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
- 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.
- 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.
- See Harold Pinter, “Writing for the theatre,” in Complete Works: One (New York: Grove Press, 1976), pp. 9-16.
