"The Seeing Place" by Agnes Borinsky

Noah Purifoy, “Adrian's Little Theater” (2000)

for Deb Margolin

1.

When I look in the mirror, I don't see myself. I was born a boy and that's not who I am. I have stubble on my jaw and I'm balding. But I'm buying wigs and I'm finding words. I have a pile of those pink Glossier bags that look like they're made out of bubble wrap in my closet.
Lately I'm the one crying in the pasta aisle. I was never good at one-liners. I'm too sincere for my own good.

When the Israelites were about to enter the Promised Land, Moses sent 12 spies ahead to explore a little and report back.
Everyone else waited in their encampment. When they squinted across the Jordan, they could see a few sheep, grazing on the hillside. They could hear music playing on the radio in someone's kitchen.
Then the spies came back. Ten of them said: “The land is beautiful. But also: it's full of giants. We'll never make it. If we try to cross the river, we'll all be killed.”
Two of the spies said they didn't know what the other spies were talking about. “We'll survive if we're meant to survive,” they said. “We saw beautiful things. The grapes were as big as your head and the water was sweet.”
But the Israelites were still reeling from the first, more pessimistic, report. The people quaked. They cemented themselves into their fear.
“We'll be murdered,” they said to Moses. “Why did you take us out of Egypt? It would be better if we were back there. We were slaves, but at least we had wine and cucumbers!”

I remember in an English class once learning that the word for theater comes from theatron. Which means, the seeing place.
We used to do that all the time. We left our homes and gathered in a room and for a little while, we all sat together, facing the same direction, and looked at people onstage.
Now we don't go to the theater. The rehearsal rooms are closed and we can't workshop our plays. What about our seeing? Can we workshop that? 

I'm not talking about realism. “Realism” is a bludgeon used to keep certain people out of the room. It's an aesthetic school and a management style as well. I could go on about its limitations but I bet you've heard that queer ditty before.

Lately I'm the one crying in the pasta aisle. I was never good at one-liners. I'm too sincere for my own good.

Here, look at my quarantine:
I am packing cardboard boxes, I am waking in unfamiliar beds. I'm crying in cars and on walks. Crying on couches and in rooms with bare walls and no furniture. I'm limping into the clinic with a swollen foot as I text with my coworkers about a walk-out. I'm beet-red, panting, sprinting back and forth between my car and my nearly-empty apartment with my arms full of things I didn't have time to sort. I am shouting at my sister and I am slamming the door. 
Love asks for separation sometimes. All the old hurts come flooding back.
I did get gifts: 
A tomato plant. A loaf of bread. A song. Four steaming, hard-boiled eggs, wrapped in a green handkerchief.
Also, look:
Hawks dipping behind the treeline on a sacred mountain. Blessed rain battering the walls of a wooden shack. A line of thimble-sized estrogen bottles lined up by the wall, like dirty glasses after a fairy cocktail party. This, the old mattress where I sleep.
Here's a manila envelope full of words and pictures that I left on a porch in Massachusetts. Here's the smell when I rolled the windows down and turned the radio up as the sun slanted horizontal across Los Angeles. Here's where I head downtown and find tens of thousands of other people in the street.

I do not think the Promised Land is a physical place. 
Zionism is too literal. I mean aesthetically. To say nothing of the politics of it.
I think I have to see the landscape of the Bible as internal geography. A river divides our hearts, and some of us never cross it. 

Who, of the spies, saw things truthfully? If that's even the right adverb. Who saw things “right”? Seeing as a kind of justice. 

Sometimes a new way of seeing can feel like discovery. And sometimes in can feel like loss. Those of us who have, in whatever way, had to excuse ourselves from the prevailing assumptions of seeing – who have had to find our own words for an experience we weren't even sure was real – are used to this gut-twisting dance. We slip back and forth between dizziness and homecoming. We are queasy with joy and when we fall in love it's like panic. The same things that sweeten our lives sometimes destroy us. Between "girl" and something else I find myself frequently skidding. I am haunted by a learned empiricism, it punishes me. Empiricism, like "empire." We are never one thing or another because we are never still. Neither are our worlds. We make a home in the movement between seemingly incommensurate realities.

Look:
A man kneels on another man's neck and the man on the ground dies. What is realistic about that? What is unreal? Were we looking? If we were, what did we see? Did everyone who was looking see the same thing? To what god or gods are we dedicating our vision?

Jacques Lusseyran, who spent many months in Buchenwald, wrote a memoir where he recalls his childhood memories of light. “I saw it everywhere I went,” he says. “I was eating sun.” Even when night fell. He writes: “Darkness, for me, was still light, but in a new form and a new rhythm. It was light at a slower pace. In other words, nothing in the world, not even what I saw inside myself with closed eyelids, was outside this great miracle of light.” 
Lusseyran was blinded in an accident at age eight. He said after that he saw more vividly. 

Sometimes a new way of seeing can feel like discovery. And sometimes in can feel like loss. Those of us who have, in whatever way, had to excuse ourselves from the prevailing assumptions of seeing – who have had to find our own words for an experience we weren't even sure was real – are used to this gut-twisting dance.

