almost december

I woke up with three spirits made of white light trailing around my head, on the right (from the actor's point of view), and I said to them, "I think I am going to have to put everything that we've been talking about on hold, because there's this list I have to do, these things I have to make, these things to put out of my head and onto some other surface so other people can see them.  I think it all has to be on hold.  These things that live inside my head, I think they have to go to sleep inside my head, and rest, or fall asleep for a lot longer than I would have wanted, because I have this list, and those things inside my head, I think they only live inside my head, and they very well might live in other heads at the same time that they live in mine, but I don't know that, and if I don't know that then maybe they're not real."

Is exactly what I said (more or less).

((It probably was nothing like that at all)).

And the three spirits of white light around my head said, "No."

They said, "No, you are wrong, but it might be easier for you to think that you're right, just because you like it when the narration changes inside your head, because that makes you feel like you're moving forward, but this is all moving forward whether you know it or not, and it really doesn't matter if you know it or not anymore."

I wanted this resolved, however, because it was too much to resolve.  I wanted a new story, not because these stories weren't interesting any more, but because all of the characters in these stories are tied, their hands are tied, and there's nothing that anyone can do, and in times like these, I would much prefer to leave them altogether, because I have a habit of waiting in a room where nothing is happening for much too long, and by the time I leave, nothing has been happening for so long that the figures have turned from flesh into magazine pin-up versions of what they were, and the pages are so worn that I can't even see the sparks in the eyes, and the faces look like they are disappointed in me, and sorry for me because I waited for so long when there was nothing to wait for.  This is how I have learned how to respond when my hands are tied for a very long time.  This is how I respond when I watch someone who's hands are tied for a very long time.

But they said, "No, because in this case, you are wrong, especially about that one, and now you just have to wait because it's cycling, and you can't really know what the cycle even is until you go through it, but you won't be alone."

I didn't want to admit that I really just didn't want to be alone for another New Year's Eve, and I was hoping that I could leave just long enough to find a date for New Year's Eve.  And I'm getting tired of my own narrator, the one who stays in the same story for too long, and longer, way after there is nothing left to tell in the story.

But they kept repeating that this story is the one that I wanted to be in for a very long time, and it would not unfold smoothly, but it would unfold beautifully, because I put it in a boat in the river, and the river knows what to do with the wishes of solitary lovers who have been sprinkled with glitter from the moon when they are asleep and dreaming.

There was a dog.  Before today, there was a dog.  It belonged to the Boy I take care of, a beautiful dog who was already old, and I understood that something miraculous was going to take place that day.  I also understood that this was the day that I was going to see the Boy, and visit the dog, and that this would not be the last time I saw the Boy, not at all, but that after today, the dog would not be there, and I didn't want to say goodbye.

But you have to say goodbye, because that is the cycle, and it's not up to me to decide where we are in the cycle, and when the dog has to go, she will just go, and it's up to me to be there and say goodbye, and that's what I would have to live through.  And before I said goodbye to the dog, there was advice, and the advice was, "Maybe you don't have to understand anything right now, there's enough going on in your life that you no longer have to understand, because it's something that's just happening to you right now, and you can understand it later on."  But the advice didn't come to me, it came from my mouth, and I was saying it to someone who has been in my head for a very long time, it came out of my mouth but I think the three spirits of white light were speaking it because they were using me.

And so it's like that.  And maybe it's something miraculous.  Because the room inside my head is not the same room I woke up in, but I've suspected I would be in this room for a long time, I was just not sure when that would happen, or when it would happen to me.

And I'm not broken or lost in this room, it seems like a place I would like to get to know, and there's room for these things to wake up, and there's room for me to avoid putting my restlessness into their faces and tell myself they are disappointed and too restless to hear what we might have to say to each other.  And I suspect that the things we have to say to each other will be very loud in the bigger picture of things, and that this room is made for those things to be spoken out loud.  But I can't know them tonight, all I can know is that it's not up to me to understand, but to stay in the room.  My eyes are too cloudy from crying over a dog that I will miss.  There is always a dog or a cat who has to leave before a story can start, and it's not up to me why that is, I'm only tracing patterns in the dirt with my foot, and wishing for something in the dark, even if I forget that the river knows everything, because the moon already told her, and we get to live in these rooms lit by moonlight, glitter in our eyes and something very loud that's waiting to be spoken.  

