Teachers keep on teachin

This from Andrea Hairston, a writer whose playwriting course I signed up for in a now-for-something-completely-different moment in college, and then dropped after two meetings--maybe one?--because I was oh so unready for it. Spiritually. Creatively. Emotionally. She got us right to work. I didn't know what I was doing. And wasn't ready to work from that place. (I remember something from our first assignment where we had to follow people around and record their gestures. Then write a scene with gestural information.) Well, now I want to come back to some of what I didn't learn then, and am looking up her work. I know there's so much I can still learn from her. Found this, from a guest essay she has up at The Angry Black Woman:

People with power, talent, and beauty don’t necessarily get wealth, success, and happiness. The tragedies that befall us are not simply caused by the flaws in our characters. Power and talent can be a torment in a system stacked against you. People can shun the magical ones, be jealous or frightened of brilliance. Social forces can thwart even the strongest will and structural reality can crush individual imagination and agency.

In all of my stories, History and the Future are always manifest in the now, in the Present. As a writer, I ask, even if folk are talented, powerful, and beautiful, what do they need in order to come through a treacherous world, whole and creative?

How can we conjure the wondrous world we believe in?

This is the struggle I love to write about.

Indeed, this is the struggle I live.

Whew. Can't wait to read her sf novel Mindscape. What a question. Yes. How can we ...? And: How are we?

A language which possesses no words for weapons

From the universe to my inbox.

Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:02:36 -0400
From: wsmith@wordsmith.org
To: linguaphile@wordsmith.org
Subject:
A.Word.A.Day--schnorrer

A language is the soul of its people. This is nowhere illustrated more profoundly than in the Yiddish language, the language of Jews of eastern and central Europe and their descendants. A tongue full of wit and charm, Yiddish embodies deep appreciation of human behavior in all its colorful manifestations. The word Yiddish comes from German 'Judisch' meaning Jewish. But it is not the same as Hebrew, even though it is written in Hebrew script.

Here's what Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer had to say about the language in his 1978 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

"Yiddish language - a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics ... There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love. The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning ... In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful Humanity."

I'll take issue with "nowhere illustrated more profoundly" -- but still. Wow.

Did I mention (did I need to) the contrast with modern Hebrew?

Where the perfection begins

Thank you to Barack Obama for that phrase, the last line in his almost-perfect speech today. (If it weren't for that one painful Likudnik, Islamophobic reference that he doesn't even believe...)

Where the perfection begins: Helga Davis.

The fate of things/the balance of which you are not even aware/ depends on your conscious participation in the stream of apparently random events/ depends upon the sounding of your particular human vibration/ your harmonic signature/ confidently/ in the face of adversity.// You are given the choice.

-- from her performance "Imaginings," last night, with Ted Cruz, hosted by the Center for African and African American Studies. As Ana pointed out: the quote is from the character "Malcolm X" from Daniel Alexander Jones' Book of Daniel, Book 7

Stimulants

So what do stimulants do for (or to) slow thinking?

I've been drinking coffee all day and trying to catch up with my mind as gears spin madly. Speed! But also, spent most of the day following all the tiny threads spinning out from a couple of things that came my way this morning. Slow thinking.

What's the relationship? When Kushner wrote Angels in America, he was fueled by package after package of cookies. Sugar. Caffeine. Can speed induce slow thinking? Is this is the artistic equivalent of tweakers piecing together shredded bank statements with exquisite, marathon focus?

Do you use stimulants when you create?

The body after dinner

Here's the full line about melancholy and humor that I quoted from Italo Calvino in part in my earlier post: "As melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness, humor is comedy that has lost its bodily weight." Not the kind of analogy you see on the LSAT, I imagine. I am sitting with this, trying to figure out what comedy losing its bodily weight might mean. Calvino (sort of) explains this as missing "a certain dimension of human carnality"--but which dimension? That of sex? Of shit? Of blood and hunger? Carnality, our carnal-ness, where carnal means
1. pertaining to or characterized by the flesh of the body, its passions and appetites; sensual: carnal pleasures.
2. not spiritual; merely human; temporal; worldly: a man of secular, rather carnal, leanings.

