Friday, February 29, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
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?
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?
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
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:
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.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
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.)
(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?)
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?)
Monday, February 18, 2008
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.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
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