The Rainbow Passage

"When sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Throughout the centuries men have explained the rainbow in various ways. Some have accepted it as a miracle without physical explanation. To the Hebrews it was a token that there would be no more universal floods. The Greeks used to imagine that it was a sign from the gods to foretell war or heavy rain. The Norse men consider the rainbow as a bridge over which the gods passed from earth to their home in the sky.  Other men have tried to explain the phenomenon physically. Aristotle thought that the rainbow was caused by reflection of the sun’s rays by the rain. Since then physicists have found that it is not reflection, but refraction by the raindrops, which causes the rainbow.  Many complicated ideas about the rainbow have been formed. The difference in the rainbow depends considerably on the size of the water drops, and the width of the colored band increases as the size of the drops increases the actual primary rainbow observed is said to be the effect of superposition of a number of bows. If the red of the second bow falls upon the green of the first, the result is to give a bow with an abnormally wide yellow band, since red and green lights when mixed form yellow. This is a very common type of bow, one showing mainly red and yellow, with little or no green or blue."

My close reading of the text “the Rainbow Passage.”

 By Joy Brook Fairfield go back Brooke Burke Brooke Brooke Brooke Brooke Brooke Fairfield Fairfield enter the lack

What is the unconscious of the text? This is always the question for the interpreter of literature. While we like at times to believe that the possibility of text without the shadow of intent exists, we will find ourselves hard-pressed to find evidence for it. The words chosen from the narrow script of the waiter seem, perhaps, to have the kind of uniformity that one could imagine devoid of poetic or psychological content: “Can I get you something to drink with that?” But language is never in control of its own intent, the speaker never fully in charge of his language. Language exists in a constantly shifting flowing field of signification surrounding us full points we have no comprehension of and affects we don’t understand. This is its magic and its curse.

I have been given a computer program, a tool on loan from an institution invested in my process of learning and participating in a greater exchange of ideas. They have an entire fresh clean contemporarily furnished spacious and even hip building in which their office for accessible education exists. In this building I meet with a sweet educated white man who supplies me with codes to make my Dragon Voice Activated Software program legal and little telemarketer headset to make it more accurate. With an awareness of my time constraints, he gives me the information I need to begin experimenting on my own with the system. I am given a  single sheet of text entitled "The Rainbow Passage"and told that I should read it thrice into this program: “Apparently this passage has almost all of the sounds in the English language.”

I have heard this claim before, in regards to “the quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.” I have never personally taken a stab at tabulating the ratio of sounds in the English language represented in this phrase. Perhaps a linguistics major would know the answer. I imagine a table of linguists huddled over their IPA dictionaries crafting poetry within the strict confines of speech’s strange architecture.  “Should we make the text scientific? Or more cultural, so that it can appeal to those in the Humanities?” “If we invoke cultural references, which should we include?” The author references the Hebrews the Greeks and the Norse, indicative of knowledge systems formed within contemporary Western academia or its colonial spaces. There is no reference to what the ancient Egyptians, for example thought about the  phenomenon of the rainbow.  Well, I just looked it up on Wikipedia, and in ancient Egypt the rainbow was associated with the goddess Nut.  As the goddess of the sky, Nut was sometimes described as wearing a rainbow gown.  Her laugh was thunder and her tears were rain.  Every night she swallowed up her grandfather and every morning she gave birth to him again.

This passage forgot about Egypt. Or, perhaps more accurately, was never taught.  Suddenly the title of this document reminds me of “The Middle Passage,” the journey of enslaved Africans to the Western Hemisphere under inhumane conditions.   I look up the origin of this phrase on Wikipedia and learn that it was the terminology used by the European traders at the time for the second segment of the triangle trade.  Perhaps everyone could switch over to using the term “Maafa,” the Kiswahili  term for disaster.

I sure hope Wikipedia is accurate. I understand why the politics of the Internet are so significant given the way it becomes a funnel to what is known as “common knowledge.”  I fear as the Internet grows in power within profit-focused, war–dependent economies, its revolutionary potential will be increasingly evacuated. Every tool is a hammer if you use it right. Or as Performance Studies scholar Angela Farr Schiller points out, “ The system that pounds the dough is the same fist that pounds the face.” (That was an example of the unconscious of this machine, the Dragon voice program I’m using.  I said in fact, “the fist that pounds the dough is the same fist that pounds the face.”  The replacement of the word “fist” with the term “system” is quite elegant).

