39 Microlectures, page 12
I cannot reconstruct these references with any precision, but I believe I read T13, the first Brecht issue; T43, on The Living Theatre (Beck and Malina) and Joseph Chaikin; and T62, on The Living Theatre and Richard Foreman, as well as the famous Happenings issue from 1965, which has since been reprinted as Happenings and Other Acts, edited by Mariellen R. Sandford. The Tulane Drama Review became The Drama Review, which MIT Press Journals now publishes.
❖
The film society screened Werner Herzog’s Every Man for Himself and God Against All. Kaspar Hauser has been stabbed. With blood spreading on the front of his shirt, he walks quickly through a garden, his upper body stiff and leaning back, a young boy leading him by the hand.
Werner Herzog, Every Man for Himself and God Against All – The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, film, 1974.
I performed a version of this movement while wearing the bloodshirt (a white shirt stained with stage blood) near the end of the Goat Island performance How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies. The creation of this performance began with a research trip to the Croagh Patrick pilgrimage in County Mayo, Ireland, images of which appear briefly in a vision scene near the end of Herzog’s film.
❖
My distracting embarrassment, one might say, moved to center stage.
Occasionally there’d be lines I found embarrassing, that seemed especially juvenile, and I’d cut them. But when we went into rehearsals I’d miss them. I’d realize those lines were the strongest and most personal – and I had to face up to the fact that they did come from my most genuine instincts. So I would restore them and stage them as the absolute center of the scene.
Richard Foreman, ‘Foundations for a Theater,’ Unbalancing Acts — Foundations for a Theater, New York, Pantheon, 1992, p. 10.
❖
Consider the performance of the elevator.
The role the elevator plays in a building of such enormous scale and its revolutionary potential make it a very dangerous instrument for architects. It completely undermines, annihilates, and ridicules an enormous part of our architectural abilities. It ridicules our compositional instincts, annihilates our education, and undermines the doctrine that there must always be an architectural means to shape transitions. The great achievement of the elevator is its ability to mechanically establish connections within a building without any recourse to architecture. Where architecture, in order to make connections, has to go through incredibly complicated gestures, the elevator simply ridicules, bypassing all knowledge, and establishing connections mechanically.
Rem Koolhaas, ‘Lecture 1/21/91’, Conversations with Students, New York, Princeton, 1996, pp. 16–17.
❖
I found a record: Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra …
Béla Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra, written for the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in memory of Mrs Natalie Koussevitzky, first performance, Boston, 1 December 1944, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky conducting, 1943.
❖
… played by the Israel Philharmonic, conducted by Zubin Mehta …
Béla Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Zubin Mehta conducting, London and New York, Decca Records, 1976.
❖
… in a brown record jacket with a reproduction of a painting by Paul Klee called The Open Book.
Paul Klee, The Open Book, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1930.
❖
What man has inflicted on man, in very recent times – the sum and potential of human behavior – presses on the brain with a new kind of darkness.
We cannot pretend that atrocity, in the words of George Steiner, “is irrelevant to the responsible life of the imagination. What man has inflicted on man, in very recent times, has affected the writer’s primary material – the sum and potential of human behavior – and it presses on the brain with a new darkness.”
John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero – Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1995, p. 18.
Treat attributes Steiner’s statement to Lawrence Langer, who quotes it in The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination.
❖
An open book is also night.
Marguerite Duras, ‘Writing’, Writing, trans. M. Polizzotti, Cambridge, Lumen, 1998, p. 14.
❖
2.2 Where there is wind
I extracted the India Today report, with minor editing, from Arundhati Roy’s quotation of it.
Arundhati Roy, ‘The End of Imagination’, The Cost of Living, New York, Random House, 1999.
❖
The extract of Oppenheimer’s famous speech derives from the NBC News archives, Washington. I transcribed and arranged this version from the sampling used by Jocelyn Pook in her composition ‘Oppenheimer’, from Deluge. See also microlecture 7.2.
❖
The difference of the world, in the twentieth century’s second half, has been, like Krishna’s many forms, a series of repetitions. The blast in the New Mexico desert marked the beginning of this endlessness.
I owe much of the analysis and tone of this passage to John Whittier Treat’s brilliant and thorough discussion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Writing Ground Zero.I have tried to acknowledge the extracted words and phrases as precisely as possible. The performative destruction of these two cities has remained the dominant mode for much of the US’s (non-covert) military engagement. Of the bombardments listed below, to my understanding only the war against Iraq employed nuclear weaponry (in the form of depleted uranium shells). Yet the ongoing threat and costs of nuclear proliferation (as discussed in Atomic Audit, edited by Stephen Schwartz) also motivated my emphasis in this passage.
