#the utterances

Dear Carlos,

I can hardly say how grateful I am to be walking alongside you in this season, just three years after we first met. It’s never felt like I’ve known you my whole life; but it has always been clear to me that we were meant to meet in the moment we did. Our individual proclivities for abysses along with our four sockets holding eyes weary of disaster have ebbed in the way of outrage and flowed in the direction of relief in this primordial sea of art making we’ve committed to. No matter how much our thoughts and inclinations convene or diverge—you coming from an imaginary concerned with exile, me coming from an imaginary concerned with home—at least one of our questions has remained constant and shared: How are we (as in proximate bodies) supposed to live (as in more than exist) after all (as in history, as in consequence, as in time)?

How you’ve chosen to (re)visit this question in The Utterances is at once deeply challenging and strangely sensible, calling for a reorientation of the corporeal, language, and time. In a year as technologically advanced as this 2017, you’d think we’d be able to, with the assistance of all our books, words, and toys, find ways to imagine beyond instances of personal catastrophe. After all, the scale of catastrophe is always collective; that’s literally how big it is, encompassing completely. Catastrophe is so total. And yet, our feelings, our ideas, our problems, our solutions concerning any catastrophic event are always so private, individual, small. What an awful reminder of how human we are.

I think of our running joke: I scream, “I don’t even like theater!” You laugh. But then I’m reminded of your question. It seems there is no art form better suited to utter a response to such an inquiry begging an actual “us” to forge ahead in the opposite direction of injury. How terrifying (and opportune) that the first step of this possibility is to give up the self. I, for one, look forward to exactly this—the giving up of my I, the dismantling of my my—with every collaboration I enter. If any of us are going to truly face and move beyond catastrophe, beyond the tyranny of total destruction, it only makes sense we get our unions right. But it requires a certain kind of rehearsal.

What you are considering takes practice: a poetry of embodiment so athletic and precise in awareness a person might be able to tell, like the difference between strands of hair on an arm, when they are being and when they are representing. I wish people, myself included, paid so much more attention to this. When are you person (unarticled, collectively unexceptional): a creature with a body that can cease, in need of a few things that can keep that body from ceasing for a time? When are you the person (a singular impression): an individuated being decidedly human because of things like power and will and the ability to tell (often ignore) time? What rights and responsibilities do we have to oscillate between these poles?

Carlos, I don’t even know. I have no idea. What I am sure of is that there is something deeply wrong with almost every single thing that purports a walkable path for our current set of global conundrums, among the most egregious of these bamboozling maps being the very art we make. I roll my eyes, the ones long weary in their sockets, watching people leave the comfort and shelter of their own homes in daily attempts to convince themselves that they are uncomfortably exiled in service of some kind of art when they are mostly dissatisfied with the entrails of catastrophe they’ve been fed, not recognizing they should be ever grateful they have not been served the belly of the beast.

I think of remnants, the leftovers we’re made to consume daily. Our stomachs are full of ghosts. It leaves little room for the Spirit.

I know giving up the self makes room for more Spirit.

Children, if they get to be that, are full of Spirit.

As I am the Magician says: “The child is easy to trick, but he is no fool.”

Fools are people who grow in years under the mistaken impression that they can keep the whole Spirit of the child. This is a tendency toward possession, a refusal to give up self.

I keep wishing people would grow up: more, faster, actually. I keep praying people would just give themselves up.

I keep wondering if the most important difference between fantasy and imagination is the personal sacrifice it takes to step out of your own mind, the fantastical realm, and into something more collectively, totally unknown: Chaos, the imaginative real.

I am not convinced people actually know what Chaos is.

The current definition of “chaos” might just be: systems of deliberate disorder manufactured by very human hands over time, fantasies on a countdown. I fear this because I recognize it in the worlds artists make: perpetuating economies of power, possession, and hierarchal transaction; inventing small and temporal countries that mimic the violence of colonization; trapping people in personal fantasies while touting enthusiastic convictions about these small and giant feats of imagination; hoping that repeated failures in any or all of these tasks might prove none of these horrors are actually true.

It’s sick.

More and more I find troubling correlations between the projects of nation building and art making. The obsession seems to be focused on the wrong query. I don’t think the question is how do we (I) make a(nother) world. What kinds of gods do we think we are? I think the challenge is how might we (all) really live in this one. After everything that’s been done, after history, into the future: What is the collective move forward? Beyond life, beyond death, beyond even love: How are you present? How do you care?

