The Telling Itself

The Telling Itself

By Steve TellArts
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The Telling Itself episodes

  • Digging My Own Gravy on Friday, January 1, 2021 - Incant Against Suicide

    Digging My Own Gravy is a year-long, durational project where I record a couple of minutes of material each day in which I am able to stay present, let go, and enjoy something happening to or around me.

    --

    This episode is proudly sponsored by the following poem:

    INCANT AGAINST SUICIDE

    Buy neither gun nor blue-edged blade.

    Avoid green rope, high windows, rat
    poison, cobra pits, and the long vanishing point
    of train tracks that draw you to horizon’s razor.

    Only this way will another day refine you. (Natural death’s

    no oxymoron) Your head’s a bad neighborhood:
    Don’t go there alone, even if you have to stop
    strangers to ask the way, and even if

    spiders fall from your open mouth.

    This talk’s their only exit. How else
    would their scramble from your skull

    escape? You must make room first

    that the holy spirits might enter. Empty
    yourself of self, then kneel down to listen.

    -Mary Karr


    4 min
  • Digging My Own Gravy on New Year's Eve (Thursday 31 December, 2020) - Stay Present, Let Go, Enjoy

    Digging My Own Gravy is a year-long, durational project where I record a couple of minutes of material each day in which I am able to stay present, let go, and enjoy something happening to or around me.

    This episode is proudly sponsored by the following poem:

    THE WAY


    the way I could tell
    today
    that yesterday is dead
    is that
    the little gray bird
    that sat
    in the empty
    tree
    yesterday is gone:
    yesterday and
    bird are gone:

    I know there's no use
    looking
    for either
    Of them, bird
    running from winter,
    yesterday
    running downstream
    to some ocean-pocket of
    rest
    whence it may sometime
    come again (changed), new
    as tomorrow:

    how like a gift
    the memory
    of bird and empty tree!
    how
    precious
    since we may not have
    that configuration
    again:
    today is full of things,
    so many,
    how can they be managed,
    received and loved
    in their passing?

    -A.R. Ammons

    5 min
  • Together In Electric Dreams (iii): On The Second Day of Christmas My True Love Sent To Me CEASE AND DESIST COMMS!

    This is a telling about me examining my conscience. 

    --

    TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS/THE TWELVE DAZE OF CHRISTMAS MINI-SEASON

    I thought it might be interesting to write and record some episodes about two psychotherapists (for what it's worth) going through a weird, online, Covid-19 break up RIGHT NOW AT THE END OF 2020!

    The best time of the year to be breaking up with someone. Which is why the human animals (us) all seem to be doing it. Right about now.

    Seeing if it might be possible with this batch of episodes to disentangle a certain strand of crazy-bordering-on-insane behaviour that Eros all-too-often steers us towards. Or something like that. See what you think.

    --

    Today's Telling is Proudly Sponsored by This Poem:

    GRAMMAR


    Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
    smiles like a big cat and says
    that she's a conjugated verb.
    She's been doing the direct object
    with a second person pronoun named Phil,
    and when she walks into the room,
    everybody turns:

    some kind of light is coming from her head.
    Even the geraniums look curious,
    and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
    suspiciously around her hair, looking
    for the door in her corona.
    We're all attracted to the perfume
    of fermenting joy,

    we've all tried to start a fire,
    and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
    In the meantime, she is the one today among us
    most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
    and when we see it, what we do is natural:
    we take our burned hands
    out of our pockets,
    and clap.

    —Tony Hoagland


    51 min
  • Together In Electric Dreams (ii): Dog Ate My Homework
    A telling about the delay to the next instalment of Together In Electric Dreams/The Twelve Daze of Christmas.
    --
    TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS/THE TWELVE DAZE OF CHRISTMAS MINI-SEASON
    I thought it might be interesting to write and record some episodes about two psychotherapists (for what it's worth) going through a weird, online, Covid-19 break up RIGHT NOW AT THE END OF 2020!
    The best time of the year to be breaking up with someone. Which is why the human animals (us) all seem to be doing it. Right about now.
    Seeing if it might be possible with this batch of episodes to disentangle a certain strand of crazy-bordering-on-insane behaviour that Eros all-too-often steers us towards. Or something like that. See what you think.
    28 min
  • Together In Electric Dreams (i): On The First Day of Christmas My True Love Sent To Me A FULLY ENLIGHTENED HUMAN BEING!

    This is a telling about how (un)enlightened I am. 

    --

    TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS/THE TWELVE DAZE OF CHRISTMAS MINI-SEASON

    I thought it might be interesting to write and record some episodes about two psychotherapists (for what it's worth) going through a weird, online, Covid-19 break up RIGHT NOW AT THE END OF 2020! 

    The best time of the year to be breaking up with someone. Which is why the human animals (us) all seem to be doing it. Right about now. 

