Three of us got together one October night and decided to fuck with Sophocles in a bathtub… spiritually, archaeologically, perversely. Rebecca Ormiston, Ryan Tacata, and I took one measly line from a dead Greek’s lost play and turned it into something called Cloud Talk for this outfit we hoped would be called Artist Weather TV, which sounds either brilliantly absurd or absurdly brilliant depending on how many shots you’ve had.
The fragment itself? “The oaths of a woman I write in water.” Seven words that survived whatever apocalypse claimed the rest of Sophocles Fragment #137. That’s it. That’s the transmission. Everything else, the context, the characters, the other 45 minutes of theatrical machinery, gone, baby, gone. Dust. Ash. The void.
Where the whole enterprise stops being some precious academic exercise and starts becoming something you can actually feel: We took that line about erasure and impermanence and staged it in Ryan’s bathroom, in his actual bathtub, with bubbles and clouds and water doing what water does, which is refusing to hold anything, refusing to remember, refusing to be anything but itself.
The location wasn’t the Getty Villa or some black box theatre space where you genuflect before Art with a capital A. It was a bathroom. A bathtub. The most democratic, vulnerable, human space imaginable. Where we’re all just flesh and steam and the things we wash away.
This is part of something bigger I’ve been working on called IOTA, a project resurrecting textual scraps from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, playwrights whose greatest hits we still read but whose deep cuts got lost in the cultural fire sale that history becomes. What Rebecca, Ryan, and I understand, what we’re enacting, is that those fragments aren’t dead things to be preserved in amber. They’re living provocations. They’re question marks without context, little bombs of meaning that go off differently depending on where you place them.
Put “the oaths of a woman I write in water” on a stage with proper lighting and dramatic pauses, it’s one thing. Put it in someone’s bathtub with bubbles and a camera and call it art? That’s something else entirely. That’s honoring the text by acknowledging its incompleteness, its porousness, its refusal to be pinned down like some dead butterfly in a collector’s case.
Because water doesn’t hold oaths. Water doesn’t give a damn about your promises, your contracts, your carefully negotiated settlements with reality. Water just moves. It evaporates. It circles the drain. It returns to clouds and weather systems and the atmospheric churn that makes life possible but promises nothing.
And maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe the reason this fragment survived when the rest didn’t is because it contains its own truth about survival, that nothing lasts, nothing holds, nothing is guaranteed except the fact that we keep trying anyway. We keep writing in water. We keep making oaths in bathrooms to people who won’t remember and gods who aren’t listening.