Japanese pronunciation help

Can any of you tell me how to pronounce "Sadako" correctly?

As a second is related to the age of the universe

How much faster is the universe moving than we can comprehend? We live in a world where we can comprehend only the effects of the smallest particles around us, never apprehending them directly. Until now.

That's a still photo from a video of an electron riding a light wave. Fingerprint of change. Blueprint of motion. The scientists saw it by using pulses of light lasting an attosecond -- ten to the negative eighteenth power of a second. Johann Mauritsson, a Swedish scientist on the team working to see electrons move, says an attosecond is related to a second as a second is related to the age of the universe.

How are you related to the age of the universe?

It's not black & white

(My Chicana beloved hates that phrase.)

What's not black and white? Race in Are We There Are Yet? (Previous working title worked itself out of a job.)

What was black and white? Race in my childhood, spent in a suburb next door to a collapsing steeltown.

What does it mean when home also signifies a deeply familiar site of inauthentic relationship? Set-ups and stifled connection? I am finding ways into writing about this -- not in the performance piece, but in what I think will be a series of poems. Mostly not about my family. Mostly about historical figures. But (in a reversal of my process for Are We There Are Yet?) the pieces about my family seem to want to come out first.

An early draft:

August 17, 1968: Breaking and Making

Inside the limo, their heads are uncovered.
He has lifted the veil from her face
and pocketed his silk kippah.
Already they begin to shed their skin.
The shine of the sacred,
the film that swayed between
their sight of one another, already
behind them. Ahead, the reception,
and hours between this moment and
the one they know is coming. She,
in the white for which she qualifies,
wants it to be time.
Across the tracks,
the time is now.
Nighttime in the long hot summer,
season of promises consecrated in flame,
whole city blocks and human hearts on fire.
The driver takes the long way to the club,
steers clear of the east side of her hometown,
where cinderblock buildings she’s never seen
are burning to the ground,
and kids their age leap
before the prowling cars of the police,
their faces lit with the dream of a greater love.

Check it out, Pisces!

Many people sincerely think that they will be called before God to account for themselves on Judgment Day. If you yourself have held that belief, you can stop worrying about it. The fact is that you were essentially called before God on Judgment Day last week (though it might have happened while you were asleep and dreaming), and everything went great! You passed your test! Your score wasn't perfect, and there were some demerits in your final evaluation, but the most important thing is that you made it! There will, therefore, be no more Judgment Days for you in the future. God found you worthy, and now you can go on living your life without fear or guilt. Congrats, Pisces! You're free!

(This week's horoscope from the astrologer that got me and Jackie together.)

Smart friends ask good questions

How do repetition and ritual, secular and religious, work to create characters?

Where is the break? In the character/the code/the pattern?
How do you experience your mind embodied in the universe?
What happens when you interview your characters?
gracias, Ana.

Got to spend time with the funny and talented Jen Simmons this weekend. She was carrying around Spaces of Creation: The Creative Process of Playwriting. Flipping through the book, I had the chance to re-experience all of my resistance to theatre process, theatre games, theatre exercises. I'm a writer, not an actor! (This was the sentiment behind one species of the laughing fuck yous I used to give Sharon in workshops.) When I confessed my petulant disappointment ("I thought it was a book to read, not a book to do") Jen asked a great question just with her eyebrows. Yeah, I know. I gotta go there.

Then, of course, there are Sharon's questions: What are you feeling? What is that about? How does it affect your writing?

So: the resistance to theatre process exercises.

Inexpert. Nervous, embarassed.

Like I'm not in my body enough to do this kind of thing. Even though doing it would help me get information from my body. Like I don't have that kind of visual imagination. Even though doing it would help me connect with the mind's eye that is there, that sees and hears concrete, physical things (otherwise I wouldn't have accidentally begun writing a piece for performance when I intended to write poems). My mind is more than just an abstraction factory.

The worry about not being able to do something well--not being able to do a process exercise well--what is that about? What is my commitment to embodied imagining being something that those other people do, not me? Oh, damn, look there's my white supremacy lessons showing. Get your hands dirty, whitegirl. And my diaspora rising-class Jew: touch the earth, it won't kill you.

And how does it affect my writing? There are days when I feel like I'm dragging Neshomeh's body into the piece. Adding movement to monologues. The character based on my grandmother is an offstage voice. I've been persistently puzzled by how to show, and not just have characters talk about, what I'm thinking about spacetime/history land. Ana and I talked a lot yesterday about movement through time and space. How does it feel when I'm writing? How does that inform how characters move through time and space on the stage? Or how time and space move through them?

Last week's pënz poll:
Experience is the function of perception. Perception is the function of time. What are the three modalities of time?
The Winner, with 57% of the vote: “duration & feeling & incorporeality”

Also the three modalities of a performance work.

(Who was the poet who said that for a reader, a poem is an experience in time?)

The Arc of the Moral Universe

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

Getting ready to submit material to Queer Codex and trying to write a note for the work as it will appear in process, in print. (Appearing in process and in print: Aren't we all brave, ROOTED comrades? Or humble. Or at least willing to be humbled, which is maybe a precondition for a certain kind of bravery.)

So in thinking of what to say in the note, I'm going back to the first musings that gave birth to this piece last summer, after the tribute to raúlrsalinas, as I sat in my backyard trying to write a poem for Raúl about the moment that Alán Gomez said "The arc of the moral universe is long," and all of us who were assembled, a congregation at prayer, murmured in response, in benediction, "but it bends towards justice."

