Readings from the Austin Project 20th Anniversary Celebration
by Jack Isaac Pryor
I am waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign. This can be futile, or immensely pathetic: in Erwartung (Waiting), a woman waits for her lover, at night, in the forest; I am waiting for no more than a telephone call, but the anxiety is the same. Everything is solemn: I have no sense of proportion.
—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
I.
I decide it’s important that I have ephemera to show, because ephemera, I’ve just reminded my friend Katie, is evidence. Be sure to cite José Muñoz, I tell her, and so she does.
Citations are evidence, too. Of research. Of rhizomes. Of a conversation that started before you arrived on the scene.
I haven’t been on this scene in nine months, this scene being my office in Abington, Pennsylvania—cardboard boxes piled high from their trip out west, and back again.
I am ripping. I am digging. I am sweating—mask dangling around my neck. I’m searching for this piece of evidence, this slip of paper, this place where it all began—before the regime of repetition and representation was inaugurated—an object that, for whatever reason, I’ve decided is so important to this story I want to tell you about theater and choice, tragedy and time.
I find it.
I slip it in my backpack, along with a thick, Black book titled Loss—just in case. The convention is that usually the word Black is capitalized when it refers to Black people and lowercase when it refers to Black as a color or adjective. But Blackness is more expansive than the human. And there is no symbolic or descriptive reference to the term Black in this society that does not also impact Black lives. So Black is Black.
See, I’ve been working from home, sweltering in place, and so I don’t have easy access to the words.
I am driving now. And the Chancellor sends an email; I know this because my phone is mounted to the dash. The subject heading is “Acknowledging our students.” I open. “Acknowledgement,” she writes,
can simply take the form of saying that you recognize what is happening, validating the range of responses to these events, which will vary based on personal experience, and knowing that emotional and physiological responses to racial trauma, violence, chronic stress, and oppression are logical and normal. Additionally, asking “How are you doing? What ways can I support you?” and being present and offering to listen can show students that […]
I swerve.
I click. Jury has reached a verdict.
I click. Verdict is estimated between 4:30 and 5pm EST. I click. I look at the clock. It’s 4:58pm.
In the corner of the screen, in flaming red, are the words “LIVE” in all caps. This is live, I think to myself; liveness matters, I remind myself—my eyes darting between the road and the screen.
The judge ascends. It is silent. He taps the mic, two times, his finger on the tip. It is silent. He speaks. It is silent. I cannot hear the words that are being said. I panic. Mute. Unmute. Mute. Unmute. I crank the volume. I watch the road. I can’t hear a single word, and this is happening right now—live—like the flaming red words remind me in all caps. And verdicts are words, and words are performatives, and performatives produce a series of effects—that’s what I tell my students when they read Judith Butler. But I also tell them that it’s bodies that matter, it’s bodies that signify, so I decide to watch him move in silence. To read the signs.
He sits. His eyes dart. His baby blue tie matches his baby blue mask matches his arms behind his back, prepped for what’s to come.
He rises. He steels himself. He puts his shoulders back. Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move.
The judge sits. He opens a manila envelope. He licks. He sorts. He reads.
Pan back to the man in blue. His eyes dart. His brow is furrowed. His suit is cheap. His eyes dart. He is listening, I later learn, to the sound of fourteen voices rising in yes:
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
He blinks. He darts. He darts. Left right, left right. He nods. He rises.
Another man, dressed in beige, obeys the words that I cannot hear. He cuffs his already cuffed wrists and escorts him ever so gently—palms pointing up to the heavens—out of courtroom C1836, which in my neck of the woods means life (18), and double life (36), and that’s what he’s about to get.
But first.
Quick pan to a Black and white Quartz clock, mounted above, against the beigest of beige walls. Beige: the color of sidewalk. Beige: the color of white skin lit by the midwestern sun. 4:10 pm it reads on the dot. Some say it’s hard to tell the difference between a camera and a gun, but not today. Whoever shot this one, knows it’s a story about time.
2.
“We are going to need a safe word,” they say. For a minute, he’s not sure what they mean. “Oh right, a safe word,” he replies. “Yes, sure, that’s a good idea.”
The first time they fuck, they show him the collection of toys hanging from the Black shoe rack affixed to the inside of their closet door. His eyes dart. A packer. A slapper. A spreader. A dildo. A gas mask. Rope.
“Do you have a safe word you like to use?” they ask. He does not have a safe word he likes to use.
“How about ‘stop’?” he suggests. His eyes are glued to the gas mask.
They laugh. “I’m going to be saying that a lot.”
“Oh. Right.” His eyes dart back.
“How about ‘red,’” they offer instead. Red sounds like a stupid safe word to him.
“Okay. Red,” he replies. He wonders if they use the word red with all their lovers, or just with him.
3.
