You see a friend you haven’t in a while and you are both alone, and say “hi” and all, and then your friend says, “I have an idea. Let’s have a short conversation. We’ll begin right away. It will be fun! Okay, you start by saying something, and then I will respond.”
That doesn’t happen, because that would be ridiculous.
(Although now all I want to do in the world is to say that to the next friend I see)
Conversation, at least in my subsection of Society, is a natural thing that just happens organically. So what about creating Art? Should it – no, wrong word. Would we like to live in a society where drawing or writing with someone felt that natural? You wouldn’t have to be creating all the time, just like you don’t have to be conversing all the time. But you’re with someone, everything is casual, and they draw a head, fold so the neck lines show, pass it to you and say, I drew a head – why don’t you draw the body?
I had a friend who lived in Iceland. She once asked me to “top her.” After an awkward moment, it was apparent she didn’t mean THAT. She said that at gatherings, sometimes someone would say, “Top me” and you make up the first line of a couplet, and you rhyme it.
PERSON A: Top me?
PERSON B: Okay. We like to play surrealist games.
PERSON A: Why don’t we have proper names?
Doesn’t that sound nice?
How about we try something like that in the context of Social Nonsense? Instead of “I have an idea. Let’s do this game I found in this book” what if we just kind of … did it? Write down a sentence and pass it to Charlie, “I just wrote a sentence. Write down the next one.” And if ol’ Charlie goes for it, “fold it down like this… now pass it to Mateo.”
I’ve been facilitating these games like I’m emceeing a show. (That’s probably because I used to emcee a lot of shows) Is that the way to go? What do you think?