Transcript of the sound portion:

Tree channel: ongoing sounds of wind, leaves rustling, insects, bees buzzing, distant car motor, birdsong
Body channel: hushed voice: "I breathe, I sing. They breathe, they sing.
As time goes by, like a fractal we get more complex. Should I be pulling comparisons? What do these forms in the trees really mean? Are they indicative of anything but an aging body? Delight with that. I ask that what will, of creative, good work; its way through me, a vessel of manifesting. I became consumed by it, not consumed, more possessed. Maybe dimension is my escape valve, something I can do. But now I’ve taken a vow of simplicity, so the simplest way of declaring the newly hatched word or idea, the sign, a new sign, that comes from a signifier, plus signified; thus signified. I will also make less commitments to anything, attend more lectures, again. I open up to the unconscious fully, ask for a connection that lets it come through. Participatory, to go without, what’s not needed, living life backward, I will ponder, come up with something. Why is it so weighty for me, such interest in these paradigms? If I were entirely free to make any art at all, what would it be? (tongue)
The things in a frame breaking out. Now that it is new, this page, go within, do what is possible. I - it. I mirror me. Relationship of love, hate, understanding, grasping, symbiosis, and the tree. Why the trees? Why this interest?
Piece these vessels with sticks and earth, clothe my root. Sew it a shirt and pants. Give it a little hat, this tree, call it Mr. Lung. Have doctors standing around: build a tableau where buddies are trying to help him out of the hospital. No. Remember the vow of simplicity. What about suitably dressed cardboard figures, sheets with a lung pattern, a gurney, a stretcher, brought in by forest creatures -the tree- part cardboard, part Sculpey, or is this too far from me? What about choices, or showing the truth in fairy tales, in Midas: you can’t eat gold. I ask you further, find balance, find a way to hold what is simple and beautiful or at least true. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, doesn’t even have to be good, it just has to be true, so it’s said. I want to dress my tree in garments, I want to dress me in tree. (nape)
Trees live life really slowly, how interesting that the sequoia is almost immortal in a way. I remember seeing it up in the Sequoia National Forest and they grow in these circles, tree circles. Why in circles? The guide said “Well, the beginning tree, the first tree, sends out roots all around itself and from those roots sprout the new trees”. And since these trees are so old, so very old, these sequoias, I know that that tree that I’m seeing, that tree circle, goes back a thousand years, two thousand years. Sequoia fossils come from the Pre-Cambrian age. They are the biggest trees in bulk, and yet, they’ve been with us forever…it feels uncanny, I think the trees have been with us always, from human time onward. The fossilized trees attest to this. (tattoo)
My body is soft, I feel the tissues changing, the skin more delicate, portions developing deeper into their characteristics as the skin changes; as I age. How sweet was Grandma Louise, who looked in the mirror, and thought to herself, “Who is this? Monkey-face. I don’t recognize me.” Whose death from an enlarged heart-well, how appropriate-she spoke of, in lucid moments, as the hardest thing she’s ever had to do. We treasure our old people, the repositories of cultural and practical living wisdom, yet can I treasure myself as I age visibly, not as craggy as the trees perhaps: shall I learn from their slower life? How that, my body is too, as it should be, and must be, and the changes that come.