there was this

this doesn't belong here, but i don't know where it goes.
this is the same space where i am, not quite belonging here, looking outside of here and looking forward and facing backward, this whole universe is set falling forward is set in motion falling forward, we always looked forward to this, and we always looked backward when we were awake enough...
but this, this here, something new.
i know in dreams, i know, i mean, i know i see you there in them, one or two at least, not many more than that, not that i remember, not that it's important, figures, they don't repeat as much as animals or places, the place, that city in between cities, you were there in that one, behind barbed wire, just your eyes, in that one.  it's too hard to describe, and doesn't belong here.
but this, this is the point, there was this, yesterday, and the day before, your name, i saw your name, written in the dust, written on the ground, on my floor, i saw your name written on my floor, that combination of sounds, the 431, on my floor, and i saw it, and it wasn't a dream, and when i saw it i just had to stop myself, but couldn't, tried to stop myself, from saying out loud, oh no, there's her name written in the dust, this has been going on for a long time, or longer than i had thought, this is going on for a long time, is what i tried not to say out loud to your name in the dust.

dream

captured an eagle or the eagle found me half alive and trapped in between live and death, a muerto, parents there, and berlin people there, and someone secret there too and in a desert but also a city and school and totems and blood and memory, blood memory a space of blood memory, and an impossible high building with no windows something i am trying to learn how to climb, hahaha, a tower, it's an ivory tower, hahaha, eagle and love old and new (they are three at least three, i recognize two, yes the same two yes, old and new, and they are twined round each other, like a candy cane, and wrapped round each other wrapped up in chicken wire) that and memory ah

What my plays look like to the people who hate me

(Scene One: A philosophy of methodology into the inquiry of desire, blabla, talking dog, talking dog, I'm so smart oh look at me I'm so smart.  We enter into a room, or rather, the room enters us.  Woo.  Wrap your head around that, it's deep, bitches.  We are entered by our setting, not the other way around.  This is based on a new theory of space that no one else but Matt Watkins has read, but I quoted it in my play first.  Hot fucking damn, watch me.)

(MAN#23 enters the space, naked, with angel wings, covered with white powder.  He is supposed to be a man who is somehow in between spaces, or liminal, and represents something entirely problematic to begin with.  Is this the male gaze at work again, even though it's couched in pseudo-feminist theory about representation?  Even if we quote Laura Mulvey, there's little doubt that this MAN#23 is ChrisDanowski, and not even very thinly veiled.  He even has the same obsessions and talks like him.  Listen to this.)

MAN#23: Oh, hoho, kiddies, this is not an easy night for anyone, no, not at all, and in fact, specifically and statistically, that is to say, why am I?  Why why why?  I lived in a war-torn country once and saw a tank in the street once and that's why I think I'm the goddam angel of history.  Now watch me puff out my chest and quote Pablo Neruda in Spanish:

Porque en noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos,

mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Aunque éste sea el último dolor que ella me causa,

y éstos sean los últimos versos que yo le escribo.

That was Pablo Neruda in Spanish and I won't translate it just to make you feel dumb for speaking only one language.  Now here's something about the moon with a lot of rhythm.  It's nothing about the moon, I will just use the word moon, with rhythm.  With rhythm.  And repetition.  Of words, like the moon, and the moon is a word that repeats, and maybe the only word that repeats is the moon.  No one reads Borges anymore and that's just so very very stupid of all of you.

LITTLE GIRL (enters.  She represents innocence so she wears a flower on her head, and she is trying to eat the flower but she cannot, because it is on her head.  How will the audience know this?  They never will.  They are too stupid): I was the one who was left in the streets after all the parades were over, and before they came to carry away the bodies of the dead.  I suffer for everyone, and it is sad, and entirely your fault because we are all complicit in the pain of the world, especially the blood running through the streets of your own city.  You people with your day jobs and your supermarket debit cards and your refusal to learn how to read Pablo Neruda in Spanish will be the death of everything that is good.  Let me remind you of a few more things to make you wish you were home smoking pot and watching the Family Guy.  Hurry, hurry, hooray. Bo.

(But it is too late, because not only has this scene already ended but the next one is already started and I don't care if you're lost, that's your problem, it's not because I'm sloppy or distracted.)

Scene Two: A Park

MAN#23: Oh, you, I wish we had something to celebrate with, like a, like a bag of psychedelic chocolate, or a beanbag, or a, what do you call it, an Arab Strap.

WOMAN#8: I don't know what that is, but I do know what phenomenology is, and that makes me so fucking hot.

MAN#23: Oh, you really have no idea.

(She takes off her shirt and they make out.)

(Note: WOMAN#8 is the same character that runs through all of his works, and she might represent something like Robert Graves' The White Goddess--nothing to do with race--which, interestingly enough, is a theme that some critics say runs through Dylan's songs, and this is no accident.  Because Danowski listened to way too much Bob Dylan when he was in high school, and thinks somehow that he might have the same thing, except for the expensive leather coats and the hair.)

