“Being fluent in a language is like being good at sex.”
- Malynne Sternstein
(can you tell I’m going through my notebooks again?)
some misc. notes I took during a panel on literary adaptation that I don’t want to lose:
“I think theatre is a medium that rewards a strong sense of place.” - Seth Bockley. “theatre is a language of action”- Leslie Danzig. it’s important to consider how the audience should read the relationship between the source material and the new piece. what, if any, is the prerequisite knowledge for both the adaptor and the audience? what is the place of the chorus in contemporary theatre?
“A text needs to feel important to you, as a lover might.”
I’m moving again soon. I haven’t even totally completed the last move, boxes stashed in former buildings, boxes taped up in corners. I have lost track of how many times I have moved in the last decade, but it is perhaps approaching twenty. I am hoping, I am crossing all my fingers that I give myself the time to make this new place a home. I’ve now committed to spending at least the next three years in this city–sort of a daunting thought, but also one that is both stabilizing and exciting–and so perhaps it is finally time to stop running around for a little while. Perhaps, however, I’ll hold on to the habit of periodically purging objects, even without the moves to motivate it. I’m a hoarder by nature, scraps and scraps and scraps piled together. I don’t have a bed frame that fits my bed, but I have sheets that fit mattresses of both a larger and a smaller size. I’m not very good at judging what to leave behind. I’ve abandoned beautiful pieces of furniture, odd musical instruments, things I would love to have now, because I simply had too much and whatever was last on the gangplank went out with the bilge. Instead I’ve kept a thousand little useless things.
Clothes that no longer fit, or never did, but that remind me of the man who took them off. A single bead from a bracelet long since broken, the elastic snapping on the wooden floor, the vending machine in Utah. Books I have never read but think one day I might. Cassette tapes of Apollinaire’s poetry being read, and no tape player to play them.
I don’t know how to throw away. I throw away so much. I feel trapped by all my objects, but I miss them when they’re gone, like an unhealthy lover. My memory is too faulty to go back digging through the trash of my heart, and so I need each box like a scalpel to open me up. I remember my dreams better than my days, and so I need this molding notebooks to remind me who I am. I reread my own words and rarely recognize them.
“a girl afraid of her own thighs. she whinnies blonde hair across her face, her rhythm jolting the redhead beside her. the shrouded, effeminate man who joins them, he shows no fear. I picture you dragging me on stage in a bloodied burlap sac, tossing me before the microphone, settling yourself behind the drum kit before I crawl out and break glass.”
Perhaps I should date my papers better. When I find these words floating in a box of a million myriad things, I do not know the woman who wrote them. I recognize my handwriting but not my intention.
“the slight change of time, adapting to your conditions–the tragedy, really, is that this work of mine, the years of slow shifts of the heart, this heard-earned suitability–this labor benefits me alone. If only my son, my son’s sons, could be born without hearts.”
sometimes it really disturbs me … #6. i didn’t know how effective it is. i just know that i wanted to do it.
I sort of don’t want to reblog this image, because I somehow feel… I don’t know, irresponsible disseminating this information, I guess. But it brought so strongly to mind something that happened a few days ago that’s been kind of haunting me that I felt the need to post it.
On the phone with my mother the other night, she mentioned the sudden death of a friend of hers. This was not a very close friend, but a woman she had worked with periodically for quite some time, who worked in another office in the physical sciences at the university where my mother works. They got along well, had things in common, went to jazz bars together after work meetings. This woman had struggled with bipolar disorder (I feel strange writing that phrase–how can we not struggle with it?) for a long time, and then very recently had gone through a very rough breakup. She was a chemist. My mother said that when she learned this woman had died, before anyone told her how she just knew. She made her own cyanide.
On the phone with my crying mother, I shivered.
http://www.firsttheegg.com/have-i-ever-had-any-unwantedundesired-physical-or-sexual-contact/
That short but upsetting article by Molly over at First the Egg is worth a read.
Rape trigger warning. (I initially misspelled that “rage trigger warning”– probably also appropriate?)
Some day, some therapist will maybe start to understand me a little better when they learn that a big part of my self-loathing and my complicated relationship with femininity is due to the fact that, despite my being a small, femme woman, in most of the sexual traumas of my life I have been in at least some way the aggressor. Maybe one day I’ll be able to write about all of that properly, maturely, some day when it’s finally behind me.
I dreamt you came to me. I dreamt with my eyes open and the sun slinking in the window. I should put up curtains.
Your head hit the ceiling fan, even with my mattress on the floor. Your dead grinning made me squirm. I was dressed all in black, but mourning fabric stops no sin. Clothes mean nothing to a ghost.
My hands shook as I held you. The air gained weight and lay upon me. A ghost is more tender than a dream. Your fingertips were cold on my neck, and space would bend and break. You filled the room. You filled my heart. You were the size of a bead of sweat. The pounding in your chest was the sound of the highway. A bird down the street was your breath. Your eyes, your eyes. A glass of water shaking on the sill.
I will not call your name into the day. Your name is dead, it died with you. I will bite the lip of memory, and some little piece of you will live in me.
the bird in my throat has been pinching, all beak and flashing eyes and wet, wet regret. my limbs are shattering on the windowsill. my fingernails are yellow, my feet are cold. this shaking of my body will not cease.
the bird rests on my back, composed. it snakes through my collarbone.
there has not yet been a language that could ask it to go.
I am sailing on a floe of ice. I am unhinging my jaw. the black of my eyes is the black of the ice. I fall apart. Make me.
The feeling of panic like ice in a glass. Spinning slow, and fast, and not at all. A clinking in my shoulder blades. The bird laughs. A sick laugh, hacking.
Fear is parting my lips with its tongue. Fear pours its words into my mouth, and they are thick and cloudy, specked with pieces of the hive.
Hope, the sediment at the end of the beer. The aching wood of the barrel’s bottom. The bird pecks but does not draw blood– that is a task for others.
Pale French wrists are mirrored in scratches and I feel a fool. My hands shake. This mania will not cease. The night is full and long and overrun with corpses. The bodies of time, a moment’s decay. All the earth existing at once in a screeching hum. I am too full of memory; bring me a sponge.
In case you’re curious about the performance work I do, click the link to sign up for my mailing list. I’ll be sending out something maybe once a month with an event schedule and project updates.
A woman takes off her sunglasses, to order her iced coffee, to read a magazine, to step down into the darkness of a ship’s cabin, and she looks suddenly old. She is suddenly human and fallible and falling apart. In line behind her, across from her in the waiting room, one hand on the cabin’s ladder, I am entranced. I am terrified, I am suddenly sad. They are so careful, the women. Their mouths are pursed and red and trembling with life. Their hair is full and trimmed and shining. Their hands only shake when they are alone. But look into a woman’s eyes and she is infinite, older than you thought, older than she is. What am I saying then? That a woman holds her youth in her mouth and her pain in her eyes? I make no claim to knowing something of women. They have broken my heart too. Nearly as much as I have broken my own. In each scene it is not the women becoming more and more the same– no, the constant here is me. A small young woman with dark, staring eyes. Eyes in a youthful face, but even now I see the workings of time. The surprise that catches me at the reveal of older features is a surprise at myself. I, too, one day will be old. I imagine my face will look a great deal like my mother’s. There’s the fear of death, of course, both the fear of getting old and the fear of not getting old. My hands will shake. My hair is turning white. Cells inside this body slowly ticking down the days, cells to be discarded. I intend to live forever, but it is perhaps good to be reminded.