(wrist wrinkles)
Well, we pass it to each other, we pass it on down, our hardscape, this city, abuilding, a building lives longer than any of us, we’re just the soft things -that start it, and end in it- but in the meantime all that goes on. It really seems like it’s become bigger than any one of us. Obviously the city is, but maybe life, and intelligence is too; now that we’ve connected the nerves of our computers with the internet, it has a brain. But we have a brain too. Maybe we’re making our own bigger brain, maybe we’re all part of the bigger human, we’re like a cell in the bigger creature that is the culture, that is the world. Harder to understand, to imagine, that we’re just a bit, a bit of it. But I look at the trees and I see that they are all a bit of it too, as are the animals, that we love. Don’t we love our pets so much, and because they don’t ask so much of us, except the basics, are so attentive to us, give us all of that.(arm hairs)
We make culture, we’re culture makers. We look around us and it all comes from there. Why art? Why do we do art? To keep it fresh. As Ellen Dissanayake says, we do it to disrupt those neural pathways that have become so deeply ingrained that we’re no longer flexible, we do it to stay flexible, to see something new, that we haven’t seen. But all we really had to do, was go out and look around us. That’s what we used to do, that’s what kept us smart, that’s what kept us sharp, we still do it. But now, where we live, it’s an environment we’ve made for us. I guess it shuts out the creepy, the crawly. I even think that women were the first to do it, to build the nest, to shut out the outside. Mother earth, well, I guess, as the source, but I don’t think we can tie it to women, and I guess, we don’t really tie it to we- do I tie it to me? If I did would it bother me that my body is changing? I don’t think so. Maybe, an understanding of that, is where the source of it is, where the source of something I can find, that makes it o.k., it is o.k., it has to be o.k., it will be o.k.. I embrace it. I embrace it and enjoy it and love it. I’ve worked hard for all these creases and wrinkles, and each little piece of skin is getting more interesting. Where it once was just a hint, now its become a landscape, a landscape of folds and wrinkles and changes in thinness and thickness, and places that move differently and develop differently: some see the sun and some don’t, where they see the sun there’s the camouflage, where it doesn’t, it becomes translucent, the skin, and you can see underneath the structures, all those places. So it continues becoming more interesting, more differentiated, more of its own self. There it is. It’s as it is.
(chest fold to neck tendons)
Do cyborgs dream of electronic sheep? What do trees dream of? A tree dreaming of being a human who’s dreaming of being a tree. With all those beautiful birds on them. Do I dream? Do I dream of being a tree with beautiful birds on me? Nightmares of when chainsaws come. Can I hear them in the distance and will I be the one they choose? And the anxiety’s unbearable. Dream of the time I was chosen and cut down and cut into long pieces. Am I a bunch of wood on the ground dreaming these things, dreaming of when I was a tree? Other times I feel, like almost, other times, I feel like I’m part of a larger structure, a piece of the minerals and the elements in the ground that build me, that come into me. I dream of what I was, I dream of where I was, a little piece of nitrogen, oxygen... SCHNOPS is the short form I guess. SCHNOPS being the elements: sulfer, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, potassium, or phosphorus, I’m not sure which, not sure, but it’s SCHNOPS.
Growing in multi directions. I dream of the little seed I was, a seed mummy. It’s an epic dream, going through time. A seed lasts so long, it can sit and be, until the right conditions come. Maybe I was a seed mummy, finally planted and growing into a tree. I dream of my effect on the weather, I can be a rainmaker if I want. I chose the height of my canopy, how high do I go? I dream about how I make love with human beings, and my connection with them: symbiotic oxygen exchange. I dream about people sitting under me and meditate, because I am psychic and can feel the emotions that they feel when they come into my energy field, and I’m sandwiched between smaller pieces and come near humans and get snatches of their conversation. I can feel myself being burned, thrown into the fire, becoming the elements again. Nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, the carbon that floats through the air and goes back into you, goes back into people. You are elements of me and I am elements of you. When you breathe out the carbon dioxide, I take that into me, and I breathe out the oxygen and you take that into you and we become each other, we’re pieces of each other. All of the life forms, we share the same basic elements that came from the stars, that came when they collided in the stars and became heavier elements and so we take pieces of them now and they are us and they are bits of us, and even those things that form our thoughts and our feelings: what are those things? They’re reactions in our heads, they’re chemistry and what is chemistry made of but the elements?(wounds)
Why the hum, I hear the hum. This hum, that’s behind every thing I say. Is it in the microphone or is it the Hum?, that’s there, because there is life, that hums".
(fade out :Dings, and/or Thump sounds)