Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans and the American Century) is a script-based performance jointly authored by Sanja Grozdanić and Bassem Saad that contends with the possibility and mutability of mourning through protracted catastrophe. While the performance begins with two discrete roles—that of traveling eulogists—the frame of who or what is being mourned appears to shift and unsettle as the work unfolds. The nameless duo recalls both the recent and distant past as if from a discontinuous identity. Their memories and musings are recurrently interrupted by the spectral presence of a third voice invoking what is called “the American Century” (1948–present). Did the Century end in Afghanistan, Syria, or Bosnia? Is it unending? Shifting tenors from the comic to the nostalgic, the melancholic to the absurd, a digressive back-and-forth between these “post-conflict” landscapes and psyches builds toward an uncertain eulogy.
Permanent Trespass was read at the Project on 9/19/2024 as part of Alien and Ordinary: A Poets Theater Symposium. Omar Berrada read Eulogist 1, and Kim Rosenfield read Eulogist 2. Its U.S. premier took place at EMPAC on 10/25/2024.
Messianic Free Association
EULOGIST 2: Ernst Bloch, the Jewish German Marxist, woke me up this morning and said that he was wrong about something. He was “wrong” about many things, of course—mostly Stalin—but he was a great philosopher, so I opened my purse, took out a pencil, and said, “GO ON.”
I suppose a ghost cannot speak, I should’ve known that; what was I expecting? So he made some drawings for me. I don’t know what he intends I do with them. Are they a warning? Of course, Ernst grasped very early on the power and sway that Nazi ideology held in the minds of a budding generation of defeated and impressionable Germans after WWI. It does seem like some things never change—the State is sacrosanct. I said, “It’s been a very bad year. Like the one before, and like the one before that. I’m going to need a more direct address from you.”
[sound ring, switch frame and diagram]
EULOGIST 1: (reacting to the diagram) Faith in progress. I keep remembering Obama. He had that line from Martin Luther King sewn into a big rug in the White House. “The Arc Of The Moral Universe Is Long, But It Tends Towards Justice.” It goes all around the Oval Office on the floor. But it’s not really by Martin Luther King, and I don’t think Martin Luther King ever believed in such a notion, that things will automatically get better—morally or politically—through some necessary trajectory.
EULOGIST 2: Now Obama just makes those yearly playlists, the Top 10 hits of the year or of the summer, every December and every Summer.
EULOGIST 1: I think it’s a little bit too easy to deride progress. Yes, everyone has been disillusioned. Everyone is divided. Barely anyone is still under the impression that it’ll be smooth sailing. But where do we go from here? Not all progress is equal. [sound ring, switch frame and diagram]
EULOGIST 2: Oh, you wish. What you’ll get is the barbarism of unsettled debts…
EULOGIST 1: I think I only learned what it means to be weighed down by the past in Germany. It doesn’t feel like an outdatedness or a constant turning backward. It feels like slow traffic on an eternal highway with no exits, where the drivers are not even agitated. No one honks because it would disturb the peace.
EULOGIST 2: Ernst would blow the horns off the car. While other philosophers have extensively debated whether mass atrocities, such as the Holocaust, represent an acceleration of a linear historic trajectory, [sound ring, switch frame and diagram]
or a turning back from that trajectory, [sound ring, switch frame and diagram]
Ernst said they belong to a species of rupturing events, which he termed the novum. [sound ring, switch frame and diagram]
These Events cannot be reduced to any predefined trajectory. They come with sweeping shifts in consciousness, and they affect the consciousness of generations to come. People make the Event, and the Event makes them.
Ernst knew this about the Holocaust: he had, after all, fled from it. What was difficult to believe back then—and maybe as difficult to believe now—is that there could also be a rupturing Event that is not only catastrophe, that ruptures toward liberation can never be foreclosed. A rupture that does not only tear but rather recomposes.
EULOGIST 1: Did your friend have a theory for why these Events happen in October? (pause) Sometimes I catch myself thinking that the next year will emerge from this one and build a house on top of it, or that the years are being collected in some archive, that accounts are held somewhere, or that experience is consistently expanding into the shape of truth.
Instead we are condemned to this continuous bookkeeping—
EULOGIST 2: Enough self-pity! You know there is no such thing as a new day…
