do you remember?
frances morgan

Text published in Kings Review, ‘Flights 2020’, University of Cambridge

Mum, I’m in the fourth dimension, see! is a dance, a poem, a fit of rage, an exorcism and a queer, secular hymn to the impending capitalist apocalypse. It is an hour-long performance for theatres which I perform solo, created in collaboration with Charlie Ashwell (dramaturg) and Nicholas Worrall (sound designer).

‘Mum!’, as we affectionately call her, is our attempt to wrestle with the tensions, crises, and precarious utopias present in the UK in 2019; to do justice to the toxic background radiation which so often feels like anxiety and dread, and to collectively search for a future beyond hopelessness, oversimplification, and endless reformism.

The text that follows arrives in a quiet, meditative moment towards the end of the show, after 50 minutes of dancing, ranting, eye-rolling, makeup-smearing, and petulant coffee-cup-throwing, after I’ve exhausted myself with a hundred hot takes and impassioned critiques, and pulled 450 metres of brown paper from a cardboard box to create a giant, intestinal, stage-filling dress (amazingly, the paper is marketed as ‘void fill’, intended for filling the spaces inside online retail delivery boxes - seemingly with yet more sad, horrifying emptiness).

When I perform this text the clouds around my head part. After nearly an hour of being totally unlikeable in front of my mum (she came to watch twice), I finally get to be nice. It is the only text in the work which I didn’t write alone, and I feel lighter speaking Charlie’s words scattered amongst mine, finally freeing all the things we’ve heard, read, and imagined together.

I stand, suspended in this precarious volume of paper - paper which has been specifically designed to occupy the maximum amount of space, which in this moment feels important. I speak of many futures: private and public, utopian and dystopian, distant and near. I am pulled in so many directions at once that for the first time I am completely still, possibly floating an inch from the ground.

Extract from Mum, I’m in the fourth dimension, see!
By Charlie Ashwell and Frances Morgan

Do you remember how we got here?

Do you remember the last time you were angry? Completely filled up with rage?

Do you remember when we were in the queue for a coffee at Latitude and an 11 year old asked their friend: ‘did you just assume my gender?’

Do you remember what the last mammal on earth looked like?

Do you remember when we lay in bed as kids and wished for things? Sometimes just for our circumstances to be different, at home or at school or whatever, but mostly just for stuff, money, a new phone?

Do you remember the last time we demanded higher wages and shorter hours?

Do you remember 2016? 2012? 2000? Do you remember the turn of the third millennium? When all of the computers, watches, radios, telephones, cars and fighter jets fell - crashed - failed - ceased, when the airports became weird deserted shopping centres, when we were stranded?

Do you remember when we said we’ll not wait for happiness - that all of this isn’t only for the benefit of our children, who we will not have.  

Do you remember how to use the Dewey Decimal System? 

Do you remember the dial up modem, cutting off your mum’s calls to your auntie to play Neopets?

Do you remember when we figured out how to disassemble gender, loosening, unpicking the traits currently organised under masculine and feminine and redistributed them, scattering thousands of seeds over a barren field?

Do you remember when I suggested we might move to the country one day and you didn’t have anything to say about that - like the future had become some kind of horrifying blank chasm, filled with racism and extreme boredom and I quietly read your mind and mourned the loss of that particular self-sufficiency fantasy?

Do you remember when we collectively said - no more disaster movies, or at least we stopped going to watch them, and the cinemas were repurposed for other kinds of collective sadness?

Do you remember when Theresa May tried to make herself appear more human by doing the ACTUAL ROBOT?

Do you remember when that political commentator Ash Sarkar went on mainstream breakfast TV and told Piers Morgan that she was literally a communist, you idiot?

Do you remember when we built a tunnel to a better world and all we had to do was walk through it, but they forgot to make it accessible and you could no longer walk, so we carried you, and we stopped at several service stations along the way - where we got hormones out of vending machines decorated with the faces of famous prison abolitionists?

Do you remember the void, the abyss, the closet that we were forever coming out of and climbing back ino, continuously forgetting things and needing to go back inside? 

Do you remember when we took refuge in the closet, keeping warm amongst the faux fur and party dresses?

Do you remember National Trust Houses?

Do you remember when we occupied the National Trust Houses and turned them into water parks and sex shops?

Do you remember when CO2 rose so high in the atmosphere that it became too dangerous to fly because of unpredictable turbulence?

Do you remember when everyone was displaced?

Do you remember making all this mess?

Do you remember when the possibility of transition became real and known, the tomb under Nature’s shrine cracked, and new histories - bristling with futures - escaped the old order of ‘sex’?

Do you remember when 4 people at once decided that the world was ready for steam engines and they were invented simultaneously in 4 completely unconnected places?

Do you remember Ancient Rome, when they had steam powered toys and ironworking skills, but they just never thought to combine the two?

Do you remember when you last took a punt on the long game of history? 

Do you remember when you took a step that was a little too wide, maybe to avoid a drain, or a puddle or some dogshit, and the landing was a little jarring - you might have twinged your back but you missed the shit and oh god does it feel good to be alive?

Do you remember the moment one second after time began, when everything was hot - ten thousand million degrees, the same temperature reached in a hydrogen bomb explosion?

Do you remember when work was no longer the defining feature of our lives and the Labour party had to change its name?

Do you remember when I reached the end of that book and decided I was a communist and it was a massive relief, not unlike the time I saw a future in which I wasn’t a man but more like a sack of bones and skin and desires and code and anxiety issues?

Do you remember when the only book on Androgyny we could find was written in the 1970’s, had a chapter on Yin & Yang and was subtitled The Way of the Flowing Stream?

Do you remember when gender became obsolete? Do you remember when we cared for the death of gender, when we held it in our arms and rocked, and we watched as it sank, with love, into a timely grave?

Do you remember when we finally mastered the art of communing with the dead and they told us to go fuck ourselves?

Do you remember 1948 when we went to visit one of the earliest computers, when it sat in a shoe shop behind glass in New York City, silently modelling the impact of an atom bomb on the very city it was in as we, the passers-by, watched on, none the wiser?

Do you remember when we left our physical bodies? Do you remember how hard we worked to find meaning in our lives beyond our biological past?

Do you remember when we spent a whole decade dancing?

Do you remember when you realised that it is impossible to pass as nonbinary, because passing is a shared, publicly generated consensus - and the concept of being neither a man nor a woman just isn’t right now - and so you wonder what the hell you’ve been trying to do all this time. You feel completely shell shocked and sad about it like you’ve lost a version of reality. And you wonder if it’s even plausible that anyone would look at you and see anything other than an ageing twink - really it’d be easier if you did identify as an attack helicopter coz at least most people know what one’s supposed to look like. And you remember that there will always be this hole that swallows up every attempt to neutralise masculinity with femininity, you know - it's true equal and opposite, antagonistic force - its Dido to your Eminem, its Kate Winslet to your Leo Dicaprio. Do you remember when we went down with this ship or this helicopter or whatever and were swallowed up with the void?

Do you remember when we reached the end of the universe, and we found a message from our future selves?

Do you remember 300 years ago, when we huddled under the table in our kitchen and I held your hand as we waited for the comet to hit?

Do you remember when the future split into 12 thousand channels and I chose one and you chose another?

Do you remember when I asked - what next, what now? And you said - there's plenty to do, pick up a fucking broom. /