But I don't believe in the split between spirit, mind, and body. That split is part of what I'm writing to heal. Maybe what Calvino is talking about here is a humor more ironic than comedy, a humor in which the body isn't necessarily absent, but is instead present in such a way that it doesn't weigh us down. So we reach a humor that can resonate beyond comedy, in the way that melancholy sustains the effect of sadness.

It's duration, feeling, & incorporeality again, the lovely triune elements.

After a pënz poll determined that the three modalities of time were duration, feeling, and incorporeality, and I decided they are also the modalities of theater, I wrote those three words on a small post-it flag made of some very 21st century material and posted them on my laptop. The heel of my hand rubs at the bottom of the note when I type, so that the word "incorporeality" has begun to blur, ghosted lettering on a translucent blue slip of adhesive plastic.

How do we create experiences of incorporeality that rely on human bodies/the human body? We playwrights, we human beings?

Here's the quote in its entire entirety:

The weightless gravity I have spoken of with regard to Cavalcanti reappears in the age of Cervantes and Shakespeare: it is that special connection between melancholy and humor studied by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl in Saturn and Melancholy (1964). As melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness, so humor is comedy that has lost its bodily weight (a dimension of human carnality that nonetheless constitutes the greatness of Boccaccio and Rabelais). It casts doubt on the self, the world, and on the whole network of relationships that are at stake. Melancholy and humor, inextricably intermingled, characterize the accents of the Prince of Denmark, accents we have learned to recognize in nearly all Shakespeare's plays on the lips of the many avatars of Hamlet. One of these, Jacques in As You Like It (IV.i.15-18), defines melancholy in these terms: 'but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.' It is therefore not a dense, opaque melancholy, but a veil of minute particles of humours and sensations, a fine dust of atoms, like everything else that goes to make up the ultimate substance of the multiplicity of things.

How great is the phrase "weightless gravity"? I'll bind that as a sign before my eyes. Finally, my last Calvino quotes on lightness for today: "Lightness for me goes with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard. Paul Valéry said, 'One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.'"

Six impossible things before breakfast

When breakfast is orange cake, anything is possible.

Throwing a net to pull in a few things swimming around in my mind today, from this morning onwards.

Advice that Ana shared with me yesterday, from a wise friend of hers experienced in theater:

1. If something matters to you (the playwright/writer for performance), put it into dialogue. Directors can (and sometimes probably should?) ignore, resist, rethink or otherwise render moot (mute) any stage direction you write.

2. Include at least one impossible stage direction in each piece. This will challenge -- reshape and open up -- the director's imaginative relationship with the text. (Ana's impossible stage direction made me laugh out loud. I won't tell on her, though.)

I woke up thinking about this, and then I read John Lahr's piece about Sarah Ruhl in this week's New Yorker. (Which mentiones an example, from "Eurydice," of Ruhl's impossible stage directions.) I haven't seen or read any of her plays--her "Dead Man's Cell Phone" is currently in production in NYC--but synapses are sparkingsparking just from reading the New Yorker piece.

How a poet becomes a playwright: something to do with "confusion about the confessional 'I' of the poetic voice" as Lahr writes of Sarah Ruhl as a poet writing in the wake of her father's death. She said:

I didn't know what a poem should be anymore. Plays provided a way to open up content and have many voices. I felt that onstage one could speak lyrically and with emotion, and that the actor was longing for that kind of speech, whereas in poetic discourse emotion was in some circles becoming embarrasing.

Of course, you could say forget what a poem "should be." Forget "embarrasing" and forget "some circles" -- who cares about them? And I still do want to keep writing poems, including poems with wide content and many voices. (As so many of you, dear blog readers, do already.) But I also remember the acute discomfort I felt at the beginning of my process with this piece, when I still thought it was going to be a series of poems. I was so incredibly unhappy trying to string together the various juxtaposing planes of the piece in my mind, so stuck. And panicked, for reasons that weren't clear to me at the time, about the 'I' of my poetic voice. I know that writing for performance has been an opening up for me. (I hope this will carry back into my poetry: I don't see myself as having passed the point of no return from poet to playwright!)

