose? I have read that there are several ways to die. One of them is to deny ones own death. Another is death watched by someone else. This is life prolonged. A third is killing yourself; a fourth is someone else killing you. Which solution is your choice? What traces would you like to leave behind? A whip, a stick, a hat, a rose? Would you like to make it easier then pull a trick. Imagine that you are a magician who disappears in the middle of the act.

She said: It grieves me so to see you in such pain, and I wish there was something I could do to make you smile again. I said: I appreciate that, and would you please explain - about the fifty ways.

Nothing brings out the unpolished and raw better then improvisation. When you don’t quite know what to do but you sense a certain path, an adaptable plan you can run with. It could be a speech where you don’t quite know what to say, or an action at a site you don’t really know or perhaps you’ve tried it out once or twice or perhaps you’ve never even been there. When you arrive you scan and register the possibilities of the site such as the audience and their thresholds, how an object relates to the room before you place a word or object the way you would like it to appear. Decisions have to be made and you’ll know immediately if they will work. Other times you have to choose between two evils, but the decision has to be made then and there and that’s when you feel that you are free to do what ever you like.

She said: Why don’t we both just sleep on it tonight, and I believe that in the morning you’ll begin to see the light. Then she kissed me and I realized that she probably was right - there must be fifty ways to leave your lover.

There is nothing as exhausting as the beginning of something and nothing as dreadful as the end of something. What is certain is that there is nothing as annoying as a bad performance. A performance that just seems to last forever and leaves you with nothing and your only consolation is that at some point it will be over and you can go home or smoke a cigarette outside, and whilst you are standing outside you find you will power slowly coming back and you find the courage to go in again and see another performance.

Linn Cecilie Ulvin 2007

Excerpts from the song "Fifty ways to leave your lover" by Paul Simon, made immortal in the cover version of Sissel Endresen.


Translations by Emma Lind Editor Anne-Marte Eudseth Rygh