The record of countries bombarded by the United States since the end of the Second World War includes the following: China 1945–46, 1950–53; Korea 1950–53; Guatamala 1954, 1960, 1967–69; Indonesia 1958; Cuba 1959–61; Congo 1964; Peru 1965;Vietnam 1961–73; Laos 1964–73; Cambodia 1969–70; Grenada 1983; Lebanon 1983, 1984; Libya 1986; El Salvador mid-1980s; Nicaragua mid-1980s; Panama 1989; Iraq 1991–99; Kuwait 1991; Bosnia 1994, 1995; Sudan 1998; Afghanistan 1998; Yugoslavia 1999. Countries bombed “by accident" in 1998 and 1999 include Pakistan, Albania, Macedonia, and Bulgaria.
William Blum, ‘U.S. Serial Bombing: The Grim Record’, CovertAction Quarterly, Number 67, Spring—Summer 1999.
❖
A crew member of the Enola Gay was able to say a few hours after dropping the bomb over Hiroshima, “I knew the Japs were in for it, but I felt no particular emotion about it."
John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero – Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1995, p. 17.
Treat quotes Col. William S. Parsons from By the Bomb’s Early Light, by Paul Boyer.
❖
Its first practical application, at 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, killed 300,000 people. It also killed the idea of the executioner.… Now we require nothing productive of our victims, but only the mathematical performance of their death – an instantaneous transformation from human being to useless residue – for audiences around the world.
There was no boot-clad executioner, rather only a brilliant flash and, for some, a deafeningly loud noise. The degradation of human life in Auschwitz was still a perverse proof of human existence, if only because Nazi sadism required fellow human beings to submit to its display of power. There was no such proof in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The intended audience was in Tokyo and Moscow, not the targets themselves. In the death camps individual human lives were rendered into pieces of common soap. Those lives, both as slave labor and then as material, made some ghastly reference to economic if not moral value. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, individual lives were rendered into useless residue. Nothing “productive” was ever required of the victims.
John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero – Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1995, p. 15.
❖
We have manufactured death with such perfection that life feels counterfeit. The result that the exact moment when the act of atrocity begins now eludes us, as does its end, or its limit.
It is easier to kill people either by means of gas chambers – or even more so, with high aerial atomic bombings – precisely because of this alienated relationship between victim and victimizer, indeed between any one victim and any other. The alienation commenced long ago, `perhaps as early as the guillotine (“that machine," as Foucault defines it, “for the production of rapid and discreet deaths”); but by August 1945, efficiency had increased exponentially along with the capacity for depersonalization.… This is the ultimate demoralized result of the process of dehumanization now accepted as the tacit policy of governments.
John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero — Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1995, p. 16.
The atomic bomb was for its time the product of the most advanced technology attained by the species. Science, its ethos long privileged in Western and Westernized cultures, and which had been expected to aid in, if not actually bring about, our liberation, became instead an abject lesson in how our discoveries can be turned against us. It is in this debilitating sense that Hiroshima and Nagasaki hibikusha feel themselves not simply the victims of war, but even victims of the contradictions of civilization itself.
John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero — Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1995, p. 10.
❖
The sum and potential of human behavior presses on the imagination with a new kind of darkness.
See George Steiner note above, in section 2.1.
❖
Like science and politics, our words have betrayed us: our languages, our silences, complicit in our violent and complex poverty.… No matter how responsible, irresponsible, how personal, wise, or innocent, how clear or unintelligible our creations, we feel they commune in devalued currencies and criminally suspect vocabularies.
No more words: language, its reliability already devalued by philosophy, has become almost criminally suspect in the wake of world wars. It has even collaborated in our collective victimhood. “Speaking always involves a treason,” noted Albert Camus, and Japanese survivors of Camus’ same war sometimes arrived at the same conclusion as they attempt to describe Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “What words can we now use,” mused writer Takenishi Hiroko in an essay on the potential of language after August 6th. “What words can we now use, and to what ends? Even: what are words?”
John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero – Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1995, p. 27.
❖
Now we think of knowledge as that from which we must escape in order to create, to find a place to call a beginning, and another place to call an end.
The experience of the atomic bomb, like a magnification of trauma in general, presents the survivor with an eternal present, an endlessness, the telling of which betrays not only the experience itself, but also those who did not survive.
Perhaps all memoirists of atrocious violence experience such feelings of radical estrangement, feelings that can so easily handicap writing; then again, perhaps for all of us writing has to be, as Barthes insisted, a “compromise between freedom and remembrance.”
John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero – Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1995, p. 42.
See also Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative & History, New York City, Johns Hopkins, 1996.
