Last Sunday, Esther prompted our writing group to write about bad habits. Considering I stayed up until 2 am watching Bridgerton the night before, it felt appropriate. It’s strange to get so enraptured in a series that only three days ago I couldn’t make it through an episode without falling asleep. I’ll blame the Queen’s hair, which is why I watched Queen Charlotte when it first came out on Netflix.
At the local Curves, which runs more like a cross-fit for women and occasional husbands, a sign reads, “A goal without a plan is just a dream.” Someone said something like this in Bridgerton in one of those consistent moments of accusation followed by upset, montage, and profound realization that they are in fact in love with the person they appear to hate (which is oh so Shakespearian).
I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot, over the last two weeks in California. A goal without a plan is just a dream. Or perhaps a dream without action is fantasy. The psychologist Iain McGhilchrists categorizes fantasy as something false and imagination as the thing closest to true reality. Perhaps this means that fantasizing and dreaming are two different things.
I spent last Friday aimlessly wandering downtown Petaluma, the North Bay town known for dairy, eggs, and The Seed Bank. I had hoped to sit in a little coffee shop and try to work out the conflict of this play I am writing about the last bar in Hell, except the coffee shop was closed for repairs. Each time I circled the street, baristas hauled machines around the store; a small sign on the door suggested caffeine seekers visit their other location in some other town. So I just kept circle. I suppose in 88 degrees I was just manifesting what we might consider the feeling of the last bar in Hell—except this bar only hosts the women of the underworld, so I’d say it’s a bit different.
At Copperfield Books, I dug through the basement of used books and found a lovely copy of Lorca’s Three Tragedies put out by New Directions in 1955. His brother contributed a 30-page preface that details Lorca’s first experience with plays, a model playhouse, and what feels a little reminiscent of plays my friends and I wrote and performed in their loft in elementary school. I couldn’t say what any of them were about, but between the three of us we played dozens of characters in costume and our parents received hand-drawn programs for each show. It’s a time I don’t think of often, but when I do, I remember it being the best.
At the register, all the employees congregated with coffee until one guy shuffled over to the register. He looked at the book for a while. “I was trying to remember which play I was in,” he said, “It was a crazy production of Blood Wedding.” I wish instead of paying him, I had asked if he played the character of The Moon. The brief play has the dramatics of Bridgerton with a Catholic menstrual flair—The Moon delivers a very Lorca monologue that includes two mentions of breasts as woodcutters hunt for a bride who has run away her with her already-married lover. (Don’t worry—she is a virgin.)
While the blood this wedding is never a woman’s, the story emphasizes the meaning of familial blood—particularly mothers discussing the blood of their sons, which also makes me think of this piece of Morgan Talty’s published in Esquire last week on blood quantum and what it means for his son to carry on their family bloodline without qualifying as a citizen of the Penobscot Nation.
There’s a very striking moment in the second season of Bridgerton in which the Dutchess younger sister advises the Viscount’s older brother not to marry his betrothed. He says something along the lines of “You were born to marry into another family, and I was born to carry on this family line, and you will never understand that.”
In Bridgerton, (read more about the show’s one menstrual scene, here) the characters have bad habits of causing scandals and not listening to their loved ones. Some have bad habits of over-spending. Other’s have bad habits of lying. They all have the bad habit of lying to themselves. Maybe this (and all the bodice ripping) is what makes the show so popular. Or maybe it’s the oppulence and survival within a system to rigid it’s amazing anyone survives at all.
In Blood Wedding, the bride’s lover from a warring family, Lorenzo, comes to her house on horseback in the middle of the night for a classic “will they, won’t they” moment of high tension. After the wedding ceremony they run into the forest. They declare only to separate when one’s dead body is pried from the other. In the forest, Lorca introduces a new character—an old beggar woman dressed in a green cloak who is not to be listed in the character list. Who doesn’t love a surprise crone? (Honestly, Bridgerton could use a few.)
When the woodcutters and their hatches search the forest, the stage directions note two screams before the beggar lifts her arms and the cloak becomes like wings, shielding the audience from the stage, but not from their imaginations.
It’s said Lorca wrote the play from a newspaper clipping about children from warring families running away together. I suppose it could also be said it’s a rural Spanish Romeo and Juliet that not only places two families in opposition (the lover’s family murdered the bride’s father) but also creates tension between rural and urban landscapes. There’s a bit of “danger in the woods” Enlightenment thinking met with a continued want for water, a judgment for how land is cultivated, a want for the survival of family blood.
In Ted Hugh’s adaptation, it becomes clear quickly, that mothers fear not just the death of their sons, but the knives that lead to it. Like Sleeping Beauty’s father, the mothers want to ban knives from their village with the hope that a bladeless life will keep their sons from bleeding. As we know from Sleeping Beauty, coming-of-age blood restriction doesn’t end well. Unfortunately, young men need knives in their lives.
There’s something anthropologically lunar about Lorca’s story—a blood wedding itself, would signify (according to Chris Knight and Camilla Power’s theories of lunarchy) something amiss from the beginning. According to the lunarchy model, “a society governed by the moon,” the chaos, rebellion, and late-night runaway with an unapproved, already married dude might be more of a dark or waxing moon behavior.
Blood, (menstrual and otherwise) is reserved for meditation, prayer, and space away from the marital home. If Knight and Power’s theories hold true, the wife doesn’t break the taboo of leaving her husband, she runs away at the wrong time of the month: the full moon. If the full moon is a time for celebration (weddings, feasts, marital bliss) and the dark moon is a time for menstruation, separation from family, and non-marital sex, the light of the full moon brings about the lover’s end.
A week or so ago, the poet Julie Carr asked Twitter “Who is making the connection between climate disaster and these two wars in a way that protestors can harness and run with?” I thought about this as the characters in Blood Wedding kept harping about the use of water. I wanted to say, “I always am,” except the current wars and climate disasters are part of the previous wars and reproductive rights and these are all parts of what it means to live in societies that suppress and disrespect the menstrual cycle. They are all part of Diane di Prima’s “Rant” which states “all other wars are subsumed in it [the war against the imagination]” and the idea that war, patriarchy, and resource extraction is the only option, or at least the only option for modern capital societies. But, instead, I said nothing. It’s a bad habit—silence.
I think a lot of “bad habits” are a personal evolution of taboos because the understanding of a taboo as something sacred is also dangerous if disrespected has been replaced by the individual habit of the habitat (environmental influences) and the drive for consistency in a mechanized, capitalized, and weaponized world. Perhaps a bad habit is just a small-scale taboo. By now I should say, my bad habit is unfinishing plays. It’s amazing all the things we can do to procrastinate completing the things we want most.
Perhaps the crone (who at times is noted as Death) is part harbinger, part savior. In the play’s final scene, three young women sit in a church-like room so white (the stage directions note) that there should not even be shadows to indicate depth. They work with a skein of red yarn as they recount the tragedy. In the end, two women are left without a man. The loss of sons seems more like a tragedy than the loss of blood. The last scene is a stage full of women holding red thread. Dear Lorca, I like this idea. While it’s not explicit, they say the bride is sacrificed after the play ends to regain balance in the community. How do we find ways forward from disaster? If only menstrual blood were offered instead.