Here’s the thing about standing in the Pacific at dawn, reciting words that haven’t been heard in their original context for two-and-a-half goddamn millennia: you’re probably insane. Or maybe that’s the only sane response to a world that’s forgotten how to have actual experiences that aren’t mediated through a screen or commodified into bite-sized chunks of digestible content.
April 24th, 2015. 6:25 in the morning. Año Nuevo. The fog’s doing its thing, that coastal opacity that makes you question whether you’re still tethered to anything resembling consensus reality. Somewhere behind it, the Santa Cruz Mountains are catching some light. Fifty-six degrees. Cold enough to remind you that you have a body, that you’re not just a brain in a jar scrolling through someone else’s curated life.
I’m standing in the surf performing Daughters of The Sun. Aeschylus. A fragment. The story goes like this: Phaëthon, in a spectacular act of cosmic hubris, tries to drive his father’s chariot across the sky. The sun’s chariot. And of course he fails, spectacularly, fatally. His sisters, consumed by grief, transform into poplar trees by the River Eridanus (we call it the Po now, because we’ve made everything smaller and more manageable). Every year they weep. Not water. Amber. Electrum. The Greeks called the sun “Elector,” the Shining One, and these trees weep fossilized light.
Pliny wrote about it. So did Philoxenus, Euripides, Nicander, Satyrus. And Aeschylus got there first, probably, with this play that’s now just smoke and echoes.
Thirty seconds. Maybe less. Maybe more. Who’s counting when you’re screaming ancient Greek at the ocean about sisters who turned into trees that cry tears of petrified sunlight?
The audience: three humans who either got it or thought I’d finally cracked. And forty elephant seals a football field away, massive and indifferent and perfect in their complete lack of concern about the existential crisis of Western civilization.
This is IOTA, a project that’s either monumentally important or completely pointless, and honestly, that’s kind of the point. Taking every surviving fragment from the lost plays of the big three (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) and performing them. Not in some black box theater with grants and wine receptions. In the world. In the weather. In places that don’t give a shit if you live or die, let alone whether you remember your lines.
What’s beautiful and terrible about this story is that grief becomes permanent. The sisters don’t get over it. They don’t move through the stages and come out healed and whole on the other side. They become something else entirely. Trees that weep amber. Forever. That’s not a metaphor for processing loss. That’s transformation as a response to unbearable pain. You don’t stay human when the grief is that big. You become something that can hold it.
So you take those words and you give them back to the elements. You stand there in the cold Pacific with the seals as witnesses, and you make your ridiculous, necessary gesture against the void. You perform for thirty seconds because that’s all the material you’ve got, and because sometimes thirty seconds of pure commitment to something beautiful and broken is worth more than a lifetime of carefully hedged bets and safety.
The fog doesn’t care. The seals sure as shit don’t care. The ocean will be here long after every play ever written has turned to dust, long after the last poplar tree stops weeping. Probably full of plastic and human waste, but it’ll still be here. But for those thirty seconds, something that was lost exists again. A story about hubris and grief and sisters who loved so hard they turned into trees. Imperfectly. Incompletely. Beautifully.
The Fragments…
Rhipae, the setting-place
of our father the Sun.
Where at my father’s setting is the cup fashioned by Hephaestus,
in which he crosses the wide, swelling waters of Ocean, asleep,
escaping the darkness of holy Night with black horses.
Zeus is the aether, Zeus is earth, Zeus is heaven—yes,
Zeus is everything, and whatever there may be beyond that.
And the women of Adria
shall have this manner of lamentation.
It stirred up in you
a flow more abundant than a fountain.
The Location…
The Quiroste Ohlone were here first. That’s not romanticism. That’s just fact. They knew this coastline, knew how to live with it, knew things we’ll never know because we made damn sure to erase most of it.
January 3rd, 1603. Sebastian Vizcaino sails past. Father Antonio de la Ascensión, doing double duty as diarist and chaplain, looks at this jutting piece of California and names it Punta de Año Nuevo. New Year’s Point. Because they’d just survived another year and here was land and why not pin your hope for survival onto geography.
Then comes the Spanish Portolà expedition, 1769 to 1770, the first Europeans to walk this ground instead of just sailing past it. November 19th, my birthday, they camp at Año Nuevo Creek. Franciscan missionary Juan Crespi writes it down: “We…halted on a steep rock, in sight of the point which we judged to be Año Nuevo, on the bank of an arroyo which empties into the sea.” Clean, simple, the kind of writing that happens when you’re tired and cold and just recording what is.
1791. Mission Santa Cruz gets founded. And here’s where the story gets ugly, because it always does. The Quiroste population collapses. Not because of warfare. Because of diseases. Smallpox. Measles. All the invisible killers the Spanish brought with them like baggage they didn’t know they were carrying. You can’t fight what you can’t see. Your immune system doesn’t have a file folder for European pathogens. So you die.
Mid-nineteenth century: development. The island. Agriculture. We’re good at that. Taking places and making them useful, productive, profitable.
And the elephant seals. There used to be massive populations here. Huge, ancient, magnificent animals doing what they’d been doing for millennia. Then hunters showed up and did what humans do when we see something abundant and vulnerable: we decimated it. Almost wiped them out entirely. Mid-twentieth century and we’d nearly erased them from existence.
Now they’re protected. The population’s rebounded. Forty of them watched me perform Aeschylus that morning, completely indifferent to the fact that we almost murdered their entire species. That’s not forgiveness. That’s just nature filling a vacuum when we finally stop destroying things long enough for life to come back.
The same beach. The Quiroste knew it. Vizcaino named it. Crespi camped here. The seals nearly vanished from it. And now I’m standing in the surf screaming Greek tragedy at the fog.
History isn’t a straight line. It’s accumulation. Layer upon layer of human presence and human absence, of things lost and things that somehow survive.