We welcome you all, humans and animals, bio and trans, men and women, transgender bodies, mutants and survivors. You've been invited by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens to celebrate the blue year of their love and together, forming a liquid community in order to marry the Sea.
We are here today to marry the Mediterranean Sea, stage of human traffic, colonization, war, but also of travel and communication.
To marry the Sea today, in 2009, is to embrace a sick being.
The Sea we are going to marry is, as we ourselves are, polluted, sick, but alive and historically charged.
During the last two hundred years the human species has contributed to poisoning the water, killing fish and water mammals, threatening the health of the Sea and therefore putting at risk the survival of the planet.
For this, we come here today, to Venice, a city made of water, to ask the Sea for forgiveness. We are here to give our love back to the Sea.
I thank Annie and Beth for inviting me, and for inviting us all, enter into their 7 year chronology of love, and for asking me I also thank them for asking me to be the Anti-Priest for this wedding.
In their love chronology this is the year of the Visuddha chakra. The chakra of the throat. Let us all now touch our throat and feel the Visuddha chakra.
COMMUNICATION
This is the chakra of communication.
But communication is not just talking and hearing. It is not only a matter of exchanging information, a practice transformed now into a consumer commodity.
The word communication comes form the latin root “munus”, meaning “ a gift that is given by someone to whom it doesn’t belong”. A gift that nevertheless doesn’t belong to the one who gives. Communication is a gift, something given, never a property.
Comunicare is “making common”, sharing the gift. This is the same root as the word community, immunity and meaning.
To communicate is to build community. But the political risk is to think that community can only be achieved through immunity.
The anxiety to be immune comes from the fear of the other. From the fear of not to be and not to have in common. The other is here seen as a threat to the community. An immune community is a community of Fear.
As we marry the sick Sea today, let us get rid of fear of the other, fear of queerness, fear of sickness, fear of ugliness, fear of the grotesque, fear of the virus, fear of death.
As we marry the sick Sea today, let us remember to construct community on “the social and biological vulnerability of the body” rather than on immunity and fear of the other.
For those of us who come from the civil rights fights concerning racial equality, for those of us who come from feminism and from the fight for gender and sexual freedom, for those of us who come from queer and differently abled politics we feel the need to ask anew the question of community, of what is common to all of us, of what can we live without fearing the other.
Let us take this occasion to ask ourselves how do we want to live together, what is the community that we want to build.
I propose that we think of community as water. The most expanded chemical substance of the planet, present in every living being, though never having the same form: the water is changing constantly through a cycle of evaporation, becoming steam, and then becoming liquid, solidifying and becoming ice, the sky being just the sea in an altered form.
To get married to the water means to abandon identity and nationality and to become a liquid community able to permeate different soils and to cross political and moral frontiers without fear.
Let us communicate, build community and live together with all living human and non-human organisms.
As we marry the sick Sea today, let us be bound by a love bigger than human love, reaching non-human animals, the elements and the earth.
As we marry the Sea today, let us make love to water, have non-human sex with the elements.
As we marry the Sea today, we invite you to open your mouth, yours hands, yours vaginas, urethras and anuses to non-human love.
Annie and Beth I will now ask you to say your vows
BETO: Annie and Beth, are you ready to make your vows to each other?
Beth: YES
Annie: YES
