Accepting no doctrine in the Santa Cruz Mountains
No, a true seeker, one who truly wished to find, could accept no doctrine. But the man who has found what he sought, such a man could approve of every doctrine, each and every one, every path, every goal; nothing separated him any longer from all those thousands of others who lived in the eternal, who breathed the Divine.
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Here’s what Hull’s doing in those recordings, and why it matters: He’s a religious education professor, right, teaches people how to teach people about God, and in 1983 his eyes just… quit. Detached retinas, failed surgeries, the whole deteriorating nightmare, and he’s got this Sony cassette recorder and he starts documenting what happens next, not because he thinks it’ll be profound but because he’s terrified he’s going to forget what forgetting feels like, if that makes any sense, and what he captures is this SLOW-MOTION APOCALYPSE of the self, where first you lose the images but you’ve still got the memory of images, you can still conjure your wife’s face, your kids’ faces, the way light hits a room, but then, and this is the part that should keep you up at night, those memories start to dissolve too, they just… fade like old photographs left in the sun, and three years in he can’t remember faces anymore, can’t remember what his own children LOOK like, and he’s honest enough, raw enough, to say this isn’t some beautiful journey into enhanced perception, this is LOSS, this is grief, this is standing at your own funeral while you’re still breathing.
But here’s where it gets weird, where it gets truly strange: Hull doesn’t just mourn what’s gone, he starts EXPLORING this new territory, this place past vision that most of us will never know, and he discovers that rain, simple, boring, utilitarian rain, becomes this incredible ARCHITECTURE of sound, where he can suddenly perceive the entire landscape, the buildings, the trees, the empty spaces, all of it revealed through acoustic texture, and he’s walking through Birmingham hearing the world paint itself in his ears, except it’s not compensation, it’s not his other senses “heightening” like some bullshit superhero origin story, it’s that his CONSCIOUSNESS is restructuring itself, the whole thing is liquid, rebuilding from the ground up, and he’s documenting it in real-time with this unflinching precision that would make Beckett weep.
The recordings, and Oliver Sacks lost his MIND over these recordings, they capture something nobody’s ever captured before: what happens to identity when you pull out one of its major load-bearing walls. Because Hull realizes, and he SAYS this, that the continuous sense of self we all carry around, this precious feeling of being the same person from moment to moment, it’s mostly a CONSTRUCTION, it’s neurons firing and memory playing telephone with itself across decades, and when you lose vision you don’t just lose seeing, you lose visual THINKING, visual DREAMING, the whole edifice crumbles and something new, something genuinely OTHER, starts to build itself in the ruins, and he’s there with his tape recorder going “here’s what it feels like when the person you were slowly becomes someone you don’t recognize but who still has your name, your history, your wife, your kids.”
And the documentary doesn’t flinch, doesn’t beautify, doesn’t do that inspiration-porn thing where disability becomes a learning experience for the abled. It just LISTENS. It sits with Hull in the dark, and it IS dark, the film is mostly black screen with these recordings playing, his voice coming out of the void – and it lets him describe what it means to lose not just sight but the IDEA of sight, to enter what he calls “deep blindness” where you’re not a blind person who used to see, you’re something new entirely, unmoored from the visual world the rest of us are drowning in without even knowing it.
That’s the thing that gets me: we’re all stumbling through existence half-blind anyway, building our little models of reality out of the poverty of our senses, and Hull loses one sense and suddenly he’s forced to admit what we all know but can’t face, that the self is permeable, that consciousness is contingent, that everything we think is solid is actually fluid, AND YET, and this is what saves it from being nihilistic, there’s also this strange beauty in the reconstruction, in rain becoming revelation, in the self that emerges from the wreckage still capable of love, still capable of thought, still trying to make sense of being alive in a body on a planet spinning through space.
Hull died last month. The recordings remain. The darkness speaks.
