Michigan Trees: A Guide to the Trees of Michigan and the Great Lakes Region - Opera in 11 parts

Michigan Trees: A Guide to the Trees of Michigan and the Great Lakes Region Libretto and Essays Grey Grant, Emily Yang, Corey Smith

Michigan Trees: A Guide to the Trees of Michigan and the Great Lakes Region An Opera in 11 parts Premiere Production August 28 – 29, 2019 Ypsilanti Freighthouse, Ypsilanti, MI

Premiere Cast and Crew Fifth Wall Performing Arts Allison Prost - Orna, As She Sees Herself Grey Grant - Orna, As She Feels She is Seen Kate Moss, Kara Huckabone, Samantha Kao - Mother of Trees Converge New Music Megan Roher, Malhar Kute, violins; Ryan McDonald, viola; Hanna Brooke Rumora, cello Sofia Carbonara, Danielle Gonzalez - percussion Samantha Kao – Rehearsal Pianist Composer and Librettist - Grey Grant Director and Dramaturgy - Karl Ronneburg Director of Music – Karl Ronneburg Lighting Design - Emily Yang Sound Design - Peter Littlejohn Front of House Manager - Madeline Endres Produced by Fifth Wall Performing Arts

The premiere of this work is supported in part through the School of Music, Theatre & Dance Meta Weiser EXCEL Fund.

The artwork for this chapbook and subsequent production was created by Tanner Porter

All texts are subject copyright © by their authors.

All Rights Reserved. Do not reprint without written permission.

A special thank you to our donors Thank you to these folks for donating their time, lamps, instruments, gear, feedback, or funds during the creation of this opera!

Alex Prior Annika Socolofsky Brian Morales Casey Reed Cassandra Venaglia Charlie Wojtas Christine Duffer Connor Darling Emma Bayer Emma Dansak Evan Chambers Hyperion Coffee Jacob Rogers John O’Trakoun Karla Manson Katherine Yemelyanov Literati Coffee Mackenzie Sato Maddy Wildman Madeline Endres Maggie Hasspacher Maria Paterno Maya Johnson Molly Jones Nicole Patrick Nina Shekhar Ron and Cynthia Grant Steve Rush The 412 House The Ann Arbor District Library Tsukumo Niwa Wanda Henson

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Michigan Trees: A Guide To The Trees Of Michigan And The Great Lakes Region.

Libretto and Essays

Grey Grant Emily Yang Corey Smith

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Contents

Libretto

Looking for Roots

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22

essay by Emily Yang

Queering Mythology, Queer Mythology, and Mythologizing Queerness

30

essay by Grey Grant

Midwestern Lattice essay by Corey Smith

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Michigan Trees: A Guide to the Trees of Michigan and the Great Lakes Region

An opera in Eleven Parts

Libretto and Music by Grey Grant

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Synopsis Orna, a trans-woman, is called upon by the Mother of Trees to journey north and turn into a white pine that will sit upon Chapel Rock. On her journey, she embraces her womanhood, fear of the unknown be damned. When she transforms, she splits into two parts: how she sees herself, and how she feels she is seen by others (the embodiment of gender dysphoria and internalized transphobia). The part of her that is the embodiment of how she is seen by others travels back to her old home, in denial about who she is, grappling with her womanhood. The mother of trees urges the two halves to reconcile and reunite. When reconciled, Orna transforms again into an even more elegant, full, and beautiful self.

Characters ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN —— Light lyric baritone/folk baritone with strong falsetto. The embodiment of self loathing, fear, internalized transphobia, gender dysphoria. The part of herself that she wants to abolish and forget. She is mourning her past self, while unclear about her future.

ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF —— Light flexible soprano. The embodiment of self love, strength, how she would like to exist in her womanhood. The part of herself that must take the journey of self discovery, damn the unknown.

MOTHER OF TREES —— Voice Trio for high, middle, and low voices of any gender. A mystic being that embodies the spirit and magic of trees.

Protector of trees young and old, and those who wish to become trees. She is otherworldly. Ideally represented in some magical theatrical way that at the same time acknowledges the theatrics.

Setting Michigan. Though, a mystic, unreal version of Michigan where trees speak, and old growth white pine was never clear cut from the north. Essentially the opera takes place along highway I-75. We pass through Ypsilanti, Flint, Saginaw, Gaylord, Mackinaw, and Lake Superior at the top of the upper peninsula of michigan.

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MICHIGAN TREES: A GUIDE TO THE TREES OF MICHIGAN AND THE GREAT LAKES REGION grey grant

PROLOGUE The opera begins with ORNA in southeast Michigan about to begin her journey. She is represented by both the soprano (ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF) and the baritone (ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN). They are joined as the same person, tethered by fabric. She (soprano) journeys north as she sings her story. She (baritone) stays behind, stretching the fabric.

ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF I left behind a golden rose, And left upon unending road, With a left and right I rightly go, Further along, and long from home.

I left my house to find a home, And right along the journey slow, I heard a thunderin’ from hallow’d north, And woke my eyes to inner-worth.

My mind was violent with her words, And tragic still, the sparrow-bird: She flies away from wretched ground, With gold-flake buried in a mound.

The ground, the ground, it held her down, She saw it as a place to drown, Her flight was freedom, with a cost Her wings grew tired, and she grew lost.

Her cry was carried by the wind, And in her air she saw no end, Though miles ahead the cry was heard, But death had, nearer, reached the bird.

Farewell, farewell, you sparrow bird, I shall heed your story’s word.

ORNA’ transformation into a tree at Chapel Rock: loud and painful and chaotic. ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN (baritone) follows her, as the fabric can only stretch so far. They both end up standing upon Chapel Rock, at the shore of Lake Superior. ORNA (both) lies down and begins the transformation. The Mother of trees begins:

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MOTHER OF TREES Michigan. Lake Superior A woman, along the red shore, upon a rock, overlooking it all:

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A woman, in search of herself, stood; fingers turned to fascicles, her skin into bark. the transformation split her, axed down the middle: how she sees herself, And how she feels she is seen.

When ORNA transforms, she splits, untethered into two halves: ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF, and ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN. ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN falls off the rock onto the shore, and there is a sharp-BLACKOUT. MOTHER OF TREES There is more work to be done.

PART 1: Entering the Lower Peninsula As the lights come up ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF, stands, wounded atop Chapel Rock as a tree., ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN, is curled up in a ball on the shore of Lake Superior. Separated by her other half, she is confused and floating. She stands and begins her journey home, entering the Lower Peninsula as she goes.

ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN She crowned me with gold flake and peony.

She ran into a forest of maple and hemlock.