    Seeing if it might be possible with this batch of episodes to disentangle a certain strand of crazy-bordering-on-insane behaviour that Eros all-too-often steers us towards. Or something like that. See what you think. 

    --

    Today's Telling is Proudly Sponsored by This Poem: 

    ENLIGHTENMENT


    “It’s all empty, empty,”
    he said to himself.
    “The sex and drugs. The violence, especially.”
    So he went down into the world to exercise his virtue,

    thinking maybe that would help.
    He taught a little kid to build a kite.
    He found a cure,
    and then he found a cure

    for his cure.
    He gave a woman at the mercy of the weather
    his umbrella, even though
    icy rain fell and he had pneumonia.
    He settled a revolution in Spain.

    Nothing worked.
    The world happens, the world changes,
    the world, it is written here,
    in the next line,
    is only its own membrane—

    and, oh yes, your compassionate nature,
    your compassion for our kind.

    VIJAY SESHADRI

    --

    CREDITS:

    The Twelve Days of Christmas (Performed by the Pudding Symphony TV Orchestra, featuring Uncle and The Bacon [seriously, I'm not making this up!] . Arrangement by Ulf Langsrud: https://youtu.be/ARu71XKZ3KM

    Piano cover of Electric Dreams: https://youtubetomp3music.com/en5/download?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DTQMlpab5A2w%26ab_channel%3Dstevechristiepianist

    Haunting music for poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DKiPY6w8rE&ab_channel=LukeFaulkner

    Uncle Caveh (Zahedi) talking about Steven Forrest's The Inner Sky and then dancing to Pavement's In The Mouth A Desert :https://youtu.be/2PlpN_5GKTI?t=2427 (from the film In The Bathtub of The World)

    The Enlightened Beings Quiz: https://www.enlightenedbeings.com/quiz/



    40 min
  • If You Remind Me of My Dog, We'll Probably Get Along (Max & The Pine Cone)

    This is a telling about my beloved soulmate Max, and his recent quixotic adventures with a pine cone.

    -- 

    We have no choice in the bodies that hold us


    Thing of dirt and water and oxygen marked by thinking
    and reacting and a couch
    one may or may not be permitted
    to sleep on. He may not permit me
    to touch him or to take the bone
    from his mouth, but he does, and that’s a choice
    based on many factors, not the least of which
    is his own desire to let me
    do these things. How I could ever
    think or feel myself more
    deserving of a single thing than
    this being, whom I call by a name the same way
    my parents chose a name for me. The same way my genes
    went expressing themselves to make my face exactly
    my face. This isn’t special. Or this is special. But it’s one
    answer, the same, for us both.

    Holly Amos


    --

    Burl Ives version of "I Know An Old Lady" (the version of the song I  know from childhood):  https://youtu.be/zQHmZMf6zwo

    Video of Max that I mention in this telling: https://photos.app.goo.gl/j4eJn8qhS4QsPfkg7

    Jose Feliciano singing "I Know An Old Lady" to a bunch of kids on Sesame Street (Episode 763/March 19, 1975): https://youtu.be/Ys-42_FKDDs

    Cat Stevens' "I Love My Dog" (Live, 1971): https://youtu.be/ET5drt_utUY

    Jane Siberry's "Everything Reminds Me of My Dog" - beautifully animated by Richard Raxlen: https://youtu.be/Y22Ityt7n6Q

    36 min
  • Apologizing Is Actually Part of Violent Communication (Elle's review of my last Telling)

    This tellings consists of Elle's one-line review of my previous telling (which was written and performed for her the week before).

    Elle's review was delivered to her therapist Rob on Monday 7th of December, 2020 at 2pm GMT. She then shared the review with me so that I could incorporate it into my telling. 

    --

    CARRYING A LADDER


    We are always
    really carrying
    a ladder, but it’s
    invisible. We
    only know
    something’s
    the matter:
    something precious
    crashes; easy doors
    prove impassable.
    Or, in the body,
    there’s too much
    swing or off-
    center gravity.
    And, in the mind,
    a drunken capacity,
    access to out-of-range
    apples. As though
    one had a way to climb
    out of the damage
    and apology.

    Kay Ryan


    1 hr 6 min
  • And Our Ears Are Formed Of The Sea As We Listen (Affinity, Kinship, and The Difference Seeking Machine)
    COMING TO THE MORNING

    You make me remember all of the elements
    the sea remembering all of its waves

    in each of the waves there was always a sky made of water
    and an eye that looked once

    there was the shape of one mountain
    and a blood kinship with rain

    and the air for touch and for the tongue
    at the speed of light

    in which the world is made
    from a single star

    and our ears
    are formed of the sea as we listen

    W.S. MERWIN
    1 hr 34 min

About The Telling Itself

From the publisher's feed

There’s a bird crying outside, or maybe calling, anyway it goes on and on without stopping."