The Rainbow Hostage, ahem Passage (hello again machinic unconscious!) invokes both physics and art, legends and logic. It performs a kind of scholarly inquisitiveness, a curiosity about the natural world. It appeals to me as a document that purports to report, transforming a miracle to a series of almost comprehensible particulate interactions.

Someone found this text appropriate for this context. This person was likely not a feminist, as the repeated male pronouns resound in my ears as unconscious exclusivity: “ Throughout the centuries men have explained the rainbow in various ways.” The uninterrogated prejudice of the Enlightenment era hangs over this passage like a rain cloud.

And yet I feel like this text was intended as a kind of gift. Rainbows, the clearest of natural phenomenon,  I’m mean the theorist,   queer rest,  queries, queerest of natural  phenomenon. Usually bode well. From the light cue of hope after the Old Testament’s flood to Lisa Frank stickers on your 8^th grade notebook, rainbows are a pleasure to our eyes.

“Rainbow rainbow red and blue

Rainbow rainbow I love you

Yellow orange green and white

You give off such perfect light”

This is a song my mother sang me when I was a child. I remember thinking it funny that she included “white” in the colors of the rainbow. I didn’t use a white pen when I drew rainbows on the brown paper in my kindergarten class. I think she mentioned something about physics, maybe something like what the Rainbow Passage says: “the rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors.”

I just searched these lyrics on Google and found nothing. It’s so nice to know there are some things that only one person has said. Of course, I have no idea if someone taught it to her.

The first hit I get provides me with this text:

I    a m    t h e    R a i n b o w

On the days when it doesn't seem worth it. When you think that maybe they were right. That "queer" and "freak" and "abomination" seem to have your name on the list. When "outsider" and "other" or "faggot" or "dyke" want to claim your autograph, remember. We are the rainbow.

When never seems bigger than always, and always seems like a terrible place to be, remember. We are the rainbow.

It is a tacky site and the font is hard to read.  A few clicks and I find that this site is maintained by a transgender activist named Deborah Davis. She worked as a high school Media specialist in Minnesota  and has maintained this site for over a decade.  I am grateful for her labor.    She references of course the rainbow flag, adopted by the gay community in the 1970s.  Wikipedia tells me it was designed by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker.  It initially included pink and turquoise too, but apparently fabric dyed in those colors was harder to find. Makes me sad, they seem like particularly queer colors.

The second hit is the Wikipedia page for rainbows, which reads a lot like “The Rainbow Passage.” I am grateful for my mother and her nursery song.  Like Deborah Davis, her message was that the world was full of a kind of beauty called difference.

I remember now that the last line doesn’t say “You give off such perfect light,” but “you give off such pretty light.”  I should try to remember that perfect and pretty are not the same thing.  

I am in this hip and spacious office because I can no longer type, a problem when one is attempting to write a dissertation. I can’t type because I’ve broken my right wrist in a skateboarding accident only a month after my first day as a skateboarder.   I was not very good but it was the pleasure of every day. My increasingly–impossible schedule has made every second precious, so cutting my cross-campus commute in half was practical at the same time as pleasurable.   Dropped into the moment in a combination of glee and terror, it was keeping me sane.  Now I have a cast, a disability counselor, and the friendly adaptive technology guy who handed me “The Rainbow Passage” and opened the door for me on the way out. 

My exposure to and thus understanding of the knowledges formed by people with significantly different abilities has been limited. Only recently, thanks to the work of scholars like Petra Kuppers and dance companies like AXIS Dance, have I been introduced to the exciting aesthetic and philosophical possibilities engendered through the differences often known as disabilities.  I’m particularly grateful for generosity of artist Isaak Tait, a performer with  “A Different Light” of Christchurch, New Zealand.  Our intimate correspondence has been meaningful, heartfelt and mind-blowingly creative.  Our differences have aligned in a beautiful way, perhaps similarly to the ways that “[t]he actual primary rainbow observed is said to be the effect of superposition of a number of bows.”  A scholar, I forgot who right now, described all of human culture as adaptive technology (or a prosthetic) for the mathematical mean of society.  Left-handed people hurt themselves on devices created for right-handed people. Chairs in public spaces are uncomfortable for the significantly shorter or taller than average. When did “average” become so ideologically linked with “good”?

