Sauna (2020)
Sauna: a video poem.
Text, audio, and video by Sid Branca. Footage shot in Haukijärvi, Finland in 2016 // text written in 2019 and recorded in 2020 in Chicago, USA.
Originally conceived as a live reading with projected video for the event SAUNA! at Iceberg Projects, curated by Marlo Koch and Betsy Johnson, May 5, 2019.
voiceover text:
when I step into a sauna, I think of the woods of Finland
a little building perched part-way up a hill, just at the edge of the forest
a witches' house in a fairy tale
a big stack of birch wood logs beside it
the forest spreading out behind
you step inside and take off your clothes like preparing for a ritual
because you are
and move across a damp interior boardwalk
thinking about the beach towns of your childhood
until you reach the basins of cold water you will douse yourself with
it's no freezing lake but it's bracing
and then comes the second entering, the step into heat
the delirium that sets in at one hundred and twenty degrees
a little window that shows you the forest
as you feed logs into the roaring fire
and pour water over the rocks
out in those woods in the early spring
before the heaviest rains and the mosquitos
the trees already dripping
my blood felt sweet and full of green
and I felt humid
so overwhelmed by the presence of something
the old god made of wet dirt
and the slight decay that brings the greater growth
I sank down to my knees at the foot of a tree
and felt myself so far inside my own body
that its borders reached the canopy
I remember the vision of my first night in that country:
I dreamt of a beast who came to me
with the face of a kind, rough man
with antlers splintering forth from his forehead
his body a mystery of limbs
muscles with a scent like dirt
like the creature who crawled over me
in a field in wisconsin when I prayed hard
whose holy body was all soil
all soil and deep wishes
they seem to come from the same strange place
hovering just outside my range of vision
so too the weight of air I felt upon me
that I thought was Alexander's ghost
this beast eats hay and roasted meats and dreams
the first few breaths of spring
songs in an unknown language
when the sun rises so early that the morning
still holds the secrets of the night
old pagan gods will come to put their tongues inside our mouths
and remind us that we too are made of spring
in my early childhood, we bent the saplings together
we lashed them with twine into shape
swaddled them with blankets
built our little lodge out in the field
Ted making the fire, feeding it for hours
until the fire was so much more than my little body
I never knew how he could be so close
how he could take that heat and carry it
stone by stone
into the place we'd built
so we could crouch there, sweating,
in the belly of a warm beast.
in my most holy moments
-- and by holy I perhaps mean
most true
most worthy of remembrance
most of a gift to myself and to others
most present
and again most true --
in my most holy moments I am in two places at once
and by two I mean one plus many
so often the state of hovering a few inches above my body
is the vantage point I have been prescribed
a method of preservation
of perseverance
of parsing out
or is it the perspective with which I have been diagnosed
a given circumstance, this doubling,
a necessary condition on a bulleted list
but in my moments of greatest joy
I have slid back inside myself
a penetrated image
not a soul living in a fleshy nest but one organism containing many
an orchestra all playing the same song with different notes
my self is my body but my body is also the leaves in the forest
and the rain dripping from them
you said the last thing either of us needed was more flesh
and I agreed because flesh is sometimes a synonym for pain
but now I wonder what if I could just keep adding
to grow immense and fleshy and expansive
like Tetsuo, destroyed
by my incomprehensible vastness
I think of scraps of language,
the body's largest organ
and I think
"the medium is the message”
the medium is the body
and “the message is death"
but as I fall asleep to descriptions of humid forests
dappled light in damp sunbeams
this thought does not distress me
because in my holiest moments
I become so aware of my body
and yet that embodiment is everywhere
all that sweat holds it all together
and in the end we all float out like steam.