I miss words now

I've been wrestling with this piece for a few months now, probably closer to a year, and I can't seem to progress, only write in circles.

In the meantime, I've been neglecting some other stories I wanted to work with, stories that use - gasp! - dialogue.

I feel that right now, my persistence is working against this piece. Perhaps I'm just not ready for this play yet, and I need time to work on other things first. Rather than force the play through (which results in the play feeling forced), I'm going to set it aside and come back to it later, when there's something I feel compelled to write with it. Then at least I'll be working with something real instead of something I squeezed from my brain out of sheer determination.

So don't be surprised if the next bit of writing is a bit different.

Beyond Religion 101

Over at Parabasis, Isaac posts Coherence, Theatre God. The gist of the post is summarized as follows:

Carroll, being both a novelist and a devout Catholic, sees the human aspect of theatre coming not from the liveness of the event but rather the coherence of the text, because in that coherence of moment to moment, meaning is created (or at least meaninglessness is denied).
. . . . . . . . . . .

For me, it strikes me as an acutely religious (or spiritual anyway) understand of the dramatic art.
. . . . . . . . . . .

To me, part of what is beautiful and ennobling both about being an atheist and about being an artist is that we get to create our own coherence and thus meaning.

I was tempted to reply in his comments about how his whole line of questioning is suspect and and just how fucking wrong he is about the meaning of faith and belief, as well as the difference between faith, belief, and dogma.

Then I thought better of it and decided to post my thoughts on my own blog.

I'm going to come clean about something so that people who have religious discussions with me can actually get somewhere. Here it is:

I am not interested in Religion 101 discussions. Does God exist? Is the Bible literally true? Is homosexuality a sin? Let me make it easy for everybody . . .

I. Don't. Care.

Those types of grade school-level ontological questions bore the fuck out of me. The discussions they produce always go in the same circles and never reveal anything new. And I'm fucking tired of talking about them.

Just like I'm not thrilled about making well-made plays, I'm not interested in talking about who believes what. I'm far more intrigued by the cutting edge of contemporary religious thought (particularly with how people experience and/or express God), and you don't get that when you're dealing with people whose religious education consists of what's spoon-fed to children. The religious avant-garde (and I don't mean New Age) approaches our experience of God in a way that's deep, subtle, and complex. This appeals to me far more than rebutting the gross misrepresentation of faith in public discourse.

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Religious-Secular Divide conference at The New School early in March. Why? Because I get to ask shit like this:

• To what extent do the intersections of religious and secular identities - for example, queer Black Jews or transgender Latina Catholics - play into or resist the compartmentalization of selfhood as lived through individual experience?
• What are some strategies for: developing new definitions for religious and secular that are nuanced, subtle, complex, and rooted in lived experience; taking the public discourse between religion and secularity away from academic and media strongholds and into other areas of public discourse (including but not limited to blogs and other social media); and bringing religious ideas and values into the public discourse for addressing secular issues facing people today?

(Side note: I have to gloat here. I fucking stumped the people on the panel - people with motherfucking PhDs in this shit. This is how I know I'm PhD material. Fuck a Master's.)

(Note to educated White folks: Read that last part a few times before you start talking down to me - about anything. Chances are that whatever comes out of my mouth goes way over your fucking head. Do me a favor and acknowledge that then let me explain myself better instead of assuming that I don't know how to fucking communicate.)

Back to Isaac's blog post.

In the comments, Tony asks a couple of really good questions:

In practical terms, does a religious writer necessarily have a overtly different type of coherence in a work than a non-religious writer?

Does having a different way of seeing how our world is created automatically equal a different way of creating a work?

I think that helps steer conversation in a better direction, but it doesn't go far enough for me - doesn't go far enough in addressing the implicit and problematic assumptions behind Isaac's post or far enough in opening the discussion to genuinely different points of view.

Let me address the implicit assumptions first.

I'll be fair and acknowledge that Isaac doesn't want to offend anyone and apologizes in advance for doing so. Fine. But to prevent future offense, I feel compelled to explain the source of the offense in my case.

I frankly think the way Isaac presents his post (particularly the part quoted above) is kind of a set-up. It presumes a lot about my reasons for calling myself a person of faith or the role religion plays in my life. It also presumes a lot about how I experience God, especially how it undermines the depth and complexity of that experience to one or two cliche variables. And from there, I'm forced to engage with the discussion on those limited grounds (limitations that don't necessarily apply to the people involved) or not engage at all. So, even without meaning to, the way he frames this discussion excludes and marginalizes the very people who could enrich it.

