The Poster

Describing this play to someone else has been almost impossible.  Hopefully, now I can just say, "Look at the poster."

We'll be doing the reading with the students on Wednesday, and then a reading with adults on Sat, June 20, 7pm at Bristol Yoga in lovely little Bristol,  VT.

Mask-Making, Part 1

Now we're getting to the good part!

After months of discussion and research, we're finally at the point in our work on Long Now that we can stop talking, and start doing things.  We've got a basic storyline down, so I'm cranking on the script, and when the students come over, we're making masks, puppets, chocolate cake, and a huge mess.

Each time they come over, we do a reading of my latest writing, and I get to hear what sounds good, what sounds clunky, and what should never again see the light of day.  It always astonishes me how something that came out brilliant reads like dried-out old dodo doo.

Fortunately, I've been reading Bird By Bird - one of my favorite books on writing by the marvelous (as I call her) St. Anne of LaMott.  And she reminds me that the whole point of a first draft is to mess all over the place, so that you can weed and winnow and cull and mull, and eventually find the key to the story which can be cultivated and re-written.  The first draft is for nobody but your own dang self, and is not to be read by anyone - except perhaps by a wonderful group of very forgiving high school students.

We're also making masks using the old-fashioned vaseline-and-plaster method, which is fun, because having someone smear vaseline all over your face can be both exceedingly pleasurable, and utterly gross.

Note the plastic Fiona has added to protect Kristen's hair in lieu of smearing vaseline all over it.  We discovered that's the only spot where the wet plaster doesn't dry quickly.

Fortunately, they'd just returned from several days of camping, nobody was in danger of ruining any carefully constructed hairdos, and the vaseline was, proportionately, far less disgusting than it might have been had they taken a shower in the last couple days.

The plan is for Fiona and Kristen to take the mask to their high school's art room, and turn it into the face of White Buffalo Woman, a Native American Creator God who has ended up as a character in the show.

WBW will ultimately become a large puppet, along with Coyote, a bunch of bird spirits, a manatee and a giant, time-eating grasshopper.

We still haven't found the 2-minute Elevator Pitch for the show, but we know it's a mythic story about preventing the world from ending so that humanity a little more time to fix its mistakes.  

The Basic Idea

I'm applying for grants and fellowships to work on Long Now, and so of course, I'm having to describe what the piece is all about, and not just give a prolonged treatise on wacky clocks.

One of the residencies I'm applying for is at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.  Not just a science museum, it's a museum of "science, art, and human perception."  In other words, My Mothership!

In articulating Long Now for them, I'm starting to piece together a story and also learn how to talk about it.  Here's where I'm headed so far:

Add to the clock stew my deep intrigue with Native American trickster mythology, and an obsessive fascination with the super-volcano underneath Yellowstone National Park.  I have a fanciful vision of it as the cuckoo in the gigantic, geologic clock of North America.  Of course, if that cuckoo pops out its door, we’re all in some serious trouble.

I find myself wondering (in my more fantastical moments) if all of the giant imbalances in the world we’re experiencing right now – environmental, political, economic – might end up setting off the Yellowstone volcano clock a little prematurely.  Or what if it’s timed to go off in 2012 at the end of the Mayan Calendar?

So, I’ve started imagining this new piece as an epic, magical quest, undertaken by 3 very different women:

• An undersea explorer who finds a mysterious ancient Greek clockwork
• A social visionary designing a 10,000 year clock and who keeps experiencing some strange, supernatural setbacks
• A seismologist studying Yellowstone and whose seismographs are giving her very unusual results

These women come together to unravel the mysteries of their discoveries and eventually to prevent the volcanic cataclysm from happening.  On the course of their journey, they keep running into Trickster, who, as a Creature of Nature, is deeply out of balance herself, and can’t decide whether to help or hinder their progress.

I really hope I get to go to the Exploratorium.  It's just a phenomentally cool place.  AND, the Long Now Foundation is also in San Francisco, so I'd get to go groupie myself at them as well.

