Exile and memory

Forgetfulness leads to exile. Remembrance is the secret of redemption.

-- The Baal Shem Tov

Cleo

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?

Peace Now is thirty years old today

How long?

In a queer time and place

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...

Dissolving the solidity of the world

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 ...

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?