How a poet writes plays: Begin with a metaphor. Make it literal, make it real. Go from there; play it out. (Sarah Ruhl's first play, "Dog Play," opens with the Dog howling "as though his heart is breaking." Later, the Dog says, "I dreamed last night that I could speak and everyone could understand. I was telling them that he is not dead, that I can see him. No one believed me.")

How a poet tells stories: Like Ovid, not like Aristotle:

"Aristotle has held sway for many centuries, but I feel our culture is hungry for Ovid's way of telling stories," she said, describing Ovid's narrative strategy as "one thing transforming into another." She went on, "His is not the neat Aristotelian arc but, instead, small transformations that are delightful and tragic." And she added, "The Aristotelian model--a person wants something, comes close to getting it but is smashed down, then finally gets it, or not, then learns something from the experience--I don't find helpful. It's a strange way to look at experience."

It's a relief to read this. Part of why I've been avoiding the word "play," the word "playwright," is that I don't experience myself as a linear storyteller. Or, more accurately, as an Aristotelian storyteller. (This despite the brilliant playwrights I know who mess beautifully with the Aristotelian arc. Hello, Sharon Bridgforth. Hello, Daniel Alexander Jones.) Also this morning, I heard the tail end of a Weekend Edition piece on August Wilson, who I do experience as an Aristotelian storyteller. And, of course, a brilliant playwright. But, see above, that's not the only kind of playwright to be. (Aristotelian, I mean, not brilliant. We do all have to be brilliant.)

Sarah Ruhl also says: "I like plays that have revelations in the moment, where emotions transform almost inexplicably. The acting style isn't explicated, either. It's not psychological." So she wants actors to go from one feeling to another, without backstory or rationale -- just embodied emotion in the moment. Lahr that says Ruhl "prefers the revelations of the surreal moment to the narrated psychological one." Reading this, thinking about it, I begin to wrap my mind around the kernels of my own aesthetic. I've been asked that question -- what is your aesthetic -- time and again, most often by Sharon (thank you, Pa), and it's always been hard for me to think about. But now I start to see, at least with this piece: it's about reality without realism. (Oh! This is what I loved about Pan's Labyrinth--which I've also had difficulty putting into words, except to talk about children, fantasy, and violence.)

Lightness. A friend asked me what my reaction was to people laughing during the excerpt of "Are We There Yet" that I read on Friday--an excerpt dealing with blood memory, assimilation, heritage, the Holocaust. I was so gratified, I told my friend. I had hoped they would! The themes in the piece are so hard, there has to be humor. If people don't laugh, the whole play is just a beating. Everyone would shut down, close up. I need people's hearts open. In the New Yorker piece, Sarah Ruhl pulls out Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium to show John Lahr the essay about lightness, an imaginative quality that Lahr describes as "the distillation of things into a quick, terse, almost innocent directness." From the article:

'In the even more congested times that await us, literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and of thought,' [Calvino] writes. Ruhl, in her plays, contends with the pressing existential issues; her stoical comic posture is a means of killing gravity, of taking the heaviness out of her words in order to better contend with life. 'Lightness isn't stupidity,' she said. 'It's actually a philosophical and aesthetic viewpoint, deeply serious, and has a kind of wisdom--stepping back to be able to laugh at horrible things even as you're experiencing them.'

This takes me to Calvino's lecture on lightness, which I haven't read in a few years. About halfway through the lecture, Calvino says, "I hope to have shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know there is such a thing as a lightness of frivolity." It's a lightness of thoughtfulness he's talking about in literature.

We might say that throughout the centuries two opposite tendencies have competed in literature: one tries to make language into a weightless element that hovers above all things like a cloud, or better, perhaps, like the finest dust, or, better still, a field of magnetic impulses. The other tries to give language the weight, density, and concreteness of things, bodies, and sensations. [August Wilson! Absolutely succeeds in that.]

