Re: [-empyre-] Introducing Erik Ehn (from Erik Ehn))
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- [picking up from yesterday... Forcing a chaos to force a telos-precipitate -] This power survives as long as light remains in anticipation, and the public is controlled by anticipation. This is advertising as an end in itself ? all trailers, no movie. * Terror can be an outcome of spiritual experience? mad to have the experience again, betrayed by the personal and the practical. Building the dark. Stitching death. Making a Frankenstein society not for the sake of the society, but for the sake of the wonderful mistake of it ? the disaster we will pursue by means of our technologies, blessed (in our minds) by prior experiences of grace. Building the dark, building in the dark, engaging in the economies of frustration ? these our tides. Crusting our eyes shut with cravings, and suffocating us with an induced fear of breathing. * But grace is not experience, finally. To know, we are known. We happen in the world as an electricity through its systems: the brains of trees, the insulin of temperature. And the world happens through us as electricity in our bodies; building patterns in us that habituate us to readiness. ?Habits of readiness? is grammar; we have grammar first, and then find language to fit it out with; experience finds synthesis in words. In reciprocity: we throw our words out to the source of words (this is a way of defining ?praise?); our language when perfect goes away- first to pure experience and then to pure readiness. Similarly the world speaks persons in the grammar of societies, not for the sake of persons or societies, but so that the world may break apart to praise. In alternative to this scary prospect (where fear = a sense of punctured control without repair) we stop at our words; we don?t move them, we tether them, hold our creations close, our temporary mnemonics, our shorthand (all language is shorthand); adore our words, and make them portable in the form of slogans. Porting slogans becomes our mission ? the definition of our citizenship; our hands are always occupied with them, we have no other function than to carry advertising. In terms of scripts: we are writing into the ads for our writing. Our ironies and glibness suggest what kind of art we would make if we felt like it, but we don?t feel like it, because something hates me or has left me and my fear produces a serum of anger that serves a biological need to defend against feeling. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Introducing Erik Ehn
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I'd like to introduce Erik Ehn, whose plays are often concerned with issues of genocide and torture (he travels regularly to Rwanda and other troubled locations), and is head of theater at Brown University. I've asked him and the other guests to post a short bio and then anything in relation to the topic. Thank you greatly, and thanks Erik for agreeing to participate. - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Introducing Erik Ehn
--empyre- soft-skinned space--[ee = a playwright in r.i.; director: writing for performance, brown u.] St. Hesychios talks about a pathway of contemplation that moves from torch, to moon, to sun. [I get this from Martin Laird’s nice, small book: A Sunlit Absence.] We start towards enlightenment by bearing our own light forward – searching by every means we can manage; managing darkness. Then our eyes adjust or the clouds clear and the moon shines; we don’t need the torches – light shines on us. As we let more and more of our own species of control slip away, the sun comes, and we slip to union. The sun is in us and through us… ending with the threatened-but-withheld destruction of the self… we are fully present and fully empty, or surrendered… surrendered without consolation – we can’t own our own surrender. And it is difficult to tilt on the instant of this; ecstasy’s not generally durable. Then in falling back into the working world, we can tear down, in the fall, the absolute gift of near-annihilation and seize on simple annihilation – a doubt of or hate for the human form. We can also hang onto a retrogression – a lament over losing the impossible presence of the completely other; one can feel robbed. Fascism (and other totalitarian ways of winning) are sentimental returns to a lost past, a past we’ve somehow been cheated of, or a past that was stolen… this, despite the fact that the past can’t be “lost” – something isn’t the past until it passes out of our hands. This isn’t cheating, it’s just how time does business; the past is where it is; it isn’t ours. All we can sustain are our framings of it – and the frames are always about our present state of mind – efforts to tilt or twist us into positions suitable to receive an anticipated future (a best-guess). After the blessed kenosis of contemplation, one sometimes suffers nihilism and bitterness. This leads to entrepreneurship, which leads to advertising. Unhappy in the debris of contemplations tear-down, we can indulge nostalgia for making and desperation – for that time when, in the darkness, we knew that what we needed was a torch, and we knew how to make one. To gratify that nostalgia, we need to ensure darkness. Our bitterness is helpful here. We announce the crisis in ourselves following a leap into the sun, as a crisis in the sun; the ruins of our temporality and preferences are named as ruins of meaning and purpose, sliding towards a vowed belief in the ruin of dynamic stillness or generative paradox. At the source of being – only the crash of inertia, an imitation of a broken person. Then, with all declared dark, power belongs to those who insist on their facility as technocrats of light. On Monday, November 3, 2014 12:08 PM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I'd like to introduce Erik Ehn, whose plays are often concerned with issues of genocide and torture (he travels regularly to Rwanda and other troubled locations), and is head of theater at Brown University. I've asked him and the other guests to post a short bio and then anything in relation to the topic. Thank you greatly, and thanks Erik for agreeing to participate. - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Introducing Erik Ehn
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Mon, 3 Nov 2014, Erik Ehn wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- (for some reason, I can't quote directly here) The technocrats of light, I keep thinking of scorched, of scorching, of the annihilation of language, body, history, past reduced to a telling and invention by others. The past was never the present, never translates; what I remember for example of the Vietnam era is just that - quotations. All the way back, Sartre in Imagination described the image as imaginary in both senses, that it's a presence/construct. But that requires someone to do the constructing. I think of Barrett's post as well - if there are images that literally block or destroy by their vehemence - or better yet, experiences that produce post traumatic stress syndrome where, among other things, the mind keeps tunneling inescapably around the same moments of anguish - what then? (What if contemplation is impossible?) - Alana ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