His suit, however, is not cheap. It is blue. A cerulean blue in luxury wool, with gold paisley lining and a lavender stitch near the wrist. He spent exactly 5% of his start-up funds purchasing it—more, if you include the shirting, and the flight. This perhaps is an example of identity politics finally working in one’s favor. Nobody wants to be the person that surveils the transsexual academic’s need for “professional attire.”
And the trip was otherwise legitimate. He was writing a book. He was here to see performance. The bespoke suit was merely a tack on to his “professional travel.”
But what’s also true is that he was haunted. If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting has taken place. The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.
When he books it, he knows it is dicey—staying in the same Brooklyn flat that they stayed on their six-month anniversary trip. His friends—his exactly six best friends—all agree that he is a masochist. Why do that to yourself. It’s not yet clear what exactly he is thinking this will accomplish, or conjure, or do—as they like to say in performance studies—but he knows that he has to put his body back in that same spot.
After they left, after they left him, to be more accurate, he would often return there in his mind anyway—his cock flicking their pussy at the edge of the bed, his shoes getting wet in the snow on their way to see Big Love, the phone-call from their mother about the funeral, and the missed flight. So why not come here for real, he reasoned: it has a wood-burning fireplace, after all, which is what they call a “rare find” on Airbnb—demarcated with the recognizable outline of a cut gemstone.
He spends three weeks there, sitting where they sat. Eating where they ate. Sleeping where they slept. Outward facing, he was “resignifying.” Like when he texts their brother to say no, he isn’t up for a visit this time around. Or when he bakes the coconut cake.
Inward facing, he is tracing. On the other hand, it must be admitted that there are aftereffects, impressions that linger long after the external cause has been removed, or has removed itself. “If anyone looks at the sun, he may retain the image in his eyes for several days,” Goethe wrote. “Boyle relates an image of ten years.” And who is to say this afterimage is not equally real? Indigo makes its stain not in the dyeing vat, but after the garment has been removed. It is the oxygen of the air that blues it.
For some reason he has convinced himself that this was the place where things started—before the regime of repetition and representation were inaugurated. But he may have been mixing it up with the image of them holding a lemon-flavored water ice at the Dyke March in June, or that trip to J. Crew on their way to Lisa Murray’s wedding in August. It’s hard to say for sure: memory is not an accurate reporter.
So when, six months after that, he wears that same blue suit on his trip to Providence—the one where he carries his suitcase in the rain, where he and Derek fight by the ocean, where the restaurant is too loud, where the installation is too scary, where Liza cries, where River cries, where the taxi doesn’t come, where Irit does, where the department chair touches him, her breasts pressing against his lapels—it is not yet clear they, too, might become lovers one day; she, too, might come to first love, then hate, the way he worries over his cats.
“I had a dream about the shift from being a living being to a myth. About the strophe and apostrophe. They were wrapped around each other and they froze and floated through space. Then they turned into statues. Makes me think of Medea,” she texts him this very morning, while he is rising from his own fever dreams. “I think my dream is about how people can become mythic when their stories can no longer change.”
Later, on the telephone, she will imply that his project is flawed, or at least maybe his logic. Myths are flat, she will say. They are flat and hard and calcified and cannot be entered, cannot be reworked: this is their very ontology—it is what makes a myth a myth. As he listens to her voice (which sounds to him like what stone fruit might sound like if it had a voice), he will imagine a sand dollar in his mind’s eye—the flat, burrowing sea urchins belonging to the order of Clypeasteroida. Their rigid skeleton, he later learns, are called a test, which he likes, and in South Africa they call the whole thing a pansy shell, which he likes even more. Myths are flat, he agrees, but theater is live. So anything can happen. That’s why we don’t like animals on stage, or babies in the audience. They hold too much power. And power can be invisible, it can be fantastic, it can be dull and routine. It can be obvious, it can reach out by the baton of the police, it can speak the language of your thoughts and desires. It can feel like remote control, it can exhilarate like liberation, it can travel through time, and it can drown you in the present. It is dense and superficial, it can cause you bodily injury, and it can harm you without seeming ever to touch you.
Work Cited:
Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Eng, David and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Undrowned: Black Lessons from Marine Mammals. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020.
Muñoz, José Esteban. “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8:2 (1996). 5-16.
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Seattle: Wave Books, 2009.
Reckson, Lindsay. “Hands Up.” Avidly. December 11, 2014.
Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
Jack Isaac Pryor is a writer, theater artist, and performance studies scholar specializing in experimental forms and trans/queer cultural production. Their first book, Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (Northwestern UP), examines the capacity of performance to rewrite histories of racial and gendered violence, as well as to reveal queer and transgender futures not determined by past harm. They are currently working on a book about transgender aesthetics, an edited volume about Stephen Sondheim, and a durational performance about tragedy and choice (24 Hour Medea). They received their PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and were an active member of the Austin Project from 2005-2006. They live in Philadelphia/Lenapehoking.
