Words on Retirement by Catherine Keller
November 11, 2016
I’m Catherine Keller. I teach theology in the Theology School.
And it was, I think, before the beginning of this millennium, that I served as the narrator, voice, for one of the Singing Mask performances, and I’m a great admirer of this great Drew shaman.
I think I was supposed to say something about “mask.” You know, we all think that mask means, like masking, hiding something, right? A kind of concealment. But in fact, in the ancient world, and for all the indigenous peoples of the world, the mask is the opposite of that. It’s the site of revelation. By putting on a mask, you make it possible for a spirit or a divinity, an elemental force of the world to appear, to reveal itself. And that divinity, that spiritual elemental force field has been revealing itself through this person low these many decades.
And by the way, actually the Greek word prosōpon becomes the mask, becomes the Latin word persona. So the very word for “person” in its legal and ultimately psychological sense, is “mask” in the Latin based languages. So to be a person is actually to wear a mask in a certain sense, but not necessarily in the sense of hiding yourself. But perhaps it’s in this sense that we need to learn so much more from you now on, because I think you’re going to become unleashed in your personhood - dangerous and unpredictable.
I just want to say, just imagine the dimensions that this persona holds together with his events, his Singing Masks, pulling together the visual with the musical, his work as an environmental activist through all these decades, especially with the river project, then pulled into conjunction with this profound aesthetic. His genius with technology (he was working with computer screens back in the last millennium), this technological wizardry, as you (Leslie Sprout?) put it, pulled together with the sense of the indigenous, this deep involvement in the earth-bound sensibility of indigenous peoples and their arts. These are really impossible combinations. He’s really refusing all of the binary oppositions that have run our civilization and that are running it into the ground.
So I would suggest that you look at this computer story he’s running back here, when you have time, where he tells the very native story of the encounter of Old Void, very scary Old Void, with the Spiral. It’s a story about courage ultimately, courage, and I’m feeling that we can all gain a courage that for this moment in history we perhaps need more than we have needed it before. And that we take all these nonbinary conjunctions, these spiritually, environmentally, politically, aesthetically charged events that you share with us into our deep shared personhood. Thank you.
Contact:
nlowrey@drew.edu
nlowrey@drew.edu