Stories in Ruins Part I
on wedging
Where have I been? It’s been so busy that I’ve wondered whether two 5, 6, 7, 8’s per month is too much. I want to go slow and steady, but life has a way of interrupting me with train rides, blood pacts, sacred spaces, and mythical deer (more on the deer in part II).
Extend your hands forth to feel this union, saying, “I feel it!”
I feel it!!
So screamed a crowd at Elsewhere and Otherwise, a collective platform dedicated to experimentation with togetherness, intimacy, the erotic, science, solidarity, time, and magic, held at Performing Arts Forum. The crowd screamed “I feel it” in testament to the “wedging” of Ellen and her recently operated-on toe. These words were part of a liturgy I wrote for the marriage marathon that Aubrey Birch invited me to officiate and design. Her invitation went like this:
Dear Louise,
Would you like to be the 'celebrant' for 2 feasts I am planning to do for E&O?
They will explore which living and non-living beings and structures we pledge ourselves to (the Scottish root of the word 'wed' is a pledge, a commitment). The first will be sensorially/culinarily dedicated to soil, the iron cores of the earth, and the development of the blood-vascular system. The second will be dedicated to abundance, fruit, fecundity, the breath of life, literally breathlessness, blushing, arousal, love.
I wonder if you could, with the powers vested in you by the free église of relationality, be our celebrant for the 2 feasts?
Kisses ~
I said yes. About a year ago I got ordained online in the Universal Life Church, which entailed filling out a form and spending 30 dollars. Now I get emails addressed to Reverend Trueheart, asking me whether I have exercised my powers and officiated any weddings yet. I signed up for the fun of it, for the kitsch of it, and because I want to officiate weddings as a side job (get in touch! spread the word!). I picture myself having a few meetings with newly engaged couples/throuples/polycules, discussing what a union means to them, what commitment and time entails in the current state of the world, and designing a ritual together.
At Paf however, the commitment ceremonies were to be part after-dinner entertainment, part witchcraft, part earnest consideration of what vows, promises, and commitments to human and non-human beings and non-beings might look like in a radical queer context. They also evolved into a performance format that I want to share with you now. I will recount how it played out and how I feel about it.
Red Tremmel, an artist and historian of sexuality at Tulane University who was co-organizing E&O was cc’d on Aubrey’s email. Red is someone I deeply admire and am fond of. He laid out his thoughts, “I have to say that I find myself to continue to be at odds with the frame of "wedding." [...] I still cannot disentangle my thoughts from or diffuse my reaction to the history of the ritual.[…]Perhaps it is the job hazard of being a historian but I find the history of the European institution of marriage to be so repulsive, violent and oppressive that I can hardly find ways to be playful in relation to it.”
Given my admiration for Red and the hot-iron drive of my will to make God queer again, I resolved do the work that needed doing (acknowledgement of trauma, incorporation of more information, incorporation of nuance, finding the bravery to hold multiple truths together at once, thickening the premise by offerring many different names to add to God and weddings, like Gaïa and “partners in crime,” and more) in order for the show to go on.
Marriage is so insidious. It is the only rite I can think of that breaches the boundaries of church and state. This should give us a sense of how foundational the hetero couple is to our current constructs of economic and civic life. When you have a trad, legal wedding, you stand before a state, your family, before God and all your friends and you speak words that enact legal and religious bonds, promising to sleep with, share money with, spawn with, and take care of a person FOREVER. Getting married is a big deal.
While I was most recently in Paris at my parent’s place, I cracked open their wedding album and remembered the hundreds of times I looked at that album as a child. In my child’s mind, their wedding was the day in my mother’s life when she got to be the most beautiful and most well-dressed, the most powerful person in the room, and the one getting all the attention. The fact that it happened right before I was born made it all the more attractive; the precursor to my arrival on this earth was this awesome ceremony, and I sorely wished I had been invited. What dress would I have worn? Young Anne and Charlie look relaxed, elegantly dancing with each other’s parents and playfully shoving cake into each other’s mouths before a crowd of drunk friends. This was Washington DC, thanksgiving weekend 1988, at Washington Cathedral. The newspaper announcement of the ordeal can be found here.
These pictures and this event meant so much to me, perhaps mostly because of the costumes and premise that on this day, everything is about you, it’s your spectacle. The theater of it, like most things to do with church, was incredibly seductive. Years later, as I reckoned with the beliefs that have come to shape my life, like queerness, non-monogamy, and a flat out refusal to participate in coupledom as the economic building block of our society, I realized that I might never get married. Abandoning the certainty that this event would take place in my adulthood stung - but in a good way.
I need to fast forward. The weddings at Paf ended up being called wedgings because of a fortunate slip of the tongue that occurred when I got down on one knee in front of everyone and asked them for their consent to officiate, celebrate, and “marry” them. Blushing, they said yes and I did too. Then I got to work.
I spoke to each party getting married (Roya and her Clown, Jagoda and Herself in her 40s, Rachel and the Sky), and broke down the dramaturgy of the event so that they would know where to stand, what to say when, and when to exit stage left. When I got to the part about the vows, I said “for this part, the stage is yours,” it was their moment to make their pledge. There was a circle on the ground crafted from discarded peacock plumage, which they were to enter on a specific cue. I told them that this was where the magic was expected to take action.