She ran into an old mystic friend.

She ran along the riverbed northward.

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She loosened the belt of her navy paint and bleach-splattered pants.

She likened me to a buoyant piece of driftwood.

She liked me no longer.

She fell into snow on the way out.

She felt she could go it alone.

PART 2: Catalyst, sapling, the seedbank reveals itself Flashback to the beginning of ORNA’s journey North. Parts 2,4,6,8, and 10 will recreate the Prologue’s journey to Chapel Rock. In her home in Southeast Michigan, ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF (soprano) is arguing with herself: ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN (baritone). They are tethered but there is tension pulling them apart. ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF knows she must go on this journey, but she is worried.

ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF I must go it alone.

I was drawn to this stand of pine by a mystic voice, Mother of Trees, Mother of my soul.

You keep your ears closed, eyes only seeing what you want them to see, And it wasn’t me.

PART 3: Passing Gaylord Returning to the present, after the tree-transformation/split. A bit further along ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN’s journey back to Southeast Michigan. She is lost in memory.

ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN She lifted two saplings from a failed lab test.

She lifted her eyes when we named them.

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She replanted The baby pine, named it Daphne.

She re-planted herself in a new place, miles from her old exposed roots.

She replanted me.

She planned to become soil and nutrient.

She planned a way of cycling past impertinence.

We cycled forty miles to a cider mill last fall.

She broke a cycle of self-abuse.

PART 4: Self preservation, departing, the understory.

Returning to the flashback narrative from Part 2, ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF (soprano) begins to frantically pack a few belongings, chaos and confidence. She’s found a fountain of decisiveness, and more importantly, a means of survival, a pathway to becoming oneself. ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN (baritone) is angry, trying slow ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF (soprano), to stop her from crossing the threshold of the home. ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF (soprano) plows straight through ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN (baritone), but not without some uncertainty of the unknown.

ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF I’m leaving and walking northward, with the legs of this temporary form / I’m off to the north-most shore / and in the bright July-Spring morn / will rest upon that rock — become lichen / first, if I must / and regrow into myself.

ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN But we’re leaving behind histories and threads beyond our own. I’m worried I will lose a part of myself,

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and you: so assured, like a sparrow bird at takeoff.

ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF I’m leaving and don’t sing / your songs, don’t attempt to bring / me back to your world and its limits of skin, / limits of growth, / its invisible limbs that kept me yoked to your thrashing / tongue and fist, don’t make deals you can’t keep, / and let me sleep, and be full.

ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN Please listen to the other part of you.

The part that can endure this discomfort. Mackinac could be the river of Styx, river of blood.

ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF Hell is a relative thing.

ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN We’re leaving behind histories and threads.

ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF (spoken, pleading) I have to. I have become myself. We have to become our self. Understand, please. (sung) I’m leaving behind histories / and threads beyond our own. Don’t tell your stories. / Beyond and above the overstory, / the canopy is an unearthed truth. / Superior now in sight, / nightfall comes with the sound / of trees. The hemlocks, and pine / seed guide me. / Elysium awaits.

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PART 5: Passing Saginaw Post tree-transformation. ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN (baritone) has made it to Saginaw (halfway there). She grows angry as she continues her inner-dialogue. She is becoming more distraught, moving from denial to anger and the beginnings of realization.

ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN She felt she didn’t fit herself.

She felt her skin, and said it was not her own.

She bought her first lace.

She bought Her first dress.

She bottled Her old ways and placed them in the back of the cupboard.

She boxed up old clothes, old ties.

She kept a box of newly found leaves She changed Her address She changed her shoes.

She changed her hair.

She changed her name.

Orna.

Our name is now Orna.

She fell off her bike avoiding an oncoming car.

She felt that this is who she was.

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PART 6: Hypothesis, intervention, deus ex machina, how trees can talk to each other.

Back to the Flashback. ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF (soprano) has made it to Saginaw. Here she is greeted by the Mother of Trees--a giant floating, flowing, figure.

MOTHER OF TREES Your body will be a split body.

You will find yourself needing to find yourself.

There is a part of you unaccepted by yourself.

ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF Mother of Trees: this body was never mine, was nothing, but a transitory vessel, the soft and easy- peeling bark like bruised birch-skin.

Dysphoria bore into my side, crooked my back into an unnatural curve, a barelythere pain, took without malice but without care what it wanted from my pitch, my heartwood, from inside out, from beginning with a mostly something shell, it left mostly nothing, hollowed from abuse, it took from someone whose cells yearn to form walls, form chloroplasts, form barked roots that stretch greedy and unabashed limbs, from impossible rock,

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over impossible air, bridged to the mainland where home is a red-lake-shore and pictured cliffs, with its impossible regrowth of trees after clear-cut, and the construction of Detroit, of Midwest, and white-pine across U.S. And where does that leave us, Mother of Trees?

MOTHER OF TREES You will see me again.

I: wind and tree, guide with gentle breeze.

INTERLUDE AND MEDITATION The MOTHER OF TREES whisks away. The sound of rustling leaves and pouring lentils fills the air.. Wild at first, as the mother of trees departs, the sounds calm into a meditation of earth. This is approx. 4’33”.

PART 7: Passing Flint ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN (baritone) is near Flint. The final leg of her journey back to Southeast Michigan begins as she enters a state of self-bargaining, reaching the cusp of acceptance. Meanwhile, ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF (soprano) sits atop her rock, wounded, half herself.

ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN She placed her hands in wet and rich soil.

She placed her trust in me.

She placed

ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF

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her trust on a sparrow.

She became liken to a dream.

I broke the thread.

I broke broke us apart.

I broke I broke us apart.

I have cried the Huron into its current state of being.

I could have been her hands, If only.

PART 8a: How Water freezes and the bark cracks and expands and I’ve always wondered if that could make a tree explode.

Flashback: ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF has reached Mackinaw. She confronts ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN unabashed, critical to the point of internalized hatred.

ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF

HER AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN

Old, scarred self: this body was never permanent, This rock will be our new home.

Miles past Saginaw, past Mackinaw, up to the northmost tree.

But what if I’m not ready?

Further south: a desolate topography, void of trust and an eye for truth. A person I never was.

I, I am of this landscape, of these pines I call family now. I am not fully healed of your brooding voice: awkward and deep, And your brooding hand.

What if I always was?

What if I always look like this? (to ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF) I… I could be unsure.

But this voice will never change.

We share these hands.

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Part 8b: The First Transformation (again, and again, and again, as memory, or maybe the present, we are unsure) MOTHER OF TREES Michigan. Lake Superior.