Let me way this. I was 22 when I came to prison and of course I have changed tremendously over the years. But I had always had a strong sense of myself and in the last few years I felt i was losing my identity. There was a deadness in my body that eluded me, as though I could not exactly locate its site. I would be aware of this numbness, this feeling of atrophy, and it haunted the back of my mind. Because of this numb spot, I felt peculiarly off balance, the awareness of something missing, of a blank spot, a certain intimation of emptiness. Now I know what it was. and since encountering you, I feel life strength flowing back into that spot. My step, the tread of my stride, which was becoming tentative and uncertain, has begun to recover and take on a new definiteness, a confidence, a boldness which makes me want to kick over a few tables. I may even swagger a little, and, as I read in a book somewhere, “push myself forward like a train.”
Eldridge Cleaver to Beverly Axelrod
Soul on Ice, 1968
I’m not going to bullshit you about what happens when you walk into San Quentin once a week with a lesson plan and good intentions, because good intentions are exactly the kind of currency that gets you nowhere in a place where time itself has been weaponized against human dignity. You show up thinking you’re going to make a difference, maybe save someone, and what actually happens is you realize you’re the one who needs saving from your own comfortable delusions about how the world works.
But first, I wait. I wait at the gate with my co-teacher while Officer Wood checks my IDs with the speed and enthusiasm of a man who’s figured out that minor cruelty is the only power he’ll ever have. He knows my names by now, seen me every week for the last year, but he still makes me wait, still scrutinizes my credentials like I might be smuggling contraband in my twenty white sheets of paper.
In that liminal space between the free world and the locked one, while Wood takes his sweet time, we start talking. Small talk at first, bullshit about traffic, about the reading list, about nothing. But day after day, waiting becomes ritual, and ritual becomes intimacy. Then comes the walk. That long, impossible walk from the outer gate through the yard to the education building, and this is where it happens. This is where I learn that she’s from San Diego, an Oberlin grad who thought she could change the world and then actually went out and tried. Geography PhD from Berkeley studying environmental racism in cities, the kind of work that requires you to look directly at how America poisons its own people along carefully drawn racial lines. She tells me about mapping toxic sites in San Francisco neighborhoods, about chemical biomonitoring, and I realize she’s spent years documenting the slow violence nobody wants to talk about.
The yard stretches out around us, men in blue moving through their circumscribed lives, and we’re both just passing through, but together.
She’s at the front of the room explaining James Baldwin to a guy doing twenty-to-life like it’s the most natural conversation in the world, and I’m supposed to be teaching but instead I’m watching the way she pushes her hair back when she’s thinking, the way she doesn’t flinch when someone tells her about the violence they’ve done. She’s got this thing, this complete lack of performance, that makes everyone else in the room look like they’re acting, including me.
Maybe it’s because she knows something about death that most people her age don’t or shouldn’t. Her mom, cancer. Her uncle, AIDS, back when that was still a death sentence wrapped in stigma and silence. She doesn’t talk about it like tragedy porn, doesn’t wear her grief like some badge of authenticity. But it’s there in the way she listens to the students, in how she refuses to look away from hard truths, in her absolute intolerance for bullshit that pretends suffering is an abstraction. Inside San Quentin, you can’t hide behind your degrees or your theories about rehabilitation. You’re just there, present, vulnerable in ways that make you understand why Cleaver wrote those letters to Beverly Axelrod with such desperate honesty.
And then after class, we walk it all back, through the yard again, through the checkpoints, but we don’t stop talking. We end up in the parking lot under those cold sodium lights, the prison lit up behind us like some industrial cathedral, and we’re still going, still processing what just happened in there, what’s always happening in there. She’s leaning against her car talking about moving to UC Santa Cruz next year, about her book manuscript on environmental inequalities, about the California Studies Association board she serves on, and I should be congratulating her but all I can think is that she’s leaving, that these walks are numbered, that the parking lot conversations have an expiration date.
This is where it really happens, not in the classroom, but in these in-between spaces. The waiting while Wood makes me feel like a criminal for trying to teach. The walking. The refusing to leave even when we should. These cold parking lot debriefs that stretch from fifteen minutes to an hour, neither of us willing to be the first to say goodbye, to get in the car, to drive back to our separate lives that suddenly feel like lies we tell ourselves about who we are.
I’m falling for her in the worst possible place, the most complicated circumstances, and every rational part of my brain is screaming about ethics and boundaries and power dynamics. But the heart doesn’t give a damn about institutional guidelines. It just keeps hammering away in my chest every time she laughs at something one of the students says, every time we debrief after class and she sees right through whatever intellectual posturing I’m doing that day, every time we’re walking through that yard and her shoulder accidentally brushes mine and the whole damn world contracts to that single point of contact.