Meet The Team

For the first round of development on this new piece (working title: Long Now), I'm collaborating with a group of high school students from the Walden Project - a program created by the Willowell Foundation, an organization dedicated to integrating the sciences, arts, and humanities into place-based education.  

Note of Transparency: I'm on the Willowell Board.

The students are all encouraged to do internships with members of the community, and so these guys are working with me.

Fiona, Kristen, and Noah

They're all very smart, insightful, and extremely good writers.  I've never created a piece this way before, and we're all figuring it all out on the fly.  Hopefully they'll be patient with me.  As you can see, to get on their good side, I feed them lunch and large amounts of tea.

Right before Christmas, I told them about the Antikythera Mechanism - an ancient Greek clockwork found at the bottom of the Aegean which calculates astronomical cycles, and which is one of the inspirational sources for the show.

Fiona wrote a very funny poem in response:

Aegeus, they found your clock. I find it difficult to pity you, because you put it in the most obvious hiding spot. Did you really think they wouldn’t look in your sea?

Medea, they found your sword. It seems to have fallen off your chariot. The C.S.I.’s scurried in and took it away to be finger printed. As if they really had to venture a guess at who’s DNA was on it. As you often remind us, you are an unlucky woman.

Hera, they found your magic lipstick. Not that it’s a big deal, but now Sephora is mass producing it and all those mortal bitches will know your secret.

Zeus, we’re getting you a court date. Hope you can find your most serious toga. It’s a shame that you have to be humiliated but you shouldn’t have raped all those wood nymphs.  

Looking forward to seeing what else they come up with.

What's That Ticking Sound?

I'm fascinated by clocks these days.  In particular, clocks of purpose, clocks of meaning, clocks designed to do more than tell what we've come to call time.

It's an eternal question - not only the relativity of time, but why we perceive it, why we pass through it.  I remember a conversation years ago with a few actor/artist types wondering why it is that we age.  Why it all goes by so fast.  It seems a tragic bargain sometimes - this swift existence - a bird flying through an open room from one dark place to another.  Our awareness of it intermittent and fleeting.  We almost shut down our awareness because it's too painful to watch it all slip inexorably away.  But by shutting down, we lose what we most want to retain.  And yet there are those moments of infinite presence, wonder, luminousness that make the infinitely high price seem utterly worthwhile.

So I've been reading about unusual clocks:

The Clock of the Long Now: A work in development.  A mechanical clock designed to sit on a remote mountaintop in Nevada, run for 10,000 years, and renew our fast-paced, apocolyptically-oriented culture's lost sense of long term future.

The Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient device (circa 100BC) found at the bottom of the sea off the Greek island of Antikythera. Designed to calculate astronomical positions.  It took 100 years from the time it was found to when they figured out what it was because the figuring-out technology didn't exist until recently.

The Chronophage: (See above) Also known as the Corpus Clock is a mechanical clock created in honor of John Harrison, the man who invented the marine chronometer.  This was a fabulously accurate clock which allowed seafarers to calculate longitude, expanding the possibilities of safe long-distance sea travel (and the expansion of the British empire). Harrison invented something called the grasshopper escapement, a control device for the release of a clock's power.  The Corpus Clock takes this a step or 10 further by putting the escapement on the outside of the clock, rendered in the form of a giant, monstrous grasshopper which eats time.

Monstrance Clock: One mother of a clock. Circa 1570.  Showed the hours, the motions of 23

 stars, the position of the sun and moon in the zodiac, the astrological houses, and phase of the moon.  Also gave day of the year, saints' days, and had an alarm on top. 

I think the new piece is going to have something to do with all this.  I've been obsessing about the Clock of the Long Now for a while.  I love the idea that fundamentally they're trying to find a way to rescue the future for people who won't even be around in the future.

It's a form of extreme altruism, perhaps.  But if we cherish this world, we can't just cherish it for ourselves.  We have to be concerned that it will go on long after we're gone just because it's worthy of existence.  Life itself is worthy of continuance.

Is it, though?  Why do we think that?  What assumptions are we making?

What story are we trying to tell ourselves?

To be continued...