Someone has to take out the garbage : Imagined Theatres

Form	Themes	Histories	Politics	Philosophies	Experiments
dialogue fragment short story comedy fable folk tale horror humor	authorship children computers domestic dreams embodiment escape excess fantasy love maternity music myth queer ecology paternity artificial intelligence reproduction			thought experiment

The performance takes place on a simple cabaret stage. The performer is wearing a pregnant belly made out of paper mache. The performer reads the text. When they get to the sphinx’s lines, they pause and press play on their computer, where the sphinx’s lines are ‘read’ by an AI clone of the performer’s voice, out of a speaker on the stage.

A short story:

One day I was driving home. It was late and I was tired. All of a sudden I slammed on the breaks. An enormous sphinx was blocking the road. I got out of my car to ask it to move.

The sphinx said “you know your uncle was sort of ambisexual, and I have some of that too, but at the end ofthe day someone has to take out the garbage.”

I wasn’t sure what to say.

The sphinx said, “you have three guesses.”

I thought for a moment and said “here is my first guess. You are saying that different people are good at different things, and that in partnerships you need difference in order to get everything done. Have I solved your riddle?”

The sphinx said, “your response reflects a surface level understanding of my question.”

I pondered again. Then I said: “Here is my second guess. You said that someone has to take out the garbage. So I wonder, why do we have garbage? We’ve decided that it’s okay to have a society that produces waste, but we don’t want to be around our waste, so we gather it up and put it in places where privileged people don’t have to interact with it.

When you say someone has to take out the garbage, what you mean is that the basics of social order must be maintained. The system must be tended to, oiled, cleaned. We all should play our part in the smooth running of the social order. So, someone MUST take out the garbage. Or else we will sit with our rot and our insects and our decay. It will smell horrible and we will get sick. At a certain point we won’t be able to leave our homes because there will be so much garbage. We will suffocate, and die, and then we will be garbage too.

But if enough time passes and no one takes out the garbage, then it won’t really be garbage anymore, it will just be a material condition. It only becomes garbage when it is treated as garbage, as in, when it’s taken out.

So really, the person who takes out the garbage invents garbage. So really you are saying, someone must decide what is garbage.

I’ve decided that there won’t be garbage anymore, and so no one has to take out the garbage. Have I solved your riddle?”

The sphinx said, “you are focussing on something inconsequential. Your time is running out.”

I was starting to get nervous, but there was one more thing that I’d thought of. I stepped a bit closer to the sphinx. “If it’s not about waste then it must be about production. You are talking about society’s maintenance work. At the end of the day, someone must maintain the human race. Dear sphinx, you shouldn’t worry, because I’ve already had three children, and they all belong to you.”

Performer rips open paper mache belly, takes out the first child, and pours fake blood onto it.

“My first child is camouflaged. They are not invisible, but they always look the same as whatever surrounds them. They are well adjusted for the revolution. If they are alone, they will become a target. Surrounded by others, they will be part of something great.”

Performer gives the child to someone in the audience.

The sphinx didn’t seem impressed. “I don’t care about children with superpowers.”

I was undeterred.

Performer takes out the second child and pours fake blood onto it.

“My second child is a hybrid, part Dracula, part Cinderella. They’re really fucking hot and a huge flirt. They’ve never stopped teething. They got their sharp teeth from you. If they bite you, you live forever. The more they eat the more unstable they become. They will implode at a young age but we’ll never forget them because they gave us immortality.”

Performer gives the child to someone in the audience.

The sphinx was angry. “Why do you will the death of your own children?”

Performer takes out the third child and pours fake blood onto it.

“My third child is a lure, an expert hunter, and a recluse. They are kind to their prey, once it’s close enough to see them, it will soon be dead. One by one they will consume us all. We will look for them, we will try to kill them, capture them, but we will fail. They will never be seen, and because of this, they will live forever.”

Performer gives the child to someone in the audience.

The sphinx was silent for a while and then it sang: “What is love? Oh baby, don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. No more. Baby, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me. No more. What is love? Yeah. No, I don’t know why you’re not fair. I give you my love, but you don’t care. So what is right and what is wrong? Gimme a sign.”

Haddaway’s “What Is Love” gradually begins to play while the clone voice continues to sing. The performer executes the dance performed by the character Adrien on a firetruck in the film Titane.

I google the word “ambisexual.” For a minute, I wonder if it’s the same word that Ria from Hinge has used to describe her sexuality, which I later decide is also my sexuality, but it’s not. Ria and I are “ambiamorous”—which I also had to google, which made me feel like a middle-aged queer, and also made me think of fish: gilled homosexuals breathing underwater together, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in groups.

But ambisexual is something else—akin to bisexual, but more precise. I think of my friend, Irit, who identifies as a “historic bisexual”—which is to say, Yes: I was bisexual once, before I knew there were infinite genders. Now I mark the limit of language, yet I refuse to alter history. Irit is a good archivist, which is why she makes hauntingly beautiful films from her dead father’s super 8s.

In the Oedipus myth, the King is said to have solved the riddle of the Sphinx: “Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three?” to which he replies, “Man,” resulting in the death of the Sphinx either by murder, suicide, or autosarcophagy (depending on the source). And yet: some believe there was a second riddle that followed the first, something about two “sisters” giving birth to one another, “night” into “day,” “day” into “night.”

I am reading about this on Wikipedia while I am texting with Joan—alternating between the phone and the screen. Joan has recently been on a date with a sad, thin vegan man who is mourning the loss of his ex. Joan is the ex of my no-longer-sad and perennially omnivore friend, Jane, who mourned the loss of Joan for many years but then one day took the literal garbage out to the curb of her Park Slope home on 9th Street—the contents of which included everything Joan had ever given her minus the black leather jacket which she bequeathed to me and requested I never wear in her presence.

I tell Joan about Ria, and Joan tells me about the tarot reading she had the week before. Dante is a homosexual, who speaks, according to Joan, “in a very dry gay way” when he makes his predictions about your fate. Normally, I would doubt such things carte blanche, but I recall my friend Jeni telling me about Dante years prior, and how all his visions have come to fruit. Dante tells Joan that she will fall in love in the month of October or July—a man with a child—and also that her friend, which is me, will find love before she, and that she will be happy to hear it.

And she did. And she was.

And yet. Like the woman in Schoenberg’s Erwartung (Expectation), who waits for her lover at night in the forest, I am waiting still. I am waiting, and watching, and wondering what it means when something is in the cards. Like Medea—a woman gone mad with betrayal, who slays her two young sons in an act of revenge or salvation (depending on the source), their lifeless bodies strewn across her lap as she flies away in a golden chariot sent to her by her grandfather, the Sun—I, too, want to know if endings are truly overdetermined from the start? Because our art is scripted, Yes; and our bloodlines, cursed. But let’s also remember that theater, like life, is so very live, so anything can happen, and will, and might. This is what my friend Lindsay calls the “the contingency of liveness,” to invoke the provisional nature of our craft. And let us also here remember that ambi is a loanword from Latin, as in both (ambivalent) and around (ambient): multiple things can be true at once. Someone has to take out the garbage, but who and when and where and how are not yet set: the riddle, in other words, may very well be that something can be both fated and free.

Someone has to take out the garbage

Someone has to take out the garbage : Gloss

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Someone has to take out the garbage

Someone has to take out the garbage : Gloss

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