Scene Three: A Park (except it's a different park, and there's no way for you to know that unless you are smarter than me, which of course no one is, hahaha.)

MAN#23: I don't want to always have the first word.

WOMAN#8: First word, last word, words don't matter, except when they do, but we are matter even before we become speaking subjects.

MAN#23: Oh my gosh that is so hot.

(He takes off his shirt and they make out.)

Scene 9: A Park (Why scene 9? Because fuck you is why.)

WOMAN#8: I don't know what I mean, I don't know how to mean, I just wish, I just wish, we could see an end to this goddam war.

MAN#23: Here I will say a line about something meaningless, to demonstrate a resistance to clarity that disguises itself as absurd, but is really an agressive stance to keep anyone who tries to figure me out at bay.  Because it will show that I am deep, and just in case you decide you don't like me anymore, some of your smart friends will want to date me.

WOMAN#8: You've heard the sounds of the blood running in the streets, and that's why I say take me.

MAN#23: I can't.  I still haven't gotten over the girl in San Diego.

(Someone else takes off her shirt, and they make out.)

(Last scene: Apocalypse with clowns.)

(You would think there is spectacle, but there is not.  You would think there is going to be music, but there is not.  You would think there might be some kind of orgy of the flesh, but no, instead, he just walks out naked in the angel wings and pours white powder over his head and you all have to sit there and watch it, and pretend that you have not seen this before, and that you didn't understand it the first time, either.)

(Lots of long words on the screen that no one could possibly read.)

(End of play.)

stutterer/1

I can't say this out loud/I couldn't say this/I wouldn't say this out loud.
I was with my friend, and we were talking, and I wanted to talk about you the whole time (but I didn't want to say it out loud).  I wanted to tell him I couldn't stop thinking about you, but I couldn't say it out loud.
But I don't really know if it's true, if I can't stop thinking about you, because I haven't really tried, and I don't know if I should try because I don't see any reason why.
That's too much.  I won't say that out loud, and I won't even think it any more.
I wanted to say it out loud to see how it sounded when I said it, but I couldn't speak it to anyone, because it's a prayer that I say to myself, and it's holy there, between my mouth and my ear, and I like how it sounds when I say it to myself.  And I want it to live there, like a prayer without an answer, because there's no space for an answer right here, because here is complicated.
I almost started saying it out loud to you, but then I stopped because it was the wrong here, and when I realized that, I wanted to tell you that, that this is not the right here, and the now is not the right now, but it's hard when you are floating outside of time, not stuck in between moments, and you start to see things that seem true but not yet, or things that you want to be true, but not yet, and these moments of being outside of time start to add up to something that becomes like a weight, like a weight pulling the body down to earth in time, and things start to unravel, and the things that are hidden in the knots in the tongue start to untwine themselves, and everything just pours out, but the here and the now are strong, and there are so many people in the way, and every one of them becomes like a barrier between the thing that you want to say and the thing that you are supposed to say, and in that space, you have to say something else, and that something else becomes the thread that you have to follow for awhile.
And that's probably ok, you tell yourself, because if you follow the thread well, eventually everyone will forget that you were just about to say something else entirely.  And so you find yourself living in a space that's in between the things you want and the things you know, and you live in that space because you have to live somewhere, and it's warm enough for now, but not quite right, because it's not even your dream it's someone else's, and the narrator is not you.
If I remember that, then it will unfold on the earth like the tongue of a story that happens in time, and this is that moment in time when there are so many things that I can't say out loud, and birds fly from my tongue because they escape, and if you listen carefully, the words aren't giving anything out to anyone who shouldn't hear it, but you'll know that they have the rhythms of the moon, and you might understand that I'm not sleeping because something in me is busy rehearsing for a scene that has not yet happened. 

monsters of the sea/back again

This is the story here, the Land of Death, the shades of the living...
http://www.mythweb.com/odyssey/book11s.html
and episode with Nausicaa (after Calypso) in the wedding veil.
Bathing and olive branches and lots of oil.  Mm hm.
And the release through Athena weaving a spell.
And Penelope weaves...
And Laertes, his father, lives like a peasant.  (not a pheasant)

