mattSPACE

Out of Context

The show happened. Tremble (also known as The Michael Rohd Project) was made, performed, and put to sleep. It unfolded three weeks, 16 meetings, perhaps one hundred or so hours. I wish I had been writing during the process. There were so many moments worth remembering for future reflection. What comes to mind now is a moment I was backstage, just about to run across for a transition. For some reason, in that moment, my context exploded. The stage, the darkened theater, the campus, the state, out and out and out, all of the contexts in which I exist ceded their boundaries to the larger context. I left the wing and entered the stage with the strange sense that my movement there was insignificant. My play, my preoccupations: nothing, nothing, nothing. Everything I have.

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The realization comes a week later: I’m 20. I was just nine. I keep having moments in which I say to myself, “so this is life. This is what it means to be alive.” They’re really not profound moments, just little observations. And I feel I can sit with life and be with it, intimidated still, but a little more relaxed. Though, my god, it is hard to say how I got here – from my backyard in Seaside to living in a studio in Chicago. And what has fueled me, really? Life is so relentless and beyond our control. But I want to own this and I want to make it good. It’s all I’ve got.
I miss the historical recognition that comes with being home – that validating gaze of people who are proud of you and have watched you become a person and helped you become a person. The other day, it struck me how sad it is that I’m not there to watch my brother change into a teenager; all the kids are growing up and off to who knows where. And maybe that goes for the parents also, just children themselves.

Thoughts from a walk on Campus

Last night I got out of rehearsal and it was raining. I walked home with the rain accompanying me through the streets where cars hummed with the rain sound and made fountains off the sides of the wheels. Late at night nothing goes on here. The town goes to sleep by eleven, Sunday through Thursday. I walked and thought, had beautiful thoughts, born from the serene, rainy atmosphere of Evanston at night. I watched my thoughts enter and leave my head. There was enough music to listen to out there, outside of my skull, to back my thoughts so I didn’t have to hum myself. I sing or imagine music, normally, almost involuntarily. I make music in my head. But this is so consuming that it disconnects me from the air, the streets, the night.
I left the theater and headed through the little park between the buildings on South Campus, where there are little hills in the path and trees that bend over onto the path. I saw the windows of, five stories up, College Hall, built in the 1880’s. I saw umbrellas and a boy near The Rock, a supposed gathering place, where people stay all night and protect what they’ve painted on the side of a tree. I walked down the narrow way to The Arch––all these places with utilitarian names, as if there is no other rock or arch that matters. What a small, self-centered world is a campus (1774, from L. campus “a field,” probably prop. “an expanse surrounded” [by woods, higher ground, etc.], from Proto-Indo-European *kampos “a corner, cove,” from base *kamp- “to bend” [cf. Lith. kampus "corner," Pol. kepa "island in a river"]. First used in college sense at Princeton.) A campus, an island in a river.
I passed a girl speaking loudly on her cell phone. I felt a strange sense of intimacy with her. I had never seen her, but was allowed, invited actually, to listen to her conversation momentarily, to hear the sound of her laugh.
Somewhere near the music building, where, even at eleven thirty p.m. loud piano and practice opera escapes, no, bursts out of the windows like an opera singer herself, fat, wide-mouthed, wearing a Viking headpiece, arms outstretched, I somehow (I wish I could remember) began thinking about happiness, fame, and the center of my self-creation. The few people who pass by the building at this time of day or any other, ignore the poor Viking sounds. The louder and more dissonant the music, the more mundane the passerby. “Oh that’s just The Viking, between The Park and The Arch.” Totally mundane.
My thought: If every culture has a center, an axis mundi, shouldn’t individuals also. What and where is the point of my fundamental qualities around which I construct myself? It dawned on me that this point is outside myself. Like the pilgrims in Turner’s and tourists in MacCannell’s conception of the search for authenticity, I am forced to live from a center which does not actually exist inside my life-space. Thus, much of my time is spent making that trip, back and forth, between what I am and the image of what  I should be.
This explains the latent desire for fame, the already disillusioning need to “change the world” and receive recognition for it.
Oh yes! I remember why I thought of this exterior center idea. A few moments before I had been thinking about the lousiness of my classes, the shortcomings of my professors. I thought about what a great professor I would make, impassioned, subtle, challenging, stimulating. But I wouldn’t want to work within the university system. I wouldn’t want to be confined to The Campus, talking about the current that surrounds us but never pushing myself or the students in, never teaching them to swim. My school will be radical, I thought. My school will be on raft in the river and the first lesson will be: how to abandon the raft and be a student of the river. So Siddhartha.
As I was thinking about these things a voice, a removed, biographical narration followed each of my ideas with a past tense description of them: a recounting of events that had not yet occurred. What is this voice? I became angry. Why are all my aspirations relegated to the past before that are realized in the first place? I wanted to lash out at this insidious voice. It is an opiate! It is a pacifier. It contaminates my aspirations, fluoridates my thought process. Why should my create a narrator like this?
And it is this question which brought me back to the exterior center idea. What if I no longer validate from the exterior in, but the inward out? What if I didn’t care about the frame some imagined dealer places on my life to put on display and sell at an opening? What if I carved a little niche in the universe and went there and discovered the Meaning alone? What if I gave up the pain of the constant need to reconcile the outer center with my self? Could I use the time I spent journeying from source to recipient to quench my thirst with my own blood? What if I stopped confirming all the time, with my words and glances “do you know what I mean?” What if this question was only something I asked myself? And how do I continue performing if I stop asking this question?