In his book Security, Territory, Population, Michel Foucault suggests that the current dominant mechanism of social control is no longer threat of punishment or simple brain-washing. Instead, order is maintained through the construction and measurement of norms.  Those outside of norms are afforded less socially–legible power by those highly implicated in the maintenance of those norms.  We can understand this in terms of representation in government, representation in media, and participation in economic markets. A population is an imaginary entity vulnerable to non-consentual marketing and management through its compliance with norms.

There is nothing wrong with the fantasy of average. Average is convenient. Average means you can always find the right bra or pair of shoes.   Average can be quite beautiful. The only danger is in creating a hierarchy in which averages become tyrannical, in which the only thing better than average is above average, in which one’s performance is constantly being measured in comparison  to radically different entities.  The fantasy of the average creates failure, creates shame, and forgets, in its attempt to quantify, the unquantifiable thrills of the unknown unknowns.

The text of “The Rainbow Passage,” like my mother’s song, reassures me.   As I repeat its exhaustive set of English syllables I remember that there are always more interpretations than I can imagine.  Queerness and disability seem to me linked in the way that they gesture towards the beauty and potential intimacy possible in the vastness of difference.

My wrist will heal, and this headset is only mine on loan until the end of June.  It’s so easy to feel sorry for yourself even when you have so much.  Yesterday in the orthopedic trauma center, a septuagenarian sitting next to me said offhandedly that she’d broken both wrists: “When I broke the left one they just put in a titanium plate and sent me home, no cast or anything.”  I am in awe of her toughness and her genuine concern for a stranger. How can I become stronger and more sensitive all at once?   How can I stop thinking of these two as opposites?

After reading through the exhaustive syllables of The Rainbow Passage, I am to practice speaking into the headset so that it can learn my voice. I am to teach it the words it doesn’t know yet that I frequently use:  performativity, queerness, radicality (not “rat ecology”), hierarchicalization (not “hierarchical as Asian”),   intersectionality (not “intersection island”). “Maybe try writing some e-mails,” he says. I  remember my long–dormant blog.

Later that day, I am told by one of my advisors that philosopher Henri Lefebvre dictated all of his critical theory texts: “You can really tell where he starts to wander.” I feel the pull of the wander.  I must think of my breath as a valuable resource.  I must think before I speak and seek out more precise and genuine ways to share my small but reverberating personal truths because we are all contributing to the knowledge that is known as "common." 

Juliet, short and muscular

When I was 17, I played Juliet in a community theatre version of Romeo and Juliet. This was nearing the end of the phase in which I considered myself an actress. The year before, I'd played Madge in William Inge's mediocre play Picnic, a young pageant-winner described as "the prettiest girl in town." I was not an unpretty teen, but it was dawning on me that with my broad shoulders and square jaw, I wasn't quite pretty enough to be a professional actress. I felt like a fraud playing Madge, a role that Gwyneth Paltrow had played a few years before, but felt slightly more comfortable in Juliet's skin. Juliet is, after all, a tomboy. The consummate ingenue, she's also a rule-thwarting, death-unfazed badass who really, really wants to get laid.

The reviews were generally complimentary, but I couldn't get over the first few words of one critic's response: "Fairfield's Juliet, short and muscular..." What the reviewer was wrestling with wasn't my height (I'm not that short) or my unjustifiably sculpted deltoids, but the subtle genderqueerness of my teen persona. It was latent over a decade ago, but, like Juliet's lupine sexuality, was ready to pounce given the least provocation.

The lack of variety in gender expression of female actors in mainstream theatre is appalling. Blame for this can be scattered widely (and accurately) on agents, graduate schools, playwrights, heteronorm audiences, wary producers, and more. As a director, I'd like to personally call out directors for their painfully limited creativity when it comes to what versions of womanhood take center stage.

