Doomsday

I heard Tuvian throat-singers a few hours ago at the Rubin Museum of Art and I’m still shaking a bit.

You should hear a decent throat-singer perform before you die.

The museum was celebrating Jung’s “Red Book,” his recently released private journal.

I flipped through a few pages until I came upon a conversation he had with his soul.

His soul said, “the great work begins.” The context was murky, so I can’t explain much there.

Kushner reads German (he translated Mother Courage and Her Children for the Delacorte) – maybe he was inspired by Jung.

We spoke today about Kushner’s democratic values as what he believes is his “great work.”

Jung probably meant something else. What is your “great work?”

And what is it about the end that often brings about great works? Desperation?

Until Prior received his prophecy I wasn’t sure why we were reading Angels in America for this class. All I was picking up on was obnoxious Jews, a Mormon marriage built on Valium and lies (yes, let’s all make fun of the Christians…), saintly former drag queens and AIDS. Maybe this was the 90s and Kushner felt that we all needed to hear it, but to be honest I feel like I’ve been hearing this message ever since and ever louder. Was Angels in America the inspiration for Larson’s Rent?

Back to academics, I agree with Ariana in her assessment – though Angels in America fits within Quinby’s algorithm of doom, I do not consider it an Apocalypse. Not to deny the enormity of the death of a loved one, but it feels melodramatic to consider such a death an apocalypse. Even when stretched to the communal level (nearly everyone in the story is dying of AIDS), it is still not an apocalypse, rather a call to action.

For me, the play felt like the funeral for the glitzy drag queen with twenty professional Sicilian mourners – so over-the-top one forgets to cry. But I shouldn’t have expected much more after Kushner’s Munich, a film I once saw aptly shelved next to a cheap porno in a bodega.

Louis’ rambling, though it could be dismissed as the sad rant of a guilty Jew, about how there are no angels in America because “there is no [singular] spiritual past,” is a question that did leave me thinking. How do we reconcile our individual and communal choices with G-d when there are so damn many of us in this country? Though heaven is infinite, can it handle the vastness and variety of human psyches? Can it handle the neuroses of guilty Jews?