Watching John Kelly’s Find My Way Home, and the talkback afterwards, led me to musing once again about the structure of Kelly’s performances. As he was talking to the audience about the multi-layered, multi-genre elements of his works, I found myself using a term from literary criticism: the engine of plot. In a novel, the engine of plot is an emotional momentum that creates and maintains a plot line, a coherence, an arc or trajectory through the text. Find My Way Home – and some of Kelly’s other pieces – has an emotional narrative thread that’s utterly clear, powered by deep feeling. The engine of this plot is like a lifeline for the audience, stretching and pulling us through the performance, leading to the climax. If you know the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, then you know what will happen: that Orpheus, having found love, will lose his beloved through death; his attempt to cheat death and get her back will fail. He ends, like all of us, alone. On the level of plot structure, then, there’s no suspense: we know what will happen, and we’re free to ponder the immutable sadness of mortality, and the futility of our efforts to outwit it. The engine of plot moves us through, like Ariadne’s thread in the Minotaur’s labyrinth: it’s charged with emotional coherence – it’s a story strong enough to bear the weight of the audience’s expectations. Since this thread takes care of our need for a logical story-line, it also leaves us free to relax, and to allow ourselves to free-fall into the other layers of meaning. The anxiety that many avant-garde performances deliberately provoke through their rejection of conventional logic is missing – the challenge lies not there but in our willingness to play with genre, to let Kelly shower us with image and sound.
Kelly says that this piece is about his response to AIDS – to losing friends and lovers, to watching an entire generation of artists die without fulfilling their promise. Loss and grief, both personal and cultural. As he pointed out, if those promising artists who died in the eighties and nineties had survived, the current art scene would be unrecognizable. This piece, with its soaring, beautiful Gluck score, opens us to melancholia, as we meditate on what we have lost. And as with all Kelly pieces, there are multiple cultural references to draw us viscerally into grief: videos, music, dance, amazing images such as the vision of the underworld where the dead are forced to dance with dummies in some parody of a dime-a-dance competition – dance to the point of exhaustion, till they collapse. Some of those references, of course, work in ways Kelly can’t predict: when he uses the Noel Coward song “I’ll See You Again,” he couldn’t know that my mother singing that as she bustled around the house is one of my few enduring memories of her, since she died when I was young. I sometimes find myself singing it and thinking of her – so Kelly’s meditation on death and loss mingled with my own, deep in my heart.
And since he first performed this piece in 1988 with collaborators who later died themselves, the piece has mutated now into a new meditation – on how grief changes as time passes. The pain of loss is not so sharp, not so urgent. And the audience is different: a new generation didn’t experience the devastation of the AIDS years first hand: what might it mean to them?
Still moved by Kelly’s performance, I went the next day to a completely different venue: a conference about the catholic church and LGBT people. The connection between this and Kelly’s grief and loss may not be clear to everyone, but listening to the iconic Sister Jeannine Gramick and a powerful response by Jamie Manson re-opened an old wound that any queer who was raised catholic must at least recognize. The violence of the Vatican’s response to LGBT people has barely been acknowledged, let alone assuaged: I was moved to tears to hear it spoken of honestly, compassionately, thoughtfully, analytically, by outraged people who have begun to find language to describe the damage. The violence continues, whether one has left the church or tries to stay and fight from the inside (it continues to puzzle me why I should still feel this violence when I rationally do not feel an affinity for catholicism: is it that past damage can never be healed unless it is communally acknowledged?). The difference is that now there is a growing group of people whose work and language clearly tells what has been done – to women, and to queers. They tell us why it matters and what has been lost because of this violence; they tell us why it is wrong, why the Vatican is wrong, and how we could reclaim ourselves. To sit in a room full of people who are finally willing to acknowledge truth – to affirm our reality – is an experience so powerful as to shake me to the core. I began to dream of rituals that could possibly take this affirmation and embody it within a community – to create a witnessing that might heal, so that then one could move on.
So it turns out that there is more in common than one would think between John Kelly and people who want to talk about queer catholics: there is trauma, and grief, there is a lack of acknowledgment, and a violent fracturing of community when people are thrown out. When I think of the effects of AIDS, I think about people who died, but I also think about their families: for every wonderful mother who marched in a vigil with a candle for her dead child, there were too many of the other families – the ones who showed up after the death and threw their child’s partner out of the house, who took everything and claimed that their blood rights trumped any gay relationship. Those families are like the church, violating their own code of ethics, supposedly based on love. They deliberately break community by marking queers as non-people, people who don’t deserve even to belong. To be cast out of one’s family, one’s spiritual community -– that is traumatic.
Thinking of families and churches leads me to consider those whose grief is considered legitimate. Every year on 9/11, the families of those who died in the World Trade Center have their grief publicly validated -- in fact, their grief seems to allow them to claim special rights over everything related to their loss: on whether a mosque should be allowed near the WTC, on whether a hideous memorial should be built in Liberty State Park, on how much money they should get. Their grief, they say, is special, and no one dares challenge them, because the lost ones have been marked as innocent. Their innocence is doubled: not only were they merely working there, but the attackers were outsiders for whom Americans claim no responsibility (in contrast to the Oklahoma City bombing, which is not nationally commemorated every year, since its origins are more problematic). The WTC families insist on – and repeatedly receive -- the public acknowledgment of their loss -- yet no public, national acknowledgment has ever been made about the devastation of AIDS. People who die of AIDS are somehow not innocent; their deaths cannot be mourned. Kelly’s comment about the enduring loss to the arts community of all those who died, and everything they would have brought to fruition, reminded me of how no one ever publicly says this; no one even says what a terrible loss all those deaths were and are, just on a personal level. The death of gay people and people of color (the ones most affected by AIDS) still does not register as a real loss in the public consciousness, the way the deaths of the people in the WTC does. In the same way, the violence done to women and queers in the catholic church does not register as a problem in the public consciousness.
The families of the 9/11 lost ones feel good about how they behaved: they don’t look back and see themselves behaving badly – they feel they were patriotic and brave; the families who threw their AIDS children away don’t want to think about how they behaved – another reason for not wanting to commemorate AIDS deaths.
What mutes grief? Acknowledgment, community, ritual. And time. But first of all, acknowledgment. So I am deeply moved by those who have the courage to insist that what is done to queer catholics is wrong, just as I was moved twenty years ago by those who insisted that HIV/AIDS did not strip one of personhood.
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