It really says that. A field of magnetic impulses. Which is, in case you haven't been insatiably tracking Einstein's intellectual development lately, what first got Einstein thinking about relativity. And which figures largely, if invisibly (how else?), in "Are We There Yet."

In his lecture, Calvino applauds examples of literature that have fulfilled each tendency, weightlessness and weight (where I admire August Wilson, he commends Dante), saying:

At this point we should remember that the idea of the world as composed of weightless atoms is striking just because we know the weight of things so well. So, too, we would be unable to appreciate the lightness of language if we could not appreciate language that has some weight to it.

The task for me, then, is to create an experience that lets the people in the room, or the readers, know the weight of the world, but feel the lightness. (For Calvino, this doesn't exclude grief, just defines how it is experienced: "melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness." )

But how does Calvino define lightness? I like Lahr's gloss very much, but it's good to go back to the lecture and follow Calvino's many floating iterations of lightness. At one point, he lays it out almost linearly (especially when I don't retype the literary examples in between):

First there is a lightening of language whereby meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the meaning itself takes on the same rarefied consistency....Second there is the narration of a train of thought or psychological process in which subtle and imperceptible elements are at work, or any kind of description that involves a high degree of abstraction....And third, there is a visual image of lightness that acquires emblematic value....

Like that, like the sudden appearance of three layers of gauze floating above, around, and under one another, I can clearly see three of the elements I've been working with, and working to create, in writing "Are We There Yet" --- lightness as material for creation.

Incidentally, back to August Wilson, I think his work, contending as it does with the weight of the world, can still be seen to contain that second form of lightness: in his incredibly finely-wrought evocations of history through the concrete, day-by-day experiences of his admirably thoroughly-embodied characters, places, times. Re-reading his work for this quality of lightness might be a way for me to learn from his craft without being overwhelmed by the distance between what he does and what I'm thinking of doing. (Did you know that he was working on a comedy about coffin-makers at the time of his death?)

But back to Sarah Ruhl, Calvino, Ovid and Aristotle. Calvino writes (still in his essay on lightness):

For Ovid, too, everything can be transformed into something else, and knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world. And also for him there is an essential parity between everything that exists, as opposed to any sort of hierarchy of powers or values.

Of course, I think of Einstein, "the central principle of special relativity is that no observational vantage point is singled out over any other. " This essential parity is necessary for transformation, Calvino continues:

Ovid's world is made up of the qualities, attributes, and forms that define the variety of things, whether plants, animals, or persons. But these are only the outward appearances of a single common substance that--if stirred by profound emotion--may be changed into what most differs from it.

Here, then, is the lineage of Ruhl's transformational aethestic, as she's traced it.

I told Sharon that when it comes to the artistic lineage of my writing for performance, I feel like Tony Kushner is my mother and Sharon's my father. (Mother being, for me, the parent I most obviously resemble, the mothertongue I speak, and father the source of the underlying structure of my thinking and assumptions about the world I inhabit.) This, as Sharon pointed out, makes Laurie Carlos, her mentor/mama, my paternal grandmother. (It probably also makes Bertolt Brecht at least my great-uncle on my mother's side, given Kushner's influences, and Grace Paley my mother's mother's something-or-other-cousin. ) Maybe Sarah Ruhl is the long-lost older sister I never knew I had.

Anatomy of Melancholy

Horizonte, by Jorge Macchi

If you haven't gone to see the Jorge Macchi exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art, just a reminder that it closes this Sunday, 3.16.

I'm so happy that I went. It was (another) lesson in slow thinking. In the pleasures of slow thinking.

Maybe I'll write more about it after the exhibition has gone; one of the pleasures is the pleasure of riddles, so I won't say too much here. I did want to document the conversation going on in my head as I viewed three of Macchi's works in succession:

What does music look like?

No, really. What does music look like?Nocturno, by Jorge Macchi

And finally: What does music look like?

Fim de Film, by Jorge Macchi & Edgardo Rudnitzky

The last notes I made in my notebook:

Be open to the realization that you are having a new, a different, experience.

Even when you're seeing something you've seen before, you're not.