Category Archives: Erik Ehn

Erik Ehn on genocide

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Dramatist Erik Ehn is touring Africa as he prepares and completes his play cycle Soulographie: Our Genocides, due to premiere in New York in November 2012. From a 6 August entry in the Soulographie journal:

As a Catholic, each day I’m asked to consider first: peace – how to admit it, how to serve it, how to serve as a vehicle for it. This sense of hope – this motion to the invisible – supports a reading of the world as revelation: there’s a massive (literally, total) project of creation going on that catches us all. Another word for revelation is apocalypse; a feature of my spiritual training is study and practice of the language of apocalypse. There’s all kinds of room in Catholic thinking – ideally, room for everything – but an aspect of the core is the regular contemplation of deicide and the murder of the person of Jesus… (But really, who reads the news has ample practice in apocalyptic and radically moral reflection). My faith considers the fracture of our absolute self-description as children of God. We willingly violate that which defines the best in us. Genocide is more intimately connected with suicide than homicide – we come to see ourselves as unclean, and we operate destructively on our own bodies. Life itself is seen as life’s problem, and we rend ourselves in oxymoron.

Genocide is revelation of a fundamental aspect of the human capacity for sin – for a disordered relationship with peace, and the natural way of creation.

So, by religious culture and philosophical inclination, I am inclined to view genocide as a fundamental aspect of the human grammar; it is a word we reiterate, a word that wants to be the last word and an ultimate relaxation of the responsibility to mean anything. As humans we weary of the job of building – of building meaning, of adding value to raw material… We want the final, tallest tower, the unshakable defense. With genocide, we say we are done with making; and, clean, cleaned out, we’re in a time of pure having.

The full text of “the ordered incomplete” is here.

Quotes: Erik Ehn

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Erik Ehn. Photo: Kagami.

At the blog for his Soulographie: Our Genocides project, dramatist Erik Ehn discusses fear and anxiety in horror films, theatre and American culture generally:

People would rather be anxious than afraid; fear is productive and explores a change of heart; anxiety is static. Or, people would rather be afraid, but then are both compressed into anxiety and made addicted to it, media among the means. The long-range mission of force is domination; force, internalized is anxiety in the sense of useless feeling. In a state of anxiety, emotions are positioned hopelessly either by one’s choice or the strong appearance of inevitability. Fear is a dilation — preparation for a change — the utter opening of contradictory options. The real dread in a lot of conventional horror movies is not in fact fear (which is in Poe, Lovecraft), but in a tipping into immobility — the sense that nothing can be done … Your scream will not impact the action; action is closing in, closing down, causing endings. Fear is the ceaseless hunt for more life; it can have a spiritual use.

The full post can be found here. For more on the cycle of plays itself, which is scheduled to be staged at La MaMa later this year, visit the project’s About page.