— Though he appears clean enough, author René Ghosh felt the urge to jump inside of Paris’s only bathtub table during our shoot, spawning a new legend: that Canadian guy who writes in faraway tubs. He also dances. And reads about dancing. Music by Grouper (second half).
EXCERPT FROM PUPPET DANCERS
Flashing, bright, colored lights that travel over and reflect off a polished dance floor, in an otherwise dark room. If Fidiory were to propose a metaphor for the world’s beginning, this would be it. It implies that the world was made to show off for an audience: a hypothetical that heightens the metaphor’s beauty and power.
He feels harmonious on a dance floor. He feels timeless, removed from the universe’s eddies. When he dances alone, he imagines being watched: it makes him perform at a higher level. In such moments, he believes in free agency, convinced that his actions are more than the mere implementation of prerecorded reflexes and conditioned responses.
This is a universal scene to him. It evokes ancestral memories that go beyond humankind’s sole focus for millennia, the struggle for survival.
A stage.
Plunged in a vast darkness.
It speaks of a distant past. It doesn’t just remind: it re-embodies, by touching on a time before mind, before brain, before awareness and sentient thought. It points to the stage that is space and the dancer that is planet Earth, engulfed in the surrounding void, spinning under the glare of the sun and the stars, twirling around its lone satellite the moon, like a prop on an invisible gravitational tether. This is the first dance: the astral dance. Though no one really remembers it, people replay it, injecting it with the specifics of their physique, with their histories, and above all their music, that hauntingly inexplicable, rhythmic, scale-abiding folly.
About the Poet
René Ghosh is based in Paris where he writes his magical punk novels and tests them out on unsuspecting open mic event attendees. He published Puppet Dancers in 2014 and The Click Shortcuts in 2015. He is currently working on two more novels, one of which is planned to be published in the fall of 2016, with tentative title ‘The Memory Monkey’. Aside from novels, René also writes acoustic and electronic crazy pop songs.