11/22/2020
FOUND (LOST & FOUND) ((LOST)) by MIMI ALLIN
SUNDAY, 6 NOVEMBER 2016
I met Black Dog (Marina White Raven) last week. Marina is an artist performing a work called Black Dog. On 10 November, Black Dog will begin hitch-hiking from Seattle to Los Angeles, hoping to travel 1500 miles in 10 days. She will travel in costume, as a monastic, without money, without language, without writing and without food. She'll rely on the generosity of strangers and on their 'getting it.' This feels crucial to her survival and is what makes her work so unnerving, so potent.
Black Dog has been raising fears and concerns in those who know her and even in those who just heard of her and yet Marina is compelled to do this thing Black Dog is asking of her, an epic, durational hitchhiking performance. In response to Black Dog, I offer my own fears. While she is traveling, I will be writing about the rewards I've reaped from facing my own fears and will articulate my present and future fears and post them as flyers on telephone poles with information about Black Dog and my hopes for her. By the way, Black Dog has a telephone number #206 245 8040 and says she wants to hear from us. Let’s send her our courage and hope, after we deal with fear, while she’s out on the road.
I've offered to find Black Dog in December, to celebrate her return, to gather a group of supporters to hear her stories. We’ll do this at TSI (Taoist Studies Institute) in Greenwood on Sunday 4 December at 3pm. You’re invited of course.
Everything now depends on her return and on our knowing her and most especially on her leaving us and on our missing her. Black Dog's journey revives so many things in me, foremost the collection of lost pet posters I started five years ago. I have two binders full of bleached, puckered, torn flyers, taken from telephone poles in and beyond Seattle. I've closed my eyes and imagined these animals out there adventuring, their tragedies, their triumphs. What happened to them, all these loving, trusting, faithful servants?
Eventually, I stopped collecting them. Perhaps I was at a dead end or didn't know what to do with all that loss. Black Dog calls on me now to address them, to call their owners, to inquire, "Did you find Pickle? What about Chief? Did Oliver come home?" Why did I stop collecting them? Was I overwhelmed? I'd been lost so long myself and looking for a path home, to some new home, for some rite of passage to redirect me. I felt invisible. I doubted anyone was out looking for me, posting flyers, but still I wondered, when and how I would be found, by who, by what? What Black Dog and I and you and all these animals have in common is that we need be found to serve our purpose.
To all those posters-of-lost-pet-signs I say, you gave us lost, now give us found. Announce your reunion, post your triumph, pin up your story of letting go. We need the resolution. We're all so turned around by grief for what is gone, missing, lost, fleeing, receding, extinct, endangered. It's time to turn homeward, to move towards being found.
For each flyer, I'll make a shrine with flowers and poems and hang these on trees and poles and hydrants in public places, to weather in our memory, as found. I’ll start making the calls at TSI and if you want you can help me place the shrines. As for Black Dog, I'll face my own fears and articulate them on new posters while she is gone. I welcome you to do the same. I look forward to hearing Black Dog made it safely home, on 20 November, and to organizing a gathering called FOUND on 4 December where Marina can share stories from her journey and where we can ask questions and offer our own ideas about found.
