ABSTRACT

Rachel’s Brain (1987) is an overview of concerns I have. I realized when I decided to do it that most of the problems that I have with the way we are and the way things are and the way the Earth is, stem from the human brain and what it has wrought. That’s why I wanted to do a piece about the brain. I started to do my usual research and became totally overwhelmed because the amount of knowledge is tremendous, but the amount of mystery is even greater. There is much that is unknown and hasn’t been understood about the way the mind works and its relationship to the brain. Even though I wasn’t able, in a short time, to render the state of science on the subject, I could at least look at my own brain and my own mind and try to understand where I am and in what way I am “Every-Woman.” I could use myself as a persona that exemplifies where the human species is now. That’s what the piece is about. I tried to pull in different extreme personae to express that. I bring in Marie Antoinette. She’s got a wig and on top of that is a high threemaster ship. She enters and does an operatic sprechtstimme1 delivery of an aria. She epitomizes the Age of Enlightenment, the age of rationality, of logical thinking, of the cerebral cortex. She at first brings in this tremendous haughtiness and hubris of being human and of having this higher apparatus up there. She’s completely cut off from her body. It’s a metaphor I work on both the mind and body level and also on the social level. She looks at people and says: “The others are below. The others foraging in the dirt for grubs are beasts.” She is the “higher” human. She ends up having to be beheaded; it’s the only way out.