Relativity: A Travelogue

This play is really a meditation on the ethics of home. What is home? Something to defend? To be defined by? A bounded space? A limitless knowledge? A willful ignorance? Something we carry with us? Or somewhere to reach, to depart from? Something distinct? Ours as opposed to another's? A place of comfort, rest, peace? A place where we can shut out all the noise and pain and fear? At what cost?

Del Martin

Del Martin died today.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/08/28-8

I'm not even sure why I'm posting this here, except for the fact that I'm learning this news while I'm at work, and there's no one here to tell.

And because the lesbian world of my play would probably not even be imaginable for me without the work of Del's life, the world that she imagined and worked to bring into being.

And because back when we were at the Rooted retreat at Alma de Mujer---as Sharon and María and Antonio shared with us some of the history in the land, the bodies, the spirits, the air, and the structures there--- as I thought about the times I'd spent at Stonehaven---as Sharon asked us to think about our own artistic lineage and how it informs our divine purpose---I realized, as if it were news, how lucky I am to have been in women's spaces. In lesbian spaces. How I have been lucky to experience these lesbian/feminist spaces, that they cannot be taken for granted (Stonehaven now gone), that I have a role to play in keeping these places going. Like I said, not news. But it's like the accusation that many women who've been doing pro-choice activism since Roe (and before) level at younger women: You were born into a world where abortion was legal, and so you take your rights for granted. They haven't always been here, and they can be taken away.

I was born into a world where Del Martin had been doing lesbian activism for nearly 20 years. I came to an Austin with an Alma de Mujer, a Stonehaven---an Austin built up by the work of women like María Limon, Sharon Bridgforth, Genevieve Vaughn, Marsha Gomez....

What does it mean to honor this inheritance?

Special relativity & the (speaking) Jewish body

In Dorothy Seidman Bilik's Immigrant-Survivors: Post-Holocaust Consciousness in Recent Jewish American Fiction, this quote from George Steiner's Language and Silence:

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are his homeland.

(Wow, if that doesn't sound like some kind of neurotic nirvana... Where are you from? Well, let me start six thousand years back... Where do you live now? Right here in the six thousand years of myself!)

But seriously, folks. It made me wonder. What are the possibilities of Jews being a people of time and not of place? Yiddish, for example. A language of time (a time before?) but not place---or, more accurately, place but not nation. Where is Yiddish spoken? Where the Jews who speak Yiddish are. A language of specific bodies in history.

Special relativity: There can be no time without place, without a reference point in space. What if the body is the only reference point? Of course there is no history without the body.

In the hollow of the sling

Kaf ha kela as traumascape. A place of visitation and revisiting. Of and out of this world.

Why this motion, knowable only in terms of spacetime? (Where spacetime=place + time, that is, History) This trajectory is not punishment but pedagogy. Proof of acceleration. A way of getting closer to the divine. (The closest distance between two points is not a straight line.) The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.

Cleo and Einstein as angels standing on the opposite sides of the world. Holding the sling like a jumprope. What are the opposite sides of the world? Einstein: Remember your humanity and forget the rest. Cleo: All that will keep you safe is cleaving to power.

Traumascapes

Traumascapes are haunted and haunting places, where visible and invisible, past and present, physical and metaphysical, come to coexist and share a common space. They are the places that compel memories, crystallize identities, and exude power and enchantment.

-- Maria Tumarkin, "Traumascapes," from the new issue---the Death Issue---of Guilt and Pleasure

What would it mean if the land itself were haunting us? Every home a haunted house. Well, isn't it? Tumarkin's idea of the traumascape as a place where history is unavoidable, asserts itself, insists on being noticed, experienced, made to matter. (Transformed into matter -- matter-ing.) What is the setting of Are We There Yet? Not a crossroads, as Sharon and I talked about. Not a place with signposts, four directions to follow, guides showing different paths. But an in-between place, a waystation. An otherworld. A traumascape of encounter and exploration. Expiation? Exhaustion? A place to rest on a long journey between worlds. The hollow of a sling -- what kaf ha kela feels like from the inside -- dizzying but also, somehow, at rest.

Kaf ha kela: a particular Jewish version of (what would in other traditions be called) purgatory, one idea in an obscure and contradictory mess of arcane Jewish notions of the afterlife. In kaf ha kela, after you die, two angels standing at opposite ends of the world sling your soul back and forth in a catapult. Some conceptions of this have the angels slinging you between your lived sins and your divinely-intended potential. A carnival ride of sickening regret. Kaf ha kela literally means the hollow of a sling. What does it feel like inside the hollow of the sling? As the sling rockets from one side of the world to the other, but you stay nestled in the hollow of the sling, are you at motion or at rest? It makes me think of the bucket in physics: why does the water not seem to be moving in a spinning bucket? What can we learn about motion relative to time and space? Brian Greene, in Fabric of the Cosmos, writes that "geometrical shapes of trajectories in spacetime provide the absolute standard that determine whether an object is accelerating." The shapes we make moving through space and time. Isn't that theatre?

Incidentally, a curved trajectory through spacetime is the "telltale sign of acceleration." Are we there yet? We're getting there.

Heightened reality

Notes from Taylor Mac's incredible show "The Young Ladies of ... " (running in rep with his other current show, "The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac"):

Singing is heightened reality. And theatre is heightened reality. So when you use song in theatre ...