My dream last night

Last night I dreamt of Ms. Comstock, the vice principle of my elementary school. We argued until I said “fuck you.” Then we began to fight physically. Though I was myself, in my current physical form, Mrs. Comstock, who in real life is either dead or standing not more than 5 feet, was taller than me. And she had the same arms as me. We were of equal strength. The two of us grabbed each others’ arms and came to a physical stalemate. My past is not gone, but here, alive, embodied in me. It is easy to separate myself mentally from the person I was then, twelve years ago. Yet, when it comes down to it, that person is me, just 4000 days ago; 4000 risings and fallings of the sun in the sky. I was that precocious, vulnerable, curious, little boy so recently. I am still that boy.

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I am my own abolitionist. My mind locates the injustices of my being and strives to eliminate them. These are the injustices I do myself: the self-imposed servitude of my habits of being. I serve myself the poison I am trying to purge from my system.
I want to write about my habits of love. Love, love with women, love with men. I want to collect my observations of myself loving and organize them into a cohesive understanding. I wrote in a note book years ago when I hoped to be a writer and when I didn’t know why to write or why to write about love: “love is dizzy, spinning, blurred.” And now I think love is nothing but physics, so complex as to appear lawless, like the particles that escape black holes. It is clear why all lines bend from points to a point, but there is no way to know how a few trajectories are sent out again, into an ineffable situation, the rarest situation in the universe.

The Persistence of Memory

Today, I sat at the train station and watched birds land on the tracks. They stood right next to the danger sign, unharmed. All of a sudden I recalled a moment from fourth grade: I was sitting at a desk in Mrs. Clements’ class. My arm was raised and held up by the other. I was begging to be called on to answer my teacher’s question. “Why aren’t birds hurt when they sit on power lines?”
I don’t now remember the answer. But the specifics of the memory aren’t important. It’s the way my mind recalls this so quickly, as if it had occurred last week. This is fascinating. How fragile is my mind’s handle on temporal continuity? Do I really lose that which I don’t recall about last Monday and keep a few moments from eleven years ago?

Etymology of the word Jazz

Reading On the Road by Kerouac… thinking a lot about Jazz…

1909, American English, first recorded in lyrics of song “Uncle Josh in Society” (“One lady asked me if I danced the jazz …”), where it apparently refers to a style of ragtime dancing; as a type of music (originally to accompany the dance), attested from 1913. Probably ult. from Creole patois jass “strenuous activity,” especially “sexual intercourse” but also used of Congo dances, from jasm (1860) “energy, drive,” of African origin (cf. Mandingo jasi, Temne yas), also the source of slang jism.

The verb meaning “to speed or liven up” is from 1917; all that jazz “et cetera” first recorded 1939; Jazzercise is 1977, originally a proprietary name. Jazz Age first attested 1922 in writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, usually regarded as the years between the end of World War I (1918) and the Stock Market crash of 1929.

Characters in my Life

I have been laughing to myself a lot lately. I have been thinking about how much Jessica is a character in one of Milan Kundera’s books. I spoke with her for the first time in months this past Saturday. I have also spoken recently with Helen, A.J. and Patti. This leads me to think that I should create a list of people I know with short descriptions of each. I want to write and where better a place to begin than from the people I know? That is to say, where better to begin than with the cast of characters I have encountered in my life and might use to create people in stories. Last night Milan Kundera said (in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), “I calculate that two or three new fictional characters are baptized here on earth every second. That is why I am always hesitant about joining that vast crowd of John the Baptists. But what can I do?”
This is what I say also: “what can I do?” I have avoided writing on a consistent basis since the year I was fourteen. That was the year I made the subtle shift from an aspiring writer to an adolescent qualitative researcher. It was also the year a great influx of characters began entering my life. Who, as I wrote to Patti yesterday, are now the rock at the bottom of my kite line. In keeping a line from me to the ground of Ponte Vedra they permit me to fly up and catch the wind and sore.
Six formative years made many connections. I’ll begin this list today, but I may have to finish it some other day:

2000

Jessica Arco

Jessica Silas

Al Letson

Sarah Wetzel

Chris Johns

2001

Stephan Dare

A.J. Heekan

Melissa Vermy

Anthony Versis

2002

Shannon Chmelar

Nestor Gil

Didier Razon

Patti Gustafson

Lupe Echavarria

Richard Oulette

David Gonzales

Mariano de Blas Aladren

Mariano de Blas Ortega

Tamara Berbes

2003

Rose Marie Prins

Chuck Paulson

2004

Marcelo

Collin
Xena

Kathy McClane

Harry Grandwilliams

Marina Williams

Josh Rosenburg

Miriam Shwartz

Helen Yurchenco

Julia Graham

2005

Eugenia Semnamovij

Jamie Samowitz

Tim Murray

Laine Forman

Micah Stanek

Lauren Holstein

Creation and Perfection

It is often said that art imitates life. And indeed this is often the case. But when Aristotle wrote that phrase in his Poetics, he meant by it something much different from its meaning today. What he wrote in Ancient Greek, which has been poorly translated in English, is that “Art re-creates the creative principle of created things.” Art re-creates the creative principle of all that has been created. The artist, then, does not only mimic nature, but in doing so mimics God. When van Gogh painted landscapes in the South of France his brush made not a record of olive trees but of van Gogh’s own Godliness. The power is in the painter working, not the painter’s work. Yet, in those surreal, swirling scenes we sense beauty and find fascination and pleasure. And this is because, mixed in with the paint on the canvases is the connotation of creation, the residue of God on earth.
Jesus said to his disciples, “Be ye perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.” He is by no means a starting point in the genealogy of the artists. In the first century A.D. he was already a distant descendent of the first people to live those words. Artists have existed since humans have existed. And from the beginning of time what other class of people has, by definition, strived so tenaciously to obtain Godliness? The clergymen one could say. But the establishments, the doctrines, bring humans no closer to Godliness. It is the church which in the end imitates life. And artists who imitate God.
Today, God is dead. There is only life: a long, but brief series of profane moments. God created the world, but we no longer live in the world. We live in history, and history is not His story, but our story. Yet the story does not belong to us. We belong to the story. We have always belonged to the story we created. God is the name of the power to own the story. And we have written him out. We have surrendered our best metaphor for our own creativity. The artist is our second best. It is up to artists to save the world from the tyranny of a history run out of control.

Thinking about Progress

It is the insidious concept of progress which has enabled the life I live and enables me to write here that I hate the concept of progress. It is a poor concept on which to build a society, a poor mission, a poor process and yet it is The Process. Progress is the father of modernization, westernization, globalization, and other equally vague terms that push our lives on, forward, driving us like cattle towards utopia, even if utopia only exists on the other side of a slaughter house.. Progress pays us back with counterfeit change. It is a self-negating concept and subsequently an illusion. That’s what it comes down, an illusion we hold sacred, an illusion we vote for, work for, fuck for, learn for, kill for, die for. Time is the frontier of our historically self-conscious people. We are crusaders in time, marching our lives toward a Holy Land which cannot exist. Time is not land. Moments are not sites. Individual lives have a destination, death. But history does not. Hegel’s End of History will not, for it cannot, be.
A brief disaggregation of the word progress: most purely, so to speak, progress means simply “to move forward.” This is the definition of the Latin root of progress, progredi, or progressus. In order to identify movement that is forward, the point of origin or the current position of the moving entity must be situated in relation to its determined end point. If a clear and predictable trajectory is not set, then there must at least be a clear end-point to which the moving entity will certainly reach if it progresses so far. The word is neutral in this sense.
Progress exists in the ethos of contemporary America at every facet and joint. There is economic, militaristic, democratic, technological, educational, health-related, progress, progress, progress. Progress is one of the sacred forces that gives the U.S. life. If the economy does not grow, if the scores do not get higher, if the technology does not become faster and more efficient, if the medicine does not get better, if the people do not get richer, what is America? The United States, my nation among nations, is a nation of progress. This is one of those few instances in which it would be “un-American” to disagree with an assertion about the nature of this country.
Yet the notion of progress, at its root, necessitates an endpoint. In the American usage, I would say the endpoint of progress is utopia: all the people have access to food, education, spare time, health care, and perhaps even political influence. Now here is a point at which there could be much disagreement. The aforementioned qualities are my simple vision for utopia. But who’s utopia are we moving towards? Utopia is relative. Utopia cannot exist. Communism, among other utopian projects, failed. Revolutions brought quick progress to the an endpoint that turned out to be, not utopia, but various forms of totalitarianism. Capitalism brings more gradual – though perhaps just as maniacal – change. However, it will never will its own end, nor universal access to its benefits. Growth cannot stop. Poor nations (periphery states) must exist in order for their to be first world nations (core states). And the endpoint – utopia – is not only a farce, but also an end to the movement which drives us un the first place – progress. The logic is round: progress makes us what we are, it implies an endpoint, which implies an end to progress, which implies an end to us, or at least our society, but progress is the root of society and is hailed as its fuel toward improvement not abandonment.
What I am trying to say is that the so called project of progress is contrary to the motivations of the political “sovereigns” that claim to drive and be driven by it. My hope: let’s abandon progress.