We need more dykes onstage. More tomboys and tough girls. More bois and butches and trannyboys and andros and genderfuckers. We need more subtly non-normative girls with square features and strong frames. We need tall women and deep-voiced women and short-haired women. And not just in ensemble-generated dance-theatre pieces in NYC and SF! We need butch Juliets, boyish Cozettes and dyky Blanche DuBois' on stages across the country. And we need brave directors - who trust audiences to welcome nature's spectrum of gender variance - to cast them.

Here's the deal. Under-representation of lesbian characters onstage is a serious matter, but a different one. We definitely need more stories of women loving women (playwrights: get on it, and directors: cross-gender casting, STAT!). But until the classical canon is toppled and filled with queer characters, let's remember that gender expression and sexual object-choice are not inherently linked. You can have a broad-shouldered, genderqueer female-identified ingenue pair beautifully with a leading man of any shape and size without sacrificing chemistry or believability. This short muscular Juliet was certainly in love with her sweet-faced, long-haired Romeo, but that's another story...

Devising the Bible, Myself

This week in my directing seminar we presented short devised works based on the King James Bible. With such a wide-open field of possibility, each piece was unique and deeply reflective of its maker and his or her relationship to spirituality, organized religion, and the human encounter with greater-than-human elements like death, love, or a divine power. Much more so than in traditional scenework, in devised work the passions and obsessions of the director spring forth shamelessly. Faced with the empty space of script-less-ness, one's own internal conflicts and pleasures must twist themselves into new and original forms.

Initially overwhelmed with my options (should I work on Adam and Eve? Revelations? Mary Magdalene?), I eventually found inspiration in a Grotowski text I was reading, titled coincidentally, "The Theatre's New Testament."

"The spectator understands that such an act [the actor's rigorous self-exposure] is an invitation to him to do the same thing, and this often arouses opposition or indignation, because our daily efforts are intended to hide the truth about ourselves not only from the world, but also from ourselves. We try to escape the truth about ourselves, whereas here we are invited to stop and take a close look. We are afraid of being changed into pillars of salt if we turn around, like Lot's wife." (Towards a Poor Theatre, p. 37)

Suddenly hit by the lightning bolt of creative excitement, I jumped online and found Lot's wife nestled into Genesis 19. Nameless and powerless (like too many Biblical women) she is punished for embodying -- in a single backwards glance -- her sense of grief at God's wrathful destruction of the notoriously queer desert cities Sodom and Gomorrah.

Like the actor who reveals herself onstage, devising is a place in which the director can look closely at herself through the scalpel of someone else's story. In my case I used Lot's wife as a vehicle for self-exposure and self-reflection. Like Lot's wife, I desire to look back: to take time to contemplate and mourn the pain I've witnessed both first and secondhand. Like Lot's wife, I am not ashamed of my connection to people and places that a vengeful God might deem sinful. In her story I feel rumblings of my fear of calcification, my longing for transformation, and my ambiguous relationship with the power of flight.

All art can be considered a calcification of experience - the bringing into solid form what was once awash in undulating formlessness. While no one wants to be turned into a pillar of salt, sometimes bearing witness to pain and destruction means taking the risk of turning around anyway.

Marcus, or the Secret of Onstage Sex Scenes

Marcus, or, The Secret of Sweet is the conclusion of Tarell Alvin McCraney's powerful Brothers/Sisters Trilogy. It plays for two more weekends at ACT and if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to get tickets immediately and DON'T READ the rest of this post!

Marcus is a character you haven't seen before on the regional theatre circuit. Sixteen, gay, and increasingly "out" in the rural Louisiana projects, he is simultaneously a visionary and a horny teenager. He's a powerful character, who, in my opinion, is betrayed in this production by the director's lack of innovation at specific moments of onstage sexuality.

Over the course of the play, three potentially sexual moments between men unfold onstage: a kiss, the prelude to a blow-job, and a thwarted rape. These moments are full of possibility for the character as well as our own culture. What does it mean for the audience to witness Marcus in these moments of queer black male desire?

In contemporary American culture, black male sexuality remains fraught. Overdetermined by threatening "thug" stereotypes, black male bodies are seen as dangerous at the same time as they are objectified and idealized (like the Old Spice superbowl commercial now gone viral). McCraney's scenes of queer desire place black male sexuality not in relationship to a fearing or fetishizing other, but to itself. "Two black men loving each other," said McCraney in an interview, quoting Essex Hemphill, "is always a revolutionary act."