As far as opening the discussion to divergent points of view, it's simple: ask more genuinely open-ended questions - questions that overtly assume nothing or are at least open about the limitations of those assumptions.

So, rather than linking a religious response to theater as by necessity rooted in the search for a predetermined meaning or coherence, why not come out and ask us how religion interacts with our experience of the aliveness of theater?

That is a far more interesting question than whether aliveness or coherence is the predominant mode of a religious experience of theater.

And to answer the question I really want to answer, it's really difficult to describe in words. Like most things that are truly profound, it has to be experienced.

Still Black, still real

I know it's been a while.

I've honestly been swamped with work and resolving personal and business issues.

I'm still Black, though. Still real.

But I think I can handle it a little better for the time being.

Being Black, being real

I'm about to get real for a moment. So if seeing a Black woman express herself with passion and conviction rubs you the wrong way, I suggest you return to the delusional world you live in where people of color aren't supposed to feel anything about the way White people treat them. Not like you're a stranger there, anyway.

This post brings up a lot about what frustrates me about talking about Black identity and racism with well-meaning White people - that racism is about hate. It isn't. Racism is about power. I can deal with a bigot. I can't deal with an environment that undermines my humanity at every turn.

Even the way you frame this post kind of makes me squirm because it smacks of this attitude that "progressive" White people have that subtly - and not-so-subtly - places the onus of eradicating racism upon the shoulders of those oppressed by it. Whether White people choose to acknowledge it or not, they often place this sort of pressure on people of color to do all the heavy lifting. We have to educate you on the realities we live with everyday. We have to do so in a way that caters to your tastes, appeals to your sense of noblesse oblige, soothes or eradicates any guilt you may feel as a result, and still defer to you as the ultimate arbiter of all that is true and beautiful and good. We're supposed to display endless patience with your attempts to cling to your innocence, endless willingness to educate you even when you show yourselves to be willfully ignorant, endless gratitude that one so glorious as you would stoop so low as to want to treat with us as equally, and endless selflessness to transcend our own pain - to treat it as not real - to make it easier for you to unlearn how to oppress us. Apparently, we're not supposed to express the pain, or fear, or despair, or anger at how we are treated every moment of our waking lives outside the safe zones we carve out for ourselves.

All the while you still don't know the privilege you have to treat racism as an abstract concept, not a reality that people wrestle with every time they interact with you and the people who look like you. You have no idea what it's like to keep your armor on all the time lest those nearest and dearest to you - those who profess deep and abiding friendship that feels closer to family - may say or do something that cuts you to the quick because it says, even if in a whisper, that your thoughts, your feelings, your dreams, your ideas, your very existence, is at best less than theirs and at worst nothing at all. You have no idea how hard it is to trust you with anything important - that is, anything regarding your deepest self - because you don't know if you will treat it with the care and respect it deserves or if you will use it like a toy or disregard it altogether. You have no idea how it feels to have to smother your spirit - or what is left of it - to make yourself less threatening to those around you. You have no idea what it feels like to be exceptional and treated as mediocre. You have no idea how it feels to need to get angry to stave off despair, how it feels to have to bottle up all the hurt at seeing the injustices that the world tosses at you everyday because that hurts less than people telling you how to feel about it and respond to it.

Point of fact is: I'm tired. I'm tired of being expected to be exponentially more capable and virtuous than you simply to be viewed as average. I'm tired of having to be as non-violent as Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi (combined), as serene as Buddha, as forgiving as Jesus, as patient as Job, as compassionate as Mother Theresa and as wise as Solomon just to be seen as a typical human being.

And most of all: I'm tired of you treating me as though I exist for you and not for me.

Fairy tale gumbo

It just came to my attention that there is a real-world equivalent for the world I'm creating with my play: the Louisiana bayou. I have to admit that I do associate that environment with a certain magic. And there's the gumbo of influences to consider too: Voodoo, Yoruba, European fairy tales, and Japanese theater. If I think about it, it's pretty Creole. Even the environments I envision have a sort of swampyness to it. Tangled roots, overhanging branches, rich black earth, owls, outlines of strange creatures (a dog? a wolf?), shadows slinking through the water (an alligator? a water monster?), weird lights, and so on.