Who Do You Think You Are? Sentience and the Body in Jordan Harrison’s THE ANTIQUITIES
I have put my phone across the room from me as I write this. There are always alerts and notifications that take me away from the concentration required to string words together, to think. There is always the impulse to see who might be texting. There is always research to be conducted — summer camp, Leonora Carrington, the benefits of a gluten-free lifestyle. My phone, my phone. It both connects me and isolates me. It makes me more and less efficient. It allows me both to discover new worlds and limits (algorithmically or otherwise) my discovery. It is duality incarnate. No not incarnate, I correct myself. Incarnate, in the strict sense, means embodied, a god or concept becoming flesh. She is goodness incarnate —a representation of goodness in human form. Even if the technology in my phone were to achieve sentience, as it does in The Antiquities — this spectacular play that is both rending love poem and prophetic lamentation — it will never incarnate. AI technology, the play reminds us, is composed of zeroes and ones, yesses and nos. Only we, in all our blood-pumping, organ-pulsing, muscly and hair-covered maybe-ness, are human.
Putting my phone away is an act of defiance from a parental standpoint. Both of my children’s schools communicate with me through an app, and there is an expectation that I am always available. Pictures from my son’s school (he’s three) are sent around noon every day. Every day I look at them — immediately, the moment they come. One reason I look is that something might have happened to, with, or involving my little guy. Another is that seeing the photos makes me feel connected to him. But there’s a third thing, too — the fact that I just want to reunite with my screen, to watch it illuminate.
There’s a scene in The Antiquities that takes place in the year 2031. Two sisters — one a writer, the other an actor – grapple with the effect of AI on their careers. Have they been rendered redundant? What does that mean about who they are? Just as they approach a moment of connection their devices light up, and they retreat from each other, back into the cozy absorption of the internet. I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon showing a woman on a sofa: I’m just going to stay in tonight and curl up with a good phone.
I tried to get a “dumb phone” last year, but I found that I couldn’t access QR code menus, check my son into daycare, or use my building’s entry system. I spent half an hour on a street corner attempting to text another parent about pick-up time, clumsily pressing the number keys in the way so many of us used to do with speed and alacrity. Are you okay??, the dad texted me back, because the message I sent was incoherent. I gave up, feeling as though the world, and my mind along with it, has been remade in the smartphone’s image.
My daughter has been begging me for an Apple Watch for years. I haven’t given in yet—I’m waiting until she commutes by herself. I’m already grieving her loss of innocence, the constant tug at her wrist. I am unnerved that an Apple Watch (deemed more acceptable by many parents because you can’t access social media) is what one calls “a wearable,” a word that feels Huxley-an, futuristic, dystopian. I tell her this. I tell her I’m locking it on Sundays. I tell her it will only give her an anxiety-provoking sense of acceleration, she will lose time, it will make the world too urgent, too fast, too disembodied. Mom, she says, you’re so judgmental. Another New Yorker cartoon: Two teenagers lying on a bed looking at phones. When I make eye contact for the first time, I want it to be with the right person.
As a teenager in the ‘90s, I used to drive the back roads of New Jersey for hours. I had no cell phone back then, nothing to distract me. I listened to cassette tapes, adjusted the heat, drank gas station coffee with hazelnut creamer, smoked (sorry) Newport 100s. I think of those anonymous drives as some of my most pleasurable memories. The Amish don’t drive cars because walking or riding in a horse-drawn carriage gives them more time to think about God. I don’t want to be Amish. But I do want my children to feel, or even want to feel, moments when they are alone with themselves and their bodies. Maybe with music, or their sense of God. Hopefully not Newport 100s.
But of course, to have a body is to die, and to feel it is to know that I will die, to know that my children will one day die. Our lives are chaotic, confusing, painful, joyful, distracted in some ways, pointed in others, but the most irrefutable fact, what we all share, is that they will end. Stuart, in The Antiquities, talks about the medieval habit of sleeping in two shifts — going to bed when it is dark, then waking in the middle of the night, then going back to sleep again — a second sleep. What if our lives, what if all human life, he wonders, is merely the waking period before the second sleep?
I don’t know if I have ever seen a play that both despairs for and treasures humanity in the same breath in the way that Jordan’s play does. After seeing it I ached to run back home and hug my children’s bodies close, to feel their breath, to be their animal mother, their mother incarnate. In the days since seeing it I have touched my phone with more awareness and fear. I’ve looked more people in the eye, treasured the small talk-y conversations I have in the laundry room with my neighbors. It is a cliché to say we go to the theater to be reminded of our human connection. But watching Jordan’s play, surrounded by all the other warm and breathing bodies, sitting on our coats and navigating our bags, I was reminded, in a way that was startling and poignant and horrible and strange, that we are all human. What a thing to have in common.
Julia May Jonas
Julia May Jonas is a writer and theater maker. She is the writer of the novel VLADIMIR and the novel DIANA, which is forthcoming from Avid Reader press. Her recent plays include YOUR OWN PERSONAL EXEGESIS, PROBLEMS BETWEEN SISTERS, and A WOMAN AMONG WOMEN. She has taught at Skidmore College and New York University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.