Ultimately, the director misses these opportunities. Unnecessarily loyal to realistic conventions, he rushes through these queer moments as though ashamed to let them breathe. Because of this hesitancy as well as his reliance on the theatrical equivalent of the cinematic "pan to the windblown curtains," ACT's production doesn't find the specificity onstage that McCraney's language invites.

Overt sexuality in theatre is always complicated. The director's challenge is to strive for an externalized vision of the character's internal experience. Is the sexual moment jolting? Languid? Terrifying? Surreal? Does time slow down or speed up? Does space contract or expand? Moments of embodied desire are always moments out of time, out of space, and sometimes out of the limits of the body itself. These edges of expressibility should be where theatre thrives.

Sexuality is not ancillary to Marcus's story, rather it's very close to the young, beating heart of the character and the play. While I'm happy to see him onstage at ACT, I feel like only half Marcus's heart made it into this production.

"Closer than a brother": The Brothers Size

The epigraph for Tarell Alvin McCraney's powerful play The Brothers Size is a quote from proverbs: "A man that hath friends must show himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother" (18:12). Closer even than blood is the relationship between a man and God, the proverb seems to say. Yet a queer reading looms right below the surface, and in fact, some translate the subject of the second clause as "lover" or "beloved," rather than friend: "there is a lover who keeps nearer than a brother." Is the beloved closer than the blood brother? When situations get sticky, when your neck is on the line, who knows you better? Who will be there when you cry out in the dark? And ultimately, who will be willing to sacrifice their happiness for your own?

These questions roil just beneath the surface of McCraney's play like the queerness inside the proverb. The Brothers Size tells the story of three men, two bound by blood brothership and two bound by an intimate fraternity borne in prison. The hinge of both of these relationships is Oshoosi Size, named after the Yoruba deity associated with justice, the hunt, and imprisonment. Oshoosi has recently been released from prison and has moved in with his big brother Ogun, who runs a garage. His best friend Elegba, who he met in prison, is happy to see him released from jail and the two re-connect on the outside, only to run into trouble with the law again.

The nature of their intimacy while behind bars is an open question - it was a love that lived in the darkness, and we see it reflected in Oshoosi's dreamscapes and hear it in between the lines of their sparse conversations: "We was like brothers" says Elegba, "Brothers in need." Indeed, the love between Oshoosi and Elegba is palpable (as is Oshoosi's fear of what that love could mean) but the words "gay" "homosexual" or "queer" never cross the lips of any character in this play.

In interviews, McCraney quotes Essex Hemphill, the African-American poet and activist, who said “Two black men loving one another is a revolutionary act." McCraney points out that "He didn’t say ‘two black gay men’, he just said ‘two black men’. It’s something we don’t see. I wanted to put it on stage – these men, in all forms of colour, trying to figure out how to love themselves and each other.”

Both Elegba and Ogun love the childlike, open-hearted Oshoosi. Both try to give him the freedom he craves - literally, both give him cars, that 20th century symbol of "ultimate freedom." But sometimes our ability to give generously to the person we love is limited by the experience of love itself. Sometimes our desire to keep him close overpowers our desire to set him free. Though Elegba's tortured devotion to Oshoosi is strong, it almost lands them both back in the prison they just left.

Near the end of the play, the sometimes-hard big brother Ogun stands on the porch of his house. Speaking his stage directions (as they frequently do in this play) he says "Ogun Size / stands alone in the night / staring." In the fantastic production I saw at the Magic Theatre, this was followed by an intense, attenuated moment of stillness and silence. One of those silences that releases into the audience waves of shifting experience: confusion, then worry that something has gone wrong, then curious attention, then tentative acceptance. Ogun's presence in this long moment was penetrating but impenetrable. It was as though he was simultaneously looking back into the dense, shared past of brotherhood and forward into the delicate tendrils of possible futures that could lie ahead. After this long pause Ogun decides to push his brother forward into the unknown.

The gift he gives Oshoosi at the play's end is the gift of flight. Leaving the elder brother Size alone again on the porch facing the stillness and solitude of his own life. Elegba was at Oshoosi's side when he cried out in the darkened prison; he was the "friend that sticketh closer than a brother." But Ogun makes the choice to unstick in order to set his brother free.