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.