Today I am bringing to you Part 2 of the STORIES for CHILDWOMAN, when she goes to UNI-VERSITY, a place quite different from the UNI VERSE, the one she gave us, last week.
The text, the words in the play, are all the same as they were in the turn of the millennium. The photos and the “digital/analog” links are from now… an intriguing and enticing exercise in learning about how to love life…(?) Yes, how to combine word photo image and feeling. forgive all. resurrect & still in between, allow a measure of the unending beat of fun… It does not fit into my known forms, so, for a beat of a heart, or two…
Recapitulating, the MUSIC throughout the performance includes live piano playing Eric Satie, Keith Jarrett, Darius Milhaud, Ernesto Nazareth, Brazilian waltzes, Chopin…and new music that may inspire the actors in the play.
Music determines the tensions. When Childwoman falls in wonder. When she gets a first voice, she sings a capella. There is a capella "noise", then there is singing. Eventually, she is joined by a chorus and by dance. Music, dance and visual textures permeate all.
Here, in Part 2, she meets characters like the Divorced Thoughts, Adolpho-the Lecher, the Pavlonian Whore, the Isms, the Antagonists and the Antonyms.
UNI-VERSITY
Childwoman goes to uni-versity
Uni-versity, the place to learn about single thoughts. The place where you can also learn much about some of the best divorced thoughts. From exile in uni-versity she learns about concepts mostly, her heart is placed on a platter and taken to the nearest lab for deep freeze. Later, she is told, upon payment of a modest fee or a very large sum, depending upon her yearnings, she could retrieve her feelings and unfreeze them.
For the continuing length of her tenure there, she remains a foreign student, a foreign teacher, instructor, a foreign under and upper graduate. Foreign remains her scarlet letter, written in those days already with indelible ink. But they all know! A turn of phrase, not even that, just choices of themes in conversation.
She has no experience with their ways, no words to speak with around them. She is a musician alone with her craft of being and no accompaniment, none. There is no guitar to her a capella, there is no praise for her music or her math. This is a foreign land. She had never paid attention to earlier lessons and had not learned to be a casual trivial tourist. So, this remains a foreign land.
There were those who actually probed and poked the skin of her forearm in the cafeteria, to find out how much black there was underneath all that tan, white skin? Coming from the depths of South America. She heard "Coming from where, Brazil? Oh, I heard spiders and snakes yes, they are a real problem! Buenos Aires? Is it not the capital?"
It was not so long ago. She still hears "You're not black? Oh, then, you're German? And White and one of us? A Liberal, a Democrat? Not one of those are you? A spy? A mole?"
"It is not safe in your country" "Your people are about fifty years behind us."
She asked herself "The burning melting pot turned into a wilting stale salad bowl?"
Her behavior to the inquiries was never quite appropriate. Her feelings even less.
"You demand too much", she heard that a lot, "You need too much, you are not pro-active enough!" What did they mean by that one, today still she wonders…"
When she was happier, she was told, they would talk to her again. Include her in their magic circles of family and of nurture. "Call me sometime and we will do dinner. Call me sometime and we will raise your consciousness. Call me sometime and we will definitely have some fun. Call me sometime, when you have decided to give up being different."
At the time, all she wanted and needed was a clear explanation as to the appropriateness for the lack of sidewalks and their side kicks, the street curbs.
This important intersecting segment where people meet and walk and promenade, the sidewalk. And the curb, where they sit and talk, where all bullshit and bragging is exchanged, all serious stories are told.
"Why these people live without sidewalks?" she wondered, the crucial question that remained inside her heart.
Culturally in exile, she learned that, in Uni-versity, the self is divorced from the dirt and the dust it comes from. Yet, when challenged, the self, like the Pope, will kiss the abstract dirt of birth. The pacifist self will take up weapons and fight aliens to defend the dirt of peace. Be adamant and bear arms for it. Strange concepts she had to learn!
She learned for instance, the divorced concept of natural enemies. While antagonists do not occupy the same space, competitors do. Competitors work toward occupation of the same space. Antagonists, like antonyms, just play!
(DANCERS RECITE AND PLAY WITH ANTAGONISTS, ANTONYMS AND COMPETITORS)
Words now play with my antonyms.
Words fall in love all over themselves, they fall in lust.
Juicy and with appropriate crazy shadows
built on to every single syllabic connotation.
They wanna marry, these single words,
they lust,
they wanna mate.
(My apology for not deleting the music below. I just could not find a way to do it. I am not 100% with Spotify but I do listen to it. Maria Bethania, played softly, might be an excellent way to continue reading this post…)
She heard about the concept that accepts duality and stops short of integrating duality back into the corpus callosus, this lump in between that qualifies humanity?
She learned about inertia, the single lonely reactionary dual force that pushes back and tries to occupy the space occupied by the competitive force that caused inertia to start being inertia in the first place! What a lovely notion in a motion!
She remembered her friend from early days in junior high school, when they would travel inside the city busses, going home from school. The inevitable crazy bus driver would stop short of collision at every stop.
And she and her friend would yell, mind you, this is a city bus jammed full with people,
they would yell:
"Ineeeertia!!"
(MIME OF ADOLPHO, THE LECHER AND THE GIRLS)
In those days, they were studying Physics under old Professor Adolpho, the Lecher. Good grades were to be had by all girls who lifted their skirts and showed their legs to him. Such innocence!
She remembers that seedy disgusting old man. All he wanted was to see the legs of the young girls, nothing more! What a great way to get good grades! Childwoman though, got good grades on her own hard male work and good merits. She never lifted her female skirt for profit.
She learns the notion that predators destroy, that the jungle needs taming, that weeds need pulling. She learns that war is a necessary condition, defense and birth natural extensions of some of our limbs.
She is told childbirth is not necessarily painful, death a certainty, pain to be avoided by any means feasible, daylight good and night not, but strangely mysterious.
From Uni-versity she brings back Cartesian positivism, Comteian logic, Darwinian evolutions and developments and Newtonian apple pie certainty, with little splashes of misunderstood quantum physics picked up from Asian paperbacks and talk shows, where top dog artists had converted to Buddhism or some of the other isms.
(THE DANCE OF ISMS FOLLOWED BY THE PAVLOVIAN WHORE DANCE)
She learns to take the isms of the world
with a lot of salt,
a bit of bitter pepper
and lots of bittersweet.
She learns about the Pavlovian Whore and how
in stage of fright, she has lived for most of her life.
With wings of bird made of something akin to wood,
a some such solid in the fur indefatigable animal of cat
trapped in the basements of her soul,
she cannot fly, the Pavlovian Whore,
she cannot fly.
And I have trained her, thought to have tamed her,
yet still she refuses to perform.
She learns disciplines and knowledges intrinsic to uni-versity self.
She is told assertion is necessary for success of self, deception necessary to hide the self in veils, protect the saintity of the family and move ahead.
The notion of movement permeates all. Life is a river. We are a ride.
Lemmings moving moving deficiently ill adapted, in syndromes of massive proportions. Can't stay still babe, must go must learn, must know, must hear, must touch, must feel. Must most of all be sensible and sense. Must have fun.
Why don’t you come along, why so dark, why so quiet, why do you not want?
She instead wished to stop, nest in the centrifugal place of heart.
Quiet every thing around
and watch the swirl.
this is quite amazing