At 6:57 a.m. on April 7th, 2016 (this specificity matters, that exact fucking minute matters) Muriel Maffre, Ryan Tacata and myself dragged our asses up Slacker Hill in the Marin Headlands to do something either profoundly necessary or completely insane. We performed fragments of a lost Euripides tragedy, one of those plays that got shredded by time and carelessness and the general entropy that eats everything beautiful. I called it Love is The Fullest Education, though nobody asked us to call it anything, and it dramatizes that precise moment when Zeus seduces Io while disguised as a cloud. Not a swan, not a bull, not a shower of gold. A cloud. The god as weather pattern. The divine as meteorological event.
Here’s where it gets properly absurd: we couldn’t do it without an actual cloud. We needed the sky to cooperate with our theatrical ambitions, needed nature itself to show up and play its part. So we waited. And waited.I climbed that hill again and again at 4:30 in the morning, stumbling through darkness under a sky choked with stars, waiting for dawn to reveal whether the gods would cooperate or whether I’d be greeted by that same bright, mocking blue. Endless failed attempts, aborted missions, theatrical blue balls. You want to talk about method? About commitment to site-specificity? Try scheduling your performance around the whims of atmospheric conditions, around whether water vapor decides to congregate at the right altitude at the right moment.
This was part of IOTA, this larger madness Id committed myself to: resurrecting the ghosts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. All those dead Greeks whose words survived in scraps and footnotes, the B-sides of Western civilization. What kind of arrogance does it take to think you can breathe life into fragments? What kind of desperate faith?
The weather on performance day was partly cloudy (which feels almost too perfect, cosmically ordained), 59 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind was coming at us sideways at 20 to 30 miles per hour. Those clouds we’d been waiting for finally showed up like unreliable collaborators who’d kept us hanging for weeks. You ever try to perform ancient Greek drama in gale-force winds at dawn on a California mountain top while Zeus himself drifts overhead in cumulus form? The words get ripped from your mouth before you’ve finished speaking them. Maybe that’s appropriate. Maybe that’s exactly what these fragments deserve: to be scattered again, offered up to the indifferent morning air.
Six and a half minutes. That’s all it took. The duration of two pop songs, less time than it takes to microwave leftover hope. Our audience consisted of myself and Ryan, which sounds pathetic until you realize most genuine human experiences happen for an audience of nobody at all.
Why do this? Because someone has to. Because these words existed once and mattered to someone, and that someone is dust now, but the words (ragged, incomplete, half-remembered) they’re still here, demanding to be spoken into the raw California dawn while clouds fuck across the sky.
The Fragments…
Love is the fullest education…
…in lovely wisdom…
He is the pleasantest of all the gods
for mortals to consort with.
He possesses a pleasure
that brings no pain,
and leads me to hope.
May I not be among those
uninitiated in his toils.
May I keep clear of his savage ways!
To the young I say,
never flee the experience of love,
but use it properly when it comes.
The Location…
The 930-foot summit of Slacker Ridge, which everyone just calls Slacker Hill because who has time for formal designations. Nobody knows why the hell it’s called ‘Slacker,’ which is either the most perfect name or the most fucked up joke depending on how you look at it. Is it ironic? Some kind of sarcastic middle finger to the nomenclature gods, considering that only the truly committed lunatics haul themselves up that brutal grade at ungodly hours? Or does it reach back to the older, almost quaint definition of slacker: someone who dodges military service, who says ‘fuck your war’ and means it? Makes sense given that Fort Baker squats nearby, along with all those other military installations that turned this landscape into Uncle Sam’s playground. Maybe someone back then had a sense of humor about the whole martial apparatus. Maybe they were making a statement. Or maybe nobody remembers and the name just stuck, which is how most things that matter actually work anyway.
Collaborators…
Muriel Maffre, Ryan Tacata and myself