She’s this brilliant fucking force, postdoc mapping poison in poor neighborhoods, teaching Baldwin to lifers, surviving losses that would break most people, and somehow she’s chosen to spend her evenings in a prison parking lot talking to me about Gramsci and grief and the impossibility of justice in a country built on inequality.
This isn’t romance. It’s recognition. Two people trying to do difficult work in an impossible place, and somewhere in the fluorescent-lit margins, in the waiting and the walking and the standing in cold parking lots talking about everything except what’s actually happening between us, finding something that feels more real than anything on the outside ever did.
I’m not going to pretend this makes sense. I didn’t drive Elena’s stuffed animal to a maximum-security prison because I was thinking clearly. I did it because sometimes the only honest response to the world is to lean into the absurdity until it cracks open and shows something true.
San Quentin sits there on the bay like a broken tooth in a beautiful mouth. All that water, all that light, and right there, this monument to every way we’ve failed each other. The thing about taking a fox puppet to prison is that nobody asks me to explain yourself. The guards see weirder shit before breakfast. I’m just another California eccentric with too much time and not enough sense.
Mister Fox didn’t ask for this. He’s a prop, a stand-in for childhood innocence or theatrical whimsy or whatever the hell we project onto these inanimate witnesses we drag through our lives. And maybe that’s the point. We’re all just being dragged places we didn’t sign up for, past razor wire and into the sun, trying to maintain some dignity in the face of the cosmic joke.
The Golden Gate was obligatory. Every doomed thing gets its postcard moment. The yacht club was for contrast, because if I’m going to document a stuffed animal’s descent into the California prison-industrial complex, I might as well show the other California first. The one with money and sailboats and people who’ve never had to think about what happens when society gives up on you.
I should’ve just returned him. Driven straight to Elena and said, “You left this.” But that would’ve been boring. That would’ve been sensible. And sensible doesn’t photograph well, doesn’t burrow into your brain at 1:58 AM when you’re wondering what the hell you’re doing with your life.
Sometimes you’ve got to take Mister Fox to prison. Sometimes the only way to process the darkness is to document it, to bear witness with whatever tools I have, even if that tool is a stuffed animal and a camera phone. It’s not therapy. It’s not art. It’s just… necessary. Like screaming into a void that occasionally screams back.
The thing is, I did return him eventually. Elena got Mister Fox back. But we both knew, me and Mister Fox, we’d seen something. Something about beauty and brutality existing in the same frame. Something about how we’re all just one bad decision away from the wrong side of that fence, and how thin the line is between the absurd and the profound.
Or maybe I’m full of shit and just wanted to take weird photos.
That’s valid too.
A place is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. … It implies an indication of stability. A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it.
Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984).p.117
Okay, so now we’re talking about something else entirely. Now we’re in the territory of obsession, of the kind of commitment that makes normal people uncomfortable at dinner parties.
She’s out there in her underwear. On a rock. In the Pacific. Scouting locations for a play that barely exists anymore. For Sophocles‘ Nausicäa, the lost one, the ghost play, the one that survives only in fragments and marginal notes and the wet dreams of classicists. We’re building a tragedy from shards. From the iota of what remains. And Angrette’s out there communing with Poseidon for it.
This is what I’m talking about. This is the difference between someone who “works in theater” and someone who serves it like some kind of fevered priest. Most people won’t even get their shoes wet for art. Angrette’s out there basically naked, exposed to the elements and the universe, because she understands that to reconstruct something that’s been lost for 2,500 years, to position Poseidon correctly in a play Sophocles wrote and the world forgot, you have to strip away everything that isn’t essential. You have to be as vulnerable as Odysseus was when the sea tried to erase him, as vulnerable as the text itself, which barely survived two and half centuries.
There’s something almost ritualistic about it, like she’s making an offering not just to this production, but to Sophocles himself. To the ghosts of Athens. To everything that’s been lost and might be found again.
The best collaborators don’t just show up. They offer themselves up. And I, putting together IOTA, resurrecting fragments, building worlds from whispers, I found someone who understands that great work demands a certain kind of madness.
