Process LXIII

Mary Todd Lincoln
(William H. Mumler, c. 1870)

As the semester winds to a close, I am confident in how well things have proceeded. I lost an entire week due to illness, and yet I am ahead of the homework game. I needed to complete at least 120 hours for my teaching internship, and I think I passed that finish line sometime, I don’t know. Today.

That was a difficult new work to bring to the finish line. I had a big, long cry in the shower after it was completed. That was a surprise. I haven’t cried like that in years. Not for two years. I was alone then, too.

As the semester winds down, I become wistful about online education. I have really enjoyed my illness narrative class; we have been covering a wide variety of often very affecting material. And in spite of our Zoom assemblage, I have become attached to this collection of students. They are all unique, compassionate, quirky, shepherded by our wonderful professor. I’ve loved this class, even though we have been attending from our personal spaces.

Then again, my personal space is a couch in front of a fire during the chilly Ohio months. Would I prefer traveling a half hour to get to a cinder block room downtown. I imagine not.

I will graduate in a year, and yet we are almost through. No classes this summer, fall quarter, next spring is all about the thesis. What will be my motivation to create, when there are no assignments with deadlines? Two plays a year, for two years. It’s a big deal.

And my brain, the reading, how will I keep up? When someone chucks a book at you and says read it, then write about it, then we’re gonna talk about it, that’s amazing. You make associations across narratives, connections between classes, and over the years.

Yesterday, reading Out of Nowhere Into Nothing by Caryl Pagel, I learned about William Mumler, so-called spirit photographer. He let people believe that his double exposed images revealed the ghosts who accompany us, watch over us, and comfort us. It’s bogus, of course, but it feeds the imagination. Tuesday night I had a dream that I was visited by the ghosts of my parents; they were dead, in my dream, I knew that. These were their spirits. It was a revelation. It was sad, it was also an adventure.

(Later she quotes Roy Scranton’s book Learning To Die in the Anthropocene, which was assigned to me in a different class this semester, another example of my current educational experience answering back to itself. Are there really so few books? Is the world smaller than we believe it is?)

I need to write about ghosts. Like, literally, that’s the next thing I need to do, write a few scenes with ghosts in them.

See also: Lincoln In the Bardo (book)

"Dog Act" at convergence-continuum

Denise Astorino in "Dog Act"
(convergence-continuum, 2022)

There is something about the apocalypse. I can’t watch the gruesome fantasy of a horror film, but there is something about certain tales of life post-civilization that I find thrilling, and in a way, comforting. Within any post-apocalyptic narrative is the supposition that humanity will endure. It may be painful, terrifying, and unspeakably difficult. But at least there is hope.

This week we were assigned Learning To Die in the Anthropocene (Reflections on the End of Civilization) by Roy Scranton. This book about the calamitous effects of global climate change offers no hope at all, at least not for humanity. That it is a rumination on the possibility of acceptance, that is the best it can offer.

Last night, my son and I went to see Dog Act by Liz Duffy Adams and directed by David L. Munnell at convergence-continuum. It’s about a small cohort of survivors in a future when the seasons can abruptly change from winter to summer in a snap. Our protagonists are a charming duo of scavenging vaudevillians who can sing and act, and speak in a rapid-fire patois of contemporary turns of phrases which have mutated far beyond their original meaning.

One of the more enjoyable aspects of this production is that the players (within the play) are actually talented, and that their brief performances (with the larger performance) are entertaining, amusing, and even affecting. Evidence of the lasting value and significance of live performance.

"Mister Burns, A Post-Electric Play"
(Cleveland Public Theatre, 2016)

This was bizarrely not the case in the HBO miniseries adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven. I am a fan of the book, and I really enjoyed the program (especially Himesh Patel as Jeevan Chaudhary, whose character is radically changed from the book into the character with the most affecting character arc) but I was dumbfounded by the actual performances of Shakespeare, which were unfortunately soporific.

Six years ago, Cleveland Public Theatre produced Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play by Anne Washburn and Michael Friedman, which is something of a lightning rod among my friends, several of whom do not like that play at all. I thought it was pretty incredible, the absurd conceit of the enduring mythos of certain animated television programs and the power of human storytelling, as folks produce stage adaptations of The Simpsons in a lawless and violent wasteland.

This year has been quite the existential hoot so far, viewing a stage production of Last Ship to Proxima Centauri (more on that), and reading Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich for class at the same time Russian troops have been using this most radioactive place on earth as a staging area for the invasion of nearby Kyiv, Ukraine, digging up radioactive material and presumably carrying it with them in their bones.

"Dog Act" by Liz Duffy Adams continues at convergence-continuum through April 16, 2022.