A woman, along the red shore, upon a rock, overlooking it all:

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ORNA (both) screams as the transformation occurs. Then, BLACKOUT. PART 9: Entering Ypsilanti ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN (baritone)is on his final leg of her journey south following the transformation. She’s depressed. Her understanding of herself has been shattered. She must start again from zero.

ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN She lifted a fallen peony flower from the soil.

She lifted me still.

She left me, and I left her.

She left me to become a tree.

I left to travel back to my old roots She walked into a forest on a Tuesday.

She left our house to find a home.

She likened me to a Bronze Birch Borer, to a parasite.

She likened my

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voice to a deep river valley.

And I became lichen — [MOTHER OF TREES intervenes.]

ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN ORNA, AS SHE SHE SEES HERSELF (She cries, as she is wilting ,slowly dying without her other half)

Mother of Trees, Mother of my soul.

My bark, peeling... my fascicles, needles turning brown.. .

Mother of trees, mother of my soul.

MOTHER OF TREES Orna.

Orna.

Your body, is a split body.

You are lost, you need yourself.

There is a part of you unaccepted by yourself

But, Mother of trees, what if I’m not ready?

You must travel back.

You are wilting away.

You must tether yourself to yourself.

(she continues to cry from this pain) My being Is a split being...

You must tether yourself to yourself.

I will travel back, Travel back, I will reunite, Reunite, I will regrow, Regrow. into my fullest self.

She runs back north, she gathers the cord that once bound her to her other self, still sitting atop Chapel Rock..

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PART 10: Finally, upon the rock, overlooking it all.

ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF (soprano) sits atop her rock, continuing to wilt without her other half. ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN (baritone) begs her to travel back, scared and in awe of her truest form. ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF (soprano) looks and sounds depleted.

ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF

ORNA, AS SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN Orna…

Orna…

Your roots, are exposed, unsupported.

Our split has wilted us.

We must converge, become ourself again.

(ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF, is afraid and responds with the frenzy and determination seen in Part 4) No — I can’t go back to who I once was.

I have taken root, here.

Guided by the mystic voice, mother of trees, mother of my soul.

… and you are I, I had to push ahead, push forward, push away from a stinging land I had to be the dream of myself.

Mother of trees, mother of my soul, She brought me back to be with you.

You tossed me aside, left us both to die.

Don’t you see, you’re wilting, I am you, and you are I. … The dream of myself involved you as well.

But you cast me out of your being, you called me a parasite.

We are both that dream.

We can live that eternal dream.

But we can’t live it in your old landscape of inner-hate, incarnate.

What you see as inner-hate I felt as fear, afraid how the world would treat us, could kill us.

You kept us from taking flight, taking root.

I was searching for truth.

You were a reminder of what we never were.

… We never were anything but us.

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Trust that I am valid too.

Beat.

I needed to be unabashed.

My way forward was regrowing.

I was searching for truth.

Our truth is I will always be a part of you.

I needed to be cautious.

I wasn’t ready to regrow.

Beat.

I was afraid what I would be With you still a part of me We can’t foster a vitriolic landscape of self, where self-love has conditions.

I know.

Beat.

I will abolish such geography from heartwood, to bark, to the forest we will soon become.

I will abolish such geography. from heartwood, to bark, to the forest we will soon become.

Let us grow a new canopy.

Our story as the overstory.

I am ready to become our tree again.

MOTHER OF TREES Appears. The transformation ritual begins.

Retrace, regrow, reunite.

Let’s begin again.

Retrace, regrow, reunite.

(During this aria, they retrace, and walk through the transformation ritual performed at the beginning of the opera. This time, however, they are more in sync, as one woman who is a peace with herself.)

ORNA, AS SHE SEES HERSELF

ORNA, HOW SHE FEELS SHE IS SEEN

Our story began: On a walk, and tired. on a walk, and tired.

The world up here turns a bit more slowly.

Rare warbler song due north, mosquito and hemlock beginning

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to wake, to unthaw.

The non-conifers mostly still bare and neuron.

And I laid down among white pines – 300 years aged now.

I could see them as children, and then saw them step-up into infinite sky.

(the MOTHER OF TREES sings a lullaby, and exits, her work is done here.)

After awhile my body sinks into ground.

Curved-spine – carrier of twenty-four year chronic ghost pain broke through the skin of our back (They lie down, the music becomes of the earth, they are rooting themselves, united.) and a freedom plunged into my still, unthawed soil, and I flew past skycloud and skybird.

and a freedom plunged into my still, unthawed soil, and I flew past skycloud and skybird.

And a freedom plunged into my still, unearthed heart, and I flew past my old earthen arms.

And a freedom plunged into my still, unearthed heart, and I flew past my old earthen arms.

I: air and water I: wood and mother and soil and root and bug and settled-soul-hug.

I: air and water I: wood and mother and soil and root and root and bug and settled-soul-hug.

And a freedom plunged into the thawing ground.

And a freedom plunged into the thawing ground.

Spring. There is a crash and clang of drums as the transformation bursts from their bodies and they jet up as one massive tree. Orna, now one woman, one tree, stands atop Chapel Rock. Reunited and beautiful, standing impossible and overlooking it all.

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PART 11: After the second transformation.

Standing on the rock. Floating. ORNA (now as one) reflects.

ORNA (soprano) And this was never a one time thing.

I was always here, always you, and the forest.

ORNA (baritone) And I’ve joined you, beautiful pines.

A home upon picturesque rocks, below shoreline.

And I’ll live into an expanding infinity.

And I’ve joined you, beautiful pines sanding crooked and impossible, upon Chapel Rock,

And I’ll forever be pine, be soil, be sea and air.

And this was never a one time thing.

You were always here, always myself. standing with impossible root,

overlooking it all.

CURTAIN.

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LOOKING FOR ROOTS emily yang

1. Recently, a billboard appeared in Detroit that read, simply, “TRANS PEOPLE ARE SACRED.” I saw a picture of it on the internet and felt ambivalent. This kind of statement keeps the hyper-visibility of trans people intact and adds its own odd expectations. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I want to be left alone from either scrutinous or worshipful attention.

My friend, who saw the billboard while commuting from Ann Arbor to Detroit, compared it to the new Bank Of Ann Arbor billboards, which replace the bad attempts at in-jokes with the simple statement “BANK OF ANN ARBOR HELPS” in blocky, colorful lettering.

Some of these billboards just say, confusingly, “HELPS.” He told me that seeing all this on his commute makes him feel like he’s living in a world of pure symbolism, with all the referents mysteriously vanished.