I have trained to keep my thoughts singular, so I could follow them backwards and forwards in time, like they were the lines on my own hand.  But my hand is less than it used to be, and things have gotten out of order, and the events don't follow each other in the way that they once did.  And those things of time that help the mortals to live their lives stopped applying themselves to me, and I lost the luxury of knowing this moment as singular, and instead am stuck in between spaces, where the threads between the past and the future are visible, and I see it the most clear when there is a full moon, and when there is no moon, I cannot see any connection at all.  There are those who walk among us, the ones who have a strange glow about them when the day is on the verge of turning to night, who have what I have, that secret that shows the spaces between worlds.  They are neither here nor there, all at once and not at all, and entirely willing to be torn to pieces, but they cannot be torn, and neither can I.  I am that image of the thing I used to be, and in certain kinds of light, I am at once whole and present, but the light changes, and it never does last for long enough to find my way in the world again in the skin of a human being.  I am somewhere in between the living and the dead, and not alone, and never lonely, but never, ever home.  And I carry the shades in my chest, they move me from one place to another, and when the light is right, they are outside of me enough so that I can see them clearly as if they were still here, already here, born again here, come back again here, or come from the future into this place with a secret vision of what we are, but everything fades when the light changes, and I'm left with my own images in my own mind.  Of what was, what is, what will be, but there is no order.  And I suspect that this is that thing that poets speak of, that place where we live when we have learned secrets, lost ones that we love to death and madness, and not been given the luxury of losing our minds, or given the gift of a simpler mind and a heart a little less complex than what we have to carry.  We are neither crazy nor stupid, then, and this means that we are supposed to do something.  And the clouds turn red because the moon is growing fond of us, and wants to show us something about ourselves, something true, but it will be mixed with the things we have loved, and the things we will love, and there is no way of knowing which of these might be a direction to tell us how we can love in this place, in these shades of ourselves, right here, and so we always have the sense that this might be wrong, or not quite right just yet, but those senses are as much an illusion as anything else, and our task, then, in these bodies, in this space in between space, is to learn the way the spider spins the webs of our own minds, until the web becomes less important than the action of spinning, the eternal love affair between the spider and the branches, where the web becomes their poem to each other, but not the love itself.  

risky sea chanty

there are way too many ghosts that spring out on a night like this, cold and starry and full of some kind of new music that i haven't been able to hold firmly in my hands, the notes flip in and out between the murmurs in my heart, it's a strange dance, and every time i give in, i can't sleep and the room fills up with characters that are almost but not quite familiar.  there's a parade of agendas trying to catch my attention and all i say, it's the same thing every time, all i say is i don't know if she knows, i don't think she knows, she has to know, but i don't think she knows.  and the birds keep singing to calm us down, and i don't know, and i decide, this is my decision, i'm going to say this very clearly, and i can lay out the maze of my heart on the sheets and say, i think she knows the way in, of all the people who think they know the way, i think she knows the way, and i can tell you, i can tell all of my ghosts, but i can't tell her, not directly, so it's a season of careful patterns that have a hundred meanings that change direction, and we can only talk in morse code on the old tree trunks that make their way to the bottom of this place, somewhere the waves can't reach.  it's a strange enchantment, and it's songs and pattens keep repeating, and i don't even know if they'll look the same by the time they reach the surface, and the sounds are all muffled.  i sleep alone, and i like it that way, whenever i settle, i always miss the one i am always looking for, and it's been long enough, enough moons between then and now, to understand that we have something important to teach each other, but i can't say the words. i can find the words, i know the words, but every sentence begins with something that i can't complete, not out loud, not here, or not yet, and i'm like that god, the one that gets torn in a hundred pieces and scattered over the water, and every piece wonders what that would be like, or if it would all be forgotten, by the time the human voices can say the words, if the maze of this murmuring heart would be so tangled up in its own sentences that it might forget that it's amazed, enchanted into amazement, because i think you know the way.

plotting ana mendieta's plot

The plot is the body, the Russian body, the Slavic body marked with the unlack, and the note written from A.M. before I was scratched before I was crowned, this is my plot, this is my body, unable to take on her ghosts, unable to represent her, unwilling to try, unwilling to try to represent the one who created her own representations, on the ground in Iowa, on the ground in NYC.  I can only represent my longing for her, for that body that is now gone, that is not here, that I never knew in the flesh, this is a song about my longing for her body, the love affairs between the living and the dead.

begin with a short lecture, then, a talk about her, her life, the basic facts, the birth date and the death date, and the passages and exiles in between, and the iles she created when she made things on the earth. a lecture without coded signs talking about coded signs, and then the lecturer removes the clothes and starts to speak in code, the naked body writing a code on the ground, and sprinkling it with omi tutu, ona tutu, tutu ile, tutu eggun, tutu espiritu de ana mendieta, this is a party for you.

