Journal notes from the……
Life of a post-modern nomad:
I’ve always needed to be part of many scenes. Even in high school, I needed to be with the theater kids, the athletes, and the musicians all at once. I liked being a part of many scenes. That hasn’t changed.
I had a dream recently, I was living in Berlin, Prague and somewhere in America, all at once, and bridging people together from all those local scenes, and being fully myself in each!
I had maps of all of them, and also knew each place by heart. So I could orient people from one place or city to another, and help haven them as they conversed.
The common language in the dream was art or creativity, but I myself, was tri-cultural. I knew each city like a friend, so could help my friends meet up and exchange and collaborate.
I’ve been like that since I was a kid. I knew each street of people in my neighborhood, which happened to be multi-racial where I grew up, and I would introduce the neighborhoods and often races of people to one another.
My “role” was to network and bridge them all; not just so they got along, but so they could collaborate creatively.
Like synovial fluid in the body helping all the parts get along and stay in dialogue!
Yet, there are challenges to living in many places at once. But it is the only life I’ve known.
Even in my real life, I left my hometown, and made many other places my hometown. I lived all over my country. And was not a tourist, but a local in each.
I have always felt like Johnny Depp in that movie Chocolate. Or like the movie Zelig—and outsider, insider, all my life.
Yes, a bit of a pirate or global photo-bomber, but more someone who goes from place to place and loves and hopefully adds to each with the same authentic gusto!
I remember once in south of France, being welcomed to a funeral of a local. They asked me to speak, and took me in afterwards. Again, in Croatia, as the first “American” in this small village, they put me on the front page of their local paper. I’m not sure why, other than the novelty of a stranger, or perhaps because I helped them pick up trash all weekend.
Once I saw a play about a man’s life. He showed each stage of his life all at once instead of linear. So you saw all the stages of his life simultaneously! I related to that play. Life, or at least mine, is a huge collage, or a great piece of street art! That has films made about it later.
Anyway, this play I saw in Brooklyn, had both vertical and horizontal stages and settings, all with different lighting and tone. But the audience could see them all at once. And could enter the story of his life at any stage it chose.
Like a collage or montage—that’s my life!
Or a cubist painting, where you can enter the same scene or identity from any angle and hear the echo of the same story.
All of us have narratives or pathways. Same identity, but many versions. The inner identity is the constant in each chapter or scene, but the costumes are entirely unique to each stage of life.
Same person, as a baby, teenager, adult and old age, but different nuances of expression.
Bob Dylan is the same person he was back then, but now, is expressing it through old age.
On needing to live in three places at once, but be present in all of them:
Most people have one scene they are a part of, and one stage to live it out on. I need at least three.
I need my other settings as well as this one. I need three scenes going on at once like the play I saw by Robert Wilson with music by Tom Waits. I need three projects of life happening at once.
Three plays in one, all occurring simultaneously.
Each with its own set, scene and lighting. But I can’t exist on only one stage like the modernist. I am more post-modern in that way. I have three plays happening at once in three places. Just the type of actor I am.
To live in Austin, San Fran, and Antwerp and Prague simultaneously. To have several scenes of which I am apart of, is my way.
I am ok with being a part of many scenes at once. As post-modernism has many eras in one building, and at its best is integrating them into one conversation.
Backwards and forwards through time, making each era reside in the present.
Like a great play does. And I want to be a great play.
One you can watch over and over and each time, get something new.
My life is a collage like that. From when I was a kid singing, “I’m not a boy, I’m Derek DeMonte” (a song I used to sing to myself through my father’s church hallways!), to now, where I make art, and try to encourage people to be themselves—as hard, at times, as that may be.
I’m into us being who we are, and I am someone who must live in many places at once. I’m ok with that. Hope it helps others.
Tri-cultural; ti-locational; same person in all of them. It doesn’t mean I’m not here; it means I’m in many “here’s”. To be a local everywhere, and to have many places on earth to be a local, has been my way. Derek, means way. This is my way. It’s not easy being Green, as Kermit the frog said, but it’s even tougher being green red and yellow. I’m trying to be a primary color!
Not everyone needs to be like me, but I am.
I now have friends, real friends, all over the world, due to my way. I’m most thankful for that. I can’t tour as often as when I was younger, but even Paris and the circus is inside me now. So I’ve learned to pray.
And when I dream, I could be anywhere in the world, and still be myself. It started as an adventure, and ended or started again, as internal cinema or a play about all the places I truly loved, and being myself in all of them.
Hope it’s a good play. So far, I’ve enjoyed the role! But, I’m a method actor, so I sort of become the role as I go!
(As for the only drawbacks: well you can’t be at everyone’s wedding, funeral, birthday or graduation; and your blood family, may get slightly neglected, but your spiritual family expands to include the stars, as they say!) Ad espera dia.
Each of us must become and live out our stories. I’m trying to live out and become mine. I’m a multiplex cinema studio, and God is the Projectionist, I pray!
My last dream, I will share here, is this: An older elderly father was filming me, as I filmed others. At one point, we looked at one another in mutual recognition. The Seer, watching a seer seeing. Like a Wim Wender’s film where he is beholding another artist. The whole dream, was also on an enormous stage. The Father had the lead role!
More to come from a person who must live in at least three places at once.
I’ll probably make this into a play one day, as soon as I find the right stages.
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