2. I grant that to be sacred isn’t the worst thing that could happen to us.

The constant scrutiny isn’t going away, in any event. And, come to think of it, being transgender is, for me anyway, so often the condition of being caught between my literally existing body and some unattainable ideal that is itself rather vague.. The writer Andrea Long Chu likens it to finally departing for a foreign country and realizing you’re going to be spending the rest of your life on the plane. In this sense, gender dysphoria resembles a religious structure of feeling — the hope is the point.

3. And also: what does that word mean now, anyway? Whose paradigm are we living in? A few months ago, on a summer-term literature program in New Hampshire, I climbed to the top of Mt. Chocorua in the White Mountains. It was overcast and windy.. The top of the mountain wasn’t part of a large enough continuous alpine area, so there were no high-elevation plants. It was bare granite, austere and architectural, like nowhere else I had been before.

I was reminded of a Wallace Stevens poem titled “How To Live,

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What To Do,” which describes a pair of mountain climbers. Stevens invokes religion, but carefully, in that way that ensures firm grounding on the side of secular meaning. “There was neither voice nor crested image / No chorister, nor priest. There was / Only the great height of the rock / And the two of them standing still to rest.”

I like Stevens, but I always found this poem a little too masculine (for lack of a better word) in its conception of nature, the discarded religious meanings only getting picked up by heroism. It seems that every time religion or mythology is discarded the only thing that rises to its place is something involving individual triumph. But no: standing on top of Chocorua, I did not become heroic — if anything, I was taken firmly back to human scale by the otherworldly beauty of the precipice, by its lack of resemblance to anything I knew, its total inhospitibility and indifference toward me.

4. Have I arrived so quickly back at cliché? The concept of the sublime was in use from at least the Romantic period — Wordsworth explains it as the aesthetic quality of intellectual incomprehension that must be, then, grasped by the spirit. Mountains are something of a textbook example of this.

Is there a connection between the sublime and the sacred, maybe? I am thinking of Thoreau’s account of climbing Mt. Katahdin in The Maine Woods, his feeling that he didn’t belong there, that he had “come there before his time.” Maybe not in this case. Sublimity didn’t come easy to Thoreau, whose perception of nature was finegrained, almost pedantic. There is something urbane and aristocratic in the sublime; in that a beautiful mountain or an ancient forest is supposed to unsettle your world, deliver you to your opposite. It ignores, say, the ecology of forests, their contingency in the face of human activity. Thoreau, the ascetic and occasional misanthrope, not only saw God behind the emergence of leaves in spring but knew their names, their patterns of growth and development. He also saw himself, like his friend Emerson, as fairly continuous with the divine.

This strikes me as acceptable — the divine is in the details rather than in the gap between the knowable and the unknowable, the same as us rather than our other. It demands attention as much as emotion.

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5. None of this is, so far, getting me any closer to whether I can find a good way to think about the phrase “trans people are sacred.” Maybe I’m not sure what I’m looking for. For a while I have wondered about the spiritual roots that wind their way under our perceptions of the world and of each other. I live in a nominally secular society, but at some level, everything is belief. This doesn’t mean that there are solid bedrocks past which inquiry cannot move, but rather that there are directions that thought takes which have been irrigated for a long time before I got here.

6. The artist who put the billboard there, Jonah Welch, said the phrase is something a friend said to them that has “become a big part of my belief system.” They elaborate on this point: “I know when I first heard that message it really moved me beyond the oppression I was feeling in the day-to-day. There’s more to defining and valuing myself than the material struggles we have in the world here.”

Maybe other people’s belief systems are always destined to not make intuitive sense, but to me the phrase feels like secondhand language, something borrowed from somewhere else like the dowdy long skirts I would get at the Salvation Army when I first came out. It’s ad-hoc.

Where is the “more” they’re talking about? And yet I get it, understand the impulse, even long for something like this myself. It feels like a door I want to wholeheartedly step through, but I’m just afraid of letting my guard down.

7. If there is anything resembling a central question of gender, it is whether the ways in which we identify are innate and psychological or contingent and sociological. Some transphobes and some trans people fall on both sides — there are transphobes who see biological sex as indelibly gender, just as there are transphobes who see gender as basically equivalent to oppression of women and girls.

Analogously, there are trans people who see gender identity (cis and trans) as emerging unprompted from our psychology, and there are trans people who see it as something that is essentially fluid and malleable on the level of the individual and shiftable on the level of culture. This is not to say that these trans people and these transphobes are in agreement, but one can abstract a certain division

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that stands for both sides: either gender is fixed by biology or psychology, or gender is the domain of culture and subject to its vicissitudes. You could call this division “nature versus nurture” if you like.

I’m pretty agnostic about this division, partly because every trans person is different, but nurture feels more ethical to me — it allows for both acknowledging the particularities of everyone’s experience and acknowledges that gender is larger than any one person. It’s not necessarily more “correct,” but it is the least wrong.

And I know this about myself, too: I am a much less dysphoric person when I am around people I am comfortable with. It’s hard to tell how much of dysphoria comes from other people looking at me and how much comes from looking at myself, but at this aforementioned program, being around 40 people my own age managed to let the dread simmer down to a comfortable temperature.

8.

It was less clear to me how I was supposed to hold my body in nature, what I was supposed to find with the imposition of myself on the wilderness. No mystic transformation came over me, although not from lack of trying. I loved the lake we were nearby, the wind that came off of it felt like it swept the world clean. I would sit by it at every opportunity and let my ears and my eyes fill up with the movement of the water. There were people who went on “solos” for a day or so in the woods, just totally surrounded by trees. Some did this entirely naked. I did not do this. The truth is, I was not used to being in the woods. I was awkward about nearly every necessary task.

The night we stayed halfway up Chocorua, I was totally exhausted from the hike, and when I took my hormones with chalky, purified brook water, all I could think of was how it would be making my body weaker, drain my musculature, making me less equipped to stay out here in this place that was hostile to me. It was deathly quiet, probably the quietest place I had ever been, when we weren’t walking through leaves.

9. At risk of broadening to meaninglessness: maybe dysphoria is better thought of as an umbrella term for affects with nothing more than a family resemblance between them, having to do with feeling out of

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place in the world, feeling in error about something fundamental and difficult to remedy.

10. But isn’t every reading of nature is a selective reading? I am starting to doubt that anyone really knows how to see nature, or what to do with even closely observed information about it when returning to society. Emerson saw nature as a set of symbols of divine agency but was vague on the details. This sometimes led him into awkward places — I think of how he freely admitted that nature has ugly, unappealing parts, but was censorious of Walt Whitman’s similarly all-encompassing poetry.

It’s possible, in the end, that all of us are just projecting our desires onto something that does not comment on us at all. The sublime, in its acknowledgement of this meaning-shaped hole in our perception, at least comes close to articulating something real about nature, which is that it does not have much to say to us at all. Maybe this is one possible way to think about the divine as well. We can orient ourselves toward it and become diligent, attentive students of it, but we can’t know it. It will frustrate our attempts to know it.

11. I am involved in a loosely organized scene of musicians on the fringes of a conservatory education. Among my set, I am sensing a desire for immersion as the goal of a performance. I have a friend who recently put on an evening-length show in which he played long, shimmering chords on a synthesizer at incredible volume while surrounded by candles. About halfway through, he signaled to someone in the basement to start playing guitar through a bass amp, which shook the floor.

I like my friend’s music, but I have to admit that I usually leave concerts like this feeling a bit cold. I never feel quite welcomed into these created worlds. Maybe I am insufficiently prepared to let my guard down. I understand the impulse, though. Among all the arts, music in its abstractness has the capability to represent feelings that don’t exist yet, affects whose structures and referents are always a little mysterious. Maybe this is what Walter Benjamin meant by his comment that art’s content is “messianic.”

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The religious language feels right, too. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the medieval Church was so deeply invested in music. The long, lively organum of Perotin were, to his clerical contemporaries in the 1200s, at one point seen to affect the body too overtly to be properly religious music — now, I have friends who go to music festivals and raves and speak of the experience of dancing to repetitive music as a way to attain a kind of transcendence.

12. The friend who put on the concert often quotes a composition teacher of his, who says that the stories we tell ourselves are the “things we think with.” I have never been able to quite qualify what he means by that, where this capacity starts and stops. When I was seventeen and on the cusp of my transition, I read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando for the first time. When the titular protagonist fell asleep as a man and woke as a woman, I cried. I immediately felt totally ridiculous for identifying with the work, but I still saw some vague reflection of myself in Woolf’s vivid world. It felt like a world I could live in.

13. Nature might resist interpretation, but there are narratives about nature, too, ones we live in without realizing it. In William Cronon’s essay “The Trouble With Wilderness” he details the history of the romantic sublime and the American frontier myth. Cronon writes: “To gain such remarkable influence, the concept of wilderness had to become loaded with some of the deepest core values of the culture that created and idealized it: it had to become sacred.” This sacredness is based on a specifically bourgeois conception of nature: “The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living” and is additionally contingent on the removal of the natives who lived there before any European wrote down aesthetic theories of anything. The ways in which we view nature are as constructed as fiction.

14. Maybe my identity gives me a unique vantage point on the humannature relationship, given how much tampering my body now requires for it to match my brain. Aristotle defined nature as in opposition to “artifacts” that humans make, which he defined as

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objects that resist the natural tendency of their own materials. Under this paradigm, you can safely put humans as a part of nature right up until you realize how much tampering everyone does. What is the “natural tendency” of anything? Is there any way to know?

15. Is the loneliness I feel a lack of a story surrounding myself? Can this be helped? Mysticism, in its total refusal to even look at what exists, is appealing. I wonder what it would be like to genuinely feel myself as continuous with deep, elemental powers. If nothing else this couldn’t possibly account for how awful I feel on a regular basis.

Every time I try to make tentative steps toward something symbolically useful, I immediately realize that it is always at the expense of something else or that it doesn’t, strictly speaking, really belong to me at all.

16. There are the arguments about human aesthetics being rooted in the symmetry one would find in, for instance, a plant. But I think what we actually find when we look at nature is symmetry and elegance presented and then almost immediately defied, mangled, destroyed.

Plants grow lopsided, in tangles, strangle each other out, grow prodigiously and then wither. Recently, I got a guidebook to weeds in the Midwest, and have been delighting in finding and naming all these ugly, tenacious plants that are usually invasive and nearly everywhere. Many of them started out as decorative or erosioncontrol plants that escaped cultivation and now grow in sidewalk cracks and in vacant lots.

17. There’s a distinction to be made between “wilderness” and “wildness.” Wildness is an innate feature of un-domesticated things, something that is found in the wilderness but not limited to it. Weeds are the result, in a lot of cases, of misguided human activity, but from the plant’s perspective it is just as wild as one in its original habitat.

If you’ll indulge me a fanciful analogy in service of making a point, there are wild parts of me — cultural scripts and roles that might have started out tidy and legible and have since escaped cultivation. This skews toward the grotesque rather than the sacred. Beauty isn’t the point, neither is legibility. I think about the caterpillars that basically

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liquefy in their chrysalises as they reconstitute themselves.

18. “Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home” — Cronon. It’s possible that part of the reason I don’t want to wholeheartedly adopt a kind of new-age-ish mysticism surrounding my gender, as appealing as it is, is that such things always feel like they’re leaving something out, like looking at something from very far away. Squinting into the distance always takes attention away from the fact that we all find ourselves somewhere.

19. One fairly consistent insight you can get from nature — renewal.

Emerson and Thoreau both mention it. The tangled underbrush that stretches together during the summer collapses under snow and emerges again, sediment from mountains is compacted under rivers.

There is always something to be made out of the past. I can imagine myself as the end of a long unbroken line of… something. How much does it really matter if all of this makes sense to me?

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QUEERING MYTHOLOGY, QUEER MYTHOLOGY, MYTHOLOGIZING QEERNESS grey grant

I am concerning myself with the subjects of queerness and mythology. I am allowing myself to be an ocean, be visible, be invisible, be known and unknown. I am concerning myself with how the subjects of queerness and mythology intersect. I am allowing them to come together in front of my eyes, to observe their interaction, to learn a history, to learn a mythology, to the history of a mythology. I am becoming a history of queerness and of mythology. I am writing to say something about these topics and how they converge, these topics of mythology and queerness.

I will begin on the topic of queering mythology. On what it isn’t and what it could be. I will then begin on the topic of queer mythology, this history of mythos, especially when it is coded as queer. I will lastly begin a discussion on mythologizing queerness. I will discuss how it can be a bad thing. How it must happen. How it can be a good and very beneficial, very nice thing. *

*

*

I will begin by defining, in part (as mythology is a world of understandings, many of which I know I do not know), what mythology is and is not.

Mythology is a story of beginnings. Is an explanation for the unknown. And by unknown, I mean not permanently unknown: things, that at the time of origin of mythos, were unknown, or at least, unknown by some. Mythology isn’t folklore. Isn’t always legend. Mythology is sacred. There can never be a queering of folklore or legend, as queerness is sacred. If one queers folklore, queers legend, it becomes mythology. How do I know queerness is a sacred thing? All things must be sacred, or must not be sacred. This is a mindset. If one believes in the sacredness of all things, then trees, rivers, cottages, cities, pavement, dog excrement on the pavement, birds, planets, are sacred, all. If one doesn’t believe in the sacredness of existence, then one really has no use for mythologies. This essay relies on the principle that all things are sacred, as mythologies concern themselves with the sacred. Without acknowledgement of the sacred, mythologies would be folklore, would be legend, would be falsehoods.

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*

*

*

I will begin by queering mythology. A woman turns into a tree, to escape a god. This is an act of transformation. The body is only a vessel. The woman was always a tree, as the woman always had the capacity to become a tree.

This woman is a trans-woman. She knows she is magic, is sacred, and acts on it to escape her turmoil (Apollo) and find peace (being a tree). A shepherd turns into water. Here, his lover transforms him into water. Though perhaps, he always had the capacity to become water. Adonis becomes the spokesman of the gay-male community. Sappho becomes symbol, the goddess, the origin story of Sapphic women.

I am concerning myself, at this beginning, of the queering of mythology. I will begin by discussing what queering mythology is and what it is not. Queering mythology isn’t a bastardization of mythology, isn’t saying that your older interpretation of mythology is not correct. Queering mythology isn’t trying to interfere with anyone’s relationship with myth, mythology, mythos, mystic entities.

The beginning of queering mythology was mythology, as mythology concerns itself with the origin of things. Since then, queering mythology has continued to be an action taken, and so, has moved beyond mythology and into the realm of the present day informing mythology.

I am beginning to concern myself with queering mythology, to make queer a thing that has keep queerness quiet, has only coded queerness, has made queerness an antagonist at time, has made queerness non-existent. I am beginning to see queering the institution of mythologies as a way of making space for queerness, yes, but also revitalizing these mythologies, making them relevant for one more go-round the modern age.

I am beginning, at my present age, to surround myself with queer persons who queer mythology. Those in particular are queer, and are very ordinarily queer. They go about their day being non-extraordinarily queer. They are but queer and yet not queer person who very ordinarily queer mythologies, in a way that make extraordinarily not queer mythologies extraordinary. They go about making extraordinary queer mythologies and yet not particularly. They

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queer particularly those mythologies, making clear queerness is a mythological entity, is a making queer thing. Is making a queer mythology a very un-particularly mythology, surrounding queering. Is but a mythology that is extraordinarily queer and particular. Is not particular, but is clearly surrounding mythology in queering. They surround in a way that queers the making of a particular one. They are not particular in being particular, wherein they queer mythologies concerning particular subjects. *

*

*

I will begin this portion of the essay, which concerns itself with queer mythology by telling a queer mythology. This mythology is the mythology of an opera that I have just written. This opera, entitled Michigan Trees: A Guide to the Trees of Michigan and the Great Lakes Region, named after the very popular guidebook on tree identification in Michigan and the Great Lakes Region, concerns itself with a woman, whose name is Orna, which has its origin in Hebrew. It means pine. This woman’s origin is her mythology.

She is a trans-woman. She lives in a real place: Ypsilanti, Michigan, though upon being called upon by the mother of trees, she travels north to Chapel Rock along the shore of Lake Superior to turn into an Eastern White Pine Tree. The Eastern White Pine Tree is the state tree of Michigan. It is the tree that was heavily logged in Michigan at the turn of the 20th century; which caused many fires to burn across Michigan, such as the Kingston Plains fire, that burned so hot that it killed all the organic matter in the soil, so that to this day the only evidence of existence there is lichen and blueberry bushes which thrive in highly acidic soil. This knowledge exists outside of Orna’s mythology, but informs it.

When she reaches the rock she begins her transformation, at the climax of that transformation, she splits into two halves of herself: how she sees herself, and how she feels she is seen. The first half concerns itself with selfacceptance, with the ideal self, with the most beautiful tree-trans-self. The other embodies gender dysphoria, internalized transphobia, the ever-floating state of fear for safety trans women experience living-while-trans. Orna, how she feels she is seen travels back home, in fear, while her other half wilts upon chapel rock. The mother of trees intervenes with the half traveling backwards, warning her of her other half’s state and the fate of both of them if they don’t reconcile. Orna, how she feels she is seen travels back north. They fight, air

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their feelings, reconcile and transform once more into a tree, standing tall and impossible, overlooking it all.

This is a modern mythology.

This is a mythology for trans folks, to say that they are extraordinary. This is a mythology that concerns itself with displaying one particular way in which trans-persons exist. This mythology is particular in being sacred, in being an origin story of how the white pine that sits on top of chapel rock got there.

How it’s roots grew bark and stretches over air. It concerns itself with the creation of real life, and the existence of real persons, though it’s hero and its mystic guide are figures of mythos. This is a mythology for non-queer persons, for they exist with trans folks, and sometimes see them as trees in a forest, meaning they sometimes don’t see trans-folks in a crowd of people, they see trans-folks, though they do not know it, like a person who sees a forest but cannot identify a white pine from a red pine, from a hemlock. I am surely not saying it is important for a person to be able to pick out trans person from a crowd. I am saying that it is important to acknowledge that trans persons are in the crowd.

Another queer mythology is Angels in America by Tony Kushner. However, this essay is not about Angels in America, apart from that it is mythology. It will not be a major part of this essay as I am unable to discuss with great confidence or knowledge the play, other than to say that I have seen the HBO series, and read it once, and finished reading it at Bethesda fountain when I first moved to New York City, in my first month where I wandered the city alone knowing no one. My experience of Angels in America was that of mourning, wondering a city of ghosts of those taken from this existence by HIV and AIDS, and of joy for living in such a fantastical mythology where dying queers ascend to heaven, where angels don’t know it all, and where people dying from a modern plague get more life, and more life, and more life. *

*

*

I am subject to discuss mythologizing queerness and I am beginning an understanding, I am beginning to definite what it is and is not, and what I am not saying it is. I am careful to say that it is not certain things, that is does not

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imply certain things, things specifically concerning the non-mythological, real life existence of queerness. That is to say, I have not particularly come to any neat and very nice conclusion on the matter of mythologizing queerness, and I understand it to be a topic that divides queer persons, particularly queer artists, who engage or critique the mythologizing of queerness as a technique for communicating a particular subject within their art; which, within this polarizing topic of mythologizing queerness in art concerns queerness.

