Cosmo Schueppel/Embodiment Toolkit

Like Wind in Leaves and Ash like Snow

first approach as a booklet:

I remember leaning my head into my neck,

I remember looking into the sky,

Ash falls like Snow,

Slowly,

Weightless,

As a child, I used to stick out my tongue to taste the first snow sometime around December,

Snow has become rare and the ash - now - tastes bitter,

I remember loading frightened animals in and onto dirty trucks,

I remember driving down into a valley,

Ash falls like Snow from the sky and the wall of fire is slowly eating its way down the mountain in front of me,

Everything is in slow motion,

The world is almost weightless - almost unreal,

A child is sitting next to me at the beach and we look at burned wood being washed onto the shore,

“Everything will burn” the child says,

Eleven years old,

Her name is Zoi,

Zoi in greek means life,

Everything feels slow,

Almost weightless,

Almost like a dream,

Virtually unreal,

Only the catastrophe alert on my phone reminds me everyday that I’m not dreaming,

125.000 hectare forest burned that summer on Evia Island Greece,

But the scenes strangely fixed in my memory are:

The beauty of the Ash falling like Snow,

The constant red sun, the all-day sunset,

Clouds that were not white but black,

The nights sky that was not black, but red,

The Russian airplanes extinguishing the fires because of the remains of an orthodox saint in the church close by,

And again and again: The ash like snow - White Christmas in 38 degree burning heat.

Now I ask myself:

What are the aesthetics of catastrophes?

How do aesthetics relate to the un-normal?

Will the apocalypse be beautiful?

How much pain must be held in aesthetic experiences?

Can everything be aesthetic when seen from a new perspective?

And why do astronauts always describe the beauty of the earth once they look back at it?

ATTENTION, ORGANISATION, ACTION

EXERCISE: