The Golden Record consists of 115 analog-encoded photographs, greetings in 55 languages, a 12-minute montage of sounds on Earth and 90 minutes of music. J Marshall – Tribaleye Images / Alamy
I am admittedly enamored with the idea that things possess dimensions that can’t be seen. Artists are particularly drawn to this idea, but I was also raised in San Francisco in the 60s so there’s that too. Certain landscapes and places feel sacred to me. I have encountered objects that have taken on the energy of people who made them and/or loved them. I have been perennially delighted by Masaru Emoto’s beautiful images of water molecules whose crystalline structures have been instantaneously altered by exposure to human emotions and music.
These examples are actually not all that far from the concept of intergenerational connectedness—with ancestors as well as future progeny. This concept is being researched scientifically even though these new models are quite different from traditional genomics and DNA science. Epigenetics is mapping how life experiences can actually be transmitted from one generation to another, and then another. The implications of this research are so profound that a major revision may be needed of how we view and define our idea of the individual, sovereign self.
Some of these new discoveries are hard to grasp and comprehend. I am still scratching my head in amazement by the well documented claim that we are only conscious of 10% of what we are thinking and feeling. Clearly there is a lot more going on inside than those stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
Meanwhile the notion that we are experiencing much more information than we are consciously aware has a multitude of ramifications. Early research has focused on inherited trauma and its impact on mental health. But while trauma can be passed through generations, other qualities can as well, like resilience and optimism.
While science probes how these experiences are transmitted through families and through societies, artists are making similar inquiries. As you might expect, they approach the material from a different point of view.
In his now iconic 1962 sci-fi film, La Jetée, Chris Marker explored the idea of a body-based capacity to time travel. Set in a post-nuclear war world where human life is being lived underground, one man’s vivid memory from childhood enables him to return to the past. That capacity makes it possible for him to also venture into the future where lifesaving technology can be accessed to save an imperiled civilization.
Miguel Valverde captures the essence of La Jetée well:
“This circle story of a man marked by an image of his childhood that is responsible for his travelling to the past only to see his own death is a photo-roman, a war story, a love story, a science-fiction film, an architectural construction and a painting of its time. It reveals the history of our future.”
Conceptual and visual artist Dario Robleto is also interested in exploring what we don’t know is there, but is. In a recent presentation at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, Robleto discussed his ongoing passion for the Golden Record, an audio portrait of the planet assembled in 1977 and placed on board the Voyager spacecraft. One member of the project team, Ann Druyan, included a recording of her heart and brainwave activity.
While these recordings of her body were being made, Druyan meditated on the history of the earth and civilization. But she was also consumed with her new (and at the time, secret) love for fellow team member Carl Sagan. Druyan asked a profound question: if she recorded her brain waves with an electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (EKG), could aliens eventually read her mind? As some have said, Druyan “snuck love on board the Voyager.”
Voyager 1 officially exited our solar system in 2012, crossing into interstellar space and taking Anne’s heartbeat of love with it. In his work that deals with this theme, Robleto asks a fundamental question: “Are we in our signals? Are we literally in there in such a way that the full experience of human subjectivity can be pulled out of the body, held in this other format, and be fully decipherable at a later date?”
Ann Druyan’s own thoughts on the implications of the Golden Record are poetic and prophetic:
“We go from people who were imprisoned on this world for 4 billion years, never leaving it, to being beings who can send these little dandelion seeds into the cosmos.
Everything in the cosmos dies. Everything. That’s the lesson, that’s the lesson of life, of art, of science, of everything, is that all we have is now. But this now, which is jacketed by before, that 13.8 billion years before, and all that is to come, we’re here together, all of us right now, communicating with each other at the speed of light.
Why? Because our ancestors decided to create a chain of minds that could reach forward into the future, and husband that knowledge, maintain that knowledge so that we could learn how to connect with each other around this little planet and even into the cosmos. And that’s the wonder of it.”