Mythologizing queerness is not making real life persons and events untrue. It is not an erasure of the lived experience of queer persons. It does not make them “myth” in the pejorative sense. It is not making fun of queerness. I do not mean to say that queerness is a myth. Nor do I mean to say that queer persons are fake, false, fraudulent, untrue. I am not saying that queer identities are any of these things either. I do not mean to imply that mythologizing queerness is admitting to anything particularly devious.

Though sometimes-queer mythologies can include actions that are in fact particularly devious, as sometimes mythologies include devious actions.

Mythology is a story of beginnings. Is an explanation for the unknown. And by unknown, I mean not permanently unknown. Things, that at the time of origin of mythos, were unknown, or at least, unknown by some. This is a reallife state of queer persons: being unknown, not permanently unknown.

People, who at the origin of existence were unknown, or at least, unknown by some, though obviously known by themselves. That is to say queer persons have always been around as mythologies have always been around, though they have gone unknown, avoided, undiscussed, and so the mythologies concerning queerness have been (at least directly, as much as I know, though I know, I don’t know much about all mythologies) unknown, avoided, or undiscussed within the realm of mythology.

The present-day act of mythologizing queerness is a beneficial and very good thing for the visibility, or knownness, of queer persons. Is beneficial or the origin, the beginning of beginning to understand queer persons; that, for those who are not queer. For the engagement with empathy towards queer persons, to understand that they too struggle, and love, and fight heroic battles (though since they’ve gone invisible all these years, many have been battles concerning the self: self vs. self, self vs. others, self vs. nature, self vs. machine, and so on).

Like Arjuna on the Battlefield of Kuruksetra, we fight on Kingston Plains, we

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fight at Stonewall. That is not to say that these places are myth, they are very real places. Yet, places of the heart. Places of deep emotion that springs mythology, can spring forth mythologies such as Angels in America.

Mythologizing queerness is a beginning of codifying queerness in the nonmythological world as a beneficial and very good thing. We know already that queerness is a beneficial and very good thing, but this mythologizing is the origin of new art, new stories, new sacred places that are innately queer. The sacred queerness is only beneficial to mythologies, wherein mythologizing queerness is an obvious action to take. Let’s not mind ourselves with nonqueer mythologies, for they have always existed in non-queer spaces (which is most space). It is right and good to mind ourselves with queering mythologies so that we can queer other spaces that have been hostile, or at least unknown to queerness. *

*

*

I begin to queer mythologies and mythologize queerness to make a queer mythos of where I live, and of the place of my origin. I currently live in the Midwest, which is not a monochromatic landscape; which I see as a very queer and very beneficial and good thing. In these (queer) mythologies of the Midwest, such as my opera, I paint this Midwest with watercolor, and sparrow bird, and queer stories, heard. In North Carolina, where I once was born, I was surrounded by the foreboding culture of “the south,” full of its own folklore (which is really just mythology, as it is sacred), which is quite fantastic in and of itself. That said, queering southern mythologies is a particular method of occupying a space with the reputation known to be hostile to queer persons. Is an act of revolution. This is a task I have seen many queer Appalachian southerners take ownership of, and one I would like to join in kind.

Queerness and Mythology have a particular relationship that is not particular innately, though can be a very good and very beneficial thing, when particularly non-queer mythologies exist and exist and exist, queerness exists too and so it is natural to see them exist, and to be created with the

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understanding that it is not certain things, and does not imply certain things, though it does imply particular things which are certainly quite fantastical and very good things.

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MIDWESTERN LATTICE corey smith

“Something interesting: land, land, people, people, people, and then — water, nobody.” He says this to me three times. First as discovery, second as resignation, third as gift.

Latticework: We are from this place — America, broadly. The Midwest, in specific. We have that horrible American ringing in our ear.

Latticework: “Let us all be from somewhere.” (Bob Hicok) The Midwest it is, then. We are repeating ourselves.

May 20, 1785: The Land Ordinance of 1785 partitions the Northwest Territory into parcels. The largest division of land was the township, a six mile by six mile square. These townships were then divided into lots, numbered from 1 to 36, each one mile by one mile. The government maintained ownership of lots 8, 11, 26, and 29 for future sale. Lot 16 was reserved for a public school. All remaining lots were auctioned off to American citizens. The minimum bid was $640 per section or one dollar per acre. Divvying up the land like this, we moved carefully a pencil across the canvas into the shape of a grid. Set to work on our genocidal Mondrian dreams.

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One of the reasons I love being in farmland: I can count the number of human beings in front of me. I can be certain about the number.

October 8, 1871: A particularly dry and hot day, during a particularly dry and hot season. The logging industry had been working through the old growth forests of the upper Midwest, in part because of demand from boomtowns like Chicago. The loggers left piles of flammable debris lying around. And then, on the 8th, a cold front. That same feeling as when you blow air on the newspaper under the unlit campfire wood. The wind and the dryness and the heat and the kindling and suddenly a fire in Chicago. And then a fire in Holland.

And then in Manistee. And then in Port Huron. And in Peshtigo every building in the town lost.

In the opposite direction from water: People in a molecular approach to weaving. Or, said another way — there are all these lines and they give me a place to dance around.

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November 22, 1962: STAR MAP BURIED IN MARINA CITY. Above, the Chicago Planetarium Society presents a map to the Marina City Building Corporation. The map shows the alignment of the stars on the night of groundbreaking.

Printed in five languages beneath the star chart — “This building began on the 22nd day of November 1960 A.D. according to the Gregorian calendar. The planets in the heavens were as shown on this celestial map. The universal language of astronomy will permit men [sic] forever to understand and know this date.”

The plaque is covered in asphalt and buried into the concrete foundation of the east tower core — 50 feet in diameter and eight feet thick.

(Agnes Martin): “If you draw a diagonal, that's loose at both ends I don't like circles - too expanding When I draw horizontals you see this big plane and you have certain feelings like you're expanding over the plane”

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There are no right angles in nature, but there are parallel lines: I wear a dress outside for the first time. I bought the dress from the internet. It’s a t-shirt dress, so it holds plausible deniability.

I walk three blocks north to a coffee shop. I order a coffee.

They give me a coffee. I walk two blocks east to a beach on Lake Michigan. I am holding my breath, I realize. I sit on a bench and I look out. Somebody passes, but I don’t look. I am seeing entirely in periphery. I am trying to focus on the Lake Michigan horizon line, but I don’t know where to put my eyes.

I end up spending most of the time looking at the waves about 50 feet from me. They appear in the same spot, over and over again. When I get up, there are the impressions of wooden slats on my legs.

