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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.
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 ...
Forgetfulness leads to exile. Remembrance is the secret of redemption.
-- The Baal Shem Tov
I'm in a new relationship. Isn't that always the reason why we stop writing our friends? There's this woman. We'd met before, but the last time I talked about her I didn't know the first thing about what I was saying. Now I'm trying to get to know her. Cleo. Cleo Cleo Cleo.
I've been learning what her father was like, what her mother believed. Where she went to school. Why she does the work she does. All that stuff you have to talk about when you think you might -- you know -- be going there with somebody new.
And yeah, I'll confess it: I've been trying to understand what turns her on. That's taking me a while. I'll let you know if I make any progress.
In the meantime: did you know that Condi Rice loves KISS?
Queer is all around (to the tune of "love is ....") Adelina helped me get some in my piece. (Get some queer sex into my play, I mean. What did you think I meant, you naughty peeps?) And now, queer sexual practices and queer genders in place, I'm still thinking about queer aesthetics/queer ethics beyond sex acts and gender expression. How else do our bodies move through the world queerly? What might it look like to queer time and space? (Thanks to Jax for that question.)
So, from the desk of the resident doctoral candidate, I picked up Jack Halberstam's In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. The first chapter begins with Jack claiming the existence of "queer time" and "queer space." I've only gotten as far as time. Perfect, since I spent last night thinking about time, reading Calvino on "quickness" and arguing with myself and him about the relative merits of quickness and slow thinking.
Anyway, Halberstam says:
Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction. They also develop according to other logics of location, movement, and identification. If we try to think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices, we detach queerness from sexual identity .... Obviously not all gay, lesbian, [bi] and transgender people live their lives in radically different ways from their heterosexual counterparts, but part of what has made queerness compelling as a form of self-description in the past decade or so has to do with the way it has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space.
Jack goes on to talk about denaturalizing the way that heteronormative capitalism has organized time, how art can remind us that time isn't, in & of itself, what they try to teach us it us. On Waiting for Godot: "the experience of duration makes visible the formlessness of time." All that waiting while nothing happens, feeling nothing happening over time! The audience has to feel/gets to feel what being-in-time feels like, without the imposition of events or even, eventually, the anticipation of events.
I like thinking about this -- things happening "out of order," the wisdom of young people, family connections that disrupt heteronormative assumptions of reproductive/familial time...other logics of location, movement, and identification...
Back to thinking about lightness. (Because Sherry Kramer was both unflappable enough and nice enough to invite me to sit in on her class discussion of Calvino, in response to my jumping out of my car to ask her "just one more thing" after her Austin Scriptworks workshop on visual metaphor and magical objects. )Calvino: Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world. I just want to go meditate on that with my draft in front of me. How to dissolve the solidity of the world onstage? What knowledge of the world do my characters have? Or seek? How do (or don't) the characters dissolve the solidity of the world? What properties are left after the dissolution? I don't want to think about puddles -- more the dissipation of breath that the Wednesday night meditation teacher asked us to visualize ...
