Chariots of Fire, The Hill House and Me

I believe God made me for a purpose.

But He also made me fast.

And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

— Eric Liddell, Chariots of Fire 

Chariots of Fire  (1981), directed by Hugh Hudson, tells the story of two British runners competing in the 1924 Paris Olympics: Eric Liddell, a devout Scottish missionary, and Harold Abrahams, a Jewish Cambridge student determined to overcome class and religious prejudice. The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. I was eleven when I first saw it, and forty-four years later, I can still hear Liddell’s voice in my ear, the Scottish brogue lingering on the word pleasure. 

Only now do I understand, through Albena Yaneva’s writings on architecture and actor-network theory developped by Bruno Latour, that what Liddell embodied could be described as a kind of pragmatism in motion. For Liddell, running is relational and communicative, a way of being in dialogue with the divine. He participates in a dynamic network where meaning arises through interaction among human and nonhuman actors: body, beach, wind, and God. His pleasure is the feeling of connection within that network.

Harold Abrahams, in contrast, perhaps embodies a structuralist mode of thought and communication. He runs within and against the social architecture of Britain, its class hierarchies, anti-Semitism, and academic elitism. His approach is analytical and disciplined; his running is a tool in pursuit of other interests. Unfortunately, in his opposition, he remains bound by the very structures he seeks to transcend. The film presents two philosophical ways of being: Abrahams’ structural design of self and Liddell’s relational communication of spirit.

In 1992, after working as wardrobe supervisor for the National Theater of the Deaf’s Northern Ireland tour, I was suddenly laid off. At twenty-two, I took a hydrofoil from Belfast to Scotland to see the houses and furniture of starchitect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. There was no internet, no Uber, no GPS, just paper maps, bus timetables, and strangers’ directions. I had to figure it out. But that was fun.

When I first studied Mackintosh at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, his work existed as images on slides, flattened light projected on a lecture-hall wall, filtered through Dr. David Brownlee’s very certain affected Harvard accent. His voice made architecture sound grand but somehow distant, polished, elite, not meant for everyone. I learned how Mackintosh fit into the architectural canon: his position within a linear, evolutionary story of architecture. That framework was important to Brownlee; it gave architecture coherence and lineage, placing each building within a rational progression of styles and ideas. But it also reflected a structuralist way of seeing, a system built on sequence, influence, and hierarchy, where meaning is derived from position within the whole. And you can talk about it endlessly without ever physically being there. 

When I finally arrived in Scotland, I stepped outside that structure and into a network. When I entered The Hill House, after a long bus ride and a walk on a wet and chilly November day, something in me shifted. The light, the landscape, the wallpaper, the elongated proportions of the furniture. In that moment, like Liddell, I felt God’s (Goddess’s) pleasure. Standing in Mackintosh and Macdonald’s space, I was in awe. I was so excited to be alive.

The building, too, was alive. We were in conversation, me, a Black Jewish girl from Philadelphia, and this famous Scottish house were communicating. I was no longer looking at a work of art on a slide. I wasn’t even thinking about Mackintosh; I was participating in its unfolding. The lines and proportions I had memorized for Brownlee’s exam now faded: I was now more interested in the way a window framed a cloud, the height of a chair back, the mud on my feet, the silence of being one of only a few people there. I became part of the system. I wondered what processes were involved in making this structure - clearing the site, bringing in the materials, who built the house and tended the land? Did they like each other? Who actually lived in the house - what were their stories? And now who now was taking care of it?  How did the get here? Did they ride the same bus I just rode? What were their lives like? How did they feel about their jobs? 

It was the difference between the canon’s structural order and Yaneva’s Latourian network, between knowing about something and being in relation to the processing of making and sustaining it. What filled my heart was not the authority of understanding but the humility of connection. Maybe tomorrow  the next architecture student would be here processing the experience in their own unique way. 

 

Staying With The Trouble

Staying with the Trouble

“We are all responsible to and for shaping conditions for multispecies flourishing in the face of terrible histories, and sometimes joyful histories too…”

— Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

When I was a resident assistant set designer at the Old Globe Theatre, I remember a staff meeting where the eloquent showman Jack O’Brien spoke about the importance of theater. We tell the stories of people’s dreams, hopes, and desires, he said. We offer escape, poetry, miracles, and feasts for the imagination.

I was spellbound. Captivated. The way he spoke about our work made it feel sacred, almost mythic. He was talking about sets, costumes, lights, acting, the scripts, the directing—the collective act of bringing a story to life. Theater, he said, was describing a communion of imagination. Ralph Funicello to an external site. nodded enthusiastically. Sheldon Epps to an external site. smiled as if he had written the speech himself. And I believed it. I was part of giving the imaginal space in which to dream, to question, to feel. That belief became a kind of moral pass: I was participating in something transcendent. Yet beneath that dream was another story—one of consumption, waste, and harm. I helped purchase and discard millions of dollars’ worth of materials used for a single episode of a television show. The culpability is too large to hold in my mind.

