45 Mills Meta

This is a collaboration I'm doing with a dance MFA grad student, so it loses something without the dance. But it says a lot of what I've been trying to say these last two years about my school and Oakland and my own obligations to both.

 

 

Intro

Over to the left we have the children's school, which moved from its original location in the Vera Long building in the early 1970s. The children's school is a laboratory school. Mills students with children estimate that it would cost 65,000 dollars to attend Mills and have childcare on campus. The eucalyptus trees on campus are over a hundred years old. Mills had the first computer science major for women west of the Mississippi. For forty years, Mills owned a ski lodge in Lake Tahoe. I am only providing context.

 

Here we have cyrus mills.

 

Please, don't pay too much attention. Cyrus knows about the two fourteen year old boys who were shot on the streetcorner on the first day of classes, but we don't want you to know about that. That's beyond us, its out there, outside the gates. So don't worry, don't stop walking, don't look. What you can look at are the roses, do you see the rose, aren't the roses pretty? He brought them from Ceylon, never mind the revolution in Ceylon Cyrus, just think about the roses, alright?

Cyrus, cryus, don't worry so much. We've got all the natives on reservations, they died in mining camps, the land's clear for the college. Sleep safe at night Cyrus. The girls are fine, but sad. You worry that their bodies, falling like snow betrothed for another landscape will catch in your rose trellis. They don't, don't worry.

And you. Are you awake and listening? Do you know what's going on? Cyrus isn't telling anything, caught in that splendid abstraction called history, but Cyrus, I've gotta ask you some questions. Are you awake and listening? Do you know what's going on?

 

Dance of Ivory Ignorance

 

So you won't tell me anything? Frankly, I doubt you knew anything, anymore, ever. Because what I'm trying to say to you Cyrus, is that I'm afraid. I'm afraid of the kind of disasters that result in snapped necks and bloody mouths, but I'm also afraid of the slow kind of disaster, the kind that take place in children's lungs as they walk to school and result in thinks like asthma and chronic pneumonia. Do you know what I'm talking about Cyrus?

It has not been so, it can not be so and it will not be so.

But Cyrus, listen! I'm afraid that what I've learned at college is that murals are only there to cover bullet holes. I'm afraid of my own fear that dogs my heels as men approach me at the bus stop. I'm afraid I'm becoming more like you everyday Cyrus. You saw brown people as things that ought to be educated and a burden you cared for abstractly, in Beatitudes and rice, and I worry that we think of Mills as a kind of mission outpost, the relic of New England's and Spain's good intentions in beautiful, brokedown Oakland. Am I right, Cyrus?

It has not been so, it can not be so and it will not be so.

Are you sure? Because the first night I was here, I mistook fireworks for gunshots. I'm terrified because I'm not terrified. The boys who died on the streetcorner behind my back are not my boys. My someday daughter will never be shot in her sleep, because I'm majoring in something sensible and getting out of here. All the same, all this eats at my heart like disease. Do you understand what I'm saying, Cyrus?

It has not been so, it can not be so and it will not be so.

Do we even know each other? I'm awake and listening, I'm paying attention, but you won't let me know what's going on. You must've had some kind of intelligence that rested in your bones saying marry this woman. she knows where she's going.

I'm supposed to be your granddaughter, I walk the garden paths you paved, I am smelling your roses, but you leave me locked out. I am looking for an education, and a kind of understanding of the hardest things, but you were so ignorant that I worry you have nothing to teach me. You, you and your roses.

 

 

 

Situation

I have talked to you as I am. Sophmore, brokenhearted, young and afraid. But sometimes, I just get so tired of trepidation. I want to talk like someone who always knew what was going on, understood the loops and patterns of history, for better or worse. Somehow, when I imagine that voice, I imagine Susan speaking to Cyrus in the rose garden called time. I imagine this is what she would say to him:

Yes, your roses are beautiful.

Yes, you were part of this thing that made history, you made the books, even as a blundering footnote.

But darling, things are moving, awake and alive. You're still here, still repeating, still caught in this loop called history.

Maybe we run out of money in ten years and close down to rot and rust. Maybe the gates come down, and little girls from Seminary come and sleep on our lawn.

And sometimes, I want that voice to speak to me, I want it to say to me this:

Let them know who you are and what you represent. Make what you represent a thing to be proud of. Work at it.

Don't be so afraid. Stay awake. Listen. Look around. There is work to be done, and you are the ones to do it.