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Latticework: God

God

God

God

God

Stand

God

Code

God

Strange

Strange

Family

Cynical

Cynical

Cynical

Warm

God

Warm

Long

God

God

God

Home

Flat

Flat

Up

God

Home

Flat

Home

_____

God

_____

_____

_____

_____

_____

_____

_____

_____

_____

_____

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Marina City: Two buildings on the Chicago River. They look like concrete corncobs, a calcified memory of a falling flower petal. Next to the IBM Building, you can see two visions of Midcentury America. One — cold, rational, boxy and glassy. Two — collective, radial, bending and sturdy.

I like Marina City because it feels orderly and modern but also soft. I like it because it is clearly artificial, clearly concrete, clearly too even in its undulations. There is nothing organic about Marina City, save for the fact that there are no right angles. And even then, its roundness feels like a wish, the way the grid feels like a wish.

I feel so sad and so alive when I think about wanting.

Genesis 19 (NIV): The angels when they visit Sodom say to Lot, “We will spend the night in the square.”

Answer to an Inquiry (Agnes Martin): “My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles, a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn't set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.”

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I think it was: a New York Times feature. A map of the USA, but everything is underwater. There were small islands on the map — the counties that voted Clinton in 2016. The rest was just ocean. It looks the way you might think it looks — all the major cities as an archipelago, drifting across the sunken country.

I’m annoyed at this for many reasons, not the least of which is that it literally submerges all the people doing good work in the Nebraskan gulf.

And, I get it. It is easy to set aside the interior as too empty or too close to the bloody American heart. I would just ask that, before you dismiss the Midwest, you follow these instructions, first.

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Instructions: Really go out to an Iowa field. Bring a PA system and hook it up to your car. Take off all of your clothes. Play music (any) as loud as possible. Blow the speaker. Use a projector to show the live album on a nearby barn. Invite everyone you know.

Ask them to take off their clothes and put on new ones. Stand in front of the infinity of the field and the obelisk of the barn and the land, land, people, people, people, and then — nobody. Do you feel it? Can you feel that intensely human feeling? The same as the rave in Minneapolis, the same as the prairie preserve in Kansas, the same as the shapeless horizon of Lake Superior?

I turn to region because I think it is useful. Because some of the memory follows the grid. I turn to region because a rectangle destroys the square’s power. A diagonal, too, is loose at both ends. It’s useful to think through place. It’s useful to think through 1962.

June 15, 1962: Students for a Democratic Society finish the Port Huron Statement at a UAW building on the shore of Lake Huron.

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They write, looking out at the lake (the Port Huron Statement): “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

As we grew […] we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration ‘all men are created equal…’ rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.

We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nation-states seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind suffers under nourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth's physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than ‘of, by, and for the people.’”

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One last thought on the 1960s: The map exists everywhere, the people exist everywhere, the history exists everywhere. Our infrastructure is different, our landscapes are different, but the struggle is the same. We are repeating ourselves.

August 21, 2017: I wear a dress outside. It is the day of the solar eclipse. I am wearing the same dress and I am at the same beach. It feels different, but it only takes a moment for it to feel the same. A public access television show is filming on the beach. They are interviewing the people who have showed up to watch the eclipse. Human interest. I am praying that they don’t come over. The people with the video camera come over. They hold the microphone in front of me and I try to speak slowly. They frame the shot well.

Empty (Agnes Martin): “if my mind was empty enough I could see it I didn't paint the plane I just drew this horizontal line Then I found out about all the other lines But I realized what I liked was the horizontal line”

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August 7, 2019: pulling out of Chicago at 7am and the couple behind me speculating on the likelihood of terrorism on a train from Chicago to Detroit CHRIST DIED FOR YOUR SINS and the neighborhood falling past us — the blood highway, the apartment buildings —and now 31st street and I know that this is where our house is, just some blocks away, and I think — The miracle of the grid! Knowing where everything is at any time! A solution to seeing only where you are looking! and I think — the miracle of abandoned buildings, boarded up synagogue next to the church and the legacies of warm spirit and the memory of the house in Ann Arbor when I couldn’t sleep and the beach on Lake Superior, where, stoned and drunk, my friends and I placed stones in each other’s hands and watched our bodies like birds nests, tacked up against the doorframe and, to kill the time, we pulled out all of our clothes and tried everything on and thought — Like a fish tank when it’s filled with just water! (and then, a dress and you gently drop a fish into the tank and the thing substantially changes and the look is now the fish and not the water or the tank or the sunset to the side of the porcupine mountains) and our eye is drawn to — I can’t believe our luck, the camp site is right next to the water, or, I can’t believe our luck, we’ve found each other in all this commotion, or, I can’t believe our luck, the sticking feeling between our lips and Cassiopeia and a dock in a cornfield, or, I can’t believe our luck, the planetarium society printed a star chart to memorialize the day when we first started this rotating skything, or, I can’t believe our luck, no one stops us when we trapeze down the street in our stilts, our best makeup and heels, in our new uncomfortable jackets and touching hands and our ununderstandable bodies and the crying out of patterns and undulation and the mundane and verdant overgrowth of abandoned lots and the stoicism of a stranger’s brown eyes and glittercovered body and the way the

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streets and rhythms knock together in a regular pattern, making every deviation feel like a bursting out like a jumping up like the big water we’ve been looking at for three hours straight like the tears in my eyes when I know what work there is to do, there’s so much work to do, it’s all stretched out before us and undistinguishable and uncirclable and forever like these lakes or the feeling of land or the feeling of crossing over, state to state, and indistinguishable road from you from you from you from you from you from you from you

Grey Grant is a Michigan based composer/performer/poet, whose work currently centers around the urgency of identity and the environment. Grey was recently selected as a resident of the Gabriella Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music for 2019. They received their BM from the University of Michigan, with a minor in Creative Writing (poetry). Their artistic mentors have included: Stephen Rush, Evan Chambers, Bright Sheng, Kristin Kuster, and Keith Taylor.

Grey can't stress enough how much they love trees.

Emily Yang is a composer, writer, and electronic musician from Ann Arbor.

Corey Smith is a composer, writer, and performer based in Chicago, Illinois. He is classically trained, but is interested in art that obscures the boundaries between worlds: words that are sound, music that is image, body that is text. He works in a hybridized performance style; a combination of original music, text, and choreography. Corey has been an artist-in-residence at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory, and Grin City, and is a 2017 grantee of the City of Chicago’s Individual Artist Program. Most recent collaborative credits include works performed at Defibrillator Gallery, Links Hall, Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the McCormick Bridgehouse and Chicago River Museum. Corey studied music composition at the University of Michigan with Bright Sheng, Evan Chambers, and Erik Santos. He is a collaborator, a friend, a proud Mid-westerner.