❖
No matter how much we write, we are left with the feeling there is more to say.
Hiroshima poet Tokuno Koichi expresses doubts over whether literature can communicate the reality of August 6, 1945: “No matter how much one writes, one is left with the feeling there is more to say.”
John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero – Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1995, p. 27.
❖
Consider the book … full of uselessness …
Merton quotes Ionesco as follows.
The Universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might perhaps be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and back-breaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots …
Thomas Merton, ‘Rain and the Rhinoceros’, Raids on the Unspeakable, New York, New Directions, 1966, p. 21.
See also microlecture 2.3.
❖
… and accidents …
The lapse occurs frequently at breakfast and the cup dropped and overturned on the table is its well-known consequence.
Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. P. Beitchman, New York, Semiotext(e), 1991, p. 9.
See also almost anything else written by this author.
❖
… the book which places our distractions and our embarrassments center stage …
See Richard Foreman note above, in section 2.1.
❖
… unfolds them like an artichoke, allows us to escape ourselves …
Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has nolanguage …
Italo Calvino, ‘Multiplicity’, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Cambridge MA, Harvard, 1988, p. 124.
❖
Consider the necessary book of elevators …
See Rem Koolhaas note above, in section 2.1.
❖
… the book of strange invitations …
Put it together. It’s a strange invitation.
Beck, ‘Jack-Ass’, Odelay, CD-24823, Los Angeles, Geffen, 1996.
❖
… about which we can say, “This book is not a book. It’s not a song. Nor a poem. Nor thoughts.”
This is not a book.It’s not a song.Nor a poem. Nor thoughts.
Marguerite Duras, ‘The Death of the Young British Pilot’, Writing, trans. M. Polizzotti, Cambridge, Lumen, 1998, p. 49.
❖
I considered a book that might result from following some simple instructions: 1) fill your book with seeds; 2) cut holes in it; 3) hang it where there is wind.
Cut a hole in a bag filled with seeds of any kind and place the bag where there is wind.
1961 Summer
Yoko Ono, ‘Painting for the Wind’, Instruction Paintings, New York, Weatherhill, 1995, p. 15.
❖ ❖ ❖
3. WHAT IS A FACT?
3.1 Thanksgiving-1: The impossible is a frog
We agreed that we would share a kind of impossible problem from which we would generate material individually, and then come together: a starting point.
Lin Hixson, ‘Soldier, Child, Tortured Man – The Making of a Performance’, Contact Quarterly, Summer 1990.
❖
We unanimously elected Lin Hixson director.
Lin had ten years of directing experience in Los Angeles before the formation of Goat Island.
Jacki Apple, ‘The Life and Times of Lin Hixson: The LA Years’, The Drama Review, Volume 35, Number 4 (T132), Winter 1991.
❖
NO to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations …
Yvonne Rainer, ‘Some Retrospective Notes on a Dance for 10 People and 12 Mattresses Called Parts of some Sextets, Performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, and Judson Memorial Church, New York, March, 1965’, postscript, in Mariellen Sandford (ed.) Happenings and Other Acts, New York, Routledge, 1995, p. 166.
❖
Now I am a frog far away from the shadow of an idea.
Tatsumi Hijikata quoted by Mark Holborn, ‘Tatsumi Hijikata and the Origins of Butoh’, Butoh – Dance of the Dark Soul, New York, Aperture, 1985, p. 13.
❖
Describe the last time you had sex.
This starting point led to the creation of We Got A Date. See Carol Becker, ‘Goat Island’s We Got A Date’, Zones of Contention, Albany, SUNY, 1996, and Stephen J. Bottoms, ‘Re-staging Roy: Citizen Cohn and the Search for Xanadu’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 48, No. 2, May 1996.
❖
Create an event of bliss/create an event of terror.
This starting point led to the creation of Can’t Take Johnny to the Funeral. See Carol Becker, ‘From Tantrums to Prayer: Goat Island’s Can’t Take Johnny to the Funeral’, Zones of Contention, Albany, SUNY, 1996.
❖
Why were you in pain in such a beautiful place?
This starting point led to the creation of It’s Shifting, Hank. See Goat Island, Hankbook – Process and Performance of It’s Shifting, Hank, Chicago, Goat Island, 1994.
❖
Create a shivering homage. Invent an arrival. How do you say goodbye?
These three starting points led to the creation of How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies. See Stephen J. Bottoms, ‘The Tangled Flora of Goat Island: Rhizome, Repetition, Reality’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 50, No. 4, December 1998, and Goat Island, ‘Illusiontext’, Performance Research, Vol. 1, No. 3, Autumn 1996.
