Question 1.     Where did the Breathing Rocks come from?

Dr. Stone (Dokutā Sutōn, 2019) — a Japanese manga (2017-19) and anime (2019) series that my teenage son curated for our Home Dinner Theatre marathon — begins with a global apocalypse in which all of humanity, together with swallows, becomes suddenly petrified. To dramatize what happened after this world-wide impasse, the manga-anime first resurrects a teenage scientist, Senkū Ishigami, who wakes up 3,700 years after the inciting pandemic by the accidental intervention of bat excrements and nitric acid dripping down in a cave. He then proceeds to revive other humans. With stone swallows as his initial test subjects, this teenage prodigy develops the revitalization elixir — aka, the miraculous vaccine — to rescue his fellow earthlings from their rocky exoskeletons. Senkū also utilizes his retained scientific knowledge to bring living comforts (ramen, glasses, windmills, rudimentary cell phone towers, etc.) to their terrestrial abode, which has long been reclaimed by jungles, rivers, muds, insects, reptiles, and other animals.

I doubt that any “first-run” global readers and viewers of Dr. Stone foresaw the impending arrival of COVID 19, the first pandemic that I’ve experienced. Among the worst symptoms caused by the coronavirus is the sense of drowning in one’s own bodily fluids, making the patients unable to breathe. This fact reminds me of the historical plagues described in The Theater and its Double (1958) by Antonin Artaud, who observed that the Bubonic Plague mostly affected two organs: “the brain and the lungs,” those corporeal sites responsible for people’s consciousness and will.

While stressing the mysterious kinship between humans and swallows, Dr. Stone still holds an anthropocentric premise, which regards humans’ becoming-stones as a “plague”-induced prison. What if stones were alive? Would humans be able to evolve organs that generate both consciousness and will, plus certain granite sentience, in order to sample, embody, or at least empathize with stone lives? Or, would we humans simply refine our senses of wonder so as to perceive and acknowledge the movements of breaths in hitherto unlikely objects and places?

Question 2: The children are humanity’s hope everywhere, but who is Ah Ma?

“Ah Ma,” a pinyin translation of the Chinese term of endearment for “grandmother,” is an elder who loves to sing and dance, make music, practice qigong, tell stories, and teach. Since she has lived the healthiest and longest, she has accumulated the most knowledge about the earth; its rare herbs and ordinary plants; the iridescent flowering mushrooms; the hidden nectar in translucent seedlings, which she deciphered from the dialects of bees. She can imitate the flight kinetics of eagles, the choreography of dolphins, and the pernicious trickery of poisonous microbes. Ah Ma heals living creatures, human or otherwise —metabolic, vegetal, or mineral; hermaphroditic or else — by listening quietly to the Breathing Rocks and collaborating with their happy moods and good will.

Ah Ma holds in polyamorous adulation the chasm-chamber in between the twin breathing rocks — the voluptuous spaciousness in their heart center — like a welcoming cleavage; like a cordial vagina; like a seductive womb.

Question 3: What’s the tense for the verb, “to remember”?

My understanding about the nature of memory is indelibly shaped by Harold Pinter’s skepticism: “We are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning” (1962, 11). Thus, to remember my past, I curate experiential fragments, editing and montaging bits and pieces retrieved from my mnemonic nerves and composing them as instantaneous imagined theatre scenarios, as everyday cinemas tilted toward the fantastic, the ineffable.

Similar to Ah Ma, the children all have their favorite memories about the Breathing Rocks. As days, weeks, and months pass, the breathing rocks forget to remember all the happenings — depressions and elations, reveries and procrastinations, joys, tedium and sorrows — of the collective pasts from their human charges. The rocks’ forgetfulness figures as excessive dirt: dust and grime that amasses into an inoperable abundance. To help their granular guardians remember is to initiate the cycle of cleaning and sorting for the Breathing Rocks. The rocks need the liberty of expansive space and accessible archiving to breathe freely. The children re-perform their remembered encounters with the Breathing Rocks to supply the gravelly duo with dramatic matter.

To remember is, therefore, almost always in the present tense – a spinning theatrical now.

Question 4: Why do you use a Greek word in the title?

When I first learned about Stoicism from Seneca the Younger, I encountered the beautiful term “pneuma,” an inherited Greek word that may be translated into English as “the vital spirit, the breath, the soul, or the creative force of the universe.” As a bilingual cultural reader, I immediately related “pneuma” to “chi/qing/氣” in Chinese, a word for “the air, the breath, the energy of the cosmos.” Just as the Roman Stoics conceived of all bodies in the universe as one, so the Chinese ancient elders chose the word “Tao/Dao/道,” to signify the oneness of all beings in heaven and Earth, from the ocean to the event horizon.

