Speculation: Rehearsing Sophocles #116. Fantastic rehearsal/experimentation/playing/imagining with amazing people at sunrise under a full moon… for Sophocles Savage Blasts.
Here’s what the photographs don’t tell you: it’s cold as hell out there at the Wave Organ at dawn. The bay doesn’t care about your artistic intentions. The concrete under your feet is unforgiving, and the Golden Gate Bridge looming in the frame isn’t there to make things pretty, it’s indifferent, functional, a reminder that the world keeps moving whether you nail this moment or not.
But Lauren and Derek are out there anyway, bodies committed in ways that would look insane if you tried to explain it to someone who wasn’t there. You can see it in the images, the full physical throw of it, reaching, extending, inhabiting these ancient savage blasts like they might actually mean something if you’re willing to look foolish enough, vulnerable enough, to find out.
That’s the thing about fragments. Sophocles didn’t leave us a manual. Just shards. Broken pieces of rage and grief and whatever passed for catharsis when people actually believed theater could change you. And here are these people, at an hour when sensible humans are still asleep, trying to reconstruct something that can’t be reconstructed. Only discovered. Maybe.
The moon’s still up, fat and fading. The light is that specific blue-gray that only exists for twenty minutes at sunrise on the water. Everything feels temporary, which is maybe the point. You’re working with language that’s been dead for millennia, in a space designed to amplify the sound of waves through pipes, with people who showed up because something about this particular configuration of madness felt necessary.
You look at these images later and think: that happened. We were actually there. Not performing for anyone, just doing the work because it demanded to be done. That’s the blessing. Not the result, the fact that anyone gave enough of a damn to show up in the first place.
In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.
The Letters