Landscape as Perk

Text As Event: A Field Recording

Silicon Valley, near Google—Caribbean, corner of Caribbean and Bordeaux on a weekend morning. Nobody: the dogs, me, and the robots as a landscape feature.

A Waymo makes a left. The walk sign goes on. It hasn’t been fixed in years, a dying Speak-and-Spell.” It tells me to wait, then go. We go. Behind us, an actual car pulls up at the stoplight. It idles.

Behind it, suddenly, a bicyclist of a certain age—a white man, white beard, screaming. “Absolutely fucking ridiculous. This is absolutely fucking ridiculous— what the fuck, what the fuck,” as he plows through the stoplight on his way down toward Matilda, Linked In, generic labs of unspecified importance.

Near another empty building, the sprinklers go on, irrigating an ungroomed landscape, surveilled by stationary parking satellites, panels upturned, ready to flash and speak if humans get too close. Empty tech campuses abut Lockheed, seemingly inhabited mostly by squirrels on the edge of the wetlands. Theoretically, people work near here—you see them sometimes. They can access the trail, but the general sense of everything and nothing, of privatized land meant to hold someone else’s venture, surrounds the natural world. As I walk through it with actual animals, I am reminded of those fatalistic day-after landscapes. Only they tell us every day it’s the day before.

My dogs like to come here to “hunt”, which means listening for wildlife and occasionally pouncing towards empty space while I toss a treat instead on a trail that reflects both carelessness and care. In the middle of the trail, someone has let their dog take a shit and has left an empty takeout container on the side. Right next to it, a well-meaning animal lover has left an overkill of plastic takeout containers of water for stray cats. A disabled automatic feeder full of cat food lies sprawled open, its goods ready for the next hungry creature who comes upon it. Cat, raccoon, coyote, fox.

Yesterday, and the Saturday before- some sort of team-building exercise. a fun run populated by people who talk loudly about some ratio of force absorption in their bright athletic shoes in metrics that I couldn’t understand. They parked in the lot, so they must be employees. This must be a perk. The landscape is a perk.

As I write this, a security car patrols an empty parking lot, with a stack of bikes stashed in a corner. At the edge of this panopticon, I can smell the distinct smell of wildcat—heavier, more zoo-like than anything you smell in a suburban neighborhood.

The landscape is so many different things at once. It’s commerce. It’s neglect. It’s privatization. It’s catering to the privileged movements of a few at the expense of many and the needs of many. As I write this, my phone autocorrects many to money, which is basically America.

I’ve been doing theater with teenagers for two decades in this town. This trail is my third place—the only third place I go to anymore, because so many have disappeared, become inundated and inhospitable to people and animals.

So in my third decade as a teacher, I go to work. I come here. I go home. Sometimes I go to the market. Occasionally to the movies. Rarely out into society. Everything else comes in a box to the front door.

I, too, work in a box, where I deliver the classics and the tiny hopeful hooks of transformation, Hawthorne and Shakespeare , Miller and Hurston, Boal and Beckett, to children who will mostly make five times my salary before even starting their lives, doing something with machines that I will never understand.

I lead them in choral poetry exercises, speaking the text into my own body to remember, to calibrate their listening because sometimes they can’t find each other in a crowd. I ask them to wonder. I ask them to notice. I ask them what they are feeling. Mostly they cannot tell me without sentence stems. Increasingly, their level of intertwinement with technology in all its forms and reciprocities is so heightened, so pervasive, that it takes time and work and grounding to get many of them to say something authentic. Increasingly, I walk the line between scaffolding their communication and putting my words in their minds for them to speak out loud.

I have hope for the ones who look for their voices. But found or not, I teach them all. I teach them all, even as opportunities for storytelling shrink because doing plays with the hours of connection and memorization and raw material construction takes up too much time that could be spent learning to build more robots, to build the future without the story of the past.

Sometimes I catch a look of panic in a student’s eyes because they know, because they sense, that there’s something not right about not being able to imagine their humanity. But then it’s often ground down by the constant wheel of expectation. Gratefully, we all reach for our phones to dull it down.

I have spent years teaching them to identify their emotions, a skill now codified and fashionable in response to the mental health crisis we call modern society. Discipline has mostly been replaced with “wellness”, as if the only acceptable commentary on the system is to stem the tide of panic because there is no way to turn off its faucet. As if we have to choose between molding decent people and literally keeping them alive- because we do.

Nobody talks about it. Teacher meetings as always are full of eduspeak, and now therapyspeak—but our rooms rarely stop to acknowledge the quandary we all find ourselves in: being held up by machines while the story continues to shift around us. We bought into STEM, and forgot its counterbalance, so we pull its strings with increasingly weary hands and wonder why it doesn’t yield the promised wealth of well-being that we all thought it would.

My students are baffled as to why they can’t conquer theater as a series of mechanical processes, why they can’t create a good performance merely from externals they superimpose on their still-growing selves. They understand performance as saying words and making gestures and wearing and carrying the external trappings of what they call character. And they cannot fathom a performance that exists without a green-screen environment to calibrate human perception and experience.

They cannot fathom it because they live here.