With her freedom as the archetypal Everywoman, Ejecta garners another freedom: since she’s not obligated to retain any one identity, she is constantly reborn. The “Eleanor Lye” video opens with the statement: “LAVA FREEZES, NEW EARTH FORMS. DOES IT STING OR IS IT BLISS. AFTER DEATH, TO BE REBORN.”
In the video, Ejecta is alone with her body, exploring the ways it can move. Macomber explains, “We wanted it to seem as if Ejecta had never had a human body before. But her first day as a human, she’s a 30-year-old woman. And she’s naked and she doesn’t know there’s anything wrong with being naked but she’s learning how to move and is kind of shocked by how to open her mouth…”
The catch to being reborn, for Ejecta, is that her body is never completely new, and she has no idea how to use it—and however miraculous, it has to be difficult. “Maybe it’s a curse for Ejecta,” Macomber says, “kind of like the way volcanoes are constantly changing the way the world is, but she doesn’t get to be reborn brand new like a baby. The world doesn’t either. The world has these craggy, horrible mountains and these deep chasms, and it’s crazy and ugly and weird the way it works out, and it isn’t like the world gets to be new. Even those islands, super new volcanic islands are just these craggy horrible-looking things. Everyone always says, like, I wish I could be born again if I knew all these things or I could lead a clean life, just the idea of starting over—so I always thought, what if you started over but you didn’t get a clean slate? And that’s really what Ejecta is. She’s this person displaced in time and space who’s a newborn on earth or a newborn in whatever planet she might find herself in, but it isn’t that she has any advantages.”