Tisha B'Av is the Jewish holiday where we mourn the destruction of the temple. There were two temples, actually, one built almost 600 years after the other was destroyed, but both were destroyed, apparently, on the same day. Now we read the book of Lamentations. I have always loved this holiday, because you sit on the floor in the dark and you listen to someone chanting this gorgeous, painful book.
This year my birthday fell on Tisha B’Av, so I fasted, and I worked my job at the bookstore, answering the phone and trying to help customers find their copies of White Fragility. 
This year I thought: it's about time the temple was destroyed. And I grieved all the years we spent thinking we needed a building to worship the Eternal. It shocked me that I'd never seen the holiday that way before. 
When I got home I lay on my bed and stared out the window at the sky, until the moon came out and everything turned purple. 
Bring it all down, I thought. Bring it down, bring it down, bring it down.

I am tired of punishing myself for what I see when I look in the mirror. What I fail to see. 

The spies can't stop talking about what happened when they crossed the river. They are invited to dinner parties. They are asked to write op-eds in the local paper. 
Wait but what was it like? Actually? You said there were giants? What did you see? 
“We saw the giants,” they said. “And, believe us, if we were to cross the river they'd squash us like bugs.” 
Here's how they say it in the Bible: “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.” 
Here we start to understand what is “wrong” about their seeing. They weren't looking at the land. They were looking at themselves. They borrowed the eyes of someone they were too afraid to even speak to, to reveal themselves to, and they looked at themselves the way they imagined themselves being seen. What contortions! And also: we do it all the time. 
Mesiter Eckhart says: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye...”
What would it mean to turn outward with a divine seeing? 
What was actually on the other side of the river? 

I've been told many times that certain things didn't fit where I wanted to put them. 
“This play will never work.” 
One dramaturg friend, working for a large theater at the time, said to me: “I would love it if a theater did a season of your plays. No one would come and they'd never make any money but it would be wonderful.” What you are writing is nice, she was saying, but it doesn't fit into world as I see it.
Look, here's my philosophy of the theater: Everything fits. 
My justification? So it is in the universe. 
Enough with these dramaturgies and taxonomies. Enough with these textbooks and how-to guides. Those ways of seeing have not served us. I do not believe in the gods to which that vision is dedicated. 
My prayer for theater: 
May the logic of creation, the logic of divine order, prevail. 
There is no fear in that logic. It's a logic of love.

The choreographer Deborah Hay choreographs in questions. Her questions always start with, What if...? To be in her dances is to put your body inside a new way of looking. “Turn your fucking head,” she says. Over and over. She insists that you constantly refresh your visual fields. Not get too attached to one image or another. And you never stop asking the question you're dancing. You ask it every minute, and with every cell in your body. What if where I am is exactly what I need? What if my grief is a form of celebration? And as you dance you feel yourself entering a new way of seeing. 

Bring it all down, I thought. Bring it down, bring it down, bring it down.

When we see something like the video of the man being murdered – something that makes visible history and systems and hatred and violence – we have to look longer until we can see something bigger than that. Something vaster that swallows it up. Turn your fucking head. Turn your fucking head again. 
We do not surrender to whatever the world does to us, and we do not drop our testifying. But we have to slip out of the terms we've been given. We have to stop seeing with the eyes of empire. 
Or else we turn into grasshoppers.

Seeing is always an act of creation, a collaboration with other creatures and with God.

2.

Let me be clear. I am struggling, myself, to see with the eyes I know I need. 
I did not think I would see so much in the light of gender. I did not think that mascara and wigs and pharmaceuticals would be given me as tools of the spirit. But I think they have been, and I'm doing my best. At least, I tell myself, I know enough to see them that way. 

My first playwriting teacher, Deb Margolin, used to say: “Ours is a theater of desire. It belongs to those of us ____ enough to claim it.” I can't quite remember what the word I'm missing was. It's dropped out of my memory. But the rest of that sentence holds, indelibly. In Deb's beautiful voice, her magnificent forward lean. 

Look: 
I am FaceTiming with a friend. I am trying to talk about the things I'm just starting to understand. My mouth opens. I pick up the starts of sentences and I put them down again. My words crumble. I don't know how to say the thing that I am learning. The truth of the collapse that is finding its way into me and breaking open my chest.
Poor child, I was raised in the strictures of middle-class white sincerity. My social mouth is my enemy. I can hear the gates clanging shut every time I open my mouth and smile. When I write, I am running up to the gates with my high-heels in my hand. Trying to figure out how to get to the other side.
But this is FaceTime. “I'm sorry,” I tell my friend, “I'm not there yet.” 
I'm talking about my Promised Land.
Look at me hang up the phone, stare out the window. 