That’s not just talent. That’s devotion. That’s grace.
A site specific dance by RAWdance in the YBCA gardens.
Unlike reproductions of other types of artworks, photographs of performances, by virtues of their focus on artist’ body, allow the viewer to engage with the artist in a haptic, as well as a visual sense. Encountering the shared ontology of the bandy makes the viewer mindful of his or her own physical presence as witness to the pictured event (even if it well after the fact.
Kathy O’Dell, Contact with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s
inkBoat 95 Rituals for Anna Halprin a Site Specific Dance performance at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park
Just as the ancients danced to call upon the spirits in nature,
we too can dance to find the spirits within ourselves
that have been long buried and forgotten.
Anna Halprin
Fort Point Contact Sheet…
When it comes to the Civil War, all of our popular understanding, our popular history and culture, our great films, the subtext of our arguments are in defiance of its painful truths. It is not a mistake that Gone with the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which 750,000 American soldiers were killed, more than all American soldiers killed in all other American wars combined, in a war declared for the cause of expanding “African slavery.” That war was inaugurated not reluctantly, but lustily, by men who believed property in humans to be the cornerstone of civilization, to be an edict of God, and so delivered their own children to his maw. And when that war was done, the now-defeated God lived on, honored through the human sacrifice of lynching and racist pogroms. The history breaks the myth. And so the history is ignored, and fictions are weaved into our art and politics that dress villainy in martyrdom and transform banditry into chivalry, and so strong are these fictions that their emblem, the stars and bars, darkens front porches and state capitol buildings across the land to this day.
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
Here’s what you need to understand: 5:55 in the goddamn morning, July 1st, 2015, we’re doing Euripides, or what’s left of him, anyway, some scrap of text that survived the wholesale cultural annihilation of everything that mattered, everything that was true. No Man’s Friend, they call it informally, because even the Greeks knew that sometimes the only honest position is to be nobody’s fucking pal.
This is IOTA. The whole mad project: bringing back the fragments of the lost plays, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, the ones that didn’t make it, the ones that got burned or forgotten or simply erased by the grinding machinery of time and cultural indifference. I’m talking about reconstructing meaning from shards, from broken pieces, from the archaeological wreckage of what used to be whole.
Aquatic Park, San Francisco. Sixty-two degrees. Partly cloudy. The kind of morning where reality feels negotiable. Six and a half minutes of performance. Eleven people saw it: three joggers who probably thought we were performance art nutjobs (they weren’t wrong), one baby who had no choice in the matter, and seven others who actually showed up on purpose to watch us resurrect fragments of dead language on a beach made of death itself.
Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about Aquatic Park: you’re standing on tombstones. Actual headstones. The markers that once meant something to someone, here lies whoever, beloved whatever, now they’re just municipal fill, WPA project rubble, the stuff you build beaches from when you decide the dead are taking up too much valuable real estate.
By 1902, San Francisco said no more burials in the city. Too crowded, too expensive, too inconvenient for the living. By 1921, they’re shoveling the dead out to Colma like so much inconvenient baggage. By 1941, the cemeteries are ghost stories. The early dead, miners, immigrants, loners, the ones who came here with nothing and left with less—they wound up in mass graves, anonymous, interchangeable. Their tombstones became construction material. Their names got buried under municipal progress.
So when we perform fragments of lost Greek tragedy on ground made from forgotten tombstones, we’re not being clever or ironic. We’re just telling the truth about what it means to make art in a culture that treats memory like garbage. The fragments speak to fragments. The lost call to the lost. And somewhere, beneath our feet, all those nameless dead are the only audience that really understands.
The Fragment…
No man’s friend stays faithful to his tomb..
Collaborators…
Jamie Lyons (concept and direction)
with Val Sinkler & Jamie Freebury
Franconia Performance Salon #14 was joint collaboration with the Museum of Performance + Design.
The Salon featured new work by Alessio Silvestrin, Rebecca Ormiston, Yula Paluy, Jamie Lyons, Ryan Tacata, Renu Cappelli, Tonyanna Borkovi, Derek Phillips, and Michael Hunter.
Performance Art Salon
at the Museum of Performance + Design,
San Francisco