With all my love and gratitude for your care, Diane

Dear Diane,

Before anything else, a deep and abiding, THANK YOU. I find it impossible to imagine having gone through this program without you. So, I’ll dispense with that non-occurrence. A confession: Diane, I do not understand time. Sometimes it feels like Time is carrying me, at others, that I’m riding Time, like a current down whichever river I’m closest to at the time. And then sometimes, Time drops me off. It’s at these moments; I can see more clearly what’s around me. I’ve had more of those moments these past three years. That’s no small thing, and it has been a privilege to be in your company for this leg of the journey: contemplating shape, geography, land, home, exile, wakes, breaks, prophecy, utterances, and good blood.

It took me forever to learn to tie my shoes; and when I was young, it was often said of me, and quite like this: “That boy ain’t got a lick of common sense.” It wasn’t just that I was untethered; I was a bona fide space cadet. And we don’t need to debate whether I still am sometimes. It was the sky, and the night sky ,in particular, that captivated me, the stars, and the stars’ integrity; I was obsessed. In the face of that mystery, tying shoelaces, the right-in-front-of-your-faceness of it, was rendered a ridiculous prospect. I couldn’t do it. I resisted; and the result being, I tripped all over the goddamned place.  That's where we find ourselves, in this world of ours. Trippin.’

I know now that it takes confrontation with death, to approach the common. Death, being that which is held by all. Common, as in that which brings us into a greater fellowship of consideration. If this is true, neither of us is lacking; and not just us. So many Others are not lacking in this confrontation with actual death, and so ultimately, find it impossible and futile to be in the habit of abstracting death. I'm attempting to think this abstraction of death with a western obsession for nostalgia, and now, a burn-it-at-all-cost kind of that nostalgia, which cannot ever be fulfilled: well, at least, the nostalgia can’t. We can burn, and this nostalgia is ultimately an exercise in fantasy. We live right now. We live right now. That eternal and childish daydreaming which fixes the gaze on a kind of time that collapses in on itself, this nostalgia pulls everything which it encounters into itself, turning all it encounters into bone, fodder, ash, global ghosts. We are not!

Prophecy, as dramaturgy, may be an intervention, or rather a way of being, before this way we’ve trod along embedded itself as normative and sufficient. At once atmospheric, and capacious, inchoate, prophecy invites us to open ourselves to all time. It is evident to me when encountering, Good Blood, and its stratagems, that what I am experiencing is a deployment of the reparative, the prophetic. It is attention inside of Time, the linear made eternal. In this way, Good Blood is epic. There is a cartography of Spirit at work; that prayerful attention that requires a lover to get up off their damn knees, and to stand up, open, and rise before the work at hand. Chelsea Beyond Her Years depends upon this opening. All of us do.

Diane, this labor of regard is a hallmark of your work and the liberatory ethic at its core. Liberation will not be managed. The ways of being, your work insists upon is different than just collisions with systems of reform, it's after revolution. This must be rehearsed in our rooms even before we build them; and how do we build the literal rooms, this one being one of those, but really all our inhabitations, so that these inhabiting spaces bring us, truly bring us into consideration of our condition. We don't have to do this alone; and of course, we can’t. If, at times we get frustrated with theater, and really all art, it’s precisely where we’ve not encountered a proper consideration, which is sometimes just really being with someone, or something, together, even an idea, or a question, a death even. What about the weather?

(Insert tornado, hurricane joke here, can I take a rain check?)

Home is the force, beyond any other that totalizes and marks us. It is our great and proper reaction.  Home is wherever I am. Well, it is, and it isn't. Home is an attachment to land. So am I homeless when I am landless? Home is where my Ancestors’ Spirits are. Can Spirits swim? I mean, really, can they swim and, if so, how far; also, do they get tired? I’m really asking. In Good Blood, Chelsea Beyond Her Years senses this paradox and inquires. I can’t tell if she’s satisfied with the answer she receives. I don’t know if we are.

The 40,000 ghosts, or the incalculable deaths, as they are so often referred, in media and history, haunt Good Blood, haunt us.  I’m talking about incalculable loss, here. It is it true, the calculus of it is impossible task, and at the same time, I know, that we better do our math, and by do our math, I mean calculate, and by calculate, I mean remember, and where memory and the archive fail us, we must imagine, which means that our work is never finished.

The result and inverse of nostalgia is apocalypse.  It is often presented as alien and not actual, as that which is far away. I want to argue for its presence with us now. One need only pay attention. When we can’t see this, this is marker of a willful evacuation of memory.

Can we get an intervention?

Can we?

I have to believe that we are all older than we know.

Like Time, Good Blood carries us, rides us, drops us all inside of itself, like Time.

With Love,