It's a whole sort of duet with another voice,
and one side is screaming, big oil, get out of here!
She gestures, she performs, grasping objects, and so on.
So I think I'll move to this wonderful "Matriot Acts."
I don't know how to quite read it.
There's a little note, "New century new millennium,
new decade, dawning your woman mind at times still in rage.
How far you have traveled in inner and outer space,
which smeared together in a furious imagination.
How a world shifts views, wave functions, quantum tunneling,
the relative nature of simultaneity,
black holes, and more string theory,
the roiling ceaseless energy of the vacuum.
What is a unified theory balance?
What is symmetry of effort, energy, and condition
of the multiverse?
What does the female human body and mind still tell us?
What synchronizes toward deeper balance?
I mark this text as response, as a public construct,
a way against a Patriot Act.
Maybe I just get insulted by the language of patriarchy."
So then I talk a little more about the occasions, street
work, demonstrations in front of the New York Public Library,
Colorado Street malls, gates of St. Mark's Church,
the financial capital of the USA as readings around the world.
And "Maybe these acts will never be laws of this or any land
or universe.
But I wanted these things to be multiplied.
I hear and see this libretto as work inside a theater
as well with a Kali figure as a deus ex machina,
invoking INADUBLE as a mode and performance,
and also inviting the participation of strings,
dulcimer, oud gongs, and other sounds, hearing the chorus
as an ensemble of vocalizers.
When I studied in Bali, I was struck
by my own experience of civilization taking place,
not in the courts, but in a network of temples,
the boundaries between art and ritual were fluid.
And one could participate in a sounding
of texts, which were actualized to maintain balance
and harmony in the community, and on behalf of Pertiwi,
Mother Earth."
And there's a beautiful photograph that--
I know how beautiful it is.
It's a raging Rangda figure on the chatbook that Charles--
they've pasted it on.
It's so wonderful.
Thank you, a photo I took in Bali.
So a little bit from the overture--
"Munificent in his eye.
Or was it resplendent?
Was being called upon to resist the overtures
of male seduction.
And consider this tract on a theme
without excoriating any particulars of habit or desire,
and act within tact with power and grace
say act within tracked.
Overdue and on stage, this being sung as operatic invention
in the manner of Puccini.
And make a gender distinction, and make a gentler distinction,
and make a district where you can play your opposition
to erroneous war.
Patriot Act, patriarch, Adam to know a 12 tribes of Israel.
Patriarchal.
How far an empire can you go descending
through the father further?
Paternalism, noblesse oblige, laboratories,
genocide, down the line nostalgia for a lost thread.
Paterfamilias, political dynasties, endless rule.
Patronymic, sound the metronome.
Patronizing, arrogance, condescension, paternity.
Who birthed whom?
What myth immigration below the border?
Pathology?
Dark, light, dark side, the war machine,
crimes against humanitas.
Patriot Act?
Patriot?
Matriot!
Yeah, matriarchy.
Yes, Matriot Acts, Matriot Acts, Matriot Acts, Matriot Acts,
Matriot Acts.
Invoke the hyena in petticoats, laughing hyena,
spotted hyena, striped and stalk the charnel ground
amid microscopic and telescopic worlds.
A step ahead of what is to come in lineage in gratitude
in naming Las Madres, in naming Las Mujeres.
Lock for reclamation.
Sniff it out.
In a voice, not my home, but all of them
within the wizened ductile face of slumbering female memory.
Beginning of time.
Timepiece of time.
She was the mother of a ghost ship.
Ship of locked on subjugated dream.
She, who could never be reduced to mere gender issue.
She announced a talismanic bond to planet
who saw vole tracks in the snow once on the radical poet's
tiny death plot.
Lorraine, Lorraine, you can come out now.
Who salvaged a blow dryer for the art people
while they sold the rights to textures of paper, of glass?
Oh, touch us, touch us, touch us with granulated beauty now.
May plead particles in the sunlight
a democratic grace who documented
all hurts and slights and transmuted them to flash,
to the wink after sex.
She was a challenge in my heart, the penultimate mother.
Did you have any animals around you from the start?
Did you enjoy yourself a lot?
How old were you when you started this running around?
Was it in your mother tongue?
Was it in a language that translates ocean
of bliss to a seed syllable?
Remember the suffragettes, or consider Blake's schema of loss
representing imagination and action, who
then tries to create forms so they can be recognized.
And then gets diluted to break a stupor.
The horses, the horses are heard.
The drones, the drones are heard.
The predators are heard.
The horses, the horses are heard.
The drones, the drones are heard.
The reapers, the reapers are heard.
And you up there on the dais, maybe he's the one.
And we came back from the cinema, glow between our tears.
And you sang, a woman, no woman, how tragic to be such a slender
thread of a woman.
Where was I being led?
More people thick in space in constant motion
twisted around a clock.
It's an atavistic mixed up dream and stirs the branches
high in our Freedom Park.
Ban all handguns.
It was the voice of a desultory fragment of speech
now talking about state and union
how darkness turns at the wrist.
If Kali were a car, what kind of car would she be?
A Batmobile!
[LAUGHTER]
She, as primordial vehicle, each letter, a form, a twinge,
a torque, a star, a sign, an imperial gesture, each letter,
a captured sound, each letter, a resolve.
Ban all handguns.
No!
Patriot-- Matriot Acts."
Thank you.
[CHEERS, APPLAUSE]
So we're going to take some questions.