People go; people come, in the dance of equilibrium.
Image a multi-media, interactive, electronic, live performance art installation representing the scenario of your existences, as it is right now. There are gadgets and gizmos placed at odd angles depicting your dreams and schemes, screens flashing images of your memories and fantasies, essence burners, giving off familiar smells and aromas and monitors emitting the sounds of your daily life. The performance aspect comprises you sitting in your deconstructionist armchair, wired, mind and body to the circuitry. As you sit there, various key players in your life walk around the installation and are affected, find it variously, 'moving', disturbing’, and 'fabulous'. The artist had obviously dedicated a lifetime to perfecting the milieu.
The whole installation runs on a special, refined form of electricity called 'chi', which is being produced in a big solar generator round the back... There is a single, fat, industrial cable running from generator to installation, which houses two separate sub-cables, one conducting a positive charge, the other, a negative. These opposing charges are mutually dependant. One is useless without the other, and so they spend eternity locked into a perpetual dance of equality.
The positive charge is called 'yang', and carries heat which, left unchecked, would cause everything in the installation , including you, to pop, expand burn and explode.
The negative charge is caked 'yin', and carries cold which, unchecked would cause the entire structure including you to shrivel, condense, freeze and implode.
To prevent the installation erupting in flames or collapsing in on itself to form a pile of condensed rubble and congealed bio-plasm, it's obviously desirable for these yang and yin charges to be equal in electromotive force thus ensuring a healthy balance in the ambience of the installations.
Balance, however, is not a static phenomenon. Yin and yang actually move in a complex of alternating currents, so that sometimes there's more yin in the mix and sometimes more yang, depending on the time of day, phase of the moon and season. This produces discernible fluctuations in the status quo.
The lights will start out pleasantly dim, gradually growing dimmer till you can no longer read, at which point they’ll star to grow brighter, which will be a relief, until they grow slightly too bright and your wrinkles start showing. Same with the smells, sounds, climate control, and even your mind, which will go from a whimper to a veritable explosion of ideas, before returning to the void.
In the performance, you don't do anything about this fluctuation; it's there to give a little variation in light and shade. You don't interfere with the process. You don't try to enhance it or alter it in any way. You don't resist it. You simply be aware it’s happening and observe which phase the energy’s in, small yang, big yang, small yin or big yin, and go with it.
When there's more of the yin and the lights go dim, and it starts getting cold, and you feel like retreating, retreat, i.e. stop. When yang's on the rise, and you're feeling restless with heat in your thighs, advance, i.e. do something.
Once you start to discern the phase and can feel the yin and yang moving in your life, they become your friends, and their fluctuations level out as evenly as the taste of sweet and sour chicken.
So good night yin and good day yang, yin and yang the life-force gang.
