Looking through Tod Seelie’s photo blog, Sucka Pants, I came across the post “People Have Kids Because They Are Scared,” shots of RZA performing at Studio B.

I noticed immediately the breadth of individual experience–of SINGULAR experience in these pictures.

In this first photo RZA cups a girl’s ass, but he is ancillary, non-respondent–only of slight interest to us and to the crowd. Hardly anyone is actually looking at RZA to lead the group experience.

credits: Tod Seelie

Like Being Deaf

Looking at pictures of people dancing and trying to imagine where that feeling lives and when it lives.

We focus on three girls, each of whom is digesting their own shuffle.

A very large amount of space surrounds the girl in the foreground. She is cocked for approval in a separate direction; she is wiggling as if she must wiggle, it is what she has to do in order to be a girl at the show. She cannot NOT wiggle, and the space around her confirms that this is her sacred quest: the Holy Grail in Chapel Perilous. She must wiggle, and this narcotic will sets her apart.

credits: Tod Seelie

RZA cups

There is not a moment in your midst that is not your own.

Then we have two side-ground ladies.

The girl in the background seems to confirm the post’s title, arms crossed in strict jurisprudence. She is not waiting for a chance to wiggle; she scorns the idea of wiggling (at least at the moment). Her stance and demeanor set her completely apart from the furtive hips of her compatriots. She might have moved, of course, the instant after Seelie snapped the shot, but for our purposes she is preserved on her very own I-AM-A-ROCK.

The lady in the front-left with the bliss-grin is not tagging along on anyone’s boat. She is at full-shields, very pleased with whatever kernel is rooting around behind her eyes.

credits: Tod Seelie

Jury Duty

Our second picture delves deeper (more blatantly) into showing these singular experiential spaces.

The girl with the long arms is fully ensconced in her private realm of wiggle. There is no RZA; there are no men, women or children. There is only the space her hips occupy and then the next space they occupy. She uses the music to build her private dome and it is only full of Present–it exists only now and now and now.

credits: Tod Seelie

No one is dancing for anyone else

Her reverie is just beyond her ability to express–she would not try. In order to be in touch with this woman at this moment you would have to vibrate along a similar frequency–be similarly absorbed in your own reverie–to make any kind of substantial impact on her cloister bubble.

We often go to public places to be privately alive. I think that’s mostly what these photos show.

credits: Tod Seelie

Clipse Mode

There is a sad longing in this photograph that has nothing to do with the sexual. RZA peers around the crowd to look after this girl almost enviously: she is SO happy and SO deep in gleeful abandon. He wants to know what that’s like again. He wants to know what it feels like to stop being powerful–to go back to when he was inspiration without a gold name.

credits: Tod Seelie

A Way To Be WIthout walls

But RZA cannot go back. He cannot go back to being on the unaware inside of his own music.

He has to wonder how his music does what it does, how it inspires these singular experience bubbles in total strangers, when to him he’s just speaking his mind.