The word 道 is comprised of two verbal parts: (1) sho/首, meaning “the head,” a shape that looks to me like an eye [mu /目 ] with eyebrows and hair; and (2) the radical for zou / 走, meaning “to walk,” “to move.” By the word’s ideogrammatic logic, I appreciate that its ancient Chinese wordsmith conceived of the cosmos as an interconnected liminal time/space and being as movements of thinking, learning, pondering, pausing, feeling, dreaming, remembering, forgetting, grieving, despairing, calculating, playing, walking, running, dancing, and breathing.

To name my imagined theatre piece with a Greek term, “Pneuma” — when using “Breaths” in English or “Qi” in popularized Chinese pinyin may suffice — recalls the queerness in me.

Queer telling: Telling it queer to queer its tale!

REFERENCES and ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

1. I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Ashtin Natshi Wang, who first introduced me to Dr. Stone (Dokutā Sutōn, first aired, July-Dec. 2019); to Gardner Henry Stern, Mikki Benjamin, and Rolf Hoefer, among many other friends, who helped my texts flow better with judicious editing; and to Dr. Lyn Lockhart-Mummery, who has ever directed my gaze towards the sliver-linings.
2. See Antonin Artaud, “The Theater and the Plague,” in The Theatre and its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), pp. 15-32.
3. See Harold Pinter, “Writing for the theatre,” in Complete Works: One (New York: Grove Press, 1976), pp. 9-16.

We find ourselves gathered together at a Tree of Life whose leafy hairs bear a crown. The symbolism of the Crown is not lost on the group. Those participating in this ceremony of rebirth are the child survivors of the great Earth catastrophe. They seem to know intuitively the appropriate gestures to make to summon the awakening of the planet’s life force, to know the healing energies that accompany the gestures with loving words of memory and of wisdom. The children know that the rocks are their ancestors. The children have brought with them to this incarnation an infinite memory of time and space from other lives in which they were being prepared, both for this moment and for their special spiritual mission.

Breathing is the way that the rebirth of the planet is summoned. The group hears the coughing coming from the cave and the rocks, which are being detoxified, throwing off the ashes of the years of near-death so that they can respond to the children’s love and memories of the powers they once embodied when they were healthy and breathing freely.

Frequencies of sound accompany the breathing “medicine” as an elderly woman with a hornpipe enters and passes the instrument around to the children so they can speak the words that will evoke memories and remind the sacred rocks of who they were and how powerful they can be again once they have awakened to the touch and the sounds of the children’s signatures and voices. The children take turns with the hornpipe and speak of their private memories and desires, reminding the rocks that through breathing they can be revived. At the same time, the inscription of their names and drawings on skins leave marks upon the rocks, a healing patch of love that will channel beads of etheric frequencies into them and open the passageway to a renewed life.

Naturally, the lungs are most important for the revival of breathing. The children remind us that the rocks are their ancestors and also the lungs for their tree-cave home. The children and the elderly healer—Mother, Ah Ma—speak volumes in silence.  They remind us that those who were disempowered in the civilization that suffered through this final disaster at the edge of the world, the elderly and the children, are precisely those who possess the spiritual knowledge and understanding necessary now for resurrection. Accompanied by the prayerful memories of the children, the frequencies of the hornpipe communicate clearly with the nonhuman world, so that the animals of many species and the growth of the new Garden of Life will be drawn out of their safe hiding places and burst into emergence and flight over the land, blessing it with their returned presence. We see this emergence mirrored in our own time, when we were all quarantined and the space was cleansed on Earth so that the animals could return to find sustenance and the love that the previous tenants of the Earth did not shower upon them. In Pnuema, that era has begun to fade into history. Those were the millennia when the humans possessed all the power and did not understand that the Earth was alive, as were all forms of life upon Her.

The spiritual ceremony was the manifestation of inborn memory from ancient times before toxic chemical medicines existed, when all life forms recognized they were interconnected and that they could heal themselves and each other in these caring and beautiful ways. The hornpipe restored to the cave, the rocks reveal that their breathing is now healed, and the parents of the children are summoned.

The parents were in the dark during these proceedings. They wear jewelry that lights up in the darkness. They were not invited to participate in this ceremony. They will surely become aware of the powers inherent in other generations, that the children and the elderly possess the wisdom of resurrection in our time.

All human and nonhuman beings—all life forms—breathe deeply and experience a millennia-long relief after being deprived of the nurturance of Planet Earth. The parents of the new generation, the elderly from previous generations, still use devices to infuse life into the cosmos, but the children from the most ancient pre-patriarchal cultures have carried forth into this incarnation the normal usage of human and natural sensibilities—touch, music, memory, and love—for the most powerful of healings ever … the resurrection of the (almost and nearly-dead) Planet Earth right at the Edge of the World.