By the way, this kind of dramaturgical conversation happens every Sunday at many churches, in the backstage area known as the sacristy. You talk through what is essentially a cue-to-cue, clarifying among other things how the choir is going to process through the nave, where communion will happen depending on how busy it is that day, have the lesson readers been briefed, etc.
At the wedgings, there was musical accompaniment. For the more goth/baroque set, we were accompanied by a harpist, Franz, a local minstrel raised in Champagne, who is also a Berlin-based tattoo artist. For the second round several days later, Maeve accompanied the unions on an electric guitar. Maeve describes herself as one breathing through the snorkel that pokes beyond the veil of human consciousness.
I know how Donna Haraway says that it matters what stories we use to tell stories, and I know how Audre Lorde says we cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. I am propelled by those thinkers to reach beyond my comfort zone and look critically at the tools used in my daily life that I don’t think twice about using, and the stories I have about myself and others that I don’t think twice about telling. However, the avoidant and guilt-driven aspects of my personality provoke a knee-jerk-reaction: if it is “bad” then drop it, disavow it, cease to claim it as yours. Can you relate? This reaction is a privileged one I know. Not everyone exists in conditions where they can curate their own identity to suit themselves.
Much of what I cherish and fetishize about my parent’s wedding is being the center of attention in an official, costumed, and ritualized way. The desire I have for this kind of attention is beautiful, and I am totally fine with it. At the end of the day, it’s about performing. However, the specter of Bridezilla cries 'THIS IS MY BIG DAY!!!' as they stamp their feet in entitled embodiment of the contemporary individualist capitalist spectacle. I wonder about how close she looms, and whether it is too close for comfort. This archetype is definitely a church thing: Bridezilla wants property and power, two things her old friend and collaborator The Church understands very well. Also, Bridezilla IS property in the traditional sense, that’s partly why she gets to have this big moment. Her payoff for being owned is the spectacle of her marriage, and the bigger the show the higher her worth. Hard to say what’s more fucked up: that the above statement is true, or that part of what’s hard for me to let go of when I decide not to get married is this high-voltage moment of praise and appraisal.
Another church thing I try to dismantle is the good-bad binary, which is connected to the guilt-story and knee-jerk reaction that propels me to drop ‘bad’ things. My understanding of ‘bad’ here is solely in opposition to ‘good,’ ‘good’ being the goal, morally speaking. Being a good person, and a good girl, are integral to my being, as much as righteous suffering and being a bad girl, in certain contexts, are too. I don’t want this binary to be integral (it’s bad!!) to my being and I don’t want to be subject to a moral code.
Imagine that your mind is a landscape built out of structures, some of which you have dismantled to states so benign in their charm they resemble a ruin. And inside that ruin, you tell stories that were never told there before, and the ruin, in its dilapidated state, must contain stories it couldn’t contain before, and is changed by them.
Jesus tells his followers to turn their backs on the devil and various types of evil. The thing is, Jesus, it’s not so simple. I am part of lineages and structures that I may not wish to partake in or participate in, but that I am still responsible for: marriage, for example, is something I have directly profited from, and which has directly harmed me and others, so given the complexity of the situation, it does not sit right with me to turn my back on it, ethically speaking.
I am not opposed to marriage. I’m not “pro-marriage” if such a position even exists. It was a delight to wed Melanie Jame and Pop Perfection, Theo to their anger, the Beavers to one another. We danced together, gave toasts together, spoke the words that manifested the unions together, and bore witness and testament to commitments beyond time, beyond property, beyond logic, and beyond frames. The wedgings became frames within which other frames could be transcended. It was really cool. At the end of each wedging, the prayer went like this:
Now that the earth has held it,
The air surrounds it,
The water binds it and flows on,
And fire pulses in your heart,
Please cross the threshold, into the garden, and stay for as long as you’d like.
~~~~~~~~
This edition of 5, 6, 7, 8, especially the part about Bridezilla, was lovingly guest edited by Melanie Jame Wolf.
Lil Announcements:
Go see The River, by Public in Private, in Berlin, on a canoe!! It runs for 3 months and it’s about grief and rivers and is so beautiful. Thank you Clement Layes for this proposal, and my dear friend Asaf Aharonson who guided the version I saw. What a way to land back at home.
Very soon I’ll be starting work on a new project entitled “The Superimposition,” co-directed by Martin Hansen and Melanie Jame Wolf, featuring Justin Kennedy, and dramaturg-ed by yours truly. The show opens at Bärenzwinger on September 18th. I’ll remind you, of course.
On August 12th and 13th I’ll be showing a new one on one performance within the frame of the Club for Performance Art Gallery’s new event “Lotto Royal,” curated by Camila Malenchini, within the frame of T.E.N.T, run by some dear friends of mine including Camila, Layton Lachman, Ivanka Trampoline, and Caroline Alexander. More info on this later too.
Don’t forget to share this newsletter to anyone who might enjoy it!
Love,
Louise