“What if I had known all that when I was growing up, you know? I mean, what kind of possibilities would have opened up for me to find my place in the world – to find my place in history? There’s a reason why I didn’t know all that stuff. It’s not just that they didn’t tell me, it’s that they didn’t want me to know it. And I needed to know it. But I found it anyway.”
- Leslie Feinberg
an excerpt from the film Outlaw (1994)
Spiral Corridor
The title of the show has an obvious shape to it – one that holds meaning and indicates movement toward an eventual end or infinite wandering. To spiral is often used as a way to describe a kind of psychosis or delusion that has no serious basis in reality. In this case I consider the spiral corridor as the death march of resignation to terror, a space one walks within when all hope for the radical transformation of humanity is either lost to depression, fear and anxiety or eclipsed by the disturbing nature of indifference and callous disregard. Even worse perhaps, is the decision so many make to push the pain back into the cage. We’ve been conditioned to believe that avoidance of agitation is more vital than life itself. And all this does is grease the skids so that the train of death’s despair gains momentum furthermore, unabated. The foundational structure of western society always hates the ones who hold the mirror to its face because so many fear that their own reflections will shatter the mirror. The colonial gaze demands that we adopt the belief that the expression of pain is inconvenient and embarrassing. We fear that touching that third rail will have us written off as crazy with the quickness. We’re told to always keep our cool, to never let it get to us, to never let anybody see us break. But every one of us knows deep down within our souls where we stand on the spectrum of worldly power and how we do or don’t tap into the potential we are given to transform this world. No one should ever seek an earthly paradise that relies on the suffering and eradication of those we call the other, lest your preference is to be haunted forever by our rage and provocation. To liberate oneself from that eclipsing death grip of supremacy and subjugation requires everything of us and it precisely releases the pressure we feel to hold it all together in that stoic kind of cool. Self-examination requires that we kill parts of ourselves and our most firmly held beliefs, just as one prunes the roses in order to make them flourish. The liberating work of letting go and admitting that we’ve had it all so wrong is what will release us all from our prisons of guilt and shame. We know in the marrow in our bones precisely what we need to do in order to stop the bleeding, but it is always a question of what is risked in doing so and that’s what scares people. But we shouldn’t be scared. The ones who do the damage should be. The work of liberation is the greatest work that we can do with the limited time we have on this earth. Do not choose to rot like a bloating body in the sun. Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Find the master key and let us all run out of this sick and twisted spiral maze.
- Leslie Martinez