And then I found the image above in a sidebar on a website of quotes made famous by Dr. King. It reminded me of pënz these last few days. Someone's photo named Thanksgiving chapel interior: so of course I think of thanksgiving, of the interiority of the sacred, of how to give gratitude so that it keeps spiraling outward into space, the expanding of a sacred universe. I am missing Raúl.

Evolving title ideas

Are we there yet? Scenes from the world to come

Here and now

My Google page stopped letting me edit it. It must have heard me calling it a blog. Said, get thee to Blogger (a Google product, of course). Here I am. Transposed into infinity. Einstein's words: "The strange thing about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost. One feels transposed into infinity, more or less alone."

Less, in this case. Much less.

Here is the link to the first blog. Well, maybe not---earlier posts copied below. Because it's all about continuity, right?

Why do black divas die so soon?

Yesterday Lorenzo and Omi both brought the news of Vincent Woodard's passing this weekend.

I have not talked to Vincent in years, but Jackie and I had just been talking about him last week. I am heartbroken. I cannot imagine the loss those close to him are experiencing

From 39 Microlectures:

A messenger arrived at a mountain hermitage. The Master interrupted the morning's lesson to hear the news. "It's about your son, sir," said the messenger. "The war has come to your home village. Your son has been killed." "Thank you," said the Master, and the messenger left. After a few moments, the novitiate monks saw that their Master was crying. Never having seen this before, they sat awestruck. Then one young monk spoke. "Master, just this morning you taught us that all life is a series of illusions. If this is true, why are you crying?" The other monks were shocked by the question's impertinence. But the master calmly answered, "It is true. All life is a series of illusions. But this particular illusion is very painful."

The few emails that Vincent and I exchanged after he moved to Boulder to teach were mostly about coordinating his inclusion in the Evelyn Street press publication Affirming Flame. It was the first book I edited, and I was so honored to publish his work. Now when I open the page, I can hear his voice: completely embodied and transcendently spirit, equally gentle and fierce. Alive, alive, alive. Vincent.

I remember watching him in Why Do Black Divas Die So Soon and knowing that no matter how many times I saw the piece, I wasn't old enough in the world yet to understand what I could already feel I was receiving. His work was exquisite, his art, his spirit work. His conjurations. Now that I am just beginning to walk with my own work closer to the doorway of a room whose air still stirs with the fragrant exhalations of Vincent's presence, I have been thinking of him, of what performance became in Vincent's hands, whether he was on stage or just living/playing at a party, taking the floor and singing India.Arie's "Brown Skin" over the boom box. Healing, challenge, prayer, celebration, cry, song, blessing, triumph.

In his time here, he gave this world more than a lifetime's worth. And yet it is hard to feel that we had enough.
Vincent, I am deeply grateful. I wish you safe passage and thank you. Love.

Neshomeh

The Performer has a name. Neshomeh. The Yiddish word for soul. (In Hebrew, neshamah.)

Love this from an article called DNA and Neshamah: Locating the Soul in the Age of Molecular Medicine:

In his new book on eschatology—that is Greek for the study of the World to Come, Olam Haba—the eminent Anglican theologian-scientist John Polkinghorne defines the soul as “the information-bearing pattern carried by the matter of the body."

The information-bearing pattern carried by the matter of the body. Yeah.

Whitegirl

Another piece of what Matt and I talked about: white people writing people of color characters and the inevitability of getting it wrong. (Yeah. Clearly that's my version of it.) So far, despite its origins in a phrase popularized by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and first coined by an abolitionist preacher in an anti-slavery sermon, Living (it's not a working title if ya don't use it) references and seeks to learn from African American experiences of diaspora and freedom-seeking, but doesn't have any black characters. (Of course, directors can cast however they want; I mean characters written to be of necessity black.)

And despite the wrestling with questions of diaspora, homeland, Palestine and Israel, there are as of yet no necessarily Arab or Muslim characters either. The agent, the one character I thought was going to be from the Middle East, has turned out not to be; he already had two or three identities, and I was putting too much on him. Plus, the agent is essentially alternately a helper or a a villain, and that wasn't a duality that I wanted to saddle a major character of color with.

I spent today writing a scene that features a character named Sadako, a young girl who survived the bombing of Hiroshima only to die ten years later of leukemia. (Based on a real person, Sadako Sasaki.) She, like Einstein, is a ghost. Matt made a good point that's it's likely no coincidence that the only person of color I'm writing is more remote from me---in time and in terms of personal experience, how implicated I personally am in the questions of justice that arise from our shared histories. If it's even possible to say this, a choice that is less charged.

I'm just acknowledging that and noticing it, not feeling bad about it. (Note to self: Remember: At present the completion is in the future.) If it's the safer choice, it's at least made it possible for me to expand who's on the stage/embodied in the text right now. And I guess I'm trusting to metaphor/poetry/jazz to make the unwritten legible/felt/known, through resonance.

I'm pleased with the work I did today. I am also, on the sidelines of my mind, aware that she's awfully mystical and helpful to the central, white character. (My main concern with Belize/The Travel Agent in Kushner's Angels, doublecast as a nurse who was the former lover and current best friend of a white character with AIDS, and a magical travel agent who helped the white wife of a closetcase escape her overwhelming life. His whole onstage life, as the only major character of color, was in relation to white people.)

Of course, Einstein is pretty mystical and helpful, too. They're ghosts. And Living is, at heart, a really personal exploration of my own shit. So it's all, more or less, in relation to the character of the Performer. I guess I'm working for less. And to use the Performer to put my own shit in relation to more.

I know that what I need to do right now is write it. And then go back and check myself on the Orientalism.