Still, I hear the famous Jack O’Brien’s voice: what we did mattered so much. And maybe both stories are true. Film, TV, and theater are powerful cultural mechanisms, but they are also engines of waste. To stay with this contradiction, to resist disowning either story, is what Haraway calls staying with the trouble. It is a way of remaining accountable without collapsing into guilt, a way of composting contradiction into understanding.

In 7th-grade English class, I can still see in my mind’s eye my South Philadelphian Italian American junior high teacher, Mrs. Tedesco. She was teaching us urban smart kids about literary conflict. She believed in us so much—the kids who traveled from all over Philadelphia to 17th and Spring Garden Streets to go to the most prestigious magnet school in the city, Masterman. She wanted to give us every tool she had to open up the possibility of brilliant futures. She wrote with determination on the board "Man vs. Nature" and "Man vs. Himself." Even then, I sensed the two were one and the same. Man against nature is man against himself, because we are  nature. Every act against nature is an act of self-harm, a kind of planetary self-mutilation. And I also forgave her the “man” part; I was a feminist even then.

Masterman - Named by US News and World Report as one of top ten high schools in the nation

Haraway writes about city kids learning to see themselves in pigeons—those despised birds—as “valuable and interesting city residents.” It feels a bit like poverty porn when you are one of those city kids being described as learning to see by a white woman in academia. But I’ll stay with the trouble. I also remember in seventh grade, where we took the long bus rides, played endless games of cat’s cradle and Jacob’s ladder with string—cheap, collaborative, complicated. We didn’t have money, but we had that web between our fingers, weaving and unweaving the world together. I don’t know if I believe that Haraway has really played cat’s cradle, but I’ll stay with the trouble.

The eyes were on the blackboard. Alex Kudera watched (my boyfriend) who became an award-winning novelist and professor. Nikki Harmon (my best friend)  watched. She became an award-winning filmmaker, professor and writer. We learned about literary structure from the all giving and earnest Mrs. Tedesco. And I watched too, wondering who I might become. And I’m still wondering. We weren’t specimens in someone else’s theory; we were flesh-and-blood twelve years olds. Maybe that’s why when I read Staying with the Trouble, something in me resists. Haraway uses the language of collaboration to describe multi-species entanglements, pigeons carrying research devices, but I can’t call that collaboration. The pigeons didn’t choose to participate; they couldn’t give or withhold consent. She's weaving a Jack O'Brien type tale when she claims to ask for their confidence. To call it collaboration feels too easy, too romantic, too Doctor Dolittle. True collaboration requires reciprocity and the possibility of refusal. Until the nonhuman can say no, stewardship will always carry the trace of dominion.

I didn’t want to go to the fancy public school. I liked playing with Leonora and Judy on Cliveden Street, where we lived. But once I was accepted to Masterman, it was like I had been selected for a different kind of flight. My days became long commutes: three hours of buses and trains, swim practice, mountains of homework. I couldn’t play anymore, even though Leonora and Judy lived just down the street. Somewhere in there, my childhood ended. I had become the Haraway's prized carrier pigeon—carrying the weight of expectation and the message of upward mobility for my family, my school, my city. I had given the system my "confidence and skill" without fully understanding how it was changing my life. And I absolutely I did not give my consent.

And I’ll stay with the trouble. Because I can’t let go of what a great education, theater, film, and TV gave me—the reverence, the imagination, the problem-solving. Even the ability to write this way-too-long discussion post. And I can’t unsee the personal loss, the waste, the harm, the staggering material footprint of what we call entertainment.

Now, as an artist and designer, I try to live in that tension. To stay with the tangle, to keep weaving and unweaving, growing and regrowing, as the world does. From the Chandogya Upanishad (6.8.7) comes the Mahāvākya “Tat Tvam Asi”—Thou art that—one of the great declarations of the Indian wisdom traditions, teaching that the self (Ātman) and the world (Brahman) are one. The Isha Upanishad and later yogic teachings echo this truth through the mantra “So Hum”—The universe outside of me is the same as the universe inside of me. For me, it is not Human vs. Nature; it is Human As a Part of Nature. The Deep Ecology of Tim Ingold, “the difference between making and growing is by no means as obvious as we might have thought.” I want to make as though I am growing, to create responsibly with materials knowing they  are alive. To participate in the world’s ongoing weaving rather than simply extracting from it. To begin to do a really dive deep into William McDonough's idea of waste as 1) consumables 2) durables and 3) unmarketables.  That Centennial Sermon was one of the most beautiful essays I've read.