We return to order, to rules, to structures when we are uncertain about what to do. The first time I taught college playwriting I had a student come to my office hours. 
“I like all the exercises we've been doing,” he said. “And I know that you want us to see all these different ways of writing weird plays. But. How do I write a normal play? Like, just, a three-act play. Can you just tell me how to do that?” He looked at me expectantly and opened his laptop to take notes.
My mouth opened but I didn't know what to say. Not in a profound way but in a maybe-I-am-not-qualified-to-teach-this-subject way. I had no idea what a three-act play was. I think I made vague reassurances and managed to end the meeting. By the end of the semester I realized what the student had been asking: “I am overwhelmed by the possible. I don't know where to start. I don't know how to choose.”
The next time I taught college playwriting I had clarified my task: help students practice choice-making in a vast field. Teach confidence in the act of taking a breath and running towards the things you love.
Seeing the landscape as your promised land. Don't look for the right answer. Look for the answer you love. Ours is a theater of desire...

“We don't know what will happen if we cross the river,” the two dissenting spies said. “But we know that we want to cross it.”

I saw a Q & A with the poet Bernadette Mayer where someone asked her, “Don't you think it's important to learn the rules first, before you break them?”
“No,” said Bernadette Mayer, and moved on to the next question. 

Consider how desire can direct our looking, can utterly transform what we see. 
Consider how desire is a structure more sacred than any rule.
But no one ever said it was easy.

Don't look for the right answer. Look for the answer you love.

Look everywhere and you will see that we are always sending spies out into the future. Professors, politicians, artistic directors. We ask them to go on our behalf when we don't quite trust ourselves yet. 
They pop over and suddenly become authorities on the Promised Land — our Promised Land. 
They say: It's a nice dream, but we'd be naive to think it could be real.
And: We love these ideas, but we don't think this candidate will be able to win an election.
And: Prison abolition? Pie in the sky. No one will ever take that seriously.
And: We love this play, but unfortunately we don't think our audience will know what to do with it.
We push back a little, gently. Because deep inside we already know everything we need to know about the Promised Land. We point and say: “We want to go. We want to cross the river.”
They shake their heads and say: We know. But. 
You artists. 
You're very naive. 
But let's be realistic.
They sprinkle the world with a gentle dusting of fear. They ask us to think seriously about what might happen. They say: You might not be able to keep all the nice things you have. 
They say: You might have to shake hands with giants. You might have to tell them why they frighten you so much.
They say: Your life might be simple, and full of uncertainty for a while.
And sometimes we believe them, and stop looking. And forget that we, too, have eyes to see. 

On FaceTime, I tell my friend about the spies. I'm trying to articulate what I'm learning from the story. My friend who is considering a new direction in his life. 
“The Promised Land,” he says, “rarely looks the way we think it will.”

It's amazing to me, writing this, how often seeing resembles dissolution. Feels like breaking and hurts like falling apart.

Nothing about my life is as I expected it to be. I was looking the wrong direction, I was telling the wrong stories. My vision was dedicated to gods I no longer believe in. 
Maybe the right story is the story of an empire falling. And I didn't see it till now. 

God is angry with the 10 spies, and with the fearful, complaining Israelites. She tells Moses they'll have to pack up and head back into the desert. Go wander for 40 years, She says, until everyone who saw with those frightened, empirical eyes is dead. 
So the Israelites pack up, turn around, and head back into the desert. They look over their shoulders, a little embarrassed, but relieved, since they are sure they are escaping a fate worse than death. In the desert the landscape is endless and monotonous. The food is boring. The company gets old.
A few people end up settling in different cities here and there. Places that seem nice enough. They save up and buy houses, they have kids.
Eventually they are all dead. All except for Moses and the two spies who shrugged when they were asked what would happen on the other side of the river, who came back and spoke of their desire.
Those spies are old now. And they've been very patient with everyone. They see the gorgeous variety of desert plants and animals. They are lovers and they listen to Tracy Chapman on a little walkman as they trek along. They loan each other books. I know these things are true.
Eventually they decide to break up because relationships are hard. But they stay friends. They look around and sometimes they wish they had fought a little harder to persuade everyone else that it would have been possible to cross the river. Sometimes they're disappointed in the choices their friends and family made, and in some of the choices they made, and they get sad. But other times they feel alright. They don't dwell too much on the past. They don't have a lot of money. They let everything fall away. They trust the light of the blink and they trust the territory of their seeing. 

Maybe they're in the promised land already. Maybe they just can't see it. Maybe they're still on the road. 

I don't know if it's an ending or a beginning. 

Addendum, 12/17/20.

In a recent email, Deb says:

The blank in that sentence that the theater (the seeing place) belongs to whoever is _____ to claim it is

demented

but all that really means is: Whoever is passionate enough, in love enough, desperate enough, enough in love with God, to cross the river.

That's all it means.

I remembered it was J. Robert Oppenheimer who said:

It is style that is the deference that action pays to uncertainty.

This he said 4 years after he directed the construction of the first atomic bomb.

I trust in the power of Desire, which is really Love. I trust I can get across; Love is all that's ever gotten me across. People threw rotten fruit at me; laughed as if I were an old drunk. I crossed. I got cancer; I crossed. I gave birth: I crossed. I crossed on a thousand stages, just standing still. [...]