ON PANIC

On "ON PANIC",
By Chris Barlow

1.

What scares you the most?

What scares you most often?
What causes you to panic––
On a daily basis?
Adapting to life in a world which shuns our natural “Fight or Flight” response is easier said than done. Some of us don’t even try. Some of us channel these instincts into sports or law school or drugs. Some of us keep ourselves tightly wound, ever-waiting for the inevitable unknown calamity to strike. In all of us, that “Fight or Flight” instinct refuses to be silenced. Without natural outlets for our panic, the instinct mutates in us–– it becomes something you can experience over the mundane, the ordinary, the seemingly routine events in life.
Panic is hardwired in our bodies.
Panic is a central part of the human experience.
What causes you to panic?
How do you respond to panic?
Why can't we all just learn to panic––
A little less frequently?


2.

I started with a feeling.
The feeling of my chest clenching––
Seizing like a fist.
This is what panic feels like to me.
And since I didn't know what to do next,
I made lists.

LIST 1: What causes this feeling?

Calamities, atrocities, natural disasters, the horrible, the terrible, the unpredictable, the uncontrollable, the things that you can’t plan for, the things you can’t avoid––
This would eventually be called THE FIRST KIND OF PANIC (because of:)

LIST 2: When do I most frequently experience this feeling?

Expectations, interactions, relationships, the ordinary, the everyday, the totally predictable and absolute controllable, the things you watch happen to you from the other side of the room, the things that you could have sworn could have sworn that you weren’t going to do anymore! This was the second kind of panic.

And so I asked myself: What does panic sound like?
And I made many more lists and sat in front of a computer for a while.
But I couldn't shake this feeling that all of a sudden panic was everywhere. There was more panic in my life than I had ever suspected. According to several reliable lists, I was panicking all the time! Even when I had no idea it was happening.
And that's when it occurred to me that sometimes we panic before we even know why we're panicking. Sometimes the body knows before the brain does. Sometimes we panic about the little things because we're really panicking about the big things. But sometimes we panic about he little things because we really panicking about the little things!
Sometimes we just don't know why we panic.
And of course we don't perceive panic the same way we experience it.
Is panic an indicator of who we really are?
Is panic an indicator of how we'd survive in the wild??

This is how I would describe my process.
With an on-and-off clutching feeling.


3.

For my virtual mentor, I chose the musician/performance artist Laurie Anderson.
Laurie’s loose definition of “song” and “composition” were particularly attractive elements of her work. And images of “United States Live (Parts 1-4)”–– a single performer in a giant space–– greatly influenced my use of space and the microphone. Laurie’s ability to completely transform her voice, to play her voice like an instrument, is absolutely mesmerizing. Even in the era of Auto-Tune (now available for your iPhone), Laurie’s liberal use of the vocoder feels mesmerizing and new. She let her text breathe, stutter, start and stop–– she treated it as just another cluster of stars in her sonic universe. Sound can speak without speaking, it can speak with silence, with tone and pitch, groan and grunt. We can explore without any real road map–– the way Laurie explored America both figuratively and literally in "United States"–– and we can enter a piece backwards or upside down or totally sideways.