create signs and marks on the ground, and in the center, draw the chalk outline of her body, the silhueta, the first one, the one that opens the ceremony.
stand at the feet of the body, cover self with white chalk, candles at the five points of the body, cover self with chalk, then lay in the center of the drawing, cover self with cloth, and then attempt to eat the body of the dead in a ritual communion with the dead, by inhabiting her space for a period of time.  over this is read the words written in the first paragraph above.

while in the space of ana mendieta, over this the voice of the lecturer says the words from the last post about the ceremony, the post about the longing for the body of the living, so that this rite is the lecturing body becoming the dead, speaking from the dead about longing for the living.  the love affair between the dead and the living.

a love affair across time and in time, moving in to sacred space of the dead and speaking the desire of the living, mixing this life with this life's own mortality.  under the cloth, the body grows very still, and then, toward the end of the words, starts to whisper the words with the recording, speaking himself back to life, ending above the cloth, standing above the body, back to life, eyes closed, speaking the words above the cloth, then opening the eyes, and spilling the water and wiping the other marks but leaving her body marked on the floor, and end performance.  

the ceremony

Because it is so dark so sudden, because it is rain, because it is colder, because it is a series of significant not yets in the middle of a storm of last gasps, because it is more here than there, more now than ever, we wake up feeling called to enter the ceremony, we go to sleep entering the ceremony, we have been called.  There is another moon coming, the one that happens after the ancestors are fed, after the thanksgiving that opens up this season happens (it happened, our thanksgiving happened)  ((*already distracted, already a side note, this ceremony is composed of margins, of in-betweens, of hybrid identities performing here and there, in writing and in speech, in codes messages in between pauses, those moments where we can't quite remember what we were about to say; the ancestors gave the sign of yes, nodding vigorously shaking graveyard dust from their chins, emphatic nodding, but with the idea that this yes is all light because it's too much light and there's not enough darkness yet, but it will come, the hidden things will come, and everything will change when we become aware that there are hidden things--and these clouds, this sudden dark, the messages that get lost because we assume they must be meant for someone else, the missing letter that would make us mean what we meant to mean))....
Because it happened, because they were fed, because it is rain, we enter into the room, and the room has a name, and the room is a place that is not what it was before we started decorating it to become this other place that we all remember, we enter the room and there is darkness at the very beginning, and there will be darkness for a very long time, because we don't know where we are yet, because we have to remember, and that takes time.  The room takes its shape, it gives us its smell, and we smell like the room, because this is where we were born, and this is where we enact those things we are meant to do while in these bodies on this ground.  My dead were not born here, far from here, I am not from here, I am from somewhere else, is what my blood tells me.
You may be from here, your dead may be from here, but before that, and before that, and before that, somewhere else, and perhaps we knew each other there before that even.  Because of this, and because it is rain, and because I know these things, I know all this and more, I am not, I am no longer, I am not able to play, I don't want to find the thing in you that is like Marilyn Monroe, I don't want to inhabit that thing that is like the movie star with the shaved head and the muscles, because the ones who inhabit those things never get to live there for very long, once born as other in the other's eyes, there is no escape, and no tricks of language can help us find our ways out, because of that, because of that very that, I don't want to play, I can't play, but the undertows of the situation keep sucking me in.
And when I come to, when I come back, I am made real, in my own flesh again, once I've taken off those trappings of my gendered body, the t-shirt that's too small and the jeans that hang beneath the pelvic bones and the big black boots that entitle me to the cement and roads that I learn every day, I have ideas, I have a hundred ideas to go with the ones we've already spoken, and none of them are entirely speakable.  For obvious reasons.
This is an enchantment, and this is a ceremony, there are more things at work than just the clothes we wear, but the clothes help us to present the alternative identity that might make us more readable when the light is too dim.  There are movie stars and idols dancing in our heads, and we recreate them as best we can, poses that are seductive and ridiculous at the same time, but before that, before that, before that even, there is the dance between the thunder and the lightning, perhaps we met there, perhaps that is where I recognize you from, and perhaps we are still that, thunder and lightning for each other, cold rain on hot earth, and the endless eternal longing of the ocean for the land, eternal shifts of waves that sing of not yet, not this not yet, not just yet, and it could play out for another hundred lifetimes, and we still wouldn't know a particle of the longing that the ocean has for the land, but the taste we do know is almost enough to build a ceremony on.
But here we are, this is the ceremony, this is the dance, this is the tango that possesses our feet when we are much too tired for any more dancing.  I will not create myself with words, and I will not try to create you with words, my words will only want to capture you, and I don't trust them, and perhaps you shouldn't either.  I trust the gypsy clicks that move my hands after the children have all gone to bed, I trust the desire to travel the earth, the earth is a body that we want to know from the inside out, I trust in those things that move me out of bed before I can speak myself into myself, before the endless lists of what's next, which shirt to wear, and which pair of underwear will paint how I live below the waist, what I might be able to do with my face to make it look more authoritative, I trust those things that hide in the cells beneath the skin, I trust the hunger of the skin, I trust the goddesses that brought me here, to this empty space, no longer so empty, no longer the space it used to be when the light was too strong, I trust the rhythms of the blood, this blood right here under my skin, I trust the ancient pulse of this new blood, I trust the age of the blood that runs through our veins.  