Chris Marker, Dario Robleto and Ann Druyan have conducted imaginative journeys in the realms of space and the future. But there are also many personal and earthbound experiences that also touch into these experiences of connectivity and Druyan’s “chain of minds.”
One of the most common ways to experience this is by just looking backwards and probing ancestral storylines. Every family has its members who choose to leave the village or the tribe, the ones who want to start life in a new place. The immigrant experience is such a universal one, especially in North America, and many of us know our family’s immigration lore well.
My 19th century ancestors were English converts to Mormonism. They left everything behind to emigrate to the United States and then cross the country on foot in search of religious affinity in Utah. Because genealogical research is such a strong value in the Mormon culture, everyone in my extended family knows these accounts by heart. The courage and tenacity of these progenitors are held as key values in our identity as family members. Claiming to be from “pioneer stock” is a point of pride, whether by nature or nurture.
More recently, there is the immigration story of my daughter in law. Her parents came to New York in the 1970s to do their medical residencies, one from Korea and one from India. They met, they married, and they never returned to their homes.
A similar scenario and timeframe are captured in Lloyd Suh’s play, The Heart Sellers, now being performed by the Huntington Theater. The title is a play on the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965, one that expanded US immigration for non-Europeans.
The play takes place on the afternoon of Thanksgiving in 1973. Two very young women, lonely and now estranged from their cultures and families, struggle with language and cultural differences to find companionship and commiseration with each other. Both have married doctors who have come to train in the United States. Luningning, now Luna, is from the Philippines. Hong Jae Ha, now Jane, is from Korea.
A play about two young women who spend an afternoon together in a 70s’ style apartment with Avocado Green and Harvest Gold decorative highlights? It does sound mundane, and describing it to anyone who hasn’t yet seen the play is difficult. But Suh’s writing is an enchantment, and the two performers, Jenna Agbayani and Judy Song, are spectacular. The Heart Sellers is actually an exquisite time capsule homage to Suh’s own heritage of Korean immigrants. And while it feels personal, it also feels deeply wise.
But it is difficult to describe. You just have to see the play for yourself.
Huntington Theater Artistic Director Loretta Greco does a good job:
“Lloyd has turned his attention to how he might introduce the complicated and inextricably linked stories of ancestors…all with an eye towards excavating narrative gaps in order to reimagine and reclaim for a better more liberated future.
The Heart Sellers is perhaps Lloyd’s most personal play. It has his usual intellectual curiosity, big hearted humanity, comedic buoyancy and compositional grace—yet it is unique in that it is his most intimate.”
Like Ann Druyan’s love buried deep in her heartbeat and brainwaves, Suh is embedded in this play. His sensibilities as a writer and his understanding of the Asian American experience all hinge on his mother who made that brave initial journey.
These new ideas about how we are connected with our ancestors, our children, our planet and the universe are inchoate and just a bit mysterious. And while that connectedness is often in background in the play, Suh takes a full spectrum approach in his writing. He has created two endearing and believable characters who must blend the unstated with the very practical demands of their lives.
Suh himself also appears to embrace a full spectrum too, both heaven and earth if you will. I was particularly moved to encounter his fierce defense of the decision to write this play in spite of current trends that assign strict ownership rights to certain stories. Suh cuts right through that argument with such clarity that I had to share it here.
“This is part of a conversation that’s happening in the American theater: how do you write outside your particular social location?
If you go into a project saying, ‘I’m going to write a play about immigrant women,’ and you are not an immigrant woman, then you are dead in the water. You’re in a lot of trouble. It’s not going to work. So you have to make it really, really personal. I never thought of this as ‘I’m writing a play about immigrant women.’ I thought of it as, ‘I am writing a play about my mother.’ Suddenly, you become the only person who can tell that story. You have to create the conditions where you are the only person who can write it. You have to make it yours.”
Your memory. Your heartbeat. Your story. And who can say where it will go and what it will mean.
The Heart Sellers, now playing at the Huntington Theater in Boston. Photograph: T Charles Erickson