unlocking

They told me that I could unlock your heart, and that this would be the thing that would consume me in my sleep, and that this would play out in perfect harmony with the changes in the weather.  And I just want to sit somewhere that no one can find us, and listen to you talk about the changes in the weather, because there is so much that we should talk about when it comes to the weather.  Para recuperarme entre las phrases, entre las lineas, entre las lenguas tan seperados, entre un camino y un otro, desconocido, casi desesparecido, casi aki y ahora.  Y aunque no puedo encontrarlo en la claridad del dia, en las vesperes es algo en cada direccion, buscando y buscando, yo me estoy como un perro con la nariz tan mojada, y como the teenage boy who stutters when the girl steps in too close & he starts to lose his sense of direction.  They told me that this ground would be dry, too dry to take in any new writing, that the words would not scratch the surface for long enough to make any impression, but inside my body it would be raining all the time, and everything would be written on me first, and that I would have to wait.  They told me that I would have to wait, and I didn't want to believe them, and the day I learned how to run, with that song in my head, that same song in my head, the one you gave me, that was the day I knew what they were telling me was true, and somewhere in learning how to run I learned how to wait, and how to fall in love with my own rain.  

and then there's more music

And it's not always so easy, oh, no no, it's not so easy, to hit the right note at just the right time, or to come in deep and low at just that particular moment, it's not easy at all, unless you slow down way down slow down everything just enough to get caught up in it, and once you're slowed down then you have the wherewithall to jump in and find the speed and the rhythm right there, it's right there in the center of it, but it's hard to get to the center, but if you're in the center, then it's all right there, it's already laid out and waiting for you...none of this is none of this any of this there's nothing of this is very hard at all from inside the storm, but i think you have to get inside the storm first and then this is not so hard...listen...i'm carrying all of this with me...there's that terribly confusing thing, that terribly crippling indecision thing that's so confusing to be inside of, there's that terribly charming thing, that absolutely charming delirious gorgeous thing, it's the same thing, they're the same thing, i'm taking you with me into this storm, and if you hear me singing and think i might be singing about you, but couldn't possibly think of you enough to sing about you, you are wrong, i took it with me and i take it with me, that bird that pecks on my ribs is writing your name inside my ribs, and that's why i sing what i sing...those terrible things about fathers and mortality, and the weight of the epic of a life behind you, his full of reflection and thought from inside the body in paid, mine full of magic and loss and a thousand cities and five or seven women with my name written on their ribs and a thousand conversations in cafes all over the world, what will we tell our daughters about the curve of a rib, the shape of a journey from here to there, what will we tell our daughters when we want them to calm down, and stop crying, and feel the pulse of this magnificent thing, even when our legs are tired and our hearts feel like this may not be worth it, those terrible anxious birds that come and go, now and then, come and go, what will we tell our daughters when we are not sure what kinds of cyclops are hiding around the bend, around that next mountain, the one that curves like a rib, i take you with me, i pull you like thread and take you with me, into the center of this storm...and that one that was me, this is me in high school, and there are girls who are distracting my attention, but i'm acting, and i have another role, and i keep acting, and this work is the place where i know who i am, and my parents think i'm too busy, and the girls are distracting, there are curves underneath a blue windbreaker that make me crazy and i keep saying my lines, and it's hard to sleep because i don't know where any of this is going, but this life is fresh and as real as the promise of a blue windbreaker on the dashboard of my father's van, this is the same song, and the same desire, there's never more than one desire it's always the same desire, and if the thrill is as strong as it ever was means i have not grown, i have not changed, then i have not changed, and i take it with me, i would have thought desire would have slowed itself down by now (with my terribly advanced years) but not so much, so be it, i'm helpless in it even if i know some things, but i'm helpless and this is all hopeless but it's thrilling and i take it with me, i take it with me into the center of the storm, and learn the chord progressions, slowwwwwwwly, and i take it with me, this is the storm, this is the center of my storm, and i did not create the storm, i just got caught in it, and i never changed i just got better at it and this is a song, this is why and what i sing, this is the song i was born with, singing from the cradle, this is the song, and it's all about you.

i don't think this is relevant

To anything at all.
So I dressed up as Jason Statham for Halloween and no one said anything.  And I practiced my accent for weeks and weeks.  Life is full of bitter disappointment.
I would love to say something without irony or distance or metaphor, but my tongue is frozen (the weather changed), and I'm trying to convince myself that the real things stand in for the metaphors just fine, except they resemble each other too much for that to be true.  I'm unhinged.  My axis is spinning, and I might be the one being spun, in a hundred different directions at once, and when I land, sprawled out on the floor dizzy and reeling, there are these things that seem true:
This may or may not be a rehearsal, but it is a repetition, this is a complex series of revolutions and repetitions, and it's impossible to figure out exactly what these repetitions are for.  But we are given roles, and all we are supposed to do is play the roles that we have been given, and, I think, I might be wrong, but I think, follow our desires, even when they are conflicted, or maybe especially when they are conflicted, or maybe even more especially, when there are road blocks everywhere.  I think that might be the game that our ancestors played, over and over, through repetitions of revolutions in a hundred countries, in a hundred dead languages.
I think this might be a poem about rescue, except it's in disguise (see above, tongue frozen, etc.)
This has happened before.  This is not my moment to figure out what is happening or why, it's a song that's sung by the dead to the living, something that follows us with their breath, hot and thick on a night like this, speaking in shadow songs through the thin veil of the moon (just got thinner, bright behind a blue tunnel made of sugar and that secret list of all the things we really want).
There are several points I would like to speak to first, several pressing issues that I want to address primarily, except I forgot all of them and can't even find a place to start (it was all theoretical probably, and I need nouns to keep me connected to the thread of things these days, and images of secret writings, hands writing in whispers across bodies that are decidedly other).  The veil between objects gets thinner, and even the living and the dead start to get themselves confused, the dead are eating and the living are too anxious to eat, lost in daydreams about the blue sugar tunnel between themselves and the moon, and it's almost too late to notice that the veil between people is also worn away, and at our most sacred moments we start to speak like each other, because the tongue is the voice of the body's sweat and muscle, and everything makes sense without any complicated introduction.
Except.  There is this, this one thing, this one pressing thing.  That I forgot, or maybe I just can't speak about it in most places.  But it's written on my tongue, on the underside, the part that is covered in sugar, waiting for the vision to kick in so that the ceremony makes sense.  But it never does, the ritual never ever makes sense until long after it's over, unless it is a poor ritual, faked by angry children who pretend they know more than they do, and charge way too much for a reading.
Those unlocked faeries come crawling out of the hole in the moon and start to watch the patterns, and the songs they sing that harmonize with the dead are the songs we like, the ones with the beat that begins on the lips and ends on the hips; seven mermaids come crying to the door, worried that no one has taken the trouble to ask them why they are so happy lately; five foxes surrounded by eight wolves, and everyone is hungry and nervous, and it would take the perfect song to remind them that the veil between one dog skin and another is very thin, and we are always at our best when we are made vulnerable to each other; under this thin light, under this thin veil, under the watchful eyes of the dead, we are best when we are vulnerable, hungry and cold but entirely sure that we are who we think we are, and a hundred other things besides.

monsters of the sea//outline

Working Title: Monsters of the Sea (or Monstrosities of the Sea)

Form: Mix of Live Performance and Media (Film & Sound)

Dates: Spring 2013 (April-ish)

Venues: Theater in My Basement living room (seats 20-30), downtown galleries, other living rooms, Tucson galleries, spaces in México, San Diego (?), living rooms in Los Angeles

What's the story:
The central story, the skeleton or frame, starts with Odysseus setting out at sea by himself, with the intention of hiding himself in the trappings of a new adventure.  He is in a state of permanent spiritual exile, and wants to make a decision to go to Ithaca, but wants to acknowledge that he will never get there.  So it's just an impulse to move into an unknown area in order to have an adventure, because he is restless and anxious.

On the way, he has a memory of someone he used to love, someone who was lost, like a Eurydice who  went to the underworld and didn't come back.  His memory of her is enough to conjure her image back from the underworld, and she joins him on this raft in the middle of the sea, surrounded by monsters.  But she is also a monster, someone who is created from memory, and is not at all who he thinks she is.  He is also a monster, because he wants to believe that she is who he wants her to be.  So she becomes this kind of Frankenstein, someone created out of desire and longing, but is stuck inhabiting a body in time, a body with its own wants and desires, but with no memory of her own to go on.  She begins to become real, making an identity based only on what happens from the moment of her conjuration.  He begins to become less real, living in an identity that only knows versions of a past that are all fragments of his imagination of that same past.  She is also in a state of permanent spiritual exile, and is looking for something to become.

At the same time, he is pulled out of these moments with her when news from the Land of the Dead comes that his father is sick.  He goes back and forth between the realms, visiting the Land of the Dead, and the Sea full of Monsters, trying to find something about his father that can heal the father.  Of course, he is the father, or has become the father archetype, and his healing will come in finding out that he's the one he is looking for.  Coming to terms with a new identity that does not feel like human skin just yet.  Her journey then starts to twist, as his visits to the underworld make her lonely for her home, which she does not yet understand is imaginary.  So she is also breaking free from an old identity, one that defined her, even though it was terribly uncomfortable, and gets to come to life for the first time.

That's the central story, but there's a lot more that revolves in and out of this.

But so far, the characters, there are five.

HE: Odysseus, son becoming father
SHE: Eurydice and Frankenstein
FATHER: A ghost figure who is not yet here and not yet there, a wounded warrior.
FERRYMAN: Trickster figure who controls passage between the here and there.
NARRATOR: She guides the central story, sometimes is a figure, sometimes appears as narrative text and voice.  Throughout the story, she becomes more entangled in it, becoming a kind of mirror of SHE, becoming real, with real desires and impulses.  The Narrator is entirely witchy, but all of these characters are witches.

This is a loose structure, then, for the performance that counters this.  In real time, there are the same characters who may have the same names, but are extensions of the performers in their real identities.  They are, in a sense, then, actors who are trying on these mythic identities, but trying to maintain their own individual lives.  As the work goes on, they become more entangled, and their real desires and impulses start to mirror the ones in the mythic story, to the point where reality and the mythic level of events will overlap.  We all enter into the project with a profound sense of spiritual exile, and  make attempts to find our way home (to our own Ithaca) through the romantic discourse of revolution.  As people/performers, we are trying to articulate a real revolution for our time, one that is based on the possibility to maintain many identities at once (through variations on themes of race, class, and gender). There is also the desire to make these realities manifest, but we are stuck inside a performance, so our tools to experiment with these revolutionary ideas are through magic spells (better to call these "works," or "kangas" in Kongolese cosmology).  There are "works" then, in the central story, but also "works" in live performance, where we can enact these mystical rituals that will also involve the spectators in some significant way (in this last one, then, I'm revealing my impulse here to play with the notions of ritual in performance, looking at how they are effective or affective when they are presented on video, and how they work when they are done by live actors.

So the bulk of the preliminary work, then, will be in setting a space where all the actors can come together and talk about their own experiences with their own constantly-shifting identities.  We will explore alternative identities, altar-egos, for ourselves, and focus on performing the versions of ourselves we most want to see representative of ourselves for any particular moment or series of moments.  Rock Stars, Magicians, Warriors, Divine Lovers, Ghost Lovers, and any extremes that suit the comfort level of the performers.  At no point should anyone feel like they're being coerced into performing a version of themselves that is not based on their own desires of what they want to be (the central story is concerned with the tangle of representations that happen when we are forced into becoming something that suits the desires of another human being, and these meta-narratives are about finding the possibilities for liberation within ourselves for who we desire to become).

So there's a story that serves as a framework, and there's a secondary reality where real life has the possibility of entering into something that will resemble art.  The secondary reality, then, ourselves performing ourselves, is the real meat and fat of the thing, and depends entirely on the involvement of the performers.  But it's basically a framework for allowing us to collectively create a space of magic, a place where magical actions are performed by ourselves on ourselves.  It sounds very time-consuming, but I'm imagining that the bulk of this material can be mined through a few sessions that should feel more like interesting people hanging out than anything else.  From these sessions, we'll pull the bits that we like the best, and integrate these into the live performance that we'd present for the spectators.  The central story is one that can be told with a combination of image, sound, and text on video.  I've put together those kinds of narratives before, and pretty quickly, but this other level, involving the actors in a more personal way, is something that I've skirted around, but never fully invested in.

So the level of experiment in this is very high, which might be anxiety-provoking, but the level of fun is also very high, and I'm much more interested in creating a situation where we can discover things about ourselves, and perform versions of ourselves in a magical act of setting ourselves in a position where we can have an empirical experience of becoming.  And I should say, at the risk of an artistic reputation, that I am always much more interested in creating spaces where we are all able to remain friends, rather than making a work of art that destroys our delight in working together.  Without that sense of delight, there is no reason for doing anything.  I would also love, love, love it if this were a bilingual production, because the myth of Odysseus, that longing for a home that is no longer there, would